cc >> We are on our last panel of
the day. We're so delighted that you're
here. For those of you just joining
us, I am Margaret Lewis, the executive director of the
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.
I welcome you to this very special event remembering the
10th anniversary of 9/11. Today's afternoon of panel
discussions and exchanges is part of our Academy Evenings,
a series of talks held throughout the year and around
the state. This Fall we are focusing on the
theme of perspectives on a post-9/11 world.
We hope you'll join us for the other events that you can find
out more about in our Academy Evenings season schedule.
Please feel free to grab one on your way in, or check our
website. You can also about membership in
the Wisconsin Academy in either of those ways, or come to our
website at www.wisconsin.org. So, this is our third and final
panel of the afternoon. We turn to the arts for a
discussion about how music, art and literature
historically have not only helped us through times of
crisis, but have also dealt with tragedy in ways that can be
particularly revealing. We're fortunate to have three
panelists with us to consider how the arts provide new ways of
understanding catastrophe. John DeMain, music director of
the Madison Symphony Orchestra is here with us today, and is
also a Wisconsin Academy Fellow. Valerie Laken, assistant
professor of English at UW-Milwaukee, and author of
Separate Kingdoms, Stories , and Jane Simon, curator of the
Contemporary Art Museum at the University of South Florida, are
all with us today. I think that we're going to
start with John. But I'll introduce all of our
speakers. Or did we agree something else?
I lost track of that coin toss, apparently.
We're going to start in the middle, so let me start with the
middle introduction first. I believe that's Jane.
Jane is the curator of the Contemporary Art Museum at the
University of South Florida where she is also the professor
of museum studies. Previously she was the curator
of exhibitions here, at the Madison Museum of Contemporary
Art. Simon has also held curatorial
positions at Independent Curators International and MOCA.
Who's the next speaker, did we decide?
Is that Valerie? Valerie Laken is the --
Prize winning author of the novel Dream House which
received the Ann Powers award and was named among Kirkus
Review's "Best Books of 2009." She holds an MFA from the
University of Michigan and teaches in the graduate program
of creative writing at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her new short collection,
Separate Kingdoms, was published by Harper Perennial in February
of 2011. John DeMain, who needs no
introduction in this town, is difficult to describe in just a
few words because of so many glittering prizes.
Now in his 18th season as music director of Madison Symphony
Orchestra, John DeMain is noted for his dynamic performances on
dozens of concert and opera stages throughout the world.
He just arrived an hour ago from Pennsylvania.
The New York Times calls him a "gifted orchestra builder" and
how. He has build the MSO into on of
American's leading regional orchestras.
In addition to overseeing it's move to the Overture Hall and
expanding the subscription season to triple performances,
he has steadily elevated the quality of the orchestra,
creating exquisite performances of evermore challenging works.
He also serves as the artistic director for the Madison Opera,
and until recently, Opera Pacific.
He is a regular guest conductor with the Washington National
Orchestra, New York City Opera, Michigan Opera Theater and Los
Angeles Opera. There are probably many others
that I'm missing. During his distinguished 17 year
tenure with the Houston Grand Opera, he led a history-making
production of "Porgy and Bess," winning a Grammy Award and a
Tony Award, as well as France's top award for the RCA recording.
In all, he has conducted more than 350 performances for "Porgy
and Bess" throughout the world. So, let us turn to this
distinguished panel to help us think about how the arts help us
deal with tragedy. Thank you again for starting us
off, Jane.
Thank you for coming. It's a beautiful day out, and
you decided to spend your time with us, so thank you.
I'm going to begin in the past, and then we'll work more towards
the future. In 1951, noted scholar and
philosopher Theodor Adorno, in response to the tragedies of
World War II and the Holocaust wrote, "Writing poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric." I think this sent all of
Europe into a tailspin because they thought, well, is there
room for the arts? I use this quote because it sets
the stage for what is essentially an impossibility.
We experience trauma and we experience hardship and grief,
but can an art form encompass the complexity of those
emotions? Can it help us heal?
Can it provide a form for outlining our fears, anxieties
and even silly hang-ups? My guess is, probably not, but
many of us are driven to make things out of our own trauma and
those things, be it paintings, cartoons or sculptures,
whatever they may be, become the repositories of human
experience. Both awful and wonderful at the
same times. I begin with, this is an
abstract painting by Philip Guston, that's owned by the
Minneapolis Institute of Art. It was created in 1958.
Guston was a Canadian born painter.
He was born in Montreal in 1913 as Philip Goldstein to Ukrainian
refugees. His father could not make a
living in Montreal, so they moved to California as a young
child. His father was a garbage
collector, which drove him to insanity.
He actually killed himself and a young Guston found his father in
the woodshed out back as a young child.
You'll see in his paintings, I'll show you just a few of
them, he was dealing with all of these things all the time in
his art. By the 1950s he was painting
only in abstraction, as were many painters of that time.
This is an example of one of those works.
He stopped painting for a while, about four years at the end of
the 1960s, because he felt like he could not paint actually.
When he returned to painting it was during the height of the
Vietnam war. Here's a painting, on the right,
from 1969, and another one from 1973, called
Painting, Smoking and Eating. In the end Guston decided
cartoonish figures in a reductive white and red palette,
there are other tones in there but basically it's just red and
white, would be the only way to deal with life, with his own
anxieties, with the death of his father, and with the looming
Vietnam war. He always used, well, he didn't
always use, he used these Klan-like figures as a way to
deal with it. The Klan, at the time of his
childhood, was rampant in California.
He at one point felt that that had something to do with his
father's death. So the Klansmen are, you know,
are himself. He often would paint
self-portraits that were himself as the Klansmen.
He could sort of see the evil in everyone.
He didn't sleep well at night I don't think.
He smoked all the time, as one way to deal with this.
In the end he decided to use cartoonish figures in a red and
white palette to create realistic but troubled scenes.
The painter smoking, eating, creating, but rattled by
anxieties. His sense of the troubles
outside the studio would always impregnate the studio.
They would always leak in. He would turn to art, but it
would fail to soothe him. We can see Guston's complicated
exploration of the Klan related to California and even his
father's death. Driven to the point, he would
say, at the end of his life, "Painting and sculpture are very
archaic forms, but it's the only thing left in our industrial
society where an individual alone can make something which,
not just his own hands, but with his brains, his imagination,
and maybe his heart." The next subject that I'm using
is a changing things a little bit.
Although Guston himself was very influenced by cartoons.
