Towers of Light
John Bennett
Gustavo Bonevardi
Julian LaVerdiere
Paul Myoda

Bennett: We’re four of the creative team who conceptualized and saw through this project and made it happen. Are we ready to start? My name is John Bennett. Each of us is going to talk about different aspects of the project, and to start off I’m going talk about the nuts and bolts of the actual, practical, physical thing of what happened. The collaboration between us four, we were all interested in recreating the image of what was lost, and this is an image of the towers before Battery Park City was actually built, just to give you an idea of what we were trying to recreate. We quickly became associated with the lighting designer, Paul Morantz, whose advise was essential in making this project actually happen. It became clear very early on that what was necessary to actually make this a reality was to use 7,000K Zeon bulbs which is really the only kind of light fixture that would be available for this type of project. Next slide. Very early on, the beginning of October, Paul Morantz did a test in Las Vegas of what these lights could do so we could figure out if this was really a viable project at all. This is a picture of one of the early tests, and yes, it became clear that it was possible. We were able to round up 40 (per tower) of these types of lights, and that’s all of these lights that are available in the world. So that defines what was possible for us. Those were the numbers of lights, that’s the type of light, and from that we were able to. . . Next slide. . . This is a mock-up of the corner of one of the towers in Las Vegas. This is before it was actually implemented. Next slide. Now this slide is a plan of the World Trade Center site, as it existed. The two large rectangles are the Trade Center site. Each of those is approximately 210 feet square, and in the test in Las Vegas, we were putting the lights approximately 5 feet apart. So, with that number of lights we knew we weren’t going to be able to actually fill the full footprint of the building--there just weren’t enough lights possible. Next slide. This is a plan of the towers, as it existed with dimensions. Next slide. Since we weren’t able to actually recreate the actual footprint of the towers, what we were able to do was recreate the void between the towers. That void space was really important in the reality of what was built. Next slide. So this plan pretty much illustrates what was built, with the shaded areas being the size of the tribute (?) light and plan, versus the full scale. Next slide. In order to orient them, we luckily were able to both recreate the void and it turned out that that same relationship we could, outside to outside, really recreate, in order to get the scale of one of the towers, the outside to outside dimension is approximately the same as one of the towers as well. Next. We did a lot of studies about, one, how you see the towers and two, where you see them from—that was something that was very important. On the towers themselves, on the top, you can see the area of overlap is actually greater than the smaller towers. So you can see the smaller towers, the tribute light towers, as two, more often than you could see them before as two. Next. These are a series of computer studies we did to simulate what the different relationships. There’s a lot of this kind of study, which seems kind of obvious, but it’s not. Just small variations in the differences and rotations give different impressions from different parts around New York and New Jersey. Next slide. This is a diagram of where the tribute light, which is the smaller, could be seen only as one versus the larger triangles, which is where the original towers could be seen as one. Next. While this kind of study was going on, we started to look for sites. This is a satellite photograph of lower Manhattan, and ground zero is on the right hand side, upper-middle. The idea was never to really put them on the site--it was impossible. Very early on it was the rescue site, and we didn’t want to interfere with anything that was going on down there, but it was important that we be in lower Manhattan. These are four sites that we investigated early on. Next slide. One idea was to put it in Battery Park harbor. Next. Battery Park, which is further from ground zero, but really in the bottom of Manhattan. Next. Number three was actually on top of a building, which was investigated as a possibility since land is extremely difficult to come by down there. It was being used by rescue workers, parking, etc., so that was one thing which was explored, as well as another empty lot, which was Number four, in Battery Park City. Next. Yellow here is actually where, in the end, the site, which was our first choice as a site, ended up after a lot of political complexity and time. We did get, probably, the best possible site. You see ground zero on the lower right, so we were catty-corner. Next. This is the site plan, which was used to make the positioning of the towers. This is a video, which we did before they went up, as a study. It shows what the number of lights on this site are. This is as close as we can get--we’re not trying to simulate the actual lighting conditions, but this is the actual physical relationship in terms of Manhattan, as to what was actually built. Next. These lights had to be placed on scaffolding in order that one of the towers was actually slightly higher than the other and in order that cars could drive under. We only had 10 days, approximately, from when we got final approval to actually do the project, until the first lighting. This picture was taken on the first day of the installation. Next. This is a picture of one of the light fixtures. Next. This is up close to the array; it’s a rectangular array of these light fixtures. Next. Really right away this became something and it was seen from all over. It really became an instant landmark. Within a couple of days this sort of thing started appearing, which none of us had any kind of conception of the amount of attention it would receive. Next. This is from Liberty State Park, looking back. It’s across the river in New Jersey. It’s pretty far away. You could see it from 20 miles or something. People have seen it from airplanes and you could see it from Philadelphia if you were in the air, people said. Next. This is a video, which was shot from a helicopter, actually a couple of days after it was lit on the site, and it gives you a pretty good idea of the physicality of it. On the upper right-hand side of your screen is Ground Zero. The tent-like structure actually is a tent, which was used as a dining hall for rescue workers, and we had to work around that. This gives you, if you weren’t in New York, an idea of how much of an impact it made on the skyline. Next slide. This is a scan from the New York Times on April 13, the last day that the towers were lit, and it’s time-lapsed. The last day the lights were kept on all night; previous to that they had been turned off at 11 pm, and in order that we didn’t have to turn them off suddenly, it was able to sort of fade into the dawn. So it was up for a month. Next. That’s the very nuts and bolts introduction. I’m going to hand it over to Gustavo and Paul and Julian who have a more interpretive take on this, but a lot of you, I know, aren’t from around here, just to get a concept of the physicality of what was actually built. So Gustavo is next.

Bonevardi: I’m a little uncomfortable with public speaking, so I’ve written out my comments. My partner, John Bennett, and I are architects. We design, but over the past two years we have spent much of our time creating projected images and combining our architectural training with computers. We produce virtual architecture, which is quite literally projected. These presentations are often of proposed buildings--buildings that will exist in the future, like our work for the Museum of Modern Art’s expansion project. Sometimes they are buildings that existed and have been destroyed, as in the work we did recreating projects by Neis Vandero for the exhibition “Neis in Berlin,” at the Museum of Modern Art. Last September we found ourselves conjuring up the image of a building that had fallen, though this time it was done in a completely different way. On September 11, John and I with witnessed the building crumble from our office in the Meatpacking district. They just seemed to evaporate. Later, we watched TV, but the framed media images on the TV just made the event seem like fiction. I needed to see reality in order to understand. I wandered around my neighborhood, now called the “frozen zone,” and rode my bike downtown. I took some photographs. Like everyone, John and I wanted in some way to help and to contribute to the on-going rescue effort. That was our initial impotence. We got to work and set out to rebuild the skyline. We proposed he use light to recreate the silhouettes of the towers as a symbol. Thousands of lives had been lost that day, and the image of New York City had been damaged. We believed that in repairing the skyline, we could help repair our city’s identity and ourselves. We believed that the light could inspire rescue workers and the city at large, and show the world that New York was still vital. We made some renderings and drafted a short statement entitled, “Project For the Immediate Reconstruction of the Manhattan Skyline.” We saw our work as part of the genuine reconstruction effort. In our minds eye, the image was as clear as the towers themselves had been the day before. It was, in a sense, an after-image. Just stare at a light and then close your eyes. The bottom line for us was that the proposal not be visionary, but rather a realistic and viable project. It had to be doable. I retell these events to shed light on what it originally meant for John and me. But our story is only one of several. Not surprisingly, the image was not uniquely ours, but shared. We joined forces with Paul and Julian and others with similar visions, in order to make this a reality. While the vision was shared, its meaning for each of us was nuanced and personal. Once realized, the tribute seemed to have as many meanings as viewers. Though thousands had died at the time of our original conception, we rejected the idea of creating a memorial. We believed the rescue workers would be freeing survivors, so we could not acknowledge the deaths. By March 11, the day the tribute was first illuminated, we had all been mourning for months. We had created a memorial, but it was a temporary gesture. The creation of a permanent civic memorial will be difficult unless we define what role and what its function is. A memorial may be a stone sculpture of a dead man on a horse, but many other things are memorials too: Memorial Day or a poem. My yearly telephone to my sister on the anniversary of my mother’s death is a private, intimate memorial. The public civic memorial on Ground Zero will be only part of a whole. Thinking in this way will help us define what role each of the parts play within this bigger picture. What each part’s specific role is and who its audience is. Personal memorials are for us. They are intimate, secret, and very important, but they will end with us. The role of public memorials, of civic monuments, is different. They go on into the future. They are not just for us but rather they are a mark that we leave for posterity-- that’s why they’re so often made of stone. My point is that we should de-emphasize one, all-encompassing grand gesture on the site of the towers. Although something must be done there, we cannot expect this one monument to address all the losses. More will have to be done than that. Remembrances might be erected at local fire stations and police stations. The site where the debris has been taken might be transformed into a memorial park, possibly with actual fragments of the towers re-erected as part of a park. The tribute in light might be reinstalled in the harbor or in lower Manhattan. All these, plus living memorials, and together with our own private, personal tributes and rituals, should be understood collectively. It’s probably too soon to finalize plans for a permanent civic memorial. This will require time. Passion has to be framed by a cool sharp historical understanding of what is being memorialized. Today, events are still unfolding; we lack perspective. A good example would be the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. It could never have been built right at the end of that war. On the other hand, a lack of perspective doomed Louie Kahn’s beautiful memorial to 6 million martyrs designed for Battery Park City. Some committee members reviewing this project felt Kahn’s work did not totally fulfill their longings or relieve their tragic memories. As a result of these unrealistic expectations of a civic monument, the project was abandoned. These could be lessons. Public monuments speak not only to us, but also to people centuries after the event that they commemorate. Their role is to place the event in history; to bring it back to life for unborn generations that they aim to teach. “Towers of Light” was a temporary installation, and as such, it was an event for us, not one meant for posterity. If it were to be re-erected or installed in a more permanent way, it’s meaning and function would change. A projected image has two aspects: it is both a light emitted from a source, and it is also the resulting image from that light, as well as its content and meaning. The tribute was somehow different, and that difference is key to its success. Sure we had shined millions of kilowatts of light into space, but the light was bright and blank. What I believe it created, what we really did with that empty light, was to erect an enormous screen, a surface onto which every viewer was able to project his or her own meaning. That’s why the tribute was so deeply felt and embraced by so many. What people saw, what they responded to, was a projection of their own personal feelings and ideas. We simply created a surface. Thank you. (applause)

