When Peter Eleey, chief curator at P.S. 1, first asked Sarah Charlesworth if he could include work from her series “Stills” in a show titled “ September 11,” she said she had to think about it.
The artist had made the pictures, huge blow-ups of newspaper images of people falling mid-air, back in 1980. She reproduced the name of the person, if the journal had published it, in the caption, but without saying whether they were jumping or falling—or whether they had lived or died. Back then, Charlesworth saw the “Stills” as a way to explore the power of photographs to elicit certain emotional reactions. “The people in midair became a metaphor between certain life and eventual death that we all live all the time,” she explains.
After September 11, though, when the viewing public became particularly sensitized to images of falling bodies, the “Stills” were seen in a different light--less as early examples of appropriation, and at times as pictures that were unnecessarily provocative or exploitative. Putting her work in the context of a September 11 show, Charlesworth thought, would only diminish its original meaning.
But, she realized, that is pretty much the point of Eleey’s show: how much September 11 has changed the ways we look at things. His selection of art, most of it made before 2001, becomes, as I wrote in ARTnews, a weirdly intimate acknowledgment of the shared anxieties that appear unexpectedly and uninvited in our daily lives.
“After thinking about it overnight, I thought of course I should let it be in,” Charlesworth told me. “It would be even scarier if the fact that something was loaded became a reason to sort of censor or to be afraid to show something.” So the work is in the exhibition, which opens today at P.S. 1. in Long Island City.
Sarah Charlesworth's Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragon, Madrid, 1980, from the series "Stills." Courtesy the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York.