The next subject is legendary graphic novelist Art Spiegelman,
who made his career from creating images from his own
life, creating comics came from his family, his father's
anxieties, his mother's suicide and even his own life.
He was an only child of two Holocaust survivors and his
first three books, The Mouse series, detailed the neuroses of
his father. His mother had died by that
point. As his dad aged he would repeat
what seemed to his son, these crazy precautions against
starvation, destruction and anti-Semitism.
This is an image of, he takes on the figure of a very small mouse
and he's worried about if he made a book about this, that
it would just be read as his father a being crazy, racist,
old Jew. It's a wonderful book and won
the Pulitzer Prize. There are three of them.
This is from the first one, 1973.
Then these are-- Spiegelman famously married the photo
editor from the New Yorker. Francoise is his lovely wife and
she always shows up as a very foxy mouse in his cartoons.
We'll see her in a few minutes. He lives in downtown Manhattan
and so, when the towers came down he was right there.
He spent years dealing with what the trauma was.
He and Francoise are at home and this all happens, and they have
to rush further downtown to their daughter's school and they
go through this whole panic of whether or not their daughter
has survived. Their daughter, incidentally,
actually doesn't panic until she sees her parent's panicking.
It sends Spiegelman on this whole other tirade about, am I
just like my father, what does this mean from a diplomacy
standpoint? You can see in the center of the
picture is actually Dan Rather on the news.
Then at the bottom are people running from commercialism
destroying American. On the far right is a
cartoon-like image of the towers burning, which of course,
everyone thought could never happen.
I'm already at the next thing. This is another image of the
same thing. The top is Spiegelman freaking
out about himself, freaking out about creating a book like this.
At the bottom is the towers burning again.
This book was first published many years later in Der Spiegel,
oddly enough a German newspaper. The Germans loved Spiegelman's
work, which is a whole other discussion.
Then by Pantheon in over-size book form.
What is most interesting to me is how Spiegelman turns to many
of his father's hang-ups, like anti-Semitism, as almost coping
mechanisms. If your terrified about
something else it's easy to displace those angers on to
something else. As if to say the world would be
all right with all the same old problems.
He didn't want these new problems.
I want to show you one more image by him.
Actually, here we go. This is actually where he
detailed-- he's imagining what his daughter Nadja would have
thought during the whole thing. The school never told them what
was going on. Nadja didn't know what was going
on until her parents showed up absolutely freaked out.
Then in 2008 for the New Yorker magazine.
These were published in 2004, four years after he had gone
through this supposedly therapeutic thing.
He said I think the most relevant explanation of the
whole thing, "There's a therapeutic side to all
art-making, but the nature of working is to compress, condense
and shape stuff, not to expunge it.
And it's not just an exorcism. Art is about eating your own
vomit." This is a cover.
I had to include this, because it's relevant to a local
artist's work that I'm going discuss at the end of the talk.
This is the cover of the New Yorker that Spiegelman did for
his wife Francoise who was the photo editor of the New Yorker,
right after the 9/11 attacks. There are two towers that are
just shadows. They're just a figment of our
imagination.
Turning to the contemporary, I have three artists that we're
just going to talk briefly about, who deal with 9/11 in
their lives, or in their work. This is a photo from a two
channel video installations that was completed in New York in
2010. It was ten years, or almost ten
years, after the 9/11 attacks. Elizabeth felt that she could
actually release this work of art and release her own take on
what had happened in New York. What she did was, just as the
towers were happening, she lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn which
is, you know, across the water, even from where the towers had
fallen. She took a battered Bolex camera
and went around her neighborhood.
It was a very mixed neighborhood, Polish people,
artsy-fartsy types. She photographed what was going
on in the neighborhood. How people were responding
publicly to this tragedy. Then she went back ten years
later and photographed the same places, to see if it was
still in this collective consciousness or not.
This is one image of that. It's a sort of vinyl siding sort
of neighborhood. They're generally two story
building, two flats in each building, sometimes three.
This is another image of how people were actually using it--
Osama bin Laden is in the upper right hand corner there.
People were publicly addressing this whole Osama bin
Laden thing. Of course, now he's dead so we
have whole other relationship to these things.
But this was right after. Here, this is many years later.
Either somebody forgot to take down the flag, or they intended
to leave it up. There was still this semblance
of patriotism. Elena Del Rivero was not
actually in New York at the time of the attacks, but her studio
was downtown and the windows were blown out of her studio
I guess, when the towers fell. She was in her native
Spain and she came back and was sort of horrified by what had
happened to her space. She felt victimized by that, and
she felt that she had been violated because her private
space was taken over with this other issue.
Then she was asked by the Corcoran Gallery of Art to
create something, which is in Washington D.C.--
to do a site specific instillation.
She used all of the things that were left in her studio and
sewed them together to hang something from the rotunda.
That's what this is here. She claims that the act was a
therapeutic act and was the best way to make sense of what had
been so disruptive. It took her five years to
catalogue everything, then to reassemble them.
That's what this is here. It's a scroll-like thing which
reads as both information but also something very personal.
There's up in the middle of the instillation.
Then here are the letters and other things like that.
So they still read as individual objects but they've come
together to be something. They're not individually
interesting at all. There's no narrative in them,
there's no personal information about the artist.
Some off them even just say "error" on them.
They're just like receipts and things like that that she kept.
But you realize, you know, your life is made up of these
insignificant pieces of paper, of the shards of your economic
transactions, the shards of your drawings, of your doodles on the
page or grocery list, or things like that.
All of those things were compiled into this one work.
If it hadn't been created from her downtown studio ostensibly
it wouldn't even be about September 11th.
Here's another one which was an essay, and then you can see that
she catalogued it is her studio to be placed in this work.
It was just recently shown in New York for this anniversary,
But before then, it was really made for Washington.
This is a local artist who actually happens to be in the
audience. It's just wonderful.
When I put out a call-out if anyone was thinking about this,
responded. I was very happy that she
responded to me. Because she deals with a built
environment, she was really thinking about September 11th in
her work. She was really thinking about
the grander meaning of all of these things.
She was also very much thinking about the differences between
black and white, and what we associate with black.
Thinking back to the Art Spiegelman cover, we do have
this morass-like reaction to the color black, which can sometimes
be good and sometimes be bad. My reaction as an art historian
or as a curator is always like, well, black is normal.
Black is what we wear. It's the norm.
But it has a whole other host of connotations.
This was installed in Berkeley at the Kala Art Institute.
It was set into the wall. It's this crumbling downed
tower, rickety tower. This is something else built
into the underbelly of a building.
