Artists Registry

"MOMENT OF RECOGNITION"
Elizabeth Michelman --- Artist’s Statement July 18, 2008

"Moment of Recognition" is a participatory sculpture-in-progress rooted in the national trauma of September 11, 2001. I invite my audience to join me in creating this work that explores the personal and political implications of an American identity.

The sculpture proposes a series of exchanges through which participants build their own community. The now half-completed work takes the form of a giant red-white-and-blue question mark embedded in shards of broken glass. It is constructed of twenty-six pairs of alternating red-and-white and blue-and-white glass balls (thirteen in each color). Two words, etched on the glass surfaces, repeat: from the artist’s hand, the question: “why”; from the hand of each participant, the response: “me.” The identity of this voluntary community only becomes enacted and known as the question-mark fills up with inscriptions. (Participants are rewarded with their own pair of inscribed balls as a personal memento.)

At 9 AM on September 11, 2001, I possessed all of the specifications for this work and the commitment of a community gallery to exhibit it, but no concept of a configuration. Our national political tragedy forced my hand. In the same hour that I was authorizing production of these exact numbers and colors of balls, terrorists bombed buildings of national prominence in New York and Washington D.C. Out of a sense of personal shock (I had attended law school and lived nearby in Washington) sprang grief, anger, and the conviction of aesthetic form. The ideals of American community had been placed in question. I saw as clearly as the American flag my responsibility to illuminate and reaffirm how we conceive ourselves as a collective political entity. In spurring individuals to join in creating a new whole the work could rouse us to rededicate ourselves to our democratic ideals.

“Moment of Recognition” requires public exhibition for its program of political and artistic education. However, its inherent ambiguity as a work of art has subjected it to misinterpretation and even censorship. I continue to seek courageous participants and exhibition sites to keep this project alive to completion. Please contact me for more information. See E. Michelman, “For What Good is a Public Library?” The Brookline TAB, March, 2006.