QUESTION/TOPIC
The Artist and the Skyscraper: a discussion about negotiating the spaces between public art, the monument and the memorial

REPORT
We had an hour. Julian and Paul sat midpoint in an arc of black chairs as a crowd gathered, maybe ten or twelve people, almost all of them women. Some were drawn by the question, others by the artists, and most by their project itself; the well-publicized monument to the Sept 11th attacks. The project had been taken up by the TK, resulting in a press freeze. This was the first, and possibly last time the artists themselves would be publicly commenting.

Julian opened his briefcase and produced stacks of paper. One stack framed the question, an obtuse query regarding public art and private artistic vision and the role of the individual artist- any individual artist- when that artistâs work becomes a memorial.

Especially a memorial touching fresh death. When it attempts to salve public wounds in a public place. When it is paid for by a people, a city or nation, for that purpose. When it is antidote to public terror. When that nation has different aesthetic sensibilities than the artists. Julian and Paul had phrased the issue academically, to initiate a philosophical discussion, and now they read it aloud.

Then Julian pulled out more paper. These were magazines, the NY Times Sunday Magazine and Art in America. Both covers depicted full-page artistâs renderings of the project Paul and Julian were championing, and Julian placed them on the carpet in the center of the circle. The renderings showed the Manhattan skyline by night, Jersey view. Where the twin towers once stood, we now see twin shafts of white light, radiating up from the island to the clouds. This is their project.

This is a sculpture, an event, this is energy as architecture. They are art, a monument, a memorial. What are they? Right now they are an idea. Whose art is this?

The discussion begins. Megawatts and xenon bulbs and candle power. Website opinions and pie charts. Pearl harbor and Mya Lynn. The danger of artistic celebrity on the back of national tragedy. The national need after a psychic national wound. Firefighters wanting the shafts of light in red, white and blue. The logistics of lighting trucks and public money, issues of bird migration and light pollution, of corporate vs. individual sponsorship and the irony of commemorating an attack indirectly resulting from American presence in the Middle East with a memorial dependent upon fossil fuel. Should the project be sponsored, should it travel, should it be temporary, occasional? With as many questions afoot, should the project be realized at all? Is the image enough?

The circle is small. All are artists, some in New York for the first time since September 11th and now, not two blocks from a TV scene theyâve seen replayed dozens of times, are these images. These shafts of light trace the old buildings like a memory. Itâs not a new skyline rather a photonegative of the old, as if the violence had scarred our collective retina. It is, at once new and familiar, both altered and restored. People speak then return to the images, chins in hands. The pictures are a black hole sucking in words and philosophy and abstract ideas. We are talking about action. Whose? Ours. If the initial question was answered, it was answered in this way.

Then the conference photographer entered the room, snapped a few pictures, then stood in the corner, staring down at the pictures on the carpet.

Reported by Charles Graeber

The artists, Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, are both former residents in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's World Views artist residency program, which was housed on the 91st floor of World Trade Center Tower One. For two years, they have been designing Bioluminescent Beacon, a project commissioned by Creative Time for its DNAid series, intended to be affixed to the top of one of the Twin Towers in the fall of 2002. Since the devastation, the artists evolved the project at the request of The New York Times Magazine, which features a preliminary rendering on the September 23, 2001 cover.

Bioluminescent Beacon was to be a public light sculpture celebrating the awe-inspiring developments of genetic engineering. It was also to be a living monument to a form of life (the dinoflagellate single-cell plankton and the light source of Bioluminescent Beacon) which has served as a rich tool for scientists in the investigation of life itself. The light broadcast by Bioluminescent Beacon would have been visible to pedestrians and others in Lower Manhattan and has now become the seed for the artists' proposal of a different sort of light: "light for light's sake," in the artists' words, that will rise for all to see, in recognition of the September 11th tragedy.

Julian Jean-Baptiste LaVerdiere, was born in the Adirondack Mountains, and moved to New York City in 1980, where he now lives and works as a artist. LaVerdiere is currently represented by: Lehmann Maupin Gallery NYC, Deitch Projects NYC, No Limits Gallery Milan, Italy, and Greene Gallery in Geneva, Switzerland. LaVerdiere received his BFA in 1993 from The Cooper Union and MFA in 1995 from Yale University's Graduate School of Art, sculpture program.

Paul Myoda was born in Wilmington, Delaware. His father is from Hiroshima, Japan, his mother is from Wolbach, Nebraska. He attended Rhode Island School of Design (BFA), California Institute for the Art, and Yale University (MFA). He has exhibited sculptures, paintings, photographs and short films nationally and internationally, and has written for various art and cultural publications, including Art in America, Flash Art, Frieze, and Feedmag.com. In 2001, he participated in Lower Manhattan Cultural CouncilÕs World View Studios on the 91st floor of World Trade Center One. He is represented by Friedrich Petzel Gallery, NY. He is based in Brooklyn, NY.