Indecent? Only If Done Well

In 2002, artist Damien Hirst said he believed the terrorists responsible for crashing planes into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 should have been congratulated for such a work of art. “They’ve achieved something which nobody would ever have thought possible”, said Hirst. “It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually, that it “it’s kind of like an artwork in its own right”. Hirst claims that the event affected our perceptions of the world and changed our visual language: “a airplane becomes a weapon,” and that “as an artist you’re constantly looking for things like that.”

I agree with Hirst: The image of the falling towers is potent and powerful. I remember I was in class at university when it happened. We crowded around a television to watch the images on the news programs, one after the other, agape at what was happening in the world. The fall of the Twin Towers is a worldwide reference. Television shows, movies, works of art and songs have been made revolving around it. It has also generated censorship: In many contexts, it is considered inappropriate to talk about the subject. Rumor has it that the television show Friends had to edit all the scenes where the Towers were shown so viewers didn’t have to remember “the incident” when they watched reruns.

In 2002, the organization Apexart opened the exhibit “The Art of 9/11.” The curator was the art academic Arthur C. Danto. Danto expressed he had learned two things about the 9/11 attacks: One, that everyone is capable of heroism in the face of tragedy, and when tragedy occurs, commiseration reigns among survivors. The second was that even the most common people respond toward tragedy with art: “On Sept. 11”, says Danto, “New York was a complex of vernacular altars; the city was transformed into a ritual precinct, dense with improvised sites of mourning.”

In 2005, The Drawing Center gallery was also allowed to be part of the new World Trade Center and presented an exhibit about 9/11, which many considered anti-patriotic. Finally, The Drawing Center was expelled from the area as they gave in to sanctimonious protests. The protest gave birth to the term “inappropriate art”; which today can be used to refer to events as the Tribeca film Festival and all aesthetic manifestations regarding extraordinary historical, highly traumatic events.

“Inappropriate art” questions the fact that art should not refer to certain matters, issues that merit a certain amount of respect due to causing sensitivity in the population. Hirst’s answer is no: nothing is exempt of aesthetic comment; somehow the unlimited is part of the idea of art, and aesthetic manifestation are called to talk about everything.

Woody Allen was once asked if kissing was indecent. “Only if it’d done right!” was his answer. This affirmation is extensive to the so-called “inappropriate art,” which is just a way to show something that aesthetic manifestations have been doing since long ago: “put the finger on the wound” and talk about the events that have marked a before and after for mankind.

9/11 left (to a great part of humanity, not just to Americans) an invisible enemy, a generalized paranoia, a burst xenophobia, produced a fruitless war and even reactivated the millenary and barbaric practice of book burning; in this case, copies of the Koran. 9/11 also left many dead. Even so, stopping its aesthetic representations for being “inappropriate” is to despise the only cherishable thing about this infamous incident: An image shared among all of humanity. The towers’ vertical image, the planes’ horizontal trail, the smoke, the fire, the event and the bravery of art by signaling the world from indecency.