By Tessa Nolan
There is a certain kind of art that does not invite you in, but rather traps you. It is an art of the locked room, of the airless space, of a world that is at once deeply familiar and terrifyingly strange. The new installation by the American artist Avery Singer, a meditation on the tragedy of September 11th, is such a work. To enter the gallery on Savile Row is to be transported not just to another place, but to another time. And in this strange, and deeply unsettling, time machine, Singer is asking a series of profound, and deeply uncomfortable, questions.
As a curator, I have seen countless artists grapple with the theme of collective trauma. But Singer’s work is different. It is not a work of mourning, or of memorialisation, in any conventional sense. It is a work of cold, and almost brutal, analysis. It is an autopsy of a memory, an examination of the way a single, shattering event has been refracted, and often distorted, through the prism of time, of media, of the strange, and often unreliable, machinery of the human mind.
The Architecture of a Ghost
The installation itself is a masterpiece of atmospheric control. You are in a grey, corporate office from the early 2000s. The carpet is patterned, the light is fluorescent, the air is thick with the smell of shredded paper. It is a world without windows, a suffocating, and deeply claustrophobic, space. And it is a world that is haunted.
It is haunted, of course, by the ghost of September 11th. Singer was a teenager when the towers fell. She lived down the road. Her mother worked there. This is not a historical event for her. It is a personal one. And yet, the work is not a personal confession. It is a kind of collective one. It is an exploration of a trauma that is not just her own, but ours.
The walls are lined with elevators, portals to an endless, and seemingly identical, series of offices. There are paintings of the people who were affected by the attack. There is Marcy Borders, the woman who became known as the “Dust Lady,” her face a mask of shock and disbelief. There is Stan Honda, the photographer who took her picture, who helped to create the very image of the tragedy that is now so deeply ingrained in our collective memory. And there is Rachel, a teacher whose fiancé died that day, her eyes a smear of mascara, her face a portrait of a grief that is at once deeply personal and tragically public.
The Uncanny Valley of the Soul
But these are not just portraits. They are paintings. And in their very paintedness, there is a kind of beautiful, and deeply unsettling, distance. They are rendered with a kind of aerobic, digital perfection, a smoothness that is at once beautiful and deeply, and unnervingly, unreal. They are paintings that exist in the uncanny valley of the soul, images that are at once too real and not real enough.
This is the central, and most powerful, tension of the work. It is a work that is at once deeply nostalgic and brutally, and unflinchingly, clear-eyed. It is a work that is at once a dreamy, and almost fantastical, evocation of a lost world, and a cold, and almost clinical, examination of the a trauma that is still, and perhaps will always be, with us.
In an adjacent room, Singer has created a bookstore, filled with the thrillers and self-help books of the era. It is a brilliant, and deeply telling, detail. It is a reminder of the stories we told ourselves, and the stories we sold ourselves, in the wake of the tragedy. It is a portrait of a culture that was at once desperate for escape, and desperate for an answer, for a way to make sense of a world that had, in a single, shattering moment, stopped making sense.
The Question of Permission
And this, of course, is the most difficult, and most necessary, question that the exhibition asks. In an age where we are, quite rightly, scrutinising the ethics of representation, of who has the right to tell whose story, Singer’s work is a brave, and deeply provocative, act. Who does this tragedy belong to? Who has the right to speak of this pain, to memorialise this death, to create art from this trauma?
I do not know if the exhibition provides an answer to these questions. I do not know if it is, in the end, a tasteless, and deeply cynical, justification for selling paintings against the backdrop of a mass murder. But I do know that in its provocative, and deeply unsettling, exploration of these very questions, it is a work of profound, and deeply necessary, importance.
Singer is not just an artist. She is a witness. And in this strange, and beautiful, and deeply, and wonderfully, unsettling, installation, she has given us a new, and more complex, and more, in a word, honest, way to see a tragedy that we all, in our own, different, and often deeply personal, ways, have lived through. She has not given us a memorial. She has given us a mirror. And in its cold, and clear, and often unflattering, reflection, we can see not just the ghost of a tragedy, but the ghost of ourselves. And that is a thing that is not just beautiful, but necessary. And it is a thing that is, in the truest sense of the word, a work of art.
