Free to Forget

September, 2021

“America does not understand the language of manners and principles, so we are addressing it using the language it understands.” – Osama Bin Laden

“Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies,” – Walt Whitman, Mannahatta 

“Cash Rules Everything Around Me” – Method Man

“I can hear you!” – George W. Bush

““The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man’s dedication to world peace… a representation of man’s belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and through cooperation, his ability to find greatness.” – Minoru Yamasak

“How little moral would the world appear without forgetfulness! A poet could say that God has placed forgetfulness as a doorkeeper on the threshold of the temple of human dignity.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

2001: in a matter of hours, the utopian concept of “world peace through world trade” was made as obsolete as analogue cassette. Global peace means localised warfare. Suburban living rooms enter the warzone via live television broadcast. We’ll never know whether it was news media that became Videodrome, or whether Videodrome became the news. Spectacular, détourned images of freedom’s home-grown war: commercial planes turned from autopilot into hijacked missiles, twin towers transformed into strategic military outposts, armies of white collar workers – the apparatchiks of kapital – metamorphosed into the Generals of the world’s wars. It was they who had channelled the flows of global conflicts and speculated on the spoils. Everywhere, there are only the victims of someone else’s executions. There are no peaceful, invisible hands that coddle the forces of the market; there is only war. Markets are, after all, the warfare of value. Never forget: where there are markets there is war — markets are the continuation of war by other means. 

Free to Forget will be intermittently posted on rrealartt over the next two days to mark twenty wasted years since the event across timezones. Along with images of the specially remodelled plinth, there will be a digital exhibition of the artworks that went up in smoke with the towers, as well as a one-off screening that will align exactly with the moments that occurred on the 11th of September in New York City. God Bless.