Art Exhibit
'Ground Zero' engulfs the senses
Museum of New Art's 9-11 exhibit packs deep, difficult emotional punch
By Joy Hakanson Colby / Detroit News Art Critic
DETROIT -- 'A black cloud a few stories high comes whooshing down the street. I stand there frozen as I watch people run for their lives. The first tower had just collapsed."
The words are from New York artist Amy Shapiro, as she relives the catastrophe of 9-11 through a performance piece given at Detroit's Museum of New Art (MONA). It's part of the current exhibit at the museum, "Ground Zero."
Shapiro pours flour over herself again and again to symbolize ashes, all the while sharing with her audience the sights and sounds she witnessed on that day. Then she wraps herself in an American flag and covers her face with a gas mask.
"The performance is powerful stuff," says West Bloomfield Township artist Robert Schefman, who was at the opening of the exhibit, which runs through Aug. 24. "It conveys the sense of insecurity in New York now. Suddenly, the town that was all about excess and fun became the target of war."
Nearly 60 artists are participating in "Ground Zero," which looks at 9-11 and its aftermath through paintings and sculptures, prints and drawings, photographs and digital images, videos and installations.
The exhibit reflects a growing trend whereby artists break from the established museum-gallery system to organize their exhibits on their own terms. Participants are usually short of cash and long on ingenuity, finding creative ways to get their work before the public without sweating the protocol.
"Ground Zero" is a big, sprawling, messy affair with some terrific works and some inept stuff. But together this mass of material -- containing everything from body bags to elk antlers -- comes together to pack an emotional wallop.
"These artists address the harder issues and most museums don't want to deal with risky work," says Jef Bourgeau, the director of MONA, which is dedicated to supporting edgy art.
"It has become essential for artists to make their own opportunities," adds Bourgeau, a risk-taking artist and former owner of an alternative art space in Pontiac.
Like other New Yorkers in the show, Shapiro had a front-row seat for the catastrophic events of 9-11. From her day job on Wall Street, only a few blocks from the attack on New York's World Trade Center, she experienced the smoke, the hysterical crowds, the sirens and the ashes that covered the streets, turning them into a landscape of death.
But what she couldn't see later during her frantic rush to safety haunted her most -- both towers were gone, leaving a terrible void in the lower Manhattan skyline.
Shapiro did what any artist worth the name might do. She translated her experience into art. Although she performed only for the opening of "Ground Zero" at MONA, she left behind an installation heaped with symbolic ashes, lost shoes and charred scraps of paper.
Count on "Ground Zero" to stimulate and irritate viewers. The artists involved took on a loaded subject. Some succeeded in getting their message across. Others failed. But their combined efforts have an undeniable impact.
"I'm overwhelmed by the scale of the show and how it represents the complexity of stories about 9-11," says Skip Davis, who heads the Gyro Creative Group in Detroit. "I've been twice and have to go back because I get super-saturated with the impact of such objects as dust-covered shoes and hoses, a body bag and digital images."
Detroiter Billy Hunter, a market analyst, says two installations -- an American eagle made of dental X-rays and a Ground Zero memorial containing a photograph of the area and and blood-red candles -- left him moved.
For John Cynar, exhibition director of the Paint Creek Center for the Arts in Rochester, "Ground Zero" brings back the meaning and intensity of 9-11. "Like most people, I had been desensitized by too many TV images. It takes artists to capture the essence of the original experience."
Cynar says he is moved most by a series of photographs documenting 9-11 sites and a sculpture of planes crashing into the towers.
Although "Ground Zero" was organized for Detroit, it contains some images from another exhibit titled "From the Ashes," which was mounted and shown in New York a scant month after 9-11. The man behind both exhibits is New York artist Frank Shifreen. He had help from fellow artists: New Yorker Daniel Sheffer and Julius Vitali of Coopersburg, Pa.
Shifreen has curated more than 30 exhibits, sending out letters and e-mails to network with artists across the country. He puts together a show in a few weeks, whereas it can take mainstream museums several years to organize a big exhibit, which might cost millions. As for funding his shows, artists dig down in their pockets to make things happen.
"We raised about $600 from artists for 'Ground Zero' and are getting about $300 more from MONA," says Vitali, one of several artists who helped install the show in Detroit. "We'll probably have $1,000 by the time everything is counted."
As for transporting the art, Pennsylvania artist Beth Ann Diamond, who is exhibiting digital prints in "Ground Zero," loaned a Winnebago RV. At MONA, she took on the finicky job of hanging 100 postcards and small 9-11 artworks sent to Shifreen by adults and children from all over the country.
Shifreen, for his part, lives less than a mile from the World Trade Center and saw the second plane go into a tower. During the crisis and shortly after, he went into action. He helped the rescue teams, raised money for firefighters' families, rallied artists for an exhibit and painted up a storm, using 9-11 as a source.
"I was going gangbusters until I crashed in January," says Shifreen, a teacher of homebound children and a Ph.D. student at Columbia University. "My energy disappeared and I lost the ability to concentrate. The trauma of seeing such an important symbol of our society destroyed caught up with me."
Shifreen believes that 9-11 was the official beginning of the millennium, bringing a whole new set of forces into play. "Ideologies like communism and fascism, conservatism and liberalism belong to the 20th century," he says. "Granted, 'Ground Zero' is only an art show. But it is meant to examine conditions of how the world has changed."
Kay Miller, an American Indian artist from Boulder, Colo., takes a timeless perspective. She believes 9-11 was but a blip in nature's cycle of life and death. She expressed this in an installation called "Three Fires," which is made up of feathers, cast animal heads and elk antlers that have been shed.
"I see human rights violations," says Miller, a painting professor at the University of Colorado. "So, the fact that 9-11 happened is not surprising."
Rights violations came home to Malta-born artist David Camilleri, who has lived in Manhattan for two years. He has been verbally abused for his accent because the Maltese language is influenced by Arabic and Italian.
"People who are paranoid hear Arabic," he says. "Many are ignorant and racist and treat anyone different with hostility."
Camilleri made a video expressing his frustration over the government detaining hundreds of people regarded as suspicious. The piece records the futile movements of a man chained to a bed by one foot and one arm for 24 hours.
So far, Bourgeau says the response to "Ground Zero" is mixed. "Some people want to come back and spend more time with the work. Others find it disturbing. It's a broad canvas of emotions and reactions."
Schefman, who lived in New York for 13 years, agrees.
"The exhibit brings home sadness and fear. It emphasizes how New York now has a whole different dynamic."
About MONA
The Museum of New Art has had seven different homes and one name change since it began five years ago. Here's its history so far:
1997: Jef Bourgeau started the Museum of Contemporary Art as an artist's project and moved it to five different locations in downtown Pontiac during a three-year period.
May 2000: A 12-member board was formed for MONA. A storefront was rented on Saginaw Street in Pontiac. Bourgeau was named director.
October 2000: MONA opened to the public. Soon after, the roof leaked and the building was condemned.
May 2001: MONA found a new 10,000-square-foot home in Detroit's Book Building.
September 2001: MONA opened the first Detroit exhibit, called "Documenta USA," which included slides, catalogs and videos, but no original art.
September 2002: The new season will begin with "Photography Now: Beyond Narrative."
You can reach Joy Colby at (313) 222-2276 and jcolby@detnews.com.