LaVerdiere: I’m Julian LaVerdiere and I am the third of the four (or five or six or many people) collaborating on this project. I think that it’s difficult to come to any one understanding of the way in which the tribute was to be felt, or for that matter, how it was found. And I think that some of the things I wanted to reflect upon were how much I like Vista Pro and I’d like to thank them for sponsoring us. (Laughter) But I think perhaps this Freidrick painting is an apt way of recognizing one interpretation of a sense of alienation. Freidrick was one the most recognizable painters for illustrating what would be a sense of alienation, or perhaps the pursuit of understanding vast empty spaces in which somewhere in the distance the sublime lies. And I’ll use this as an example, because it was that sense alienation that we were all left with shortly after the 11th, where it was a sense of total disbelief and misunderstanding of that absence. I don’t know how many of you were here in New York at the time, but it was very uncanny to all of a sudden recognize an entire city that became alien to you because these simple symbols were lost. There are many ways to illustrate the nature of that loss, one of which was to recognize that that empty space left you with a sense of having experienced an amputation. So one of the terms that was common to us was the idea of a ghost limb, and it was almost as though that after-image that John mentioned, was permanently engrained in that fog, and I think that what some of our impulses had been initially was to try to find the remembrance of those buildings within that fog, but mostly to try to recognize that space as a sort of hollowed space. Paul and I had set out to gain this understanding through photographing the empty landscape, and then reconstructing this vision. We had, through happenstances, presented an image to the New York Times where they had some artists respond to the attack. We made this image that was meant to represent that sense of loss and they chose to put it on the cover. It was evident at that time that this vision, as Gustavo had mentioned, was of a Zeitgeist—a shared communal feeling that seemed to capture that emptiness and that alienation. So we set out to generate a number of images that could capture this feeling in all sorts of different ways and that would reflect different emotions. I think that our response, and I’ll speak for Paul and I, was somewhat more of an abstract one. It wasn’t one aiming to pursue getting this accomplished yet, so it wasn’t particularly realistic. Many of these images were an emotional response, and the emotions had changed from ones of an immediate sense of loss and sorrow and disbelief, to a sense of anger and defiance--and so had these images that we had rendered. These images were rendered with the intention, this was over the few months that the initiative began, that they could be presented to the public and that the people might be able to feel some empathy to the proposal. This image was particularly defiant, not necessarily proportional, but one that was meant to be a gesture of perseverance. Some of them were inherently spiritual, and some were meant to reflect the totally multicultural nature of the city, because I think the important thing to note is that obviously there is no one way you could ever try to capture everybody’s spiritual interest. So obviously, Ellis Island represents all those that were here. These images you are seeing are not real images, they’re pre-visualizations. So, we tried to capture them from different neighborhoods recognizing that we may well have been seen from a great distance. The interesting thing, because the project had taken such a long time, was that it also gave us a lot of time to try to recognize what this meaning could be. So, we wanted to try to offer a number of different interpretations. Many of which were the immediate interpretations by the public of what it could be, and others that came out through a sort of social-political interpretation. Obviously, in some ways, it seems as though the tribute was akin to a temporal monument to these candlelight vigils, because it’s a temporary gesture that’s immediate and it’s one that people find a collective empathy toward. I think that the Union Square Park memorials were most phenomenal because it was an example of tens of thousands of people who were gathered together with no inherent link--no one nationality, no one race, creed or color. That collective gesture was something that we felt the tribute should capture. But it’s also interesting how light becomes this great common denominator, that’s obviously been used in eternal flames and candlelight vigils, as well as in many types of memorials or ceremonial burials. I think that the flaming Viking crafts are a symbol in existent folklore, but it spans all cultures, not strictly Western ones by any means. For example, Zoroastrianism, which is sort of the seat of monotheistic religions, has a flame that they claim has been burning for 3,000 years. Judaism also has light festivals using flame to symbolize loss and death, as does Catholicism. Interestingly, in the Old Testament the new Jerusalem was depicted as these images are rising, but I don’t think that the impulse was a religious one. In some ways it was a collective one that was bred by many different influences, some of which was a desire to try to rekindle that sense of awe and that sense of pride in the city, and the interesting way in which people tend to respond to the use of spotlights, and how spotlights can become these gestures that commemorate an event or signify some sort of moment of change or shift. I think that in a pre-war world, this type of technological optimism rang very clear, but in a post-war world, it’s difficult to look at spotlights completely with a sense of open-eyed awe. The defensive spotlights of the second World War were things that seemed to ring in some of the older generations’ years. Obviously during the blitz, the anti-aircraft lights were used to try to fend off enemy aircraft, and on the opposite side, anti-aircraft lights were used to symbolize triumphant power. So they evoke two very different, contrary meanings, and that frightening dichotomy is something that the U.S. seemed to absorb, and I’m not going to claim to be writing any blanket statements over social politics of the United States, but it’s interesting the way in which media culture has adopted these multi-faceted meanings, and how these spotlights or the movie premier event light, is one who’s meaning is difficult to find the primary reference for. And, how the pomp and circumstance of our celebrations still can feel so militant. So I think that some of these images reflect some of the responses to the tribute that weren’t necessarily all good. The question is, what does a response like that, using the spotlights, necessarily evoke? In Star Wars, you have these rebel forces that are fighting this imperial force in that same imbalance. I suppose if you were to put our current state into that equation, we would have been that imperial force. But in that same respect, I think that our response to the “Tribute in Light” and the response to that attack that we felt, was also asymmetrical because the idea was how to find a very simple gesture that could make a very heavy emotional impact on the city at large. And it wasn’t a gesture that was going to be built of bronze or stone, it was a gesture that was seemingly effortless, but incredibly effective. The gesture was a defensive gesture, which then again brings up the ironies of what grand offensive gestures can call for, and also the way in which our national defense can mimic the media inspirations. Obviously this literal “Star Wars,” is obsolete in today’s day and age, as are the suggested civil defense of hiding in order to avoid incoming attack. How can you hide from an invisible force? You certainly can’t black your windows out. Interestingly, it seems as though our defensive strategy was the exact opposite of that which would be designed to fend off an air raid, which was to relight the city, to relight all of our windows, to rebuild immediately and to show a sense of spirit, and hopefully a sense of prevailing good spirit. I don’t want to cast a judgment on light, but I think it’s safe to say that almost all cultures will recognize light as something inherently virtuous. That was what we set out to do. I’m going to hand it over to Paul. (Applause.)

