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

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: MoMA curator Ann Temkin. Part one is here.

MAN: You're a curator at a a New York City institution. Have you or any other MoMA curators sat around in acquisition meetings and said, 'You know, we need this one in part because there's a connection to our city's history?'

Ann Temkin: Certainly when we purchased both the Tuymans and the Matthew Marks installation that Bob Gober did the topic came up. I do think that there was a strong feeling, I believe, on Tuymans' part and on Bob Gober's part that they were feeling -- or maybe we were just feeling it on their behalf -- that these were works of art that ought to stay in New York City. Of course, for the works of art to be "good" they should be good for viewers in any time and in any place, but we felt that these pieces would have particular potency for artists and audiences in New York City, that the connection between those places and times would be strongly felt here. I think that that helped us... that, and that their dealers weren't inclined to send them off to other places.

MAN: The reaction you and Paul both have to the Tuymans is especially interesting to me. As I'm sure you know, it's not actually a painting of a tower falling, nor is it from a photograph of a tower falling. But we see that painting and because of our shared historical experience, we think 9/11.

Temkin: Exactly. It's so much more the indirect effect [of 9/11] than the direct effect that ends up being the most interesting. And when it comes to keeping one's eyes out for this kind of effect in art this is the beginning rather than the end. I think that neither artist would be happy if one was to say that they're works only about 9/11. They're not like Guernica.

That brings up the point that a lot of the work that one might say is an artistic response to 9/11 you'd never know it. It could be an abstract work that's just incredibly moving because there is just this very introspective quality to it. But all it might be is a field of color, say, or some massive material. But if you were to talk to that artist they might be 100 times more explicit about the impact of the event: See this red square? That was all about 9/11. So it's not necessarily something that the work of art wears on its sleeve. And it would be wrong to think about it only in those terms.

For example this art historian in London wrote a decade ago about Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross as a response to the Holocaust. There's an example of one thing where it's a 20-year time lag, and if you look at Newman's Stations of the Cross there's nothing in them that would say to you this is all about the Holocaust. But this historian created what was, for some people, a very convincing argument about what those incredibly abstract paintings were all about. These are very subjective areas.

And I also think it's important to make the distinction between what the artist intends and what the viewer's response is because the artist doesn't have control over what the viewer takes form the work. It might be nothing they could have predicted.