On the Eve of September 11th

The Miami Herald published an article about the lack of artistic ways by US artists that deal with the September 11th demolition of the World Trade Center and the partial destruction of one of the five sides that comprise the Pentagon.

The author somehow compares this event with the bombing of Gernika and it comes to a logic conclusion, is there a Picasso "Guernica" for September 11th?

Is there?

Is there a Picasso to remember the fall of the Catalonyan Republic to Franco, Hitler and Mussolini?

The Republic of Catalonya was after all, founded on September 11th of 1931, a fact that many Spaniards want us to forget today.

Is there a Picasso to remember the military coup against the Chilean government which ended with the murder of Salvador Allende?

We can not allow ourselves to forget that it was the USA the force behind this event that also took place on a September 11, an event that would usher an era of terror and death for the Chilean society at the hands of Augusto Pinochet.

Here you have an excerpt of the article:

Apocalypse now: Sept. 11's influence on arts and entertainment.

Posted on Sun, Sep. 10, 2006

BY EVELYN McDONNELL

emcdonnell@MiamiHerald.com

On April 26, 1937, German and Italian planes bombed the Basque city of Guernica, killing hundreds -- probably thousands -- of mostly women, children and the elderly and almost completely destroying the non-military town. It was a bombing with no strategic purpose except to inflict horror and oblivion on a civilian population: Guernica was Ground Zero of modern terrorist warfare.

Within three months, Pablo Picasso had memorialized the fascist slaughter with perhaps his greatest painting. Today, when we think ''Guernica,'' we think of the artist's Cubist evocation of agony -- those twisted, turning human forms -- and then of the ghastly evisceration that inspired it.

Five years after three planes crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, destroying buildings, killing thousands and shattering the American psyche, the worlds of art and entertainment still have not come to terms with the terrible events of Sept. 11, 2001. There have been efforts, forays, angles, documentations. But, ''is there a Guernica for 9/11?'' asks documentary photographer Joel Meyerowitz, creator of the book Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive. "I don't think so.''

Maybe Meyerowitz is not asking the right question: ''Should there be a Guernica for 9/11?'' Is the absence of a definitive piece capturing that day a failure on the part of 21st century artists, or an act of honoring?

Comparing 9/11 to Guernica is somewhat unfair. Picasso, after all, didn't have to compete with CNN. In the era of 24-hour instant news, the arts don't have the same opportunity to shape our perception of world events: They reel to keep up, to make sense of the senseless, to tap into feeling in a world overloaded with information. A captivated (or, perhaps, captive) audience experienced 9/11 as a mediated event as it happened, unfolding in real time on millions of TVs -- individualized by our own phone calls to loved ones, or by our proximity to Ground Zero. For miles and months around Manhattan, noses confirmed what eyes saw on small screens -- or you could watch the smoke yourself, atop buildings from Brooklyn to New Jersey.

It's not a day anyone wants to relive, or see sentimentalized, commercialized, exploited

Continues...

I want to tell one thing to Evelyn McDonnell and Joel Meyerowitz. You insult the memory of those who died in Gernika on that day.

There should never be a "Guernica" to remember September 11 because the painting by Picasso was and is an indictment against the fascist powers that conducted that massacre. September 11th was used by fascist minded US citizens to install an extreme right government in an already arrogant and meddling nation. George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are today's Hitler and his henchmen. Tony Blair and the dethroned José María Aznar are Bush's Franco and Mussolini. September 11th was used by the US military as an excuse to attack and destroy Afghanistan and Irak directly and to continue to suffocate Lebanon and Palestine with the proxy Israeli army.

So the answer is no, there should never ever be a "Guernica" to commemorate the day the extreme right (supported by the oil money of the Saudi Arabs) decided to take the USA into a new era of imperialism and global domination. If anything, you can compare September 11 with the alleged attack by the Polish army against a German radio station back in 1939.

~ ~ ~