Myoda: I think I’ve lost my paper. Did someone happen to take it? That’s good. Okay. I think the order is little strange, so I apologize if there’s some overlap. Out of curiosity, how many people in the room have actually seen the tribute, because in a way I’m going to talk about the experience of it.

Younger: Most of these people are from all around the United States.

Myoda: In 1998 Julian and I were invited by the non-profit art organization, Creative Time, to propose a public sculpture related to genetic technologies. We wanted to harness and embrace and bottle the phenomena of the bioluminescence in some manner. We decided upon a beacon, a bioluminescent beacon, which we were planning to mount atop the radio tower of World Trade Center One. It was to have been an artificial star, faintly visible above Manhattan’s skyline--a blinking, shimmering point, which said simply, “Here there is life as well.” King Kong written for the genetic age. The scale was very important to us. The light emitted from one organism was multiplied by the same number to produce the luminosity necessary to see the beacon from ground level--it was to have been a sirenetic angel. In developing this project, we were given the studio on the 91st floor, part of the lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s studio program. Initially we chose the building for its complex symbolism. I, like many others, didn’t really like the building, but was in awe of the hubris which made them a reality, their shear stubborn and doubly indubitable presence. But working there changed this somewhat. Another experience that defies description was standing on top of the tower. The gentle arch of the earth’s horizon, the shear generosity of spirit that afforded anyone the opportunity to see a vista that could not otherwise be seen. My opinions of the buildings changed, grew more nuanced, and even more contradictory. We spent many months doing line-of-sight tests in all five boroughs and New Jersey as well as twin profiles and countless angles, very much at the front of imagination for some time. There was just a lighting test on the 91st floor where we had the studio, and then the towers were gone. Julian and I spoke immediately of the phenomenon of the phantom limb. The World Trade Center was invisible; unmade in the world of dust and dirt and fire and body parts, but somehow, remade in our imaginations and in our denial--it was present in our mind’s eye and in our hearts. The experience of phantom pains revealed itself as well. The tingling oftentimes-maddening sensation attendant with the loss of a limb is prevalent in medical literature. The sense that something is there, something that undeniably hurts but cannot be rubbed, cannot be allied, cannot be given even momentary respite. We had spoken before of how grateful we were when the New York Times invited us to respond in some manner just a day or two after the 11th. It gave us a focus and it allowed us to direct our energies and thoughts. With such strange urgency, an image almost immediately revealed itself: a spectral image, a vision, to combat the chaos of the actual one. During the period, after delivering our picture to the Times and its eventual publication on the 23rd, we realized this strange uncanny power and made steps towards transitioning it from a virtual image to an actual image. Many people caught wind of this desire and contacted us to say that a similar idea had come to their minds, and offered their support in making the image a reality. It was as if we were the representatives of a collective hallucination; midwives to a communal spectacle. This is when we got in contact with John and Gustavo. They had quickly come to our attention as they were proposing a very similar idea and circulating it throughout the Internet. Because they’re of such like minds and enthusiasm, we decided to join together to work under the umbrella of Creative Time. I should just mention that Anne Pasternak who is the art director of Creative Time, was incredibly instrumental in making this happen. Then, shortly after we formed an initiative, people formed another non-profit arts organization in New York called The Municipal Arts Society and said they too were proposing a very similar thing. So, we all agreed to go forward as an ad hoc sort of multi-disciplinary initiative. During this six-month period, I felt like a politician having to stay on message. Perhaps this is the reason that I appear tonight with more questions than answers. Subtlety and self-doubt have very little room on the stump, crowded as it is with platitudes. Because of the explosive way the media circulated our images, it seemed like everyone was weighing in with an opinion. So many people wanted it to happen while others were so worried that it would happen. For instance, people from the Audubon Society thought it would confuse birds. Some people, recognizing the irony of it being powered by electricity, which was generated by fossil fuels, suggested using solar power, which we did look into. But it was unattainable just because of the shear size. Some people in Europe and around the world thought it had already happened. Personally, at times I wondered if it should happen. If in some important way an image was sufficient, or for that matter, if it was all we could bear. The computer renderings allowed for convincing illustrations, illustrations that seemed to touch so many, but was this really enough? Architects and designers often speak of the danger of not wanting their models to look too accurate, for fear that their clients will not be able to imagine change through the process of development. As a sculpture, the scale of ones body to another body is paramount to the perceptual experience. Negotiating ones way around an object activates and completes the experience, in a way. In the neurosciences, our minds are now understood to be embodied; body affecting mind in a feedback loop so intimately entwined as to render the Cartesian mind/body split inoperable. As Michelle Fuco has pointed out so simply, when it comes down to it, all we are, are our bodies. First you’re warm and then you’re cold. From a social/political viewpoint it was Marylous Ponte who showed that to be a body is to be tied to a certain world, emphasizing the contingent nature of consciousness by stating further that a body is not primarily in space, it is of it. And how did we understand the World Trade Center if not as an architectural extension of our very bodies, our body politic--it’s destruction an injury to ourselves? In this way, I personally justified the need, the desire, to see the image realized. On such a large scale, nerve-endings raw and severed loose, it needed something to grasp, something to close the loop, something that even momentarily avoided the mediating interference inherent in an image or screen or interface. Ultimately, and this is in a way sort of surprising still to me, it was a very experimental gesture. All of our breaths were taken away after the tribune soared skywards, especially after the waiting and breathless anticipation before the switch was thrown. The phenomenological affect was heretofore unseen--the tallest, brightest image in history. The visual affect of the three point perspective strangely personalized the image that worked above ones head, no matter where that person was located. Facing it and looking above, was the same as facing away from it and looking above. In the very humbling days following the event, I read and heard almost as many different reactions to the tribute as there were to the attacks themselves. Perhaps this had to be. In other forms there have been discussions and certain debates as to what to call the tribute. Personally, I think the most accurate description would be to call it a civic situationist gesture or a symbolic action, meant to be temporary and itself a part of the unfolding of time. But unlike the often aggressive techniques of situationism, techniques which tried to unsettle and to defamiliarize, and to shock into relief hidden agendas or to make the flesh of ideology, the situationism of our tribute was civic minded.

What did we see? The symbolism directs us up to only a certain point, and then we are on our own. Momentarily look up from the scorched pit in the ground and follow the light up to heaven or elsewhere, out and beyond. Given the enormity of the bursts of wave of particle energy streaming up into space, there is a surprising soft, quiet and peaceful image. Perhaps something like an artificial aurora borealis. And like astronomers in the past, we are put in the position of trying to comprehend and decode this strange event in the sky. Are we trying to ward off prey or are we trying to communicate with one another? I began by mentioning escapism. This term has so many meanings in different places and times. Often it is used to suggest having ones head in the sand or up in the clouds. In China, when the urban centers became politically unstable and when factions were bearing their fangs amidst all that war, the artist would embrace nature in a symmetrical or visceral manner. At times, the most accomplished and progressive representation of the natural order of things was done in the most violent periods of social unrest and upheaval. Henri Matisse is a good example of this. He was interested in painting flowers during the war years, wherein he justifies the intensified pursuit of investigating natural beauty in the face of political monstrosity. Escapism in these instances can be seen as a type of active engagement. Perhaps as artists, the redefinition of this term is before us again, in a way that hasn’t been so urgent in many generations. How and why and where must we shine our light? What must we try to make visible? What, without our efforts, cannot otherwise be seen?
(Applause)

Bennett: We should say that we represent four, though there are others that also came up with similar ideas. The actual group that executed this whole thing, Creative Time, as well as the Municipal Arts Society, the Mayor’s Office, the Victims’ Families Groups and the community board all participated. It was a very large and complex thing that actually made it happen. We just played a role.

