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Out of Minimalism, Monuments to Memory

January 13, 2002

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN




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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/arts/design/13KIMM.html?ex=1011903360&ei=1&en=ff621404377f3c22



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