19 December 2003

Tumbling Woman

It is Friday and it is cold. It is also nearing seven am, and I am, as usual, way behind. The sun is going to be up in twenty-two minutes and the day will be shortest on rthe 22nd. I like the symetry. I had intended to plug out a story this morning. All the best intentions and all that. But I don't think it is going to happen. I got sidetracked on art and history.

I usually scan the Times On Line to see if there is anything "interesting" out there. It has to be a little offbeat and it has to happen just at that magic moment when the second mug of coffee is starting to course through my veins and before the caffein in the blood makes my fingers dance and enable my fingers to only create flying typos.

I have pages of typos on the hard-drive, they must mean something, but for the life of me I can't bring back whatever it was. Maybe the typos conceal great art, or the coincidence that Keith Richard turned 60 yesterday, or that Leonid Brezhnev, ruler of the Soviet Union for eighteen years was born on this day. Or that Charles Dicken's knocked out a little puff peice called "A Christmas Carol" and published it on the 19th of December a long time ago.

I still don't really consider the holiday season to have begun until I see the version of the tale starring George C.Scott as Scrooge. I have not seen it yet this year, and perhaps that accounts for a certain condition of denial of the holidays on my part this year.

There seems to be some denial happening in New York as they talk about the memorial to the 9-11 attacks. They are talking about reliasing the design for the new structures on the site. It is supposed to be the world's tallest, 1,775ft, they say, with windmills on top and everything.

There was an op-ed piece about it in the Times by a guy named Eric Fischl. He is the artist who did "Tumbling Woman" in bronze. He does nudes well, in bronze and oil. His sculpture was intended to be a tribute to those who fell from the floors above the impact zone at the Trade Center. Their flight was dreamlike on the television, in the twenty minutes or so before the towers came down.

I remember watching in the moments of stunned inaction, sitting at a little naked desk, trying to get a fax number for the Director of the National Security Agency so Mr. Tenent could send hiom something and having nothing at all to work from, no rolodex or secure phone or anything in the secure underground room where we had relocated. It was an industrial space, normally, and we were not ready for what was happening. We were also expecting our own airplane momentarily.

Eric was upset about the new design for the memorial at Ground Zero. He belives that there should be something that commemorates the humanity of the massacre, not the buildings. The buildings are too big and too impersonal, he thinks. He ouwld like to see the battered bronze globe back on the plaza where it stood that day, still shiny. And see a part of the slurry wall still exposed, when they did not know if it would hold against the river and that the water might invade and flood the PATH tunnels and most of the subway system of lower Manhattan.

He said: "By trying to honor the buildings' footprints, and by placing the intimate and sacred memorial spaces underground, covered with a false sense of tranquillity, they are regrettably doing what the attack did to the people inside: making them disappear. Not only is the coffin being put in the ground, the tombstone is being buried along with it."

So I tried to find a picture of "Tumbling Woman." I remember the controversy at the time. It was unveiled on the first anniversary and it made some people, victims relatives, very upset. I had to see it this morning and that lead to a search and a discussion of his other works, and a look at some of his oil paintings, and now here I am, late for my shower but much better prepared to deal with the day.

The sculpture itself is pretty neat. Classical, almost Rodin-like. If you didn't know the association with the event, it would just be another nude. Eric also did a fourteen-foot tall nude of Arthur Ashe just after he passed away. It was placed across from the facing the stadium that bears his name at the National Tennis Center in New York.

I agree with Eric and I think they ought to hae place for Tumbling Woman someplace in public. We all do what we can, and of course it is why we do what we do.