Audience: I wasn’t here for the Towers going down or for the “Tribute in Light,” but I grew up in New York City, and it’s very interesting hearing Cheryl talk about it and people who were down in that neighborhood. My sister works down in that neighborhood, and she was a part of that community that saw the towers fall, but there is this whole other community that we are now in, that’s uptown. An uptown community who did not see the Towers fall, who felt them fall, or had this mediated experience on television. I don’t know how to really form the question because I wasn’t here, and I wasn’t here to see it, but there was this interesting conversation that I had with my family who lives in Harlem saying, we are a part of Manhattan, and we are a part of this loss, but we have an almost second lost limb, because we could never see the towers from our neighborhood anyway, but we feel this loss and we can’t see the “Tribute in Light” either. They couldn’t see it up in Washington Heights. There is a very strange downtown community, I guess, and now people extended in Manhattan, and the other boroughs. I know people in Brooklyn could see it, but how that affects minority groups or other neighborhood communities is something I’ve been thinking about as I’ve come back and forth from where I live. I don’t know if there’s a response for that, either.
Audience: My sister and my mother, who lives by Mt. Morris Park couldn’t see them and parts of Washington Heights couldn’t see them. It was just an interesting family discussion, and I wasn’t here, so I couldn’t say, “hey mom, you just were looking the wrong way.”

Bennett: I think that, besides intentionally trying to make them not visible from Harlem (Laughter) I think that one of the problems was that there was so much light pollution that we were adding to already, depending on where you were. Like, I live in Chelsea and you couldn’t see them very well if you were near a streetlight but if you went up to a dark roof you could see them, so I think it’s sort of an optical effect. I did go to Connecticut and you could see them, and that’s above Harlem, so it really depended on where you were. If you were in a brightly lit street, forget about it.
Bonevardi: Things also exist in a place, and this was a symbol, which was very tied specifically to a time and a place. I don’t know if, other than the consideration that we did have and that we did take very seriously, that that was the orientation of the towers. There was, at one point, a suggestion that the towers be rotated such that they would be visible from Manhattan from a greater vantage point but the towers were never visible from all parts of Manhattan. They were based more north/south, and that quickly just didn’t seem like the right thing to do, because then you were actually giving the bad view to Brooklyn, and the idea was to recreate the symbol and this image, and that’s what it is. It’s hard to go beyond that.

LaVerdiere: Even as we were trying to develop it for Manhattan, people from San Francisco had called and said they wanted to do it there, people in Chicago did, people in Japan were very enthusiastic about doing it there, and then we found out as it was going up that some people were interested in bringing it to Afghanistan. So it was this strange thing where we entertained the discussion that we wanted to do it where it was, because it was etched into our experience of New York and it just made sense. It was a ready-made symbol there.

Myoda: When I heard the proposal for it going on the road or going to Afghanistan, then it became very clear to me that this thing was going to leave the realm of being a temporal empathetic gesture for loss and it was going to become a piece of propaganda, and that changes the dynamics of the whole project. I’m not saying that it didn’t become a piece of propaganda where it was, but it sort of depended on how you looked at it. But if you were to move it or change it or alter the positions like Gustavo was saying, or if you didn’t replicate as close as you could to reality, then it would become recognizable that there was strategic manipulation made to try to say something other. I think that finding the clearest anonymity was the best strategy for finding a sort of universal message.

Audience: I’m actually a New Yorker and I was able to see the tribute in light from Brooklyn Heights. I happen to live in Queens, where I could see it from Morris Avenue and also from my advisor’s house, I could see it very clearly. She always had a view of the World Trade Center. I went to school at Pace University for four years and then worked at Rutger Street for about seven years after that, and the Twin Towers for me were always sort of like a pyramid for me, you know, you go to visit them, they don’t come to you. I happen to think that the tribute, for me, was very intense, very powerful and very moving. The night that I went to Brooklyn to see it I went kind of late and the lights went out just as I was enjoying it. I didn’t realize that they actually turned off the lights, I thought it was on the whole night, so it was a little traumatizing again to see them shut off like that, but while they were there, they were very beautiful.

I had two questions. I think you answered one of them, and it had to do with, as artists are you concerned with blurring the line between expressing an emotion and political propaganda and when you get involved with a project like this, there’s always the possibility of the politicians turning it into some kind of political statement, which may not be what you want. I think you kind of answered that when you mentioned the Afghanistan project and your sort of backing away from it, but if you’d like to comment on it more, that would be fine. The central question I have is, there is an ongoing proposal now for a permanent structure, and I wanted to know if you folks were involved in that or if you’re going to be part of any advisory group or committee to talk about what would be an appropriate memorial.

Bonevardi: I guess I could respond a little to the first question. The question of propaganda is very complicated, and I guess we owe a lot to the new mayor who has really been terrific in helping keep it away from that. It was just a thrill how well handled the opening night was when Jessie Norman sang. The mayor went on the stage and said, “this young woman, whose father was killed in the attack, will turn on the lights and Jessie Norman will sing.” She sang. It lasted 5 minutes. There was no political grandstanding; there were no political statements, there was nothing. It was just pure and simple, turning the lights on. We were fortunate for that. I’d like to think that we were so powerful as to really keep this thing pure, but I think you’re very vulnerable with that. On the other hand, the idea of it traveling was part of John and mine’s original proposal. I think that goes back a little to the prior question and our feeling of the idea of erecting these lights in different cities around the world. One idea was that it might be a traveling monument, where it might shine in a different city for a month around the world and return to New York every September. Because it was the World Trade Center, and this event seemed to really affect the entire community of the world, it seemed that it could have been a way for everyone to share in it. People didn’t have to see it from every neighborhood in every city, but rather they could see it from different cities and different places and be able to partake in the memorializing of it. Bonevardi: I’m very happy with what we did. I like the idea of reconstructing the void, as opposed to reconstructing the buildings. I like the idea that there is a certain abstraction, a certain sort of symbolizing of the buildings and not a recreation of the buildings, because ultimately it’s not about the buildings, it’s about the people who perished. The buildings become a symbol for that.

Audience: I have one more question. I’ve lived in Las Vegas and you said you did the test in Las Vegas, I assume because most of the lights were there . . .

Bonevardi: The company that actually did the installation was Las Vegas based.
Audience: But, just a quick question, the light that’s on top of the Luxor, is it the same kind of light?

Bonevardi: There are 35 of the same brand of light, and we had 88.

Audience: Okay, because I didn’t get to see it in real life, and that gives me an idea of the brightness.

LaVerdiere: I’d like to make one observation, to reiterate what Gustavo said, that we were very fortunate about the mayoral transition, because for many, many months we were trying to get Giuliani to agree. He was in discussion with the organizations that were representing us and he had suggested that perhaps one of the lights could be blue to represent the police officers and one could be red to represent the emergency workers. I don’t know how much we kicked our heels but we were really determined. So when Bloomberg came along it was amazing how he disbanded the commission that he had for proprietary or whatever. In some ways he recognized more the spirit of the gesture that we wanted.

Bonevardi: I don’t know what we would have done though--we wouldn’t have had the blue and the red.

LaVerdiere: We did have a good argument against that--it was technically impossible.
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Bonevardi: The only thing is that, because there were moments within the last six months when it was a really wild ride, and because we were individuals who had started a grass roots movement, it was very frightening. We recognized it had become a machine much larger than ourselves, and the question of creative control over it seemed like it would be inevitably taken from our hands, and in certain aspects, once the project was approved and started rolling, there wasn’t much control to be had. The thing that was inspiring was that having ignited this fuse, the press still recognized us for having been fuse-lighters, so they would often come back to us and ask us our opinions, and that was our only safety. I think perhaps the mayor would not have listened to us otherwise if there had been anonymity. But if we said that we didn’t think blue and red was appropriate, then I don’t think there would have been much choice as to whether or not he would choose to listen to our voice that day. It never came to that, but there were times we were still left somewhat at the helm through the strange machine.

Audience: The topic of the void was brought up a few times. Your intent was to reconstruct the void of the towers, and for me that invokes this idea of a democratic space which is an open, contestable place of antagonisms or contradictions; a place where anything is possible because everyone has a right to do what they need to do. So given that, I don’t know if you would agree with me but do you think that a memorial, which I know is another kind of topic that’s a contestable one since one of you brought up that perhaps this is not a memorial but it can function as a memorial, has the possibility of creating a democratic space in that metaphoric void? Can it create a void where questioning and conflict can be brought up? Because the whole thing around 9/11 was that there was this incredibly deep wound that was created at the time. The response to it by some people was to, of course, to try to heal. That was natural and it was necessary. Then, the rest of the response was to react, in some cases, with anger and to strike. And that was, I thought, the opposite of what a democratic space is all about. The Twin Towers symbolizes something very specific to a large portion of the world. It symbolizes American imperialist capitalism and anyway, I’m going to stop there. What do you think of the function of memorials? (Laughter)
Bennett: If your question is really have we sanctified western imperial iconography or the symbolism of capitalism, which is sort of reading between the lines, it’s a good question. It’s a question that I’ve asked myself through the process, but the gesture we made was a democratic gesture because hopefully it raises discussion, whereas if nothing was done, then there would be nothing to offer somebody self-reflection with. It was a device that allowed for a certain degree of self-reflection, so there were innumerable responses to it. Should it go up or should it go down; this is the best idea and this is the worst idea; but at least it was something that created a discussion. So maybe that is democratic.