Actually, an HVAC system in the basement.
The city is placed on top of it. We're imagining, you know, a
city that could be vulnerable. This is another image which is
actually in the collection at the Madison Museum of
Contemporary Art. I'm going to end with a quote
that bookends more with Guston's than with anything else, but it
was written a London based artist, Sadie Smith, who was in
New York about a year ago. She says, "Last Christmas I was
standing in an apartment building in New York and I was
struck by a hallway where paper mâché stars of David and holy
crosses came together in a decorative seasonal theme.
These 'people of the book,' whose religious texts overlap
and divide us as deeply as either text from the Koran.
They were living peaceably in the same space."
Remember they're just symbols in this thing, but she's, you
know, having a very sentimental attachment to these Chanukah
and Christmas decorations. She writes, "What enabled this?
Maybe this took generations and passed through periods of
unspeakable horrors. Sometimes people forgot.
Sometimes they forgave. They did both of these things
imperfectly. Practical matters certainly
helped. General economic parity and
difficult acts of goodwill on both side, and then a democratic
country in which the apparently impossible has the freedom to
happen. It's not a perfect relationship.
There is not such thing, and it took 2000 years to get this far.
We forget that these things take time.
'Let us realize that the arch of moral universe is long but it
bends towards justice.' said Martin Luther King who
resided over a meeting of supposedly irreconcilable
peoples. Not everyone is a monster."
[applause]
I'm going to talk about-- I guess I should stand
by the microphone. I'm going to talk about, mostly
literature, and the wake of 9/11.
There's been a fair amount of it, so there's a limit to how
much I can cover. I decided to focus on just one
or two specific novels. Also a little bit of art and
people's reactions to these things.
There's a curious scene late in Don DeLillo's novel, Falling
Man , when his protagonist, Lianne, physically attacks her
downstairs neighbor for playing "a certain kind of music,
wailing music, lutes and tambourines and chanting voices.
Over and over. It was beginning to make her
angry." Now, Lianne is a mild-mannered
sort, a mother and book editor who volunteers with Alzheimer's
patients in her spare time, but her husband has just survived
the Twin Towers attacks and she is now seeing the world
in new ways. In the build-up to that
confrontation with her neighbor she thinks to herself, "Maybe
the neighbor was Greek. But the music wasn't Greek.
She was hearing another set of traditions, Middle Eastern,
North African, Bedouin songs perhaps or Sufi dances, music
located in Islamic tradition, and she thought of knocking on
the door and saying something." In his typical, seemingly casual
fashion DeLillo highlights a central problem of speaking and
writing about 9/11. In the wake of the attacks many
choices of expression and reaction suddenly became taboo.
Added to our shock and confusion was a new, deep fear of saying
the wrong thing. Lianne spends weeks walking past
her neighbor's door, enraged by the music but unable to say
anything. She thinks, "Knock on the door.
Adopt a posture. Mention the noise as noise.
Knock on the door, mention the noise, use the open pretense of
civility and calm, the parody of fellow-tenant courtesy that
every tenant sees as such, and gently mention the noise.
Mention the noise only as noise. Do not allude to the underlying
theme of a certain kind of music as a certain form of
political and religious statement, now of all times."
When Lianne finally works up the nerve to voice her objections to
her neighbor, the woman participates in this dim and
willful circumlocution, she expands the blank space where
the unspeakable, Islam, 9/11, terror, silently festers.
The neighbor says, "Music, that's all.
I like it. It's beautiful.
It gives me peace. I like it, I play it."
"Why now? Why at this particular time?"
"Now, later, what's the difference?
It's music." "But why now and why so loud?"
"Nobody ever complained. This is the first time I'm
hearing loud. It's not so loud."
"It's loud." "It's music.
You want to take it personally, what can I tell you?"
"Of course it's personal. Anybody would take it
personally. Under these circumstances.
There are circumstances. You acknowledge this, don't
you?" "There are no circumstances.
It's music," she said. "It gives me peace."
As in DeLillo's book, in post-9/11 America we saw a lot
of people pushing for silence, for restraint, for selective
blindness or feigned obliviousness on certain
matters. Some people, often purporting to
represent the forever silenced victims, argued that certain
images and facts were too painful, graphic, or
inflammatory to be spoken or shown.
So the shots of the people falling from the towers were
quickly exhumed from the live news coverage.
Some of us saw a few images like this one, before TV producers
decided to focus instead on the equally shocking but more
palatable images of architecture, rather than
individual people, under attack. Photographs like Richard Drew's
"Falling Man" flashed once in certain newspapers, sparked
outrage, and were basically stricken from the record.
But other people, also reeling and devastated by the attacks,
went in the other direction. They grasped for specific,
palpable ways to more fully feel and understand what they had
witnessed. They gravitated toward the
images that others deemed off-limits.
There was something grotesque and lurid about watching the
planes crash into the towers, or the victims fall from the sky,
and yet many of us couldn't tear our eyes away.
We stood riveted before our TV screens, watching the attacks
from different angles, over and over.
We watched it until we could feel we'd been a part of it.
We watched it in an effort to pull ourselves a little closer.
It has always been the job of artists, of writers, to bring
people into closer contact with the world around us, to force us
to look at what we'd rather not see, and in so doing to help us
more fully understand the world's terror and glory.
Newspaper clippings and history books can transmit every last
known fact about the invasion of Normandy, but if you mention the
event the first thing that comes to my mind is the visceral
opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan.
This isn't because the film gives a more thorough or
accurate sense of the events; it's because the film gives a
more palpable one. It's because the film brings me
closer ... or seems to.
We expect this of art and literature.
Yet those who attempted to write fiction about 9/11 were faced
with the daunting challenge of bringing readers close but not
too close , faced with the call to say something , but not the
wrong thing. In post 9/11 America, saying the
wrong thing suddenly felt like it could get you put on a very
bad list somewhere. When the novelist Jonathan
Safran Foer used photographs of one of the falling victims in
his 2005 novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, many
critics rejected the move out of hand.
The photos are placed in reverse order in a flip-book at the end
of the novel, so that as you flip to the final page the
falling man, a stand-in for the boy-narrator's dead father,
rises back up to the towers and survives.
The San Francisco Chronicle critic Tom Barbash wrote, "I
imagine that Foer debated whether to include the
photograph of the man leaping from, or ascending back into,
the building. I for one wish he'd made a
different decision. It lends to the story a horrific
and unearned gravity." Other works of art dealing with
9/11 were likewise slammed for being insensitive, for
exploiting pain they hadn't earned.
