Richter was flying from Germany to Newark on Sept. 11 for the Manhattan opening of a show of his work. The flight was diverted. Richter’s itinerary is one of the countless peripheral stories that make up the mosaic that is our ongoing collective sense of that day. Call it the cultural absorption of 9/11.
It consists not just of what happened in Lower Manhattan, but also the impact of watching what happened there, and the innumerable cascading consequences, whether as minor as a canceled trip or as overwhelming as the death of a loved one. Most enduringly, it consists of the reexamining of that impact and those consequences in art and literature.
What makes Richter’s painting such an emblem of that cultural absorption isn’t so much what it shows. There have been numerous other renderings, in various media, of the events of Sept. 11. No, what makes “September’’ emblematic is how the painting so eerily balances absence and presence. Sept. 11 is there all right. But you have to know to look for it, and then look closely. Robert Storr, a noted curator who has written about Richter’s work, has called the painting “the ghost of a ghost.’’
That could describe the cultural status of Sept. 11, too.
Ghosts can be discernible, of course - that’s what makes them frightening. The ghost of Sept. 11 can be seen in the abundance of bollards and barriers and empty plazas in the security-conscious design of public buildings. It’s there in how resurgent patriotism has maintained such a potent presence in the culture. It’s there in the ongoing fascination with the culture of surveillance (what was once a cause of paranoia in so many films is now a cause for reassurance). In its most troubling form, the ghost of Sept. 11 can be seen in Hollywood’s seemingly ever-greater taste for calamitous spectacle.
