The Rise of Misguided Memorials

...But this should be taken no more seriously than pretended awe of James Joyce's unread Ulysses or the unreadable prose poetry of John Ashbery ("I really like Ashbery, even though I can't understand him," one is frequently told...

...We would snicker if our public figures were portrayed in togas, but we would be wrong...

...the angular black sheet of metal was detested by the citizens using the plaza in its shadow...

...The problem with this reasoning is that a memorial is meant to commemorate the valor of the citizens who served their country, not the goals or methods of a given war...

...Criticizing her design on esthetic grounds is heresy in the United States...

...In the context of America's class-based culture war, the appeal of decentralized memorials embedded in landscape architecture is understandable...

...If the Washington Monument were built today, no doubt it would consist of a little park studded with 13 obelisks(one for eachof the original states), plus a statue of George in buckled shoes, exhibiting his false teeth at the insistence of the dentally impaired...

...Yet just as it is a violation of decorum to invite people to lay flowers or make rubbings at the Vietnam Memorial, as though it were a giant headstone, so it is a solecism to encourage visitors to relax and eat a picnic lunch in a memorial that takes the form of a charming green locus amoenus...

...It seems that the public does not interpret the wall as a war memorial at all...

...Unfortunately, the composite Vietnam Memorial is not an isolated monstrosity...

...American soldiers who fought in failed or stalemated efforts such as Korea and Vietnam, or for that matter Lebanon, deserve to be remembered in exactly the same manner as soldiers who fought in the "good" war, World War II (whose projected monument is appropriately classical and luminous...

...Striking inventiveness in a civic work is a vice...

...A public monument is not a tycoon's folly on a private estate...

...It is not enough for literal-minded populists that the memorial includes a fossilized Fala (the President's Scottish terrier...

...To insist that a memorial express "the spirit of its time" is to doom it to be amausoleum haunted by this or that bygone Zeitgeist...

...Quite apart from its political message, Lin's design, praised for its originality, is bad precisely because it is too original...

...My sympathies, then, lie with the disgruntled vets, most of whom came from the classes that fight America's wars, rather than with the art professors from the draft-dodging classes...

...Nevertheless, the veterans compounded the catastrophe by commissioning Frederick Hart's realistic statue group of three servicemen (white, black and Hispanic) and putting it near the wall...

...And here he is describing a public housing project for The Hague that resembles a nightmarish Expressionist set from The Cabinet of Dr...

...A monument will fail if it lacks any historic ornament—and if it has too much...

...The memory of those who suffer any atrocity can only be degraded by clumsy and manipulative attempts to use art to suggest the nature of their torments or the depravity of their persecutors...

...The combination of extreme austerity with allusive traditionalism makes both 19thcentury neoclassicism and early 20thcentury stripped classicism too inflexible for most kinds of building, but perfect styles for civic art...

...The ultimate act of dehumanization may be commemorated by these masters of dehumanization in art...

...When Lin's conception was chosen, Vietnam veterans objected that it was an insult...

...We think of realism in art as antiquated, yet it is just slightly older than modernism...

...Serra, it may be recalled, unsuccessfully sued the U.S...

...Designed and built in the 1980s, it stands as an anachronistic monument to '70s artistic minimalism, as well as to '70s antimilitary Leftism...

...Maya Lin's monument was dated before it went up...

...They are the Edgar Allan Poes of their respective fields...

...In the Western tradition, eternity is evoked by the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome, with a little help from Egypt (obelisks and pyramids...

...Better Stonehenge than the Monolith of 2001...

...To make an American war memorial that is black instead of