LaVerdiere: It’s really a complicated question and I think it would take a lot of thinking. I see things very personally. I try to think in big pictures but my emotions and my reactions are mine. I grew up in New York and I grew up watching the Twin Towers go up--it was always there. I really felt very strongly that it was a very New York thing, this project, and it concerned me enormously that this thing would be seen as patriotic or seen as this imperialist gesture. Maybe I’m wrong and I’m reading the right newspapers for my point of view, but I don’t think it came across that way. There seemed to be a very personal relationship that people developed with it somehow and it seemed to stay out of the political realm.

Bennett: One thing which maybe relates to what we’re talking about is the rebuilding process going on now. There’s sort of a consensus that seems to be moving forward without a lot of thought or discussion, to rebuild the street that existed before the World Trade Center actually came in as a super block. It took over many blocks and it became a big plaza; it’s own new kind of space as opposed to this knitted street fabric that came before it. Now it seems like that is where we’re going again. The firm that’s been hired to do the master planning has said as much--that we’re going back to the street, old kind of space and that we’re going to go back and erase this space of the towers and this big plaza.

Audience: Back to the old imperial rationalism rather than the new kind.
Bonevardi: It’s interesting that really there isn’t a lot of thought about what kind of a new space you can develop or a third space. So far, it seems to be a reactionary, going back to something traditional kind of feeling. It’s like, “we’re going to go back to something that we know. The towers weren’t successful, so let’s retrench instead of trying something else.”

Myoda: Maybe I could just answer, and maybe it’s a frustrating answer, but my father is Japanese and his family is from Hiroshima. I’m constantly struck whenever I go there that between Nagasaki and Hiroshima there’s something like 60 different memorials, all from very specific communities and very specific demographics, in addition to two museums. So I think something like this will inevitably occur wherever you have special interest-type memorials. One of my former classmate’s and friend’s has been designing the Irish potato famine memorial just a block away from where the World Trade Center stood, and there may be a sign of the times, but it includes a media center and a medial center, which is a place to collect and update information. It’s like a three-dimensional website where you have participatory things and maybe events will happen and what not. Maybe that’s where it’s leading, and that’s what will inevitably happen. So rather than one monolithic memorial, it will be perhaps as unwieldy as democracy is.

Audience: You mentioned that the first impetus from this was an emotional response, and then you talked about some precedence in the way that light functions in memorials. I’m wondering when you first became aware of some of the ominous, notorious precedence such as the Nuremberg rallies in the 30s, and whether that caused any kind of reconsiderations. When did that awareness of it come about? I really respect you trying to keep this out of the political realm, but it’s such a charged political atmosphere that this is happening in, that the connection is just very . . .
Artist: I think the connection is very superficial. I was aware of that as an architectural student and I was aware of that as a high school student (The Nuremberg rally, I mean). I had no problem. To me, the image we were creating seemed so strong that it transcended that image, and plus there are formal differences. One was the space that was occupied, and the other was the kind of objects that were to be perceived from the outside. So there were real, formal differences. But if you were to keep something like the Nuremberg rally displayed, and I don’t know if everyone knows there was a box of search lights that was created and Hitler had a rally in it in Nuremberg. If that suddenly becomes an untouchable image that is strictly associated with that, you are giving it power and you’re sticking with it. It’s good to rob that image from that meaning and open it up and let it have others. I think it’s actually a positive step in further breaking it down.

Artist: But it’s not so much the appropriation of Albert Spears design for the Nuremberg rally you’re referring to . . . but the thing that I was concerned with was the reference. It depends on what you’re looking at or how you project meaning onto the memorial; how you project meaning onto the United States and what its foreign policies are and what it is that we want to remember or not remember; to recognize the strengths within to make these associations. I think that the fear would be if after it’s all done, the Nuremberg rally were still the only thing that people would remember when it came to a great light gesture--the word great meaning all-powerful and frightening. The thing that was remarkable was, and I don’t know if this is the case but time will tell, that perhaps we may have had the opportunity to rewrite some of those associations in people’s minds. Maybe in the future when spotlights are used, the first thing they think of won’t necessarily be Nuremberg, they might think of our tribute of lights, and then people can start re-writing their own histories. But, yeah, to find meaning in anything, you’re going to look for references. They’re going to start having huge dirigibles for trans-Atlantic shipping of cargo, the size of which hasn’t been seen since the zeppelins and the Hindenburg. So the first year that those dirigibles are aloft and they’re going to be in September, people are going to be saying, “Oh, my God! Here it comes again!” But history re-writes itself.Audience: I have a question regarding the response that you may have had from family of victims of the attacks and how they may have personally or collectively responded to this gesture.

Artist: We got nothing but positives responses from the families that we spoke to. I think it was remarkable and it was really the most moving thing for me, to hear from the family members. We would d get telephone calls, emails, poetry--it was an incredible outpouring.

Artist: The Municipal Arts Society, which really spearheaded the whole aspect and which is really the organization that made this thing happen by raising the funds, hiring the light designer, etc., really handled the contact with the groups. There were repeated and extensive meetings where the project was described and exhibited and it was done very, very carefully--they could have even said no. It was presented to them as something they could pass on but obviously they didn’t. “Towers of Light” was the name we are using currently to refer to it, but they seemed to think that it was too building-oriented. It was through these groups that the name “Tribute in Light,” which I feel is a much better name, came about. They not only decided whether or not to pass on it but they also participated in the project.

Artist: I definitely agree that there was overwhelming support, but some of the responses I experienced that were the most saddening were those people who enjoyed and appreciated it so much that they were counting down the days until it was going to go up again, but then it was a traumatic experience redoubled when it went down again. We were in a position where we had made so many promises but there would only be 31 days. There was the question of money and financing, so there really was no way for it to continue. The other response that was sort of disturbing and sad was when we were down near the site working shoulder to shoulder for that week or so with the reclamation workers and so many of them in conversations, said, “I’m so numb that it kind of means nothing, like nothing could mean something to me.” I imagine that experience might be true for a lot of people most directly affected, like the victims families.

Artist: Whether something means something or means nothing as far as a gesture or a memorial or a symbol, the temporal nature of it, the fact that it existed as a moment, perhaps allows for it to be remembered as a stronger gesture than if it were permanently there. How many times do you look at the Statute of Liberty and empathize with liberty? It becomes this rote icon. So I think there is strength in this short duration that makes it unique.

Audience: Okay, you answered the first part of my question, which was about the temporal nature of it, and how you felt about that versus having it up permanently. I’m always sort of concerned about memorials that are created for things that are unspeakable, and in terms of the distance that you give yourself before you construct a memorial. I watched it on TV and there was a lot of discussion about whether they were going to rebuild and I was just thinking, “Oh God! The recovery isn’t even over and people are already wondering what you can replace on the site.” I’m always sort of suspicious of imperial actions and propaganda and the project struck me as being very opposite to that, just because of the fact that it was something temporary. I thought it was a very subtle gesture. I love America though I’m not American, but I always think you tend to overdo it sometimes. (Laughter) I was waiting for it to become this sort of Disneyland, weird tribute thing. I was really pleasantly surprised with what you did.

Bonevardi: It was difficult. There was such a great amount of clamor and there was so much will to have this project go on. In the op-ed pages and the letters to the editor people really were pushing to have it done, even wanting to provide some financing. People were saying, “You need money? Here’s money.” There was a very strong drive. But again, the real decision was that this was a commitment that had been made in a time of so much uncertainty with so many strange things going on. Therefore it was vital they we stick to a plan.