Eric Fischl's sculpture, "Tumbling Woman," sparked such
controversy at Rockefeller Center that it was quickly
covered with a sheet and removed.
Fischl promptly offered a grave apology for, what I think is, a
very beautiful work of art. One passerby said of the
sculpture, "I don't think it dignifies their deaths.
It's not art... It's very disrupting when you
see it." Asked about the controversy,
Fischl highlighted another key problem that artists faced after
9/11, the idea that "some people have a right to express their
suffering and others don't, that there are those in
this hierarchy of pain who own it more than you do.
It's not necessarily about witnessing firsthand that makes
the experience. Picasso wasn't at Guernica when
it happened, Goya wasn't there on the firing line.
This is what a culture looks to art for, to put image, or voice,
or context to a way of rethinking, re-seeing,
re-experiencing." The fact that the worlds of art
and publishing and cultural criticism are so centered in New
York may have made the act of making art about 9/11
particularly perilous. There were an awful lot of
culturally powerful New Yorkers at the top of the hierarchy of
pain, and while they didn't want their pain mis represented, they
also didn't want it ignored. In 2003, in her review of the
first book DeLillo published after 9/11, the novel
Cosmopolis , the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani captured
the high expectations critics placed on New York writers.
She wrote, "In novels like Libra, Mao II, White Noise
and the magnificent Underworld, DeLillo has drawn
a vivid fever chart of American history, showing us, often with
uncanny prescience, how random violence and paranoia have
insinuated themselves into the collective unconscious, how
madmen and terrorists have used bombs and guns and the media to
seize hold of the historical imagination.
It is with great anticipation, then, that the reader turns to
his latest novel, the first book by Mr. DeLillo to be published
since the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Cosmopolis, however, turns out to be a major dud.
It's not that the novel, which is set in New York City in April
2000, declines to depict our post 9/11 world.
It's that its portrait of a millennial Manhattan is
hopelessly clichéd." Although she hedges this last
statement, it seems to me, by the very fact that she mentions
it, "declining to depict our post 9/11 world" is DeLillo's
first misstep. When he got around, in 2007, to
satisfying her desire for a 9/11 novel, she met the book, Falling
Man , with the same high expectations and almost
inevitable disappointment. She wrote, "The reader
approaches Mr. DeLillo's post- 9/11 work with great
anticipation. Unfortunately, his strangely
stilted 2003 novel, Cosmopolis, was a terrible
disappointment, and so is his spindly new novel, Falling
Man. It doesn't seem to occur to this
critic that DeLillo's two post-9/11 books might have been
"spindly" or "stilted," because actual New Yorkers had been
struck speechless and numb by 9/11, and DeLillo either wanted
to capture it or couldn't, himself, escape it.
After all, writers are just as likely as anyone else to find
that they have, as Elif Batumen writes, "accidentally checked
out from the human condition." This reminded me of the Adorno
quote that Jane mentioned. The line about writing poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric. I think that a lot of Holocaust
literature, I was reminded, is incredible spare.
Very, very minimalist. It was as though language had
been so corrupted and so misused, and beauty had been so
debased, that a lot of Holocaust poets especially felt that it
was sort of grotesque, sort of vulgar to use language for
beautiful means. It had been put to such awful
means in the Holocaust. We see that again, actually
before that. Hemingway writing about World
War I famously said that, you know the language had been so
corrupted that, after a certain point, only the names of certain
places and the dates of certain battles held any meaning at
all. Anyway, back to Falling Man.
In the Washington Post Jonathan Yardley also skewered the novel
Falling Man . He quotes a vivid description by
DeLillo of a character who's been going around New York
jumping off buildings head-first as performance art.
Then Yardley writes, "Sorry, but that doesn't work.
Once again, DeLillo is merely piggybacking on September 11,
counting on those vivid images cemented in our memories to
give this novel the force he's unable to instill in it
himself." And here we arrive at perhaps
the greatest challenge of all, the possibility that the attacks
themselves were already such devastating works of art that
anything attempting to depict or interpret them can look an awful
lot like a pale derivation. After all, the real terrible and
disruptive power of 9/11 lay not so much in the human or
architectural destruction but in its imagery , in the spectacle we
all witnessed as an audience. Because it must be said that
3,000 people die all the time, all over the world.
Buildings fall. Planes crash.
And life goes on; such tragedies merit only a few days or weeks
of news. They are not called cataclysms
or apocalypses, as 9/11 repeatedly has been.
August 29th for example, the anniversary of, does anyone
know? Katrina is barely remembered.
The cataclysmic power of 9/11 stemmed from the audacity,
precision, and orchestration of the attacks, and from the
horrific images that played out in real time before our eyes.
All of this combined to reconfigure our sense of who we
are and how we are vulnerable. The attacks brought us closer to
the elements of the world we had not wanted to see.
But this is another thing that we are not supposed to say.
The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen tried it when he
called 9/11 "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole
cosmos." This was 6 days after 9/11 and
of course outrage ensued. He attempted to clarify that
"great" did not equal "good" by renaming it "Lucifer's greatest
work of art." Yeah.
When that didn't suffice he offered a full apology.
"This whole situation is regrettable and I'm deeply sorry
if my remarks were misconstrued. To offend the grieving families
of the brutal terrorist attacks of New York City and Washington
D.C. and I will continue to keep the victims of this outrage
in my prayers." A year later, the artist Damien
Hirst tried to express this again.
He said to the BBC, "The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of
an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was
devised in this way for this kind of impact.
It was devised visually." He too was quickly badgered into
an apology. Ten years have passed.
Our fears are subsiding. Maybe the mass of commentary
about 9/11 this week suggests that it's getting maybe a little
bit easier to find something, maybe the right thing, to say
about 9/11. Thank you.
[applause]
The artist's response to war is thought provoking, both
visually and in spoken word. In music, it's interesting
because music has been associated with war from the
very beginning. When you really think about the
integral role that music played. Think about formations, army
formations or organizing, launching cavalry charges, bugle
calls, drumming, marching bands, celebrations of victory,
mourning loss, underlying ceremony.
But I think the number of works where war is actually depicted
in music, you could probably count on two hands.
One of the early ones, and I think one of the big influences
on composers, was Napoleon. That inspired Beethoven to write
"Wellington's Victory." Now, what's interesting is
that Beethoven was commissioned, he was paid to write about that
war. Of course in that piece we have
fanfares, cannonades, themes from British patriotic songs.
