Generally speaking, politically and socially provocative art is always inspiring in some regard so I was generally pleased by NYU's "How Life Has Changed Since 9/11: Works by Faculty and Staff". The pieces on the first floor all relate directly to the World Trade Center Towers and the events that occurred ten years ago, chronicling each artists' relationship and experience with the event on September 11, 2001. Something was especially striking in looking at the photographs of "Missing Person" signs which seemed to appear all over the city. I was overcome with a great feeling of loss and sadness as I read through Peter Lucas' work which combined his narrative of the signs as well as pictures. Reading the exact location of a single person, indicated by an arrow, working for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th Floor, so precisely captured a quotation from Stalin, "1,000 deaths is a statistic. One death is a travesty."
I found the textual based pieces to be quite intriguing as well; a portal into a direct conversation with the artist juxtaposed to their photographs. Deborah Willis speaks of her work in response to the term "Citizen Journalism", the phenomena when a "concerned citizen believes that the telling of a story and the imaging of it do not have equal importance." (See Picture included below)
On the second floor, or 8th floor of the exhibition I was a bit confused. There appeared to be no order, choice, or congruency between the works and especially none with the what now seemed a sort of 9/11 memorial on the first floor. I couldn't draw any parallels between what was on display upstairs versus downstairs, the entire 9/11, "ten years later" theme vanished, save the "Letters to Obama" booklet which showed a few photographs and mainly tacky newspaper clippings put into collages. A letter on the first floor collection was featured at the beginning, asking students to be hyper aware and re-evaluative, warning against returning to any sort of normal life; however, the upper-floor collection seemed do just this, it entered into the space of banality.
I had to return to the first floor to revisit the large prints and finish where I feel my journey had started, in simply remembering 9/11, the people who lost their lives, which all brought an overwhelming presence to my current life, the context in which I live.