Audience: I had a question regarding whether there was criticism actually for it being almost too grandiose. I’m not from New York, so the World Trade Center has never been a part of my collective consciousness in a very large way at all. Although the light obviously doesn’t take up the same volume as the buildings in width, but the light seemed to go up higher than the actual towers did themselves. Then, hearing the fact that you used all of the lights available seems, I hate to say this, but so American. To use them all, rah, rah, rah. (Laughter) I’m just wondering about that.
Artist: I think we actually got more criticism before it was actually lit for that kind of topic. People were concerned about this, but I think, at least in my experience, most of the people I talked to said that the actual real, physical thing, like if you were right next to it, was not that bright. It was actually very subtle and I was pleasantly surprised by that. It was something you could see under certain conditions and it changed from night to night. Ultimately the real object was very subtle and not such a grand. . .
Artist: Keep in mind that you are seeing the best of how it works. It was a clear night. . . .

Artist: I remember, I think it was the second or third night, I stuck my head out the window and suddenly, “Oh my God!” I couldn’t see it! I went running down in a cab thinking, “What’s going on?” And when I got there it was one of the most spectacular of all the times I ever saw it. It was completely overcast and from close-up the fog was so dense that the clouds in the lights made them look like solid objects. It was just unbelievable, but from a couple of blocks away there was nothing to see.
Artist: I think in respect to the question of grandiosity, and a larger than life American sensibility, I think that that is a question of scale-relationships. There has been a lot of criticism about the tribute from, and this is going to sound weird, but there’s been a lot of criticism from people who weren’t from New York; people who didn’t live here, didn’t know anybody that knew anybody that was affected by it. I couldn’t speak on behalf of someone from any other part of the country or part of the world but as a New Yorker--nothing would ever seem big enough.

Younger: I want to add to that. For people who weren’t in New York, I interviewed this construction worker and he was saying, “We just suffered a real architectural wound in our skyline.” For us, you can’t find where you’re going anymore, and you don’t realize how much of a landmark it was when you came in from New Jersey or when you came in from Long Island or the north. You always were sure you would see those towers. It’s sort of like the whole landscape is gone, and I think the first thing you do when you’re wounded is pick the hand back up and try to reattach it. For us, I think it was just a relief to let it be there and let it go away slowly somehow. Do you know what I mean? And I think for New Yorkers that was really more what it was. I don’t think it was that big. In fact, I was disappointed that it wasn’t that big. I got on my roof and I thought, “Is that it?” I’m also amazed at how you photographed it straight up, because from my house it was like this, all the time. I had to go further away to see it straight up. It wasn’t like a bright square like you see it there, because you know how they do that with photography, right, is you leave it on a long time. It wasn’t like that. It was like light. It was beautiful.

Artist: There’s one thing that kind of defies description and Paul had mentioned it. It’s the phenomological effect that it has when you’re seeing it. We understand that there’s a vanishing point where all things will converge, but suddenly you could be standing in Jersey and the vanishing point is above your own head, as it is when you’re in Brooklyn or Staten Island. The affect of the beams is that they give the impression that they are always speaking to you alone.

Younger: They’re always over your head, no matter where you move.

Artist: Yeah, that was really true, especially in the few block radius immediately in that vicinity. It was really odd. One of the first nights of testing we were there and we panicked. We thought, “This is really wrong.” It’s just that the vanishing point is so high, and you’re standing here looking – it felt like it was above you, and it would follow you the way the moon follows you. That’s what Paul was mentioning, that wherever you would go it seemed to be looking at you.

Audience: One thing that I’m seeing is that there’s a complex thing going on, because I can totally understand the sort of affirmative gesture that the tribute was and the need for it, especially for New Yorkers. I believe one of you mentioned the status of a memorial for unborn generations and the importance of that for the permanent thing that will go up. I think that the complexity that I’m seeing is that there is a New York environmental aspect to this temporal gesture, but then there’s also a global issue that is very unresolved. I’m really sad to hear that the plans are going towards retrenchment in some previous arrangement. I’d really like to feel that there are some people out there that are making decisions that recognize that this could well just be the first stone, and that it’s very much an unresolved issue. For us to just approach it with a hubris that preceded it, or to retrench into some previous thing as if it didn’t happen, it’s really frightening to me. And I’m wondering how you guys feel about that.
Artist: I like to think about how people respond when they see the tribute--whether they think it is a Nuremberg rally gesture of imperialist rabblerousing, or if it’s indeed like a giant candle vigil, so maybe all those who believe that we’re inherently evil can recognize that we all are also inherently sorrowful, so the tribute could represent that. It’s going to be in the eye of the beholder--there’s no way of controlling the way people are going to interpret it.
Younger: I also think you’ve missed one interpretation that seems to be really prevalent among the people I’ve talked to. It’s also a path for the souls to go to heaven. People really talked about that a lot. This gave them a way to go, and they felt that they were going there.

Artist: That was one of the big criticisms from a physicist that believed that the soul is in the middle of the earth because it was going in the wrong direction.
Audience: What I was also suggesting is that it’s almost a nice thought, for me, that the space could remain open.

Artist: You are referring to the architectural development, in terms of the retrenchment?

Audience: That’s right. The one thing we talked about the other night in the bar was that it’s too bad that they took the last remaining beam out. Because as ugly as it was, it was what remained.

Artist: I think that after a while it doesn’t matter what we think. But I just wanted to add to one thing regarding rebuilding. The big criticism about rebuilding so fast, is that people are saying “We need time to reflect.” It’s kind of like, would you tell that to a person with a chest wound that gets rolled into a hospital? Like, “Listen, we can’t operate on you right now because we need to recognize that this is a traumatic moment and it’s really too overwhelming for me to deal with operating.”

Artist: It’s still incredibly disappointing what’s going on downtown. It’s a huge shame, I really do think we should go slowly and do things right. The idea of just knitting the street fabric the way it was before – these are so-called preservationists doing this? You’re not preserving, you’re rebuilding some ancient history. What was there, actually, was a mega block with modern structures on it. Maybe that’s what should be preserved or rebuilt.
Artist: I think the best proposal I’ve heard was to rebuild the two giant Buddhists that the Taliban blew up. (Laughter) That was just a suggestion.

Audience: I have two questions. I am a New Yorker but I haven’t lived here in the last couple of years. I thought that “Tribute in Light” was a fantastic gesture and really healing. I particularly liked the pantheistic readings, though I’m not a religious person. I’m wondering if the religious aspect was something that you fought with. If that’s something that was heartily embraced by this team or if that was a problem. Then my other question is whether or not it’s possible for you to embrace the readings that you were given regarding the Nuremberg rallies, the star wars, and all the war mongering readings. I don’t know if any of you have thought of that as a commentary on what our government is doing now.

Artist: First question, I think Gustavo, in his talk, sort of mentioned that the light became something that people could project their own interpretations on to. We didn’t embrace a religious reading, necessarily, but I think we liked the fact that people could use it for whatever they could get out of it. It’s more of a neutral thing that people could project on to.

Audience: I have a comment and question. Actually, I’m kind of embarrassed to say this, but I didn’t know about these beams of lights because I don’t watch the news that much and sometimes I don’t know what’s going on in the world. Actually, I only heard about this from my mom in Korea and friends in Japan. It sounds like they’re overwhelmed by the power of this light, but you mentioned that you got criticism from the people who are not in the victim’s family or from people who are outside of the United States. I was wondering exactly what kind of criticism you got.

Artist: I think there was more criticism before it was illuminated than after, because I think there was more concern about what it could have been rather than what it ended up being.
riticism that hasn’t been discussed that we did get a little bit of was just the fact that it’s using energy, which reinforces our dependence on Middle Eastern oil sources.

Artist: It’s $200 a night.

Younger: It was really only $200?

Artist: $200 a night, right.

Artist: That’s because it was given to us free by Con Edison.

Artist: No, it cost nothing, but that’s what it would have cost. (Laughter)

Artist: I was concerned with the war-mongering thing. I never saw any war imagery at all. I saw the Nuremberg thing, but again, it didn’t work for me. The image of the Nuremberg thing is an enclosed box of columns of light. This was somehow different to me. It was also sort of architectural light, but it didn’t read to me as the same thing. But yeah, the use of it as a patriotic flag-waving thing made me nervous. I would have been unhappy with that. I was unhappy with the American flag that hung on the base of it.