The other obvious work that we listen to quite regularly, which
has an aspect of war inside it, is of course, the "1812
Overture." Again, that is related to
Napoleon, and that of course has cannons written into the piece,
and then a tradition of fireworks associated with it as
well. Haydn wrote his mass in a time
of war. That's distinguished with the
sort of militarists trumpet fanfares and timpani rolls that
are a part of the piece. The final movement is also a
prayer for peace, as is Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, a
prayer for inner and outer peace.
I think that often composers have a response to war by going
away from war. By not wanting to actually
depict war. But by actually hoping that, you
know, never again. One for the great pieces written
in response to war was Britain's "War Requiem" in 1962.
It had poetry from Wilfred Owen, a British pacifist killed before
the end of World War I. In which he was quoted as
saying, "All a poet can do is warn."
Another very important work that I think depicts war, or at least
written effected by war, was Shostakovich's "Seventh
Symphony", the "Leningrad Symphony."
Written in 1941, composed one month after the invasion by the
Nazis. This work is filled with
references to terror and slavery and oppression of the spirit.
This composition became the icon of the resistance, suffering and
hopes of the Russian people. These works were written
specifically in response to victory or defense.
The end of this week we will be presenting John Adams'
commissioned again, asked to write a piece, in memory of
9/11. He wrote it a year later, 2002.
It won the Pulitzer Prize. It is on the transmigration of
souls. It's interesting in his
description on this piece, he calls it a memory space.
It's written for chorus of adults and children and a
massive orchestra, and a tape of the city sounds of New York,
including sirens, people walking and the names of victims.
It's a very, very powerful piece, and it also though, has
the sounds of war. As I said before, war has an
obvious audio component, and music deals with sound.
What's interesting today to listen to CNN where CNN will say
now during the Arab Spring they'll say let's just pause and
listen to the sounds of war. And we just pause and listen to
the volleys of gunshots. And I thought that was rather
unique that we're doing that now, that we're supposed to sit
and just listen to this horrific noise.
But the point is it is noise, and music, of course, is some
kind of noise, cultivated or less cultivated.
And it's interesting to see and to contemplate what effect war
has had on music in general. And I think that we have to be
careful because I think the trends in music happened not
necessarily parallel to war. I think what's happened after
the 20th century, the end of Romanticism, at the end of the
19th century, more happened because of people like Freud and
movements in Paris and the world of art and is also with --
paving the way, changing the harmonic palette of music, the
rise of technology and machinery and the noise that's associated
with machinery. A lot of these things came into
the 20th century to influence where music went, not just the
fact that there was a world war, two world wars.
So I think that we cannot, in itself, say that music was
affected, in general, by the world wars, but certainly
composers were both collectively and individually influenced.
For example, Ravel served in the war.
He wrote his "Left Hand Concerto" as a response to
someone who lost their arm in the war.
So there, for example, is a very specifically war associated
work. Vaughan Williams, incredibly
affected by the war, wrote both his symphonies number 4 and 6,
the war effect is quite audible in his music.
The music is much more dissonant, much more intense.
Some composers went the other way.
Richard Strauss, who had given us this beautiful "Der
Rosenkavalier" in 1910, but before that with "Salome
Elektra" was aiming towards a much more abrasive kind of
musical style, actually retreated after the
war, almost as though not wanting to have dissonance
because of the dissonance created in real life.
But I think as we got through to the second half of the 20th
century, we have to take a look at, in addition to not only
classical composers and their response to war, but Rock and
Roll as started with the people like Bill Haley & His Comets
progressed into something much more intense, something much
more serious and Rock took on connotations of serious art.
And I think that what has happened is we can go back to
the Civil War when we had songs like "Dixie" and "Yankee Doodle"
already associated with war, and then as we progress we look at
some of the songs in the '40s that were written while the
second world war was going on, but nothing compares to the
antiwar protest song that developed as a result of the
Vietnam War. And if you look at the list of
songs associated with the first world war and the second world
war and then you look at the songs written in response to the
Vietnam War, it's 15- 20-fold. It's unbelievable.
And that has continued through the Gulf War and the so-called
War on Terror. The popular music world has
taken on a lot of the moral outrage and response to war, and
we find this much more depicted than before.
I think that there's few pieces of war that were sort of
pro-war, the Lincoln Portrait, Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky.
In the world of opera, we are able to depict war, or at least
set stories with war in the background.
So, for example, Verdi actually wrote an opera about Attila,
Attila the Hun, Attila in Italian.
Of course, Handel's Giulio Cesare, Julius Caesar, and
Otello is returning from battle coming off that ship, the
fight between the Venetians and the Moors, and so war becomes a
backdrop. Tosca with the Roman Republic
on Broadway. Vietnam served as the backdrop
with that famous helicopter landing in Miss Saigon, and,
of course, the magnificent South Pacific is set against
the backdrop of World War II. And in this most recent
production, the addition to the sounds of war through the scene
changes and the recent revival in New York which brought an
even more urgent sensibility to the work.
Possibly one of the greatest process songs of all time was
Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," as he contemplated the need for peace
and for the brotherhood of man. I think that this afternoon we
had in Overture Hall a very beautiful memorial service where
we sang pieces that oftentimes become associated with the way
we mourn and the way we mourn loss, and, as I said, a lot of
times we make an impassioned cry for peace or we sing a requiem
and, of course, the "Barber Adagio" for Strings, which was
played this afternoon, and that's probably no more greater
performed piece associated with tragedy, national tragedy, loss,
than that work. When I was thinking about
commemorating 9/11, I don't want to say that that would be the
easy road for me would be to play the "Adagio for Strings"
and move on. But I was curious to find out if
there were event specific works. And, of course, the only big
large-scale event specific work that I could come up with was
the Adams' "On the Transmigration of Souls."
However, today in San Francisco by the wonderful composer
Christopher Theofanidis, who I've performed a couple of times
here in Madison, his opera Heart of a Soldier is being
premiered by the San Francisco Opera and is about the fireman
from Texas who was in New York and pulled 2,000 people
out of the towers. And so here we are 10 years
later getting a major work of art.
And I think that sometimes you have to have a passage of time
to have an appropriate response or want to depict something.
