Five-channel video installation
Variable dimensions
2004
Richard Humann • Delicate Monster • Five-channel video installation • Variable dimensions • 2004
Commissioned by the Tampere Art Museum in Tampere, Finland, Delicate Monster is a five-channel video installation that explores the collective trauma and personal experience of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. Through the recollections of individuals who experienced that day, Richard Humann examines how a shared historical event becomes a collection of individual memories, each shaped by the perspective and emotional experience of the person recounting it.
For the installation, Humann recorded multiple people telling their personal stories of that morning. He then processed the footage through computer manipulation software, slowing the videos to produce highly pixelated, distorted images. The resulting figures hover between recognizable human presence and abstraction. Their faces and gestures remain perceptible, yet the distortion makes them difficult to fully apprehend, suggesting the difficulty of translating a traumatic experience into coherent language or stable images.
The five video channels played simultaneously throughout the museum’s massive 10,000-square-foot exhibition hall. Multiple voices and images occupied the space at once, creating an environment of overlapping narratives, fragmented information, and sensory confusion. Rather than presenting a single, authoritative account of the event, Humann immersed the viewer in a convergence of personal testimonies. The competing sounds and images evoke the disorientation of that morning, when ordinary life was abruptly disrupted and the scale of what was happening became difficult to comprehend.
The title, Delicate Monster, is drawn from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play set on an island. The reference establishes a connection between the island setting of Shakespeare’s drama and Manhattan, an island whose familiar landscape was transformed by the attacks. The title also suggests a tension between vulnerability and enormity: the fragility of individual human lives confronted by an event of overwhelming scale. The distorted figures embody this tension, appearing at once vulnerable and elusive within the vastness of the installation.
Through the interplay of testimony, technological distortion, and immersive sound, Delicate Monster considers the limits of representation when confronting collective tragedy. The work does not attempt to reconstruct the event as a seamless narrative. Instead, it gives form to the fragmented nature of memory and the difficulty of making sense of an experience that exceeds any single person’s account. By surrounding the viewer with these overlapping recollections, Humann creates a space in which the personal and historical dimensions of September 11 remain inseparable.
Richard Humann • Delicate Monster • Five-channel video installation • Variable dimensions • 2004
Richard Humann • Delicate Monster • Five-channel video installation • Variable dimensions • 2004
Richard Humann • Delicate Monster • Five-channel video installation • Variable dimensions • 2004
Richard Humann • Delicate Monster • Five-channel video installation • Variable dimensions • 2004
Richard Humann • Delicate Monster • Five-channel video installation • Variable dimensions • 2004
Richard Humann • Delicate Monster • Five-channel video installation • Variable dimensions • 2004
From the Delicate Monster Museum Catalogue:
Art is the most ancient expression of humanity’s desire to come to terms with our essential complexity. Even in its most abstract, linguistically and conceptually indecipherable manifestations, art is both a filter and a mirror of our will to image and to understand ourselves, one another, and the world we live in. In the work of Richard Humann, an artist and a creative thinker from New York, this will is strong and compassionate and timely. Delicate Monster, a poetic 5-projector video installation Humann has produced for the Tampere Art Museum, mines the metaphysics of human confusion and suffering as exposed in the facial and verbal landscape of the artist’s fellow New Yorkers who lived, like he did, through the physical and psychic terror of 9/11 and its enduring aftermath. Delicate Monster invites the audience at Tampere to contemplate the violence and trauma of an event that occurred far from this peaceful, pleasant city. Through a hypnotizing amalgam of images and words, Humann’s work speaks to us of the communality of human suffering, of mental shock that knows no national border, political creed or gender divide. Delicate Monster reminds us, perhaps, of the collection of war-induced scars that adorn the human surface of national history in every nation, also in Finland, a country that lost around 5% of its male population to the horrors of war in 1939–1944.
The destruction of New York’s Twin Towers on 9/11 changed the world as we know it. On that day, in the span of a few hours and with the anxious aid of twenty-first-century information technology, terrorism evolved from a regional calamity, the occasional news blip that posed no immediate danger, into a global menace; and thus the world slipped, delicately and monstrously, into a world war unlike any other humanity has endured before. The power of the event and its aftermath cannot be measured in the number of lives lost, not in the magnitude of the fiscal loss inflicted upon the infrastructure of the world’s largest market economy, nor even in the scope of the bullish territorial wars it spawned first in Afghanistan and more recently in Iraq. 9/11 has evolved into a complex and contradictory symbol—of anger and intolerance, of vulnerability and vengeance, of internationally intertwined agony, uncertainty and fear and the chaos that humanity invites upon itself through their synergy.
We live our lives in the vicinity of births and deaths, but these potent actualities become meaningful to us only in the form of symbols. Humann’s work at the Tampere Art Museum raises before our eyes the specter of a symbol that is both ancient and unforeseen, a symbol we recognize but cannot classify or fix into position because it both embraces and exceeds the communicative parameters of any one culture, community or language. In an echo of 9/11, Delicate Monsteris anchored to an oral cultural base, the evanescent human voice, that is, by definition, ineffable: like the traumatic event and its ongoing aftermath, Humann’s work is a restrained primal cry that speaks of humanity’s present condition in terms that cannot be deciphered through the handmaidens of Enlightenment logic, the letters of an alphabet. We have heard this sound before—it strikes us as an aural symbol as potent as the wailing of a beloved child—but its specific meaning remains as obscure, as mesmerizing, as it must have been in the beginning of time. Art, poetry and music constitute perhaps the only communal window through which we can reach our minds and imaginations towards a better understanding of the symbols of our being, our collective and communal identities, in space and time.
On behalf of the Tampere Art Museum, I would like to thank Richard Humann for opening a vista through one such window and for reminding us of our common humanity.
Janne Sirén, PhD
Museum Director
Tampere, 31.7.2004
Photo credits: Richard Humann Studio