Creating in a World Where the Moon Can Fall

Osvaldo Golijov was in the midst of a new composition for the Los Angeles Philharmonic when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. For days, he could not work. When his mind cleared, he found that he could not continue with the piece.

It was a work about Jerusalem, where he once lived, using music from Christian, Jewish and Muslim liturgy. “The piece was about grief, about a grieving landscape,” the composer said from his home in Boston. “Every pain has a geography, and I realized that now it is here, not there, this pain.”

So Golijov started afresh, in a different vein. The new work, a string quartet titled “Vespers,” draws on American influences, including blues musician Blind Willie McTell, to depict the stages of mourning.

Golijov’s music evokes his Jewish heritage and his early life in Argentina during its years of dictatorship and “dirty war.” “It’s not that I am discovering acts of terrorism for the first time,” he said. “I have seen people shot and killed, seen things blown up. But I thought this was part of my past, that I could raise my children here in safety. But that is not to be.”

Sept. 11 has resonated deeply in the minds of artists. At first, many hesitated, wondering whether art had anything to say at such a moment. Like lower Manhattan, the landscape of metaphor lay broken. Old work took on different shades of meaning. New work seemed trivial, even pointless.

But in the months since, poets, sculptors, painters, composers and playwrights have reflected the national tragedy in varying keys and hues.

Some have tried to provide solace, while others remain dedicated to questioning boundaries and beliefs. Some have used words and images to explore the complicated issues of individual, country and world. Others have infused traditional forms and themes with a sense of vulnerability and loss.

Many artists speak of a new seriousness, and few think this entirely a bad thing. Powerful works have emerged during the past 20 years, but an era diverted by the noise of pop culture and the drumbeat of Wall Street has hardly been a golden age for American art.

Although it is too early to discern the lasting imprint of Sept. 11, some artists believe that works of cerebral abstraction will give way to those that express the universality of emotion. Broad social themes will probably become more central in literature and painting.

In a grieving New York, a number of artists felt compelled to change works in progress. Playwright Stephanie Fleischmann was midway through an adaptation of four Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales set in contemporary New York.

The first two were done. But as she watched her city change, her play changed too. “I couldn’t write,” she said. “So I wandered the streets, tried to collect the images and stories, the small things we might forget.”

The play, which is scheduled to open off-Broadway in March, is tentatively titled “I Only Appear to Be Dead.” Although the first portion remains a vision of pre-Sept. 11 New York, the rest is essentially a version of the tragedy. A segment based on Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” explores the desire many people expressed to change places with the dead. Another, loosely based on “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” is about the confusion of war.

To link the tales, Fleischmann turned to “What the Moon Saw,” another Andersen tale. In her version, a huge meteor has fallen to Earth and everyone thinks it is the moon. Throughout the play, a reporter asks people where they were when it happened.

“That is the question everyone asks here, even now,” Fleischmann said. “ ‘Where were you?’ And the feeling is that we now live in a world where it is possible for the moon to fall.”

A Conceptual Artist Rethinks Images

In mid-October, John Baldessari was finishing a series of new works that will be unveiled at a New York gallery in the spring. He is a conceptual artist who likes to imagine the improbable--including a piece done more than a decade ago in which a faceless couple stands beneath a burning World Trade Center.

Pacing through his Santa Monica studio, he hung image after image on the wall and stared, attempting to select the ones he would send to New York. With his signature hybrid of photography and painting, he had created crosses, rectangles and several 7-foot-high, T-shaped images.

Color photos of high-rises, many from the Wilshire corridor, form the stalks of these giant Ts and are overlapped on the top with black-and-white movie stills. In the intersections between real life and fantasy, Baldessari had painted figures and shapes in vivid hues.

Looking at them, he realized that some of the movie scenes he had chosen now suggested something other than what he had intended. He replaced the African battle, the two women arguing over a gun. Even photos of a gymnast in mid-flight and a mountain climber were set aside.

“They look different now,” Baldessari said, pointing to these last two on his light table. “She could be falling from a building. He could be a soldier off to war. You have to question everything.”

After much internal debate, he decided against dismantling the striking T shapes. Baldessari has frequently used images of tall buildings in his work, as well as smoke and fire. “Do I have to eliminate conflict and chaos from the work because it’s inappropriate? Am I going to have to edit my life?”

His World Trade Center piece, stored in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, will probably not be displayed for a while, he said. “Anyone now using the image of the World Trade Center will do so with a different meaning. In fact, two of anything now signals something else. What before was quite benign now is infused with meaning.”

These shifts are both instructive and worrisome, Baldessari said. “Are we going to have all horizontal art for a while? Will it get that bad?” he asked. “We live in a fragile world, and it’s good that we think about it once in a while. I am continuing to do what I do, because otherwise it would be censorship.”