And I think that was the point made by these talks is that it's
so overwhelming, the event in the beginning, that to have
something to say about it or to sing about it or to play about
it is very, very difficult. So I think what John Adams has
done is a very difficult piece to get through because of not
only hearing the names of people but hearing the cliched but
absolutely heartfelt responses that people make and that the
chorus will sing through this. However, also, the orchestra
explodes twice in this piece, and the brass do some sustained
playing that makes you feel a little bit like the sounds of an
airplane. And I'm sure John Adams would
deny it, but there is this feeling of, and also the way
there is an electric keyboard, there's cellist, there's these
instruments playing these tinkly, almost as though there's
shattered glass, and in this world that we're brought into
and that we're asked to remember.
So I think that, just in conclusion, I think that, as I
said, music has been associated with the army, has been
associated with a war, armies, navy, all of them in general,
with military. Music has always been a part of
it, from parades to memorial services.
I do think that it's important that we're careful not to
associate musical styles as directly resulting with war but
rather than larger forces going on, and at the same time
recognize those pieces which composers were moved to give us
as their response to the horrors and outrage of war.
Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Thank you, all, for taking time to be here with
us today. It's now your time to ask
questions. We have about 15-20 minutes to
have a conversation with these special experts that are here
today, and we ask that you wait or raise your hand so the
microphone can be brought down to you so that all may hear.
So please, Ronnie, I see a couple of hands already, and I'm
sure she'll get around to just as many of you as she can.
Thanks so much. >> Thanks.
Valerie, when you talked about how critics reacted to the war,
I'm curious about your thoughts about how much each of us
experience events now because of the way they're so accessible.
None of us know what it was like to be in World War II.
A lot of us kind of have a sense of the Kennedy assassination,
and we were close to that. But 9/11, we all saw it.
We all felt closer. We all have a very sort of
personal experience associated with it.
And so much now we all see these things firsthand in a way we
never did in the past, and does that alter, do you think, our
ability to sort of allow others to share their takes of it and
take offense at? >> Yeah, I think absolutely our
access to documentary coverage of tragedy is now so much more
pervasive and easy. And, actually, Kakutani, in this
past week's New York Times was talking about how probably the
most, what she considered the most successful books that came
after 9/11 or dealt with 9/11 were the non-fiction books, and
that there hasn't yet, in her opinion, been the great 9/11
novel. And I think on some level, yeah,
that artists are competing with that raw footage, and, A,
there's only so much that an artist can do or a writer can do
against that backdrop, and, B, I think it does mean that, this is
just my opinion, but it seems to me that we all feel more
ownership of those events that we watched unfold before our
very eyes, particularly with 9/11 because it was happening,
so many of us sort of turned on the TV and saw that second plane
hit the building. And so you really feel as though
you, you know you weren't there but you can remember where you
were and you saw it in real time and you felt like you
participated in some way that we don't feel about World War II or
Vietnam or these other events unless we were really there.
And I think that's a tricky circumstance.
It means that more and more people, I guess maybe a larger
percentage of the population, feels that kind of ownership
that the victims feel. Whether that's accurate or
inaccurate, a lot of people feel that way.
And so they have a stronger sense of whether the artist is
getting it right or not getting it right or doing it justice or
not doing it justice or being insensitive or insensitive.
Just a few comments and anecdotes.
Since you mentioned "Ode to Joy," I think that another
application of that song to peace is the fact that it's now
the national anthem of the European community.
Let's see, and also regarding the question of selective memory
and how certain things are forgotten, as we know or as
sometimes is brought up now, 9/11 has other negative
associations historically. It was, of course, the coup in
Chile in 1973 that brought down a democratically elected
president to bring in a military coup, and it was also the date,
I believe it was in 1940, that Charles Lindbergh made one of
his more, I guess, racist or anti-Semitic or
non-interventionist addresses talking about the importance of
keeping the US out of the war in Europe.
So there's a lot of nefarious events associated with 9/11, and
also your comment in response to the first question, the question
of perspective and having personal memory of a given time,
I find that I'm almost in a minority now in that when I go
to panels and discussions on the Vietnam War, I'm practically an
old-timer because I'm one of the few in the audience that has
memories of it and that contribute that way even though
I didn't fight there. I was never in the military, but
I still have very strong memories of it from the home
front. So it's just interesting to me
that in that way one develops different perspectives depending
on what you lived through or not.
Thanks.
I actually have two questions.
One is, in the first panel today there was some discussion by the
participants of how the War on Terror, which resulted from the
events of 9/11, was different from other wars because there
was not a nation state that had a standing army that was
involved, and I'm wondering if you think that the art that is
coming out in terms music or literature or film, visual arts,
is different because this was not a traditional war as we have
seen. And then my other question is we
don't have a representative here from film, but it seems to me
that film is the quintessential medium for depicting war.
And we've had, ever since we've had film, we've had films about
war. And I'm thinking that there's
something about that medium that really is able to portray in
ways that, perhaps, the music or the visual arts or the
literature is not. But I must say, in terms of
music, one of my really striking memories of the Bosnian/Serbian
conflict is there was an image and I think it was a cellist
playing "Adagio for Strings" in a very empty stadium.
It was interesting that today, if you were watching the TV,
that the musicians they chose to perform were Yo-Yo Ma and I
can't remember her name, a flutist, and James Taylor and
Paul Simon. So music, I think, is very
evocative. >> You know, Apocalypse Now is
one of the great war movies in our time, and The Hurt Locker,
incredible in terms of the kind of realism that a movie can do.
But I think music, certainly art music is more abstract in the
way it congers up memories inside you that you create the
visions, the visuals, where I think the movie sort of
creates it for you. I do think we've seen, in
theater and in television, suddenly these CSI and these
various series now all of the sudden there might be a plot
about terrorism, Homeland Security.
That's permeating our culture in the last several years in terms
of subject matter. Same thing with plays on
Broadway. We've seen some plays where
terrorists have captured someone.
And so the subject matter is there.
I think, by the way, there have been quite a few chamber music
works created with 9/11. And there was a work today that
was premiered in Houston by Jake Heggie.
There is, I think Richard Danielpour has written.
There's quite a few chamber works.
I just haven't noticed a huge amount of symphonic work
written specifically in response, and I think John Adams
was the big one. It was written for New York
Philharmonic, won the Pulitzer Prize, and is incredibly
specific to that event to create a contemplation.
But, you're right, film is, and of course music is always part
of film as well. >> I think that there are a lot
of films that deal with that, actually.
And you think about even something like Batman wouldn't
look like it does. The one with Heath Ledger.
