The Progressive Reaction

There is a book to be written about the behavior of cultural producers after September 11. It will be an inventory of grotesques as lugubrious, moralizing and overlong as anything in Solzhenitsyn. There will be paragraphs on Maureen Dowd's hysterical column of last October, "Terror, the Sworn Enemy of Fashion," a deft fusion of narcissism and cowardice about her anti-anthrax leather gloves and the terror of being famous. For Bob Woodward, a chapter on his "Ten Days in September" series in the Washington Post: the title implies either that, à la Seven Days in May, President Bush had narrowly averted a military coup, or that the Post now names its investigative journalism after John Frankenheimer movies. There will be a chapter of remedial instruction on what the journalist should know about irony and the avoidance of the same: Nixon fanned the '50s Red Scare, then took credit for opening China; Bob Woodward helped to destroy faith in the American presidency, then mugged for another Pulitzer with White House worship. Some remarks are in order on decorum, as for example with the New York Historical Society's recently closed exhibit Missing: Streetscape of a City in Mourning, which adjoined their festive show on Macy's floats. Close it with a chapter of interviews: the firefighters, survivors' families, New Yorkers and Americans who have found their decency violated by weepy features cued to artsy photography of rubble and flags.

The précis for this book (call it Necrophile Pulp at the Fin de millénium) identifies a crying need for new intellectual and artistic responses to September 11: work that is analytical and polemical, that does not make a fetish of the dead but addresses the living, engaging, in Trollope's phrase, the way we live now. Some of just this sort of work is emerging from artist Ramsey Arnaoot. Along with Dick Davis, Arnaoot toured an asbestos cleanup site in central Virginia and took snapshots of meticulously staged compositions. Consider "Goodbye to All That," in which Arnaoot, draped in optic white Tyvek and with a respirator mask and peach latex gloves, gives a toothy grimace. What could be inside the patent leather case? Bio-terror? A cobalt-iodine nuclear device? Or encyclopedias, for sale from an upstanding Arab-American who has to wear an asbestos suit to stay clean of the gritty distrust and intolerance polluting his country? Is it playfulness that wrinkles the artist's nose? Or are his lips upturned with anger at a nascent police state that imprisons American citizens without trial and places all swarthy, mustachioed men under suspicion?

Arnaoot himself, the child of a father and mother who immigrated to the Washington area from Syria and Texas, respectively, encompasses what Samuel Huntington has called the clash of civilizations. (To many from our college-educated class, a more useful word has been 'diversity.') The synthesis embodied in Arnaoot (the personal as political) is a uniquely American idiom. Look at the blue and beige plaid shirt, appropriate for any logger or Teamster, just visible in "White Flag (Not Jasper Johns)." The shirt is unbuttoned at the collar to reveal a few inches of chest hair below the clavicle, the face radiant with an embracing grin. Beneath his respirator and clean suit, Arnaoot is openness, friendship, and a spirit of freedom: an anthropomorphic American flag. At his left collides the sobering counterpoint of Dick Davis, whose features betray the fears of the Anglo-Saxon chieftain. Shrouded in prominent, foregrounded glass, nostrils flared beneath frenzied deer eyes, the representative of the old imperial tribe is an intimation of intolerance, threatened, brooding, unpredictable.

The Arnaoot-Davis tension is envisioned resolved in "Fall, I'll Catch You," of the three photographs we examine here perhaps the most pregnant with possibility. Beyond the confines of the asbestos cleanup and the stifling present, in front of a timeless main street with street light and lamp pole, Arnaoot leaps into an action of seeming violence, human foot hurtling towards human torso. Yet we see, as we progress through the four panes, that the jump kick is only a celebration of the human form. Davis does not fight back; he catches Arnaoot in mid-air. It is a majestic realization of slow motion, rich with the memory of the man who discovered the miraculous weightlessness of that effect: D. W. Griffith, the American paradox who made a fortune celebrating the Ku Klux Klan and, in his next film, lost it all fighting prejudice. For every action of evil in America, there is an equal and opposite reaction of good.

If, as someone once said, journalism is the first draft of history, it has been a shabby draft lately, C-minus work from an undergraduate with nothing but cigarettes and fifteen minutes to deadline. But in the photography of Ramsey Arnaoot there is hope: a glimpse of reconciliation, a first draft, neither profiteering nor sentimental, of national healing. Arnaoot's are works of courageous physicality, approaching social questions with as much honesty and courage as exists anywhere in the art world today. If we are to understand and to shape the radical transformations that are now taking place in our culture and our national policy, we will need to foster open and vigorous debate, as these photos do. We will need more Ramsey Arnaoots to help us.

The Arc of the Bicycle: Digitized Photos, 2001 - 2002 is on view at www.people.virginia.edu/~rma3n/photomax/ through May 31, 2003. Continuing on at the same address is the visually dense three-photo series Glima: Wrestling of the Vikings, presented by the Students for the Preservation of Icelandic Culture, Ramsey Michael Arnaoot, President.