The Towers Fell, Leaving a Paper Trail of Upended Lives

If you've seen "Man on Wire," you know that the real stars of the documentary about Philippe Petit are the World Trade Center towers the tightrope walker used for his 1974 high-wire feat. There's a fascination with vintage footage of the buildings going up, knowing what we do about how they came down.

The towers' innards also feature prominently in the Corcoran Gallery of Art's current two-part exhibition, "Elena del Rivero: Home Suite." Spanish artist del Rivero lives in New York and harnessed particulars of the 2001 terrorist attacks -- in this case, the papers scattered from offices as the buildings fell -- to create an artwork of considerable poetic impact. The work, called "[Swi:t] Home: A Chant," memorializes a specific event but also speaks generally to lives upended by unexpected tragedy, no matter its form.

"Chant" (as I'll call it from here on; the artist's mannered phonetic spelling proves a distraction) was five years in the making. Its conception depended on happenstance: Del Rivero's home studio stood adjacent to the World Trade Center. She fashioned the work from the Post-its, canceled checks, corporate prospectuses and account statements that blew into her home when the buildings collapsed.

Collaborating with an archivist, del Rivero cleaned and detoxified the papers, then numbered and catalogued each piece. Finally she stitched them onto the five rolls of muslin now cascading down from high in the Corcoran's rotunda.

Those five 23-foot rolls hang one next to the other. The effect is that of a waterfall, frozen. Light descending from the rotunda's oculus bathes the papers in diffuse light, lending the work an elegiac air.

Though the events of 9/11 precipitated "Chant," the work grew out of a project del Rivero had begun a year earlier. In July 2000, the artist covered her studio floors with paper made from heavy-duty abaca fiber, which is as porous as paper but strong as fabric. Her goal: to go about her life as usual, expecting only that the paper absorb the shoeprints, drippings and occasional tears of life lived underfoot.

After about a year, the artist pulled up the papers and sewed them together to create 14-foot-tall tapestries that look like gargantuan dish towels. These cloths hang in one of the Corcoran's first-floor galleries. Also on view here, the artist's appointment book (open to February and March 2001) and a selection of her notebooks.

The works are del Rivero-centric to the core. The artist's dishcloths offer little of interest save their extraordinary scale; their spills and footprints won't mean much to us. Likewise, notebooks filled with random number sequences hardly hold our attention.

But there is some pleasure to be had in del Rivero's appointment calendar. Offering enjoyments akin to glimpsing private diaries and the hypnotic trance of looking at a map, the calendar invites extended looking. What we come up against in that looking, though, is the impossibility of gaining intimacies from a stranger.

Del Rivero's display pales in comparison to the exposure that happened on Sept. 11, 2001. Countless personal papers, many highly sensitive, were thrust into public life. Many burned or disintegrated. Yet some survived and, in the case of those that landed in del Rivero's studio, some were fetishized.

Rivera's "Chant" is so powerful because the everydayness of those papers reveals the catastrophe's abruptness. How chilling to read this yellow sticky note, probably left by an assistant for the boss: "FYI [redacted name]'s mother -- just died." Or these notes to self: "Talk to Rhona," "Welcome package." Packets of Sweet 'n Low, museum tickets and countless business cards are among the detritus.

After cleaning them, del Rivero sewed them up. Some received fabric borders. Some she embellished with tiny white pearls. Others were sewn wholesale onto muslin with intricate stitching. The pearls and thread control chaotic folds and rips in the paper.