Artist: I think I’m kind of unhappy with the American flag--period. But I think that there is no way to control the way the image once it was up. That was the thing that was most remarkable and also the most humbling about being a part of the project. Once it was up, it was long gone from whatever our thoughts could have been regarding its meaning or purpose as being because it became public, intellectual fodder that couldn’t be spoken for. There was also a discussion about putting beams up at the Pentagon sight, but that discussion didn’t go anywhere, and I think if that happened, if the light became a symbol that was used adjacent to a building, a federal building, it would be undeniably tied to the relationship with the United States government. Whereas, although the World Trade Center symbolizes United States commerce, it still happened to be a place that was populated by people from all over the world.
Audience: Actually, my question had more to do with whether or not you enjoyed, maybe, the associations after doing the research or after having this knowledge about how light is being used and the various uses of such beams. I personally don’t see any of that in there, and I am aware of all the symbolism. I’m just wondering if in recognizing that those images do exist and that those uses exist, if that’s perhaps something that you liked personally.

Artist: Personally, and I’m not going to try to monopolize this dialogue, but personally I got very little sleep over the last six months out of fear of misinterpretation but there were so many interpretations that I recognized that the only responsible thing we could do was try to rehash them all so we that we understood what had been said. I don’t know if there is a way of doing that. Those references, there’s just a smattering of them, and they change month to month as time progresses. So I think there’s more of a need for me to try to understand what this super-simple gesture means. In some ways, that’s the way in which the Vietnam memorial was so successful--because it was just a blank slate that people could project anything onto. And the criticisms that the memorial received when it went up in the beginning ran the gamete. Like some people said it was a racist memorial because it was made out of black stone. You wouldn’t believe the sort of meanings that people will try to leave. But the only thing you can try to do is keep track of them.

Younger: Were you given--I mean, did somebody make the criticism that it looked like the Nuremberg thing, or did you take that up yourselves? Did you ever hear that?
Artist: Actually, it came up immediately on-line. Actually, in numerous places because we had talked about making the tribute a reality. There was inevitably that one person who would bring it up. But then talking about it, it would just be a recognition of, oh, well, there are similarities but obviously it’s radically different. It’s true that we tried to re-write it, and one quote that came almost immediately in mind after it happened was that of Oscar Wilde who says that a work of art is kind of like nurturing a child. You try to be responsible and direct the child to understand its development, but once it goes into the world, you can’t control it anymore--it just has a life of its own. We didn’t mention specific religious arguments or militarist arguments; they happened after the fact. You mentioned the heavens. There were two political cartoons that immediately came in the New York Post when the tribute was going up. The policemen and firemen were standing on clouds looking down, and it said, “Oh, look. This is our way – You can see it from here.”

Artist: I think also to dovetail what you’re saying, without trying to avoid any particular religious reference since we are kind of fighting a kind of holy war right now, or whatever it is that we are in the midst of, the last thing we wanted to do was to make a gesture that is inherently Catholic or Jewish. Therefore, the one reference that we did use for the press was it being a candlelight vigil, only because it would illustrate the way that it was meant to be temporal and reflective. The idea of the candle being used as a means of reflection is totally pantheistic.

Audience: I was just wondering about the relationship between the loss of lives and the loss of the building and their representation in the memorial, keeping in mind the work of Rachel Whiteread. It’s not one to one, but you guys chose to go with almost a one to one kind of representation of the buildings with the light as the square kind of blueprint, which I think is great. I love it because it is kind of literal. I was just wondering in terms of the process of decision-making, whether you had in mind something else while approaching the project. Still using lights but maybe connecting the buildings horizontally rather than vertically or whatever.

Artist: There was some discussion at some point about how the number of lights should reflect the number of people who died. We heard people saying that there should be a more direct relationship to the people who lost their lives, symbolically. One thing to keep in mind though, when it was conceived the day after on the 12th or 13th, was that it was still the site where we were hoping that hundreds of people would be pulled out alive. It was influx. It wasn’t a story that was complete in its conception.

Artist: Today it’s obvious that when the towers came down, everyone died. But on September 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, we were all watching the TV. Did anyone come out? Is anyone alive?

Artist: Yeah, the death toll was changing.

Artist: We were expecting survivors. It just didn’t seem possible that everybody died. You just thought that somebody was going to come out.

Artist: In the permanent memorial, it certainly will be much more of a one-to-one relationship, but that’s something different.

Audience: You mentioned that during the process of planning, and in response to how to erect a memorial, you used some words like defiance and defense. Were those emotions as an individual, personal emotions? Was it nationalistic emotions? Because in some of the excerpts that you gave us for readings, people were responding in a way that was very defiant, like this is in response to show that we are Americans and we’re not going to let this happen to us again, and whatever. Again, this grandiose notion that we can’t be hurt in any way and that we can stand up after such tragedy. And my second question is, did you at any point think that it wasn’t going to happen? (Laughter)

Artist: At every point along the way. There was probably four times that we were told it was going to happen and it didn’t happen. But by the time it actually did happen, I didn’t believe it was really going to happen--until it actually happened.

Artist: It’s interesting. There was actually one final approval we needed, and it didn’t come until around 9:00 on Friday night. They had to get that approval or it wouldn’t be able to happen. This was the window, this was the deal, and it just went down to the last possible moment. We never knew for certain.

Artist: Actually for that matter, there was within that period a great change from when we first conceived the emotion. It changed so radically because as Gustavo had mentioned, much of our initial inspiration was to create something that was going to work in concert with the rescue effort--it was more about rescue. Then, as time dragged on, there was a point for months afterwards where I didn’t want it to happen anymore, because it didn’t embody the emotion that I’d felt at first. It wasn’t necessarily ever intended to be a memorial. A memorial is contingent upon memory and was something we don’t have yet because we’re still so much in the present. So it changed, and the interpretation of it changed, so I think there were times when it went in and out of being an appropriate thing.

Artist: As far as the defiance thing, I think one of the reasons why it was successful was that the light had this dual nature. It’s a positive, forward-looking thing, but it also points backwards to loss, as well. Rebuilding the towers would be defiance. The lights are a little in-between. It points to the souls, it’s also hope and renewal. I think it’s kind of this two-sided thing, which makes it more appropriate than a real defying gesture, like we’re building it back.

Artist: I remember quite often in September we saw the quote, in the United States particularly since the horrors and the inevitable nature of horror has a lot to do with our understanding of the holocaust, by Theodore Adorno, which was, “is poetry possible after the holocaust?” That question was asked rhetorically to New York and to the world. What do we do after something like this? Adorno later qualified the quote when he said, “Well, poetry is possible, just as a suffering person has the right to scream,” so I think that’s how we were talking about it in the first month--it was like a scream. Maybe it just had to do with the tenor of the time, but it became softer and quieter in a way.

Audience: I’m really fascinated by the mention that you made of stepping back from a patriotic gesture. I’m from Indiana and I live in a town called Liberty, so the first thing that everybody did was everybody was glued to their televisions, then they went out to fill up gas tanks, and gas prices were rising by the minute, then they went to the grocery stores and bought everything off the shelves, and then everybody bought flags and put them up. So the response in my hometown, was very patriotic indeed, in the sense that the Twin Towers falling was really one of national grief and we recognized that it had particular resonance for New Yorkers. It seemed that nationwide, the response throughout America very often seemed to be to buy flags and show your patriotism. I’m really interested in the fact that you had the opportunity to do something in New York in a very public way but didn’t want that recognition of national loss and New York’s loss to be read as a patriotic gesture. I find that really interesting. Am I correct?

Artist: For me, that was very important. I am an American, but I am first and foremost a New Yorker. (Laughter) I grew up in the 60s and I grew up going to every anti-Vietnam rally as a grade school student. My political views are probably not very interesting to any of you, but I was concerned with the patriotic thing and it seemed appropriate for New York. It was about rebuilding the spirit and the image of the city. This city has a tenuous relationship, at best, with the rest of the country. It’s in America, but it’s kind of different.

Younger: I think New York is very different from America. When I take groups around, I have to be real clear to say this is the only hope for the world, because we can mostly get along together here. There’s somebody here from every city in the world and every small town, and that’s very different from every place else I’ve lived in whether it be Indiana or Minnesota or whatever. It’s not like here.
Artist: The one thing that seemed unanimous after the attack was that everybody needed to find a voice. It was after the election, the debacle election that we went through, that everybody recognized that we had to use our voice. So, whether you chose to go and buy an American flag as part of that collective voice, or I actually went and bought a United Nations flag, it was a time where speaking up was mandatory. I don’t think that a passive response, in one respect or another, was really in order.

