9/11: Q&A with Ann Temkin

Last week I started talking with several of America's top contemporary art curators about artists' responses to 9/11. Here are the posts I did with MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel. Today, the first part of my conversation with MoMA curator Ann Temkin.

MAN: Is there any art about 9/11 that really speaks to you?

Ann Temkin: Two of the works that Paul referred to are in the MoMA collection. Those are the two that would have come to mind for me most immediately: The Gober installation and the Tuymans.

I think that my reactions were very similar to his when I first heard what your question was because I think that might be something that's almost beginning now, rather than something that would have been happening over the last six years. These things have a kind of built-in delay, I think.

There's a value in the sort of sudden impact of this event on an artist's life -- perhaps, sometimes, that will result in a really great work. But chances are [that initial work] is most apt to be a great and profoundly felt personal reaction, and not a great aesthetic processing. The processing of something like 9/11 into what ends up being a great work of art is much more apt (to me) to be something that comes between five and ten years later, and more.

MAN: Paul mentioned Goya's Third of May. It was made six years after the events it depicts. We're six years after 9/11 now.

Temkin: Exactly. The difference is when you're talking about these historical things is that the difference between, say, 1870 and 1862 doesn't sound so great to us. But at that moment, it was. So for me it would be easy to see some art historian writing 20 or 50 years from now calling anything made in this whole decade as something that's easy to link to that 2001 event.

MAN: Have you considered doing a 9/11 show? If you did and decided not to do it, why not?

Temkin: I didn't consider doing it, and I think that reflects my point-of-view that the art comes first and that it's not a subject that will make art great or not. What I'm interested in is art that is great as great, not art that is aspiring to be great on the basis of the issue that it addresses. So for me to do a show about that would be less art-centric than topic-centric. That's something that I'm not against, but it wouldn't be something I personally would do.

I'm not surprised that it hasn't happened yet because most people do share the feeling -- or most artists would share the feeling -- that the primary motivation for whatever the work of art comes to be has to be a whole lot more profound and complicated than something you could sum up as a response to a historical event. It's just too simple somehow to hang a whole bunch of works of art on that hook.