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Windows GalleryWATCHING CATASTROPHEA group exhibition Curated by: by Anthony P. Clune This exhibition is a student-generated response to the contemporary experience of watching catastrophe. From 9-11 to the war in Iraq and the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, a repeated experience of American life has become confronting what would once have been the unknowable or unthinkable in visual form. In a seminar I taught last Spring,I was moved and energized by the students's engagement that led some to spend time helping out in New Orleans, others to make contact with journalists stationed in Iraq, and still others to design a children's book to help them understand what happened on September 11, 2001. Now they have come together to produce this exhibition consisting of their own work and that of other young artists they know. The student-curated show is the product of a collaboration between artists and critics from at least five different NYU degree programs. What does it mean to watch catastrophe? In aesthetic theory, the idea of the sublime corresponds to the response generated by such viewing. However, the sublime rests on the idea that the viewer is personally safe from any threat, something that no one can say with confidence today. Nor does this work show the 'disinterestedness' that was held to be the hallmark of modern American art. It represents a new form of documentary that is emerging as one of the tasks of contemporary art. Such documentary is fragmentary and so partial. It is also partial in that it takes part and participates in the event it documents. This taking part is a new form of democracy in a time when that institution seems threatened on all sides. It answers the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire's call for an art that is "passionate, partial and political." This is also work-meaning the class work, the students's activism, their decision to hold an exhibition and its subsequent planning and execution. It is the work of visual culture as a new interdisciplinary project that is at once the practice of theory and the theory of practice. Nicholas Mirzoeff 
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