Artist: We were very fortunate. I can’t even remember any of the discussions so much about politics, but there was an article by Susan Santag that came out. She was one of the first to ask questions. Well, why did America get bombed? And the response to her was just so violent. Like, “how could you possibly question America?” They wanted to drag her down there and show her the body parts.

Artist: Or Bill Maher for that matter. He was practically burned at the stake for his comment too.

Artist: But we all agreed on Santag’s article. We were very happy to have seen it. Unfortunately she was the first and got beaten up for it, but we coincidentally, or maybe not coincidentally, were on the same page in that respect.

Artist: As much as it’s a time where everyone wants to voice opinions and stuff, I’m still patiently waiting for New York to rebel again.

Artist: I think we’re even still in the midst of all this. Soon enough we’re going to wake up again. By the way, you guys were buying gas. We were buying water. First thing, there was a run on water. I bought like dozens of water. I filled my house with water. I think that one person was walking in a supermarket with a jug of water just as it happened or something, and it just caught on, and it just grew.

Artist: How many of you are not from New York? So you all chose to come here this summer to partake in this program at Columbia? Who thought that was an unwise idea? Who read last week’s New York Times magazine article and shit bricks?

Artist: I think we’re already dead and just don’t know it.

Artist: The reaction is more that you realize that something could happen, but why would you give up an opportunity? I’m not going to go home and wait it out. It might or it might not. The fact of the matter is that I can’t do anything about it but live my life and see what happens. In some ways we’re all rolling the dice everyday. I spend a lot of hours and miles in cars so. . . .

Artist: That’s totally like the only answer that’s available. It’s like speaking up and making gestures. Not that there’s going to be a virtue found in this disaster, but maybe it was a wake-up call to be aware of the present and not to exercise any kind of apathy.

Younger: Do you think that happened?

Artist: A wake-up call? I don’t know if there’s a wake-up call. I don’t think that the United States has changed their foreign policy, but I think we need to recognize a certain degree of mortality. I think the fact that we now know what bio-warfare is, or perhaps we know where Afghanistan is on the map, is a small gesture.

Audience: I understand that reflex, right? Like someone hits your brother you want to beat the shit out of him, right? It’s a family thing, that reaction. So I was like, okay, fine, everybody wants to wave their flag, everybody needs to heal in their own way and sort of retaliate, but then as time goes on. . . . I think the world gave that time, because now you read newspapers abroad and it’s like this collective eye roll about America again.

Artist: The fact that we dropped daisy cutters on Afghanistan in response is just inexplicable. I can’t even imagine why would we open an arsenal like that. It’s like we’re throwing gasoline on a fire. The question is how to handle an ideological battle like this.

Audience: Yeah, well, we’re going to do things that we’re going to be ashamed of in 25 years. I was sitting at home going, “Geez!” Tom Clancy was the first person I heard that said all Arabs aren’t the same but in the beginning I sat there and thought it was going to suck for a long time to be Arab. My roommates are from Egypt, and I remember my first reaction. I was sitting, watching it happen on the big screen on TV in school. I’m seeing the projected image on a screen this big, like live news broadcast, and at one point it just clicked and I ran to the phone and I’m like, “Karen, take off your veil!” It was like, “Hide, I’ll come get you,” because you could feel people being angry. I thought “Tribute in Light” was really a nice gesture, especially the idea of dealing with the void. I was hoping it would be a new concept for a memorial. I was also hoping that when you have a memorial it will be more for reflection on a personal level. Even though people were seeing it as a group, the light was like a blank canvas that would have space for individual reaction as opposed to this mob mentality that was going on. For example, you couldn’t say anything against America--you sort of had to sit there and let people say stuff. In personal conversation, it was like, “Watch your neighbor, if they’re saying too many things against America.” It became like a joke after a while but I still felt it was very serious. You would hear these things like “Academics are the great evil right now, in this country.” So I don’t know if the lesson has necessarily been a wake-up call. It just seems like at this point there was a bit of a pause and weird things were going on but nobody ever questioned. Even Katie Couric was angry for the first time. (Laughter)

Audience: It’s a thing for a region, like it’s a very New York City thing. I think New York City has become politicized and has woken up in its own system, but it’s broken down for the rest of the country, and it’s not going to peak until something happens, unfortunately, in Disney World or Chicago or something like that. Like flying back and forth from New Mexico, stopping in cities, going back to New York, and coming back to a very somber place or a very political place and then going to these other cities, other people were just acting normal. So it seems like the energy’s here. It doesn’t feel like that, for me, in the rest of the country.

Younger: Let me say one thing. I think that I really experienced that there was some thing in America that changed in that moment. Because I know that the women in Iowa got together and went with the Muslim women out to shop and things like that. And my brother, who’s one of those rednecks who lives in Missouri, he even said, “Look, Cheryl, for as huge as this country is, and for as many nuts as there are, this is very little, you know, awful things that have happened.” It seemed like right away we were starting to address, as a people, the people who lived here even in the government. Even Bush got up and said a few things like, “Don’t burn Arab churches.” I do think that was one thing I really felt like, over time, having lived through the 60s and civil rights stuff, is really different. And I also think that here in New York, everybody was helping everybody. And everybody was talking to everybody. That doesn’t normally happen in New York. Everybody was talking to everybody.

Audience: Have they gone back to normal?

Younger: I don’t know. Most of the people I know are still talking. Also I think we were vulnerable in a way. I almost found myself in a scam a couple of times and I always got out of it because I was aware but I think this time we all felt more vulnerable. That same guy came up to me and tried to scam me again, and somehow he seemed familiar to me, so I gave him money and I thought, “Oh darn!” Because we let our guard down.

Audience: I just wanted to say that I’m not from New York, but I moved here in 1983 and my first job was in the World Trade Center. Every five years I would end up either in the World Trade Center or the World Financial Center, where I was also living until I went to graduate school. I didn’t go to “ground zero” because I knew it intimately. Symbolically, there wasn’t a memorial, or there wasn’t the most powerful politicians deciding what could be done down there. The tribute was very helpful for me, and I commend you all. I could only imagine the stamina it took to work on a project that must have been a runaway train.

Younger: Thank you.


Bennett, Bonevardi, LaVerdiere, Myoda Analysis
by Deborah Jack

The articulation of grief in either a visual or verbal manner remains a daunting task. How do we frame it? How do we represent an event that by its awesome nature invites us to forget its occurrence? The events of September 11, 2001, namely the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers and the resultant collapse created a rupture in the landscape and skyline of New York City and also on the inner landscape of New Yorkers, Americans and the rest of the world.

In their presentation of "Towers of Light," the collaborators, John Bennett, Gustavo Bonevardi, Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, sought to provide a historical overview of the project and its logistics, as well as their perspective of the realization and aftermath of the event. Through a presentation of the conceptual as well as the personal, the presenters created a flexible framework for the discussion.

Issues regarding whether or not the “Towers of Light” could have negative historical associations, led to a discussion on whether art can transcend past connotations. In this instance the similar use of light in the Nuremberg rally during Hitler’s Third Reich raises controversial issues. Concerns were brought up that the “Towers of Light” project could being used as a tool to promote a political ideology. How can the artist prevent their work from being misused? Can the artist control the reception of their work? How far does the responsibility of the artist extend?

Conceived when there was still hope for recovery, the very nature of the tribute, with its use of white light and projection addresses and employs aspects of embodiment and disembodiment; tangible and elusive; absence and presence. Despite a consensus regarding the emotional currency of the piece, there was still an overall cautionary feeling that was expressed for the projection of this blank space as well as a concern for the possible appropriation of the piece as political propaganda--something that the public artist must always be prepared to face.

Their eventual decision to fill the void that existed between the Towers, rather than recreate them in light, can be viewed as a successful attempt to limit nationalist responses. By not projecting a representation of the Towers, the artists created a new space for reflection, mourning and possibly a blueprint for a new type of memorial--one that resists fixity and location.

Cognizant of the need for the passing of time and the perspective it brings, the creators maintain that the “Towers of Light” was not meant to be a memorial but rather, a symbol of hope. Whatever the original intent the tribute was a gesture; a whisper amidst the political and military clamor that followed. It extended to those of us that needed a place for our grief or a light to fill the void.