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January 14, 2002

Out of Minimalism, Monuments to Memory



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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
The Oklahoma City National Memorial, designed by Hans and Torrey Butzer, consists of 168 glass and bronze chairs in a field, one for each of the victims of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in 1995.
The Associated Press
A model of the prospective Holocaust memorial in Berlin, by Peter Eisenman.

In his official farewell address last month, at St. Paul's Chapel, a stone's throw from the rubble, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani made headlines, calling for a memorial at the former World Trade Center site.

"I really believe we shouldn't think about this site out there, right behind us, right here, as a site for economic development," he said. "We should think about a soaring, monumental, beautiful memorial that just draws millions of people here that just want to see it.

"If the memorial was done correctly, you'll have all the economic development you want, and you can do the office space in a lot of different places."

Art before business: an amazing thought. The new mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, promptly made clear that, in the midst of a fiscal crunch, turning the site over mostly to a memorial was pretty unlikely. More likely was a mix of office and retail space in addition to a memorial.

Proposals for memorials have poured in to City Hall and elsewhere, some of them strangely identical. (Twin light beams seem to have occurred to many people simultaneously.) Ultimately, the tough part won't be deciding to build a memorial but agreeing about what it will look like. From Berlin to Oklahoma City, this has been a gigantic problem, not least because victims and their families feel they should have a say (who can argue with that?), and in New York's case there are thousands of victims. But even when small groups of so-called art experts decide, the process is usually a struggle.

I have a guess. A memorial, as part of a mixed-use project, will in some way turn out to look Minimalist, Minimalism, of all improbable art movements of the last 50 years, having become the unofficial language of memorial art. What used to be men on horses with thrusting swords has morphed more or less into plain walls and boxes. Once considered the most obstinate kind of modernism, Minimalism has gradually, almost sub rosa, made its way into the public's heart. And now those bare walls are blank slates onto which we project our deepest commonly held feelings.

Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial in Washington is the obvious example. Peter Eisenman's proposed Holocaust memorial in Berlin, originally conceived with Richard Serra, is another, a Minimalist field of plain concrete pillars, like headstones. Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust memorial in Vienna, a big eggshell-colored box made to resemble an inside-out room with shelves of books, is yet another. And Oklahoma City, with a grid of chairs lined up like Donald Judd boxes, representing the victims of the terrorist bombing there, is the most germane example for New York. Even the temporary viewing ramps at the former Trade Center site are in a Minimalist vein.

The purpose of a memorial is to get people talking, so that the memories being honored are kept alive after the events memorialized pass into history. What kind of art best serves that function? The artist Nathan Rapoport, responding to criticism that his 1948 Warsaw Ghetto Monument, a realist sculpture, was inadequate to the enormity of its subject, asked: "Could I have made a rock with a hole in it and said, `Voilá! The heroism of the Jewish people'?" In a modern world, he realized, neither abstraction nor realism was going to be universally acceptable as a style for memorializing the dead.

The exercise of taste is a matter of who wields power at a given moment. You may have heard how both sides in the debate over the World War II memorial on the Mall in Washington, the most conspicuous non- Minimalist memorial of recent years, claimed to speak for the preferences of the war veterans, as if veterans were a monolithic group.

Centuries ago, when public art was commissioned by royalty, aristocrats and the church, official taste was synonymous with high art. Democracy and the modern era altered all that. Official art in a democracy requires consensus, an aesthetic common denominator.

But modern art is about one person's vision. The idea of a consensus is antithetical to it. Its concerns are often entirely formal: line, color, mass and weight. Memorial art, on the other hand, is therapeutic, redemptive and educational. These are different things.

Modern artists also love ambiguity and irony. Monument builders don't. "The notion of a modern monument," Lewis Mumford famously wrote 60 years ago, "is a contradiction in terms. If it is a monument, it is not modern, and if it is modern, it cannot be a monument."

You will notice the speed with which the Oklahoma City memorial to the people who died in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995 was undertaken. It wasn't until 1922 that the United States got around to building a memorial to Lincoln, and even then it was controversial. But in our day, the impulse to memorialize tragedy is instantaneous. It is as if the memorial were a quick fix for whatever bad happens and a way to move on. The moving on is crucial. So is the coming together in a sometimes uneasily diverse society, through a presumptive communal or national bereavement, which the monument embodies.

