Art on the Eve of Destruction

Out from the universe of tragedies, subsequent occurrences, and possibilities for future calamities of a cycle which ostensibly began on September 11, 2001 (though not necessarily without prior historical causations and ancient political and or transcontinental fault lines) a whole new range of personal and public experience and imagery has entered into our societal consciousness. Hereafter different modern art signposts (if not works canonically accepted as masterpieces) and their contemporary and post-millennial antecedents will have to be seen in the light of a new relationship to events of the recent past. Perhaps the most famous modern piece of Western art to achieve iconic status in its relation to war is Picasso's Guernica, which is said to depict in the abstract the eponymous village as it and its population (both residents and transitory partisan fighters) are decimated by bombing runs and ground war at the hands of the fascist forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil war.

Seemingly, if one were to re-codify this work or apply it to an event now, one would link it not to the infernos of downtown Manhattan but to the rural villages of Afghanistan. Whereas areas within the multi-tribal nation were subjected to ongoing anti-Taliban and Al Qaeda sorties, many of the civilian inhabitants were certainly helpless as the foreign fighter jets dropped munitions upon their habitat. For those who witnessed and/or escaped the World Trade Center destruction either in the United States or abroad (as seen on one of the global television news networks) a work which might ring eerily pertinent is German artist Max Beckmann's painting Falling Man (painted by the German expressionist after World War II, when he was an expatriate living and working in New York). Here, Beckmann depicted the free fall of a mortal from an apartment as an allusion to the godlike heights where some urban dwellers reside. In this painting an oversize figure plummets between dual infernos made of twin high rises aflame. Much as the leaps of the victims from the Trade Center occurred on a day where the weather was of a quality that has been described as ideal, Beckmann's mortal descent also plays itself out against a clear blue sky.

A rendering of recent events that somehow in reflection parallel the Beckmann has been a series of postcard-like paintings by the Swiss-located Korean-born artist So-Un (Han-Kyoung) Lee. These works are as if windows to scenes of the New York tragedies. The dramas are sometimes pictured within the alphabetic confines of her converted calligraphy forming the letters "N" and "Y." In some passages the fumes of smoke and the rise of the doomed towers mirror the letters' shape (the character's bulges, summits, and dips). In one instance a single innocently pop art-type figure descends head-first in an almost orderly matter-of-fact manner to his death. Then in still another episode workers crouch in fetal positions against the windows as if each in a private cell is overtaken by an instinctual reaction brought on by the appearance on their horizon of present, if not forthcoming, demise.

In an example of Picassian integration into a contemporaneous response to the hijacked airplanes slamming into the towers, there is Salma Arastu's One Tragedy is Not Over Yet Another Begins. Arastu is an artist working in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania whose symbolism, derived from her background as an Islamic woman of Indian descent, shares much with that of Persian photographer Shirin Neshat. Arastu, in this epic canvas, lays down a color field of sanguine burnt red-and-black. She then renders a vast poltergeist type of cloud formation. Next as the twists and unruly turns of the artist's line wrap together in a violent spin with what appears to be ghostly apparitions in the form of women in burkhas, the Islamic palm symbol, and...