9/11: Q&A with Ann Temkin, part three

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 final part of my chat with MoMA curator Ann Temkin. Part one is here. At the end of part two Temkin discussed how while artists may make work that's in response to a certain event, it's not always clear from their work. I pick up from there...

MAN: The Robert Gober that MoMA bought has that same quality.

Ann Temkin: The most explicit part of that installation is these drawings of people embracing, couples [juxtaposed] on the remakes of the September 12th New York Times. When I saw those in the Matthew Marks Gallery that spring... that was probably my first real goosebumpy, tears-coming-to-my-eyes kind of reliving of that moment. I think it was as much seeing those newspapers turned into artwork. Then with these super-imposed embracing people -- Gober was being absolutely direct there.

MAN: We've been talking around this idea but I wanted to address it more head-on: I don't know if this is a coincidence-of-timing or an indirect response, but for several years now Chelsea and Los Angeles have been full of art about decay and degeneration. (I see less of that from European artists, but maybe that's just me.) Do you see that and if you do, do you see bits of the post-9/11 mood in that?

Temkin: I was going to bring this up to you too because one of the things that does happen (which is interesting but also problematic) is that we end up reading work through the lens of 9/11 when it didn't necessarily have anything gto do with that.

For example, there's this work by Martin Kippenberger, of a 'crushed Metro entrance' which was made in 1997. and it's a gigantic sculpture of what would have been a structure that would have conceivably been a subway entrance but basically it's just a geometric-looking room with a stairway in it, and it's crushed. When he did it in 1997 the reason for doing it was this Kippenbergerish joke that this sculpture, which is almost 30 feet long was too big to get into a gallery, so it had just been bulldozed to get through the doors it needed to get through. That's his typical irreverence or sanctity about a work of art. If you look at that sculpture today you might say, 'He was such a prophet!' or you might say, 'Oh this piece is about the twin towers,' and it just wasn't.

I think that there is a lot of work that has been made in the past decade, and sort of a lot of work that has been made throughout modern art history (at least) that has to do with destruction, that has to do with decay and time passing and loss. That's almost for me such a constant of 20th-century history that you can almost pick any decade, hook it up to some war, or the Holocaust and so on, so to make the causal assumption there is hard. And yet what's interesting to me is the fact that one does it. Once you have this historical event to sort of read the art through the intentions of the artist almost are beside the point. Every viewer comes to it with his own interpretive viewpoint.