The connection between a space and a memory is a tenuous one, confounded and fragile, contingent at best. This connection makes a place into a site, and then transforms a site into a context.
Site: A Matter of Context
Zhanna Veyts
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Site Matters: Edited by Moukhtar Kocache and Erin Shirreff / Published by DAP, Inc., 2004 / 317 pgs. / ISBN: 0-9726973-1-4
The connection between a space and a memory is a tenuous one, confounded and fragile, contingent at best. This connection makes a place into a site, and then transforms a site into a context. The context becomes a stage for action, for production, for communication and in turn for forging new connection. This is the framework within which the Lower Manhattan Cultural Foundation joined with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to launch the World Views program in 1997. In 2004, Site Matters was published in commemoration of this World Trade Center Artists Residency program.
As Moukhtar Kocache states in the opening of the book, "Amazed and baffled by the [WTC] site and its many unique sociopolitical layers, we recognized that it would be a fertile environment for artists wanting to pursue issues related to institutional critique, architecture, modernity, supermodernity, globalization, urbanism and popular culture." The initiative was originally intended as a temporary project, providing artists with unrestricted access to temporarily vacant, raw space in both towers and at various elevations, on the 24th, 36th, 48th, 81st and 91st floors. Applicants from around the world submitted proposals for projects conceived for the World Trade Center, which underwent selection by a jury of art professionals, critics, artists and curators. Throughout the program’s six-year run, these jurors would regularly select approximately 15 artists per six-month residency.
The WTC towers fostered a colony of artistic production, wherein participants shared communal raw space and were encouraged to collaborate, dialogue and exchange. Some of the work evolved out of isolation and contemplation; other projects were generated by the opportunities afforded by the program. The artists were visited by critics, curators, art professionals and students, creating a dynamic space of "exchange, learning and exposure." Over the course of the five years, LMCC partnered with the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Americans for the Arts and others to expand their audiences and help weave the workspace program into the city’s "cultural fabric."
A beautiful tribute and a living memorial, Site Matters documents the incredible variety and range of the work produced by the resident artists. The initial works were "perceptual", impressions of the awesome views from Tower One. James Shehan, for example, tried to concentrate his kaleidoscopic visions into 2 1/2 x 2 1/2 inch miniatures of the cityscape. Other artists used every medium from photography to performance to document the intense experiential elements of the space and its (world)views. John Long’s video installation recorded the continuous traffic flow through the WTC doors. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy took a studio in the office of failed Japanese bank, where they proceeded to create Airworld Radio, a fake corporation, a conceptual metacompany that was a stand-in for the WTC: the voice of global capital. Nadine Robinson interjected the "Muzak" played in the elevators with her own soundtrack for the commuters’ daily route. Emily Jacir used the medium of her credit card to create a month-long performance: buying and returning from every store in the World Trade Center Mall, thereby allowing the passage of time and her own existence to be marked in a larger system, the system of commerce. Even such retrospectively eerie projects as Diane Ludin’s "Pass the Bomb" made note of the unique intermingling of art, politics and commerce within this space.
The projects reveal that the theoretical interpretations of site have expanded to become "site-determined, site-oriented, site-conscious and site-related." These notions have served as springboards for myriad site-specific projects worldwide.
With the destruction of the WTC, the LMCC residency space and countless artworks produced prior to September 11th 2001 were lost. In an effort to reconcile these losses, the connection between memory and space has come to mirror the relationship between presence and absence. In a recent interview, Tom Healy, LMCC President, said, "The residency was about bringing artists away from the periphery." He described the LMCC as a "catalyst for art downtown, for getting people to think about art in new ways." Healy spoke emotionally about the two-year long process of compiling the book and recapturing a moment of history in New York, a city now changed. This book project took an overwhelming amount of research and inspired new connections in the community; directly and indirectly, the project has fostered a wide variety of programming ideas that the LMCC is now in the process of initiating, including projects in Performance, Visual arts, New Media and Technologies, music, and literature. This reasserts the importance of the residency as a catalyst for artistic thinking about societal issues. The subsequent move of the residency out of a commercial space and into the urban environment reinforces the community- and global-mindedness of the projects that are created therein. That is, the artists of the LMCC are global citizens responsible for pursuing cultural issues in their work. Site Matters is a conceptual consideration of the absence, memory, and commemoration of a context that no longer exists. Yet, as a chronicle of the ideas and creativity that were fostered there, it compels us to find new ways to be present in its post-history.
