💥✍ 20-YEARS ago the alpha-numerical SEPT11 ended up defining the decade. I was in 2NDYEAR art school living with my then girlfriend & now wife. We lived in a bedsit in Ranelagh D6 [2ROOMS that should have stayed 1ROOM]. The landlord had taken what was once a 10FTX10FT box & split it into a 5X10FTROOM & 5X7FTROOM leaving a 3X5FTCORRIDOR for the entrance proper into the bedsit & then bedroom with sliding door where the bed was slotted like a matchbox with no floor space on either side so you crawled onto & into bed every night. Being 6FT6INTALL it was comedy night every night in our sitting room-cum-kitchen as we choreographed our movements so I exclusively sat on the floor like Gulliver & my wife behind on the Lilliputian couch (we purchased with glee at Rathmines' Market D6) where we baked in TV light & food smell. On SEPT11, I returned early from art school, around lunch. It was Tuesday. Our fridge, which had a freezer box that could only fit fish fingers (out of their box) was miraculously connected to our cooker which was caked in a Salem of burnt & blacked something. I was cooking lunch - no news yet. Our TV held an image inside that was grainy & distant like looking into the eyes of someone behind jam jars. The TV had no remote, just a plastic dial that clunked into place. We had 𝘢𝘭𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 3 stations. I *clunked* it. The news. Clunk! News! Clunk! Looks like news… eventually committing to 1 news & there it played out - SEPT11. The following years in art school SEPT11 was all around even if it wasn't obviously visible. In 3RDYEAR we had a seminar on artists, mostly American, & how they treated SEPT11 in their art. At the time it felt more like therapy than art - something you had to expel as a trauma rather than express as a privilege. Today we exist inside jam jars where everything is grainy, like the dots that swarmed the Twin Towers & then vanished. SEPT11 was a TV programme, for most. COVID-19 is also a TV programme as we cling to news media not one day in September but successive & future days as info is drip fed & fails to dramatise the threat because it's not skyscrapers & planes. For now art is not art anymore; art is capitalism in crisis.

MARCH 16, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night