But I said impulse. The impulse to memorialize is immediate; arriving at a design in Oklahoma was grueling because the wounds were still fresh and everyone who had anything to do with the event wanted to contribute to the design. The process was fascinating. First came the calls to destroy the Murrah building to obliterate evidence of the tragedy and help erase its memory, and also avoid the site's becoming a pilgrimage spot for lunatic sympathizers with Timothy McVeigh. John Wayne Gacy's home in Chicago and Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment building in Milwaukee had been destroyed for these reasons.

But then the question came up: is obliterating forgetting? In a very different context, that's what the Nazis wanted to do to the Jews. Obliterate and forget. It's the dilemma that faces the keepers of every Nazi death camp: is Auschwitz today a cautionary tale or a tourist attraction or both? The French writer Jean Baudrillard, in a remark also germane to New York now, talked about how "forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself," but eradicating what the evildoers did may also be a way of exterminating them. The desire among survivors to eradicate McVeigh — to execute him — was about trying to forget him.

That was one discussion, anyway, but it was overwhelmed by plans to build something where the Murrah building was. The first memorials, spontaneous, were like the makeshift shrines that have sprung up in New York: flowers, letters, quilts, toys, clothes. People claimed to have sudden visions for memorials entailing doves, angels and bells. Ideas for parks were popular, too.

The public clearly expected a memorial to be everything: a place to mourn; a place that warned against terrorism; a symbol that the terrorists hadn't won; a history museum; a spot to which local people could come to hear music and tourists could meditate on American values (and spend money).

The final design called for a grid of bronze and glass chairs in a field, the chairs representing the 168 people who died. When it was done, many survivors said the process, although sometimes bitter, was constructive — it brought them together to create something that might enlighten people, someplace they could go, something good that came from bad, a show of fortitude by survivors.

From an art perspective we could note two things: that the headstonelike sculptural array of chairs is Minimalist in concept, or Minimalist-derived. And that it commemorates ordinary people, something so obvious and commonplace that it is taken for granted, but not something that memorials always did.

You can trace the roots of the common- man memorial at least to Rodin in the 19th century. He was commissioned in late 1884 to design a monument to the burghers of Calais. In 1347, six burghers offered their lives to the English in return for ending a siege of the city. Rodin made the figures life- size, grouped one next to another, looking gaunt, not heroic. The expressions suggested doubt or fear.

This was a very different monument from other memorials up to then. The six figures were of equal importance. Critics noticed that Rodin represented not the moment they decided to sacrifice themselves, when they were their noblest, but them in bondage. "The effect is most graceless," one writer said at the time. Rodin envisioned them either high on a pedestal, silhouetted against the Houses of Parliament, or on the ground, "closer to the people," he said. His point was to level the human condition: he brought the masses into proximity with his heroes by eliminating highfalutin allegory and stressing the real. The burghers were plain folk who became heroes.

Leap several decades to Constantin Brancusi and another kind of modern monument, the one Brancusi finished in 1938 at Tirgu- Jiu in Romania, a memorial to the soldiers who perished defending that town against the Germans during World War I.

It is a complex of sculptures with the famous "Endless Column" at one end, an enormous modular pole in the middle of a field. Brancusi described it as a votive or funerary monument. Leading up to the column along an axis are what he called the "Table of Silence," a circular table with hourglass-shape stools, then the "Gate of the Kiss," a stone portal that may have been partly inspired by Rodin's "Gates of Hell" and also by local folk carvings.

This was a purely abstract memorial linked not by some narrative, like Rodin's "Burghers," but by formal properties, a thoroughly modern monument, encapsulating the radical idea that a modern memorial could be, first of all, modern and not necessarily explicit.

But a crisis was brewing. After World War II, artists increasingly distrusted monuments, which the Nazis and Soviets had used so conspicuously to promote totalitarian ideas. By the 1960's and 70's, Claes Oldenburg was making giant sculptures of clothespins and lipsticks, Pop Art monuments. They implied that what people shared now was no longer a set of common ideals or heroes — the stuff of traditional monuments and memorials — but a bunch of everyday household objects and consumer desires. Mr. Oldenburg's frequently quoted remark was: "I am for art that does something other than sit in a museum, that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends, accumulates and spits and drips and is as heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself."

His most notorious public monument, a kind of antimemorial, was "Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks," at Yale. A giant phallic lipstick that looked like a warhead, it had been inspired partly by something the philosopher Herbert Marcuse said: that a really subversive modern monument would help bring society as it existed to an end. People, Marcuse said, would thereafter "refuse to take anything seriously, neither their president, nor the cabinet, nor the corporate executives."

Several years later this concept of the antimonument became the basis for an extraordinary antifascist memorial in Germany. During the mid-80's, the artists Jochen and Esther Gerz came up with a scheme for a pedestrian shopping mall in Harburg, a dingy suburb of Hamburg, with a population mostly of Turkish migrant workers and blue-collar Germans.