It wouldn't look like it did now if 9/11 hadn't happened because
they're imagining the destruction of Gotham, which was
of course New York City. It would have entered people's
minds, Godzilla and things like that included that, but it's
totally different now. There are even more popular
films that imagine an apocalypse that is totally different now
after 9/11. >> And I think you're right,
that film is the medium. It's interesting how well film
is adapted or suited for war coverage.
Because it's one of the things about literature about wars is
challenging because we can't show the explosions so well and
the fast pace doesn't quite come across as well.
So film is really the ideal, or may be in many ways ideal for
that. I do think that your comment at
the beginning about whether the fact that we weren't fighting a
nation complicates the presentation of the war in art
and literature and film. And I think it does because it's
easy enough to say in a TV movie or in a film he's a German and
so we're supposed to kill him in this war.
German equals bad guy. With the 9/11, with the wars
after 9/11, it's been very difficult for people to find
ways to portray the enemy that aren't sort of stereotyping
Arabs or stereotyping Middle Easterners, and so they had to
kind of find, I guess, either they have sort of stereotyped
and it's made some people uncomfortable or the better
films have kind of found ways around that.
It's interesting to me that some of the better or more remembered
Vietnam films came out several years after the war, and there
was sort of a spade of them in the early '90s, late '80s even.
And it's a similar thing with novels and films about the war
now. A lot of the films that have
been about 9/11 or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan haven't
done very well. And The Hurt Locker is one that
has and I would argue it's the same thing that happened with
novels, that the ones that deal very directly with the events,
like the Oliver Stone film, what was it called?
9/11 or Twin Towers? Does anybody even remember the
title of this film by one of our major filmmakers?
That nobody wanted to see. And the novels, the same thing,
the novels that dealt very directly with the event, and
Falling Man is one of them, a lot of people didn't want to
see, weren't ready for, but the stories that were sort a few
steps removed, like The Hurt Locker, those did a lot better.
Audiences were more receptive to them.
And I would argue that's because they can't.
They can't encompass the tragedy or the trauma or the grief or
the destruction that happened, and yet somehow we can eat our
own vomit, as Art Spiegelman said.
We can deal with, if we set the perimeters correctly, as The
Hurt Locker did, we can deal with that.
We can deal with these moments, these snippets or lightning
flashes, as Eudora Welty called them I think, we can't deal with
the whole thing. We just can't.
It's way too big. I think in some sense Eudora was
right. We can't.
It's also fascinating to me that film doesn't have to be
politically correct, and literature probably can do that
too to a certain extent. Theater and live performance
seems to be much more cautious about just how real they get.
But film, somehow that screen, you can say and depict
politically risky positions, and yet somehow the way you can
depict racism in film, the way you can depict all kinds of
issues. It's always fascinating to me
why we can do that in movies and we have a hard time of doing it
and accepting it in a live situation.
And somehow, I don't know, maybe it's just that screen or the
fact that it's so realistic that there's nothing impressionistic
about it. It's trying to be so true to
life. >> I'm not sure whether it has
to do with realism over a similitude or if it just has to
do with the fact that, particularly longer narrative
works of art tend to be dialogic in their construction.
They involve many voices coming together to create one truth,
but those voices can descend and contradict and offend one
another. So an author can create one
character who is stereotyping and discriminating against their
Muslim neighbor because they're shocked after 9/11, and another
character who argues with her that that's not the right thing
to do, and the audience can see many layers and not, if it's
done well, not assume that the author or director or producer
agrees with one character more than another.
Whereas, I suppose I would imagine that's harder to do in
music. [INAUDIBLE]
No, I'm thinking about this "Transmigration of
Souls." It's not going after the outrage
of what happened as much as the feeling of loss and the people
left behind. But the music, certainly, is
layered because you have, John Adams was a minimalist, and you
have moments where his essential minimalism comes through in a
very tonal, very beautiful sounds of the children and the
chorus make about how they loved these people and he was the
apple of our eye, as I said, cliched things that are so true,
and then at the same time, the orchestra just fiercely erupts
and in gigantic volume and it's terroristic.
And so I think he's making his statement about that but, of
course, nothing in text that will be offensive or go after
the perpetrators of this but more the people left behind and
the memory of those who were lost.
So it's an interesting point. But I think you can, certainly
your imagination can go where it wants depending on what the
music does to you. >> I have a question for all
three of you, I think, because it's kind a stew of a question,
and it's two-part. Just recently I saw a special on
Nat Geo, I think, and it was really interesting the way this
documentary was done because they were talking heads of
people who were in the buildings that got out.
And it was, of course, a reenactment in the building
about the smoke and horror and people breaking through the
wall, the drywall, because they couldn't get the door open.
We've heard those stories, but it was the first time in my
memory that I can think of, like, oh, that's what those
people looked like. And to your point, Valerie, I
feel like it did become so much about the architecture and the
ash and material flying through the air, but there wasn't this
real up-close connection to people.
And that also threaded through this documentary was the story
of these two men that kept climbing up and climbing up, and
I think they were with the Port Authority and they kept going up
and going up and going up, and one of their wives was actually
coming out of the building, and she said I knew he wasn't coming
back and he didn't. And so that is this rhythm
that's tying this whole documentary together is going on
and on about these two men who were singular heroes even though
there were hundreds, if not thousands, of heroes that day.
They really chose to follow these two men that you only see
snapshots of with their kids and their family because they did
both perish. And I think, I'm curious about
this idea of the somatic response that there's a somatic
thing that happens when we see pictures of people that doesn't
happen when we see pictures of other things.
And I think there's actually neurosciences looking at this
really close right now, like an actual physical location in the
brain that creates a somatic response when we see pictures,
images, of people, of touch. Not to be crude, but that's why
porn works. It does some work, obviously it
does some work. So part 2 or B of this stew is,
I wonder with all the reality shows, and again I have a bad
time line in my head, but I don't remember reality shows
like I do these last 10 years, and that's a lot of budgetary
stuff going on, but I wonder if there's, since 9/11, if there's
some way that we are unconsciously, consciously,
reframing reality to make it not so real because everyone that
watches reality TV shows, whether it's the housewives of
wherever, we don't believe it as reality, yet that's the same
medium that's broadcasting what we need to think about 9/11 that
came to us there. I don't know if there's any
connection. I don't think it's a conspiracy,
but I was just wondering if you can speak to the visual in that
way. And, Jane, I'm thinking about
you in particular in terms of the way that that's working in
video, in fine art, and sort of the way we've seen the way
artists use the moving image and video shift in the past decade.
It's kind of open-ended. >> I think ideally, ideally we
know more of the back story, and so if we know more of the back
story, of course reality television isn't going to work.
