Art: Other than 'Tribute in Light,' 9/11 inspired few great artworks

Ten years after the horrific fact, Sept. 11, 2001, has yet to produce its Guernica. Most likely this is because our era lacks a Picasso, but I can think of at least two other possible reasons.

The first is that the societal, political, psychological, and historical ramifications of what the late, unlamented Osama bin Laden wrought are just too immense and complicated to be neatly encapsulated in a single work of art.

The other is that our media-saturated age has produced so many 9/11 images, from the banal to the poignant, that even a Guernica would become lost in the visual miasma. Remember that millions of people around the world saw the towers collapse in real time. How could art trump the ultimate in reality television?

Not that artists and civilians haven't tried. The immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon produced an outpouring of art, mostly photographic.

The most inspired piece of 9/11 art was created in 2002, when Tribute in Light's twin beams of blue light were projected into the sky from ground zero on the six-month anniversary of the attacks.

Since then the beams, created by 88 searchlights and underwritten by the Municipal Arts Society, have glowed every year from dusk Sept. 11 to dawn Sept. 12.

At the five-year mark, a massive book of color photographs made at ground zero by Joel Meyerowitz was published, but it was more a document than a work of art. Locally, the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown exhibited a suite of disaster watercolors that New York artist Todd Stone made in 2002 from his own photographs. These were appropriately elegiac but also denatured, detached from the catastrophe that inspired them.

(I'm discounting the "sculptures" made from twisted and scorched steel beams salvaged from the Trade Center; one was displayed at 30th Street Station. These are more sanctified relics than art.)

In the five years since the Stone show, 9/11 appears to have dropped below the horizon. Today artists seem more introspective, or perhaps more narcissistic, than the history painters of yesteryear. Bigness today means scale, not concept.

So I don't expect that the next decade will produce any 9/11 art more memorable or insightful than Tribute in Light. It was so grand, yet so ephemeral, but also poetically elegant and poignant.

Contact contributing art critic Edward J. Sozanski at esozanski@phillynews.com.