The monument they designed consisted of a column, 40 feet high, 3 feet square. It was a hollow aluminum pillar with a layer of soft lead and a steel stylus attached to it so people could write into the pillar. Whenever a section of the pillar got sufficiently covered with graffiti, it would be lowered into the ground. This was a disappearing monument. Unveiled in 1986, it vanished in 1993.

Harburgers scrawled all sorts of things onto it, as they were supposed to, including Stars of David and swastikas. A local newspaper called it a "fingerprint" of the city: "The filth brings us closer to the truth than would any list of well-meaning signatures."

The visual analogies between Brancusi's column and the Gerzes' pillar were obvious. But there was another visual connection: between the pillar reflecting German public sentiment and Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial, which reflected the faces of visitors who came to see it. Ms. Lin talked about her reflective black granite walls as mirrors: "The point," she said, "is to see yourself reflected in the names."

What was happening was a gradual, unexpected transformation of high modernism's abstract language into something like its rhetorical opposite: something sentimental, narrative, populist. In art terms: the adaptation of postwar Minimalism and its solipsistic legacy of formal and material concerns to a successful form of public memorial art.

IF you want to know how the public used to perceive Minimalism, to the extent it knew about Minimalism at all, remember how Mr. Serra's "Tilted Arc" in New York was loathed by some of the people who worked near it. A huge curved sheet of Corten steel, the sculpture traversed the plaza in front of a downtown federal office building. Mr. Serra's defenders did not help the cause by saying that the work addressed the condition of alienation in modern society. Disgruntled office workers just plain hated it, not only because it was so big but also because it seemed to them industrial and blank. It was removed in 1989 after a bitter court battle.

"Tilted Arc," among other things, led Mr. Serra to do the immensely popular sculptures he makes today. They are inextricably linked to that work formally, conceptually. The paradox has not been lost on him. The difference between these new works and "Tilted Arc" is partly context: "Tilted Arc" was not in a museum or a gallery but in a public plaza, thrust upon people (so they felt) and thwarting their (questionable) expectations that public art should be friendly. At the same time they recognized in their discomfort a latent aspect of Minimal or Post-Minimal art: its emotional intensity, which derives from its mass, its austere, abstract and elemental form. Minimalism is a deeply rational kind of modern art, and rationalism, like spiritualism, carried to an extreme level of control can become a form of terror.

But it can be turned to other purposes, too. And this is the brilliance of Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial, which comes straight out of Mr. Serra's sculptural vocabulary. It has helped change the popular perception of Minimal or Post-Minimal art, even if people don't think about it that way, being basically the same sort of design as Mr. Serra's so- called elevation sculptures: two 10-foot- high, 250-foot-long walls meeting at a 125- degree angle, one pointing to the Washington Monument, the other to the Lincoln Memorial.

The walls are inscribed with the names of the 59,939 soldiers who died or were missing in action, listed in chronological order. When it opened, a feminist writer described the monument as a wide V-shape surrounded by a grassy mound at the base of Washington's giant phallus. Detractors, less creatively, simply disliked the plan because of the black walls, which seemed to them grim and maybe racist. And there was also a realist art contingent, led by Ross Perot and former Interior Secretary James Watt, who managed to get a figurative sculpture installed nearby, the abstract-realist argument going back to Rapoport's Warsaw Ghetto memorial.

That said, Ms. Lin's monument quickly became almost universally admired. The reason is partly the names: people go to read, touch, leave flowers and photographs beside the names. But the genius of the design is the combination of names with Minimalist sculpture: Ms. Lin recognized and exploited the inherent theatricality and ambiguity of Minimalist abstraction, linking it with the most literal kind of descriptive device, a list, which represents every person who died not through some generalized image of a soldier holding a gun or a flag but specifically, by name. She grasped two things: the value of naming and the nostalgia inherent in what you might call the modern memorial sublime, the way Minimalist art and its Post-Minimal legacy, precisely because of its stripped-down, elemental forms, evokes a kind of long-lost grandeur. It is the closest modern art has come to an alternative to the heroic public sculptural ambition of Michelangelo or Bernini.

Memorials, being fixed in concrete and stone, have an inherent problem because memories aren't fixed. Perceptions change. Minimalist abstraction, with its allegorical pliancy, turns out to function in a memorial context as the best available mirror for a modern world aware of its own constantly changing sense of history. Good art outlasts the events that prompted the artists to make it. We need good memorials now for future generations to remember what we refuse to forget.  

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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