We do have several outlets of news that do occasionally, if
they do their job, give us the back story which can govern our
response to something. So at least in terms of reality
TV I think that we know those things are doctored in this big
way. And so how do we deal, then,
with things that are not doctored?
And I think sometimes that's why we don't want to see things,
like the people actually falling out.
I think in many ways, at least in art, we don't want it to bite
that hard. There are very few works that
really tell us something truly awful.
We don't necessarily want that dialog all the time.
I think what's interesting is that in my research thinking
about this relationship between composers and writing and
response to war and noticing that, for example, surrealism,
atonality, this was on it's way before World War I.
-- was already beginning to establish so that certain things
were happening irrespective of war.
But I think that this idea of reality television, which has
become so prevalent in the last 10 years, is obviously a
response to the fact that we're able to witness events in a
different way than we could, you had to get you Movietone News in
the '40s if you went to the movies or something like that.
You got caught up after the event.
Now we're being taken to these events sometimes as they are
happening, and I think that has created a world, it has lead to
this idea of reality experience, even if it's fake, the idea of
it is an --, I think, of the way we perceive events in the world
through the media. And 9/11 was, we had already
been perceiving events. Wasn't it interesting?
My wife and I were in California, turned on the TV and
you heard this, from more than one person, saying that, what
science fiction movie is this? When you first turned it on, you
think what were you watching and then all of the sudden.
It took me a long time, by the way, to realize that it wasn't a
piece of science fiction. >> Yeah, that's the response
that I had heard over and over again when I was reading up for
this, so many people saying they thought it was a bad fantasy
film when they saw the footage of the towers because that was
our only context for that sort of image was terrible Hollywood
films that exploited violence and explosions.
And so, to see the reality of it suddenly, I think it did change
our sense of what reality could look like.
I'm also thinking back to what you were saying.
The only person who really dealt with this, even on a filmic
level, was Spike Lee with Katrina.
Which was this awful thing to sit through it even is just
dramatic because it's four discs or something.
It's nine hours worth of film. It was supposed to be even
digestible. And about the Holocaust, there
was show which was equally as difficult to watch as Spike
Lee's show. >> But people will watch nine
straight hours of "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" or
something. [INAUDIBLE]
It's much easier. It's much easier.
There's not doubt that
entertainment is much more easily digestible than these
things that are trying to get at what's worst about mankind.
And it may just be a coincidence of timing that in
our increasingly pervaded, our lives are so pervaded by media
right now, and real time media, that our sense of what is real
or what's really happening right is different.
We used to think of stars as people who did something a few
months ago and that ended up in a magazine and then we read
about it a few months later. Now, it's like, well, did so and
so from "Real Housewives" have her baby yet?
We interact with those characters as if they are our
second cousins or something, that they're real people who are
living in the same time continuum as we are, which, in a
way, they are. Although, I think it's several
months lag time. I think the coincidence also is
that "Survivor" started just after 9/11 or soon after, around
the same time, and was so much more successful financially than
any other reality show had been that everybody else said oh, my
god, look at how much money we could make doing this.
At the very beginning of your comment, though, you had a note
about how few faces or actual human victims we have associated
with all of that footage, and it strikes me that because the bad
guys were killed or disappeared afterward, all we really had
were all those images of, and we didn't have images of actual
victims being pulled out very often, if they were they were
quite covered up, there became this sort of grand lionization
of the firefighters and of the first responders.
I don't know. In my lifetime I haven't seen
anything like that. And we didn't see that with the
first responders in Katrina. But there became, I think in the
absence of any other faces to look at, we looked at what we
could human-wise, and that was firefighters.
It was way more complicated with Katrina because some of
them weren't so blatantly heroic.
I was very moved by the fact that because of the immediacy of
our communications capabilities, cell phones, etc, and the six
degrees of separation, this event happened in New York and
yet the entire nation, well for obvious reasons the entire
nation would be affected by it, but across the country people
were directly, personally, affected by it.
And I was scheduled to do a concert that week, an outdoor
concert, and I had a big decision to make whether to
continue the concert or cancel it, and I chose to do it and
raise money for the Red Cross. And since it was a very late
romantic concert of the music of Verdi which dealt so much with,
like "Va Pensiero" became, practically, Italy's national
anthem, and so much of Verdi's late work is set against a
political backdrop so it wasn't a flippant kind of concert to
do. But when I got to the rehearsal,
my cellist was deeply upset and I said, did you know someone?
And he said when I'm not playing the cello, I work in the
financial markets. I can't remember what company he
was working for, and he said so my colleagues were in the World
Trade Center and we talk every day.
And he said it was just unbelievable.
He said this guy called me in tower two and says this plane
just struck tower one, and of course a little while later,
this person lost their life in the other tower.
But the cell phone conversations from the planes and all of that
kind of immediate, that could have never happened in the
second world war or probably not even to the extent in Vietnam
that this immediacy is able to happen now because of our
various ways of communicating which changes so that people
felt connected in a way. >> We felt more connected, and
the question is, were we? And I don't have answer for
that. Like, on the one hand, yes, of
course we must have been more connected because we felt we
were. But I also feel connected, some
people feel connected to "The Real Housewives of New Jersey"
and are they? [LAUGHTER]
It is this curious phenomenon of our current media
situation. >> Interesting.
But isn't that one of the things that art does, that it
allows us to feel connected and to make connections.
To make connections. >> Even if the actual purpose of
the artist is not to make these connections but that's the
wonderful thing about art is it allows those connections to be
made whether they were intended or not.
Last night here, there was a discussion between two artists
who have exhibits and they were saying we weren't political.
We were doing art that turned out to be sort of political, but
we did not have discussions about politics.
We were doing art. And I think that's the wonderful
thing about art and why it's so powerful.
And I'm so sorry to have to kind of bring us to a close
here, but I think that leaves us in a very good place in terms of
the connections that art brings to us.
And I just want to remind you again of a photography reception
downstairs at the Playhouse Gallery that is featuring the
work of three Wisconsin photographers that is reflecting
on 9/11 that will be, I think, up for another month or
whatever. But if you have time and want to
stop by today, that would certainly work well.
Thank you, again, to our panelists and this special
afternoon of reflection and remembrance.
Thanks to the panelists from all three sessions: John Hall, Don
Downs, Louise Cainkar, Charles Cohen, Asifa Quraishi, John
DeMain, Valerie Laken, and Jane Simon.
We really appreciate your taking the time to connect with us this
afternoon. [APPLAUSE]