In Memoriam: 911

 

In Memoriam: 911

By Tom Wachunas 

   Ten years ago I was blessed with the opportunity to be included in a group show at downtown Canton’s Anderson Creative (later named Translations Art Gallery), guest-curated by Dr. Fredlee Votaw. Some of you readers may remember the exhibit. It was called “The Persistence of Memory” – commemorating the 10^th Anniversary of 911. Here’s a link to my comments on the exhibit from back then:

http://artwach.blogspot.com/2011/09/mournings-after.html

   So here we are once more immersed - thanks largely due to the towering medium of television - in our recollections of 911, twenty years later.

   And here I am likewise immersed. Not only in remembrance of an overwhelmingly tragic event, but also in recollections of making my contribution to that 10^th Anniversary exhibit - a sculpture, nearly 5’ tall, called Window on the World. The process was a long one, evolving through about 10 weeks during the summer of 2011, and one I continue to think of as a series of daily meditations and a season of protracted prayer.

   It started with purchasing, then gutting (removing the heavy picture tube) a big, used Magnavox television from a Salvation Army store. An eery serendipity, this finding a Magnavox TV. Magna vox, Latin for “great voice”.  Next, building a wood pedestal. Then faux-painting those forms to suggest the marble or granite finish of an elaborate gravestone - a funereal totem.

   The protracted prayer element commenced when I began to handwrite a litany - the names of 2,977 people - on to 41 sheets of white paper, on each page three columns of names. As I scrolled down the online list I found of all those who perished, one name at a time, I touched the desktop screen, offering aloud each name to God as I wrote it onto paper. I made photocopy reductions of those 41 pages, finally cutting them into thin vertical strips that I glued to the inside walls of the hollow TV shell, arranged to perhaps suggest the metropolitan skyline of NYC.  

   Even as I type this now, in this moment at my computer desk, I can hear my TV in the living room, broadcasting the reverential ceremonies transpiring at the 911 Memorial in lower Manhattan.

   Television. Tell a vision. In this moment, I am praying yet again. Looking through this window on the world. Here, but for the grace of God…