The New World Order Following 9/11 is a Template NOT to Follow
Extraordinary events tend to thwart future progress.
Dana and I took a road trip to Ann Arbor, Michigan one winter to get out of Chicago for a weekend and explore. The beauty of hitting little places, snagging a cheap hotel room, and wandering around is the often amazing discoveries one finds.
An alley covered with graffiti.
A bookstore with signed first editions of ancient texts.
A deli known for its outlandishly delicious breakfasts.
Museums. I love museums.
Of course there is a grand art museum in Ann Arbor and the signage touted a special collection celebrating art from the nineties. Dana is from the nineties (being the decade she came of age) and, while I am from the eighties, I can still delve in with both nostalgia and perspective.
The collection was superb.
Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s provides a fresh look at the art of the pivotal decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. The exhibition, whose title references the 1991 Nirvana song (considered by many an anthem for the decade), focuses on three principal themes—debates over “identity politics,” the digital revolution, and globalization—is the first major museum survey to examine the art of this pivotal decade.
Given we were viewing this collection some fifteen years following the attack on NYC, what struck me was how forward thinking artists were just prior to that event and how 9/11/2001 practically forced these ideas underground. The fear-mongering, the conservative desire to suppress ideas of digital revolution, of a more vocal pursuit of equity among the LGTBQ and Trans communities, almost fully quelled the artistic movement of the time period.
It seemed that we were on the right track with artists really digging deep into problems a peaceful society should mine only to be almost instantly snuffed out with the reading of a children’s book while planes were smashed into buildings.
In Las Vegas right now in the wake of the Virus is a sense of desperate calm. People now suddenly out of jobs as most of the work here is on hold until other people can fly here to party. The freshly unemployed clinging to the notion that things will soon get back to normal while fighting that nagging feeling that it will never be what it was only a month ago.
Soon the reality of having no income and no work will set in. Just around the corner of Flamingo and Las Vegas Boulevard is the very beginnings of what could become our Mad Max universe, all cheap gas and violence, battling it out for warlord supremacy centered around potable water in the desert.
Whether things get that bad or not, I believe that the progress society has made in terms of equity and justice and activism will be overshadowed by fear and anguished need. The art of those most motivated by empowering those with less may be brushed under the dark and soiled shag carpeting of disaster.
In a world order dominated by toilet paper hoarding and a power grab for masks and ventilators, the poetry slam and the digital art hasn’t got a chance unless we actively rebuke the 9/11 template and hoard instead ideas. Ideas and art, stories and songs and films. Books and paintings and insane performance pieces that challenge the paradigm that left us so miserably unprepared for a pandemic that was foretold by so many.
Extraordinary events tend to thwart future progress.
But they don’t have to.