Many writers have felt similarly unmoored. In New York especially, many looked at their contemporary love stories, their plays about parental relationships, their novels of personal angst and wondered if they should simply toss them. At a meeting put together just after the attacks by New Dramatists, a playwrights’ organization, some venerable writers cautioned younger ones against rash reactions.

“All these people who were 30-ish or younger were wondering, ‘What should I be writing?’ They were concerned that what they were working on was too trivial,” playwright and screenwriter Jonathan Reynolds said. “I said, ‘Relax, it will come to you.’ This kind of life-and-death crisis says a whole lot about human nature. So we watch and wait. This is what we’ve been put here for.”

Theater and poetry have gained a new resonance in recent months, as audiences, as well as artists, search for context and comfort.

Moving but Ironic Reactions to a Poem

Adam Zagajewski’s poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” appeared in the Sept. 24 New Yorker. Although written almost two years ago, the poem read as if composed expressly for this moment. Its opening images of “June’s long days” and “wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew” lyrically distill the inevitability of hope amid desolation.

Americans’ reaction was moving and ironic for Zagajewski. Born in 1945 and raised in an industrial town outside Krakow, Poland, he has only known a mutilated world; it wasn’t until he visited the U.S. in 1981 that he realized there were places in which it was whole.

“Everywhere you look, even in Western Europe, there are scars from the war,” he said. “When I came to America, I could not believe my eyes.”

The response to his words was remarkable. “Never before have I gotten so many e-mails and letters, and never before this emotion,” he said. “I’m always happy when a poem speaks to so many people.”

The tragedy could also invest serious prose with greater depth. After years in which fine writing has largely been confined to exquisite personal epiphanies and sharp but self-absorbed memoirs, some writers are again in search of cultural and historical context.

Novelist Susan Straight, known for her fiction about marginal lives on the outskirts of L.A., was in the midst of her first historical novel when the terrorists struck. A visit to New York at the end of September has permeated the work, the story of a slave rebellion in Louisiana seen through the eyes of a young girl. The slaves were caught and beheaded, and their heads put on pikes lining the main road into the town.

When it came time to write about what that looked like, she could think only of the fliers of the missing that covered every lamppost and window in lower Manhattan. “I realized that, like the 11-year-old girl in my book, there are 11-year-old kids walking around New York seeing these faces of the dead.”

Composer Focuses on Light and Hope

In the weeks after the attacks, shaken Americans turned to classical and sacred music. Even news radio separated its grim reports with slices of Bach and Haydn. Composers were aware of the solace they had provided.

The luminous choral piece “Lux Aeterna” was played and replayed by radio stations, and its creator, Los Angeles composer Morten Lauridsen, was flooded with e-mails from grateful listeners.

Written in memory of his mother, Lauridsen’s piece is consonant and spiritually unconflicted. “It centers on light,” he said, “on illumination and hope, which is the exact opposite of what happened, and people recognized that.”

After the attacks, Lauridsen began adaptations of his “O Magnum Mysterium,” a similarly consoling choral work, and of “Ave Maria.” “I dropped everything else and did that immediately,” he said, “because it seemed so necessary.”

For a few days after the tragedy, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Los Angeles Philharmonic music director, considered writing a piece about its psychological effect. “But I wasn’t able to find a musical metaphor,” he said. “The scale did not seem comparable.

“I cannot describe what has happened,” Salonen said. “I know I have a different sensitivity to the music. Even to Bach, even to Beethoven. I am very grateful music exists, because it goes beyond the limits of words.”

But in acknowledging the power of his art, he also admits that he and some of his colleagues have felt almost guilty, wondering why they did not anticipate what now seems inevitable. “We all have been thinking about the false sense of safety and security we managed to lull ourselves into,” he said. “People feel intellectually ashamed that we didn’t see it sooner--not in a counterintelligence way, but as an artistic sensitivity to the world around us.”

Installations Had Long Addressed These Issues

Many modern artists seek to inspire change rather than to comfort. For them, art should have a frank connection to politics and the spirit of the times. Conceptual artist Barbara Kruger, who watched both towers fall from the window of her Manhattan apartment, said she won’t be changing the thrust of her work because she has long been obsessed with cultural enmities and misunderstandings--with “how we are with each other.”

“I feel like my last installations have been a soundtrack for this,” she said of work that included, amid her trademark black, white and red words and images, a contorted face screaming, “How dare you not be me?”

“People were telling me, ‘Oh, we’re over that,’ as if we’re ever over how we relate to each other. I’m a news junkie, and I don’t know why anyone was surprised. It’s just the horrific inability of people to act and live with one another, to tolerate any kind of difference at all.”

Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman’s work has long dealt with issues of poverty, race and social justice. She speaks for those who are less concerned about the effect the tragedy will have on art than about the changes it might force on the American consciousness. “There are a number of people taking the stance of writer as healer, which is a very powerful pull,” she said. “But what interests me most is: Are we going to enter adulthood as a nation after all these years?”

Some artists look back to ancient myths and Shakespeare as a reminder that we have experienced events like this before, if not as Americans, then as part of humanity. “All art is there as an exorcism, to help you get through the hard times,” said stage and film director and artist Julie Taymor from her home in New York. “And it’s important to show how we fought these battles before.”

Much of Taymor’s work, especially the 1999 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” explores the difference between justice and revenge. “I think of the scene where the queen begs Titus to spare her son, and Titus says he must kill him because it is part of his religious tradition, and the queen answers, ‘Cruel, irreligious piety.’ She could be speaking today.”

Artists, she said, also have to accept that they do not operate in a creative vacuum. “Art has the power to alter the worldview,” she said. And just because of that, she said, artists should be doubly thoughtful and aware of the complexities of the world. “It is up to artists to take responsibility about the story that they tell. Not censorship, but sensitivity.”

Familiar Territory for Artists and Writers

Art frequently reflects tumultuous events, and some works remain vivid in the collective imagination long after even revolutions are reduced to notations on a timeline. In response to the political chaos consuming Europe in the mid-19th century, Gustave Courbet famously rejected the Neo-Baroque by portraying the simple lives of peasants and artisans, thus founding the school of Realism.

Artists and writers have also turned to fantasy--whether Dadaism or Surrealism, George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” or Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”--to describe the horrors of war. Some works have emerged from plain fury: Pablo Picasso, inspired by the 1937 bombing of the town Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, created an unforgettable tableau of human anguish.

Art can also thrive on a plane apart from world events. Claude Monet painted waterlilies as World War I raged. Henri Matisse created his whimsical cutouts during World War II.

Many contemporary artists believe that the terrorist attacks have changed them as people and therefore will subtly affect their art, but they remain overtly committed to the styles, forms and subjects they had claimed before Sept. 11.

L.A. artist Chris Burden watched the disaster unfold from far away. He was in Istanbul, Turkey, finishing an installation called “Nomadic Folly”--a room hung with Persian fabrics and Arabic lamps, and strewn with cushions. “All their beautiful stuff condensed into a nugget,” he said.

It felt good, he said, to be using such things to make art, to be participating in a wider world, “because all that finery which is Arabic and Persian myth is beautiful. I mean, this is what started the Crusades--Europeans were living in caves, and they were living in all this luxury. Now, it feels like the reverse.”

Burden said he is playing with some ideas that would reflect current events, but in terms more provocative than comforting. “I’m not always a nice guy,” said the man who in 1975 had someone shoot him as a piece of performance art. “I don’t think art has a moral imperative.”

Playwright Mac Wellman sought to exorcise the influence of Sept. 11 from his students’ minds so they could concentrate on other inspirations.

At the end of September, in a playwriting class at Brooklyn College, Wellman instructed his students to spend the next hour writing, “but not about it.” When the hour was up, he gave them their real assignment: to turn what they had written into “broken” plays, works that tell a story in fragments, with significant pieces intentionally missing.

Without the crutch of a traditional structure, the writer is forced to say only what is necessary and look at events in a new way. “It seemed very appropriate for the time,” he said, “a broken play for a broken world.”

Almost all of the pieces that emerged were about Sept. 11, which was what Wellman intended. “I wanted them to get it out of their system so we could move on to their other work.”

Wellman says the tragedy will affect his work, but he does not yet know how. “If something was worth doing before this happened, it will be worth doing after it happened,” he said. “Maybe someone will write something brilliant, but not for a while. It will require delicacy and indirection, and now is not the time for delicacy and indirection, is it?”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

Adam Zagajewski

Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

Try to praise the mutilated world.

Remember June’s long days,

and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.

The nettles that methodically overgrow

the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

You must praise the mutilated world.

You watched the sylish yachts and ships;

one of them had a long trip ahead of it,

while salty oblivion awaited others.

You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,

you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.

You should praise the mutilated world.

Remember the moments when we were together

in a white room and the curtains fluttered.

Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn

and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.

Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feather a thrush lost,

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.

*

Excerpted from “Without End” by Adam Zagajewski. Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Copyright 2001 by Adam Zagajewski. All rights reserved.

*

Times staff writer Tim Rutten contributed to this story.

ABOUT THIS SERIES: This is the fourth in an occasional series of stories exploring the effect of the Sept. 11 attacks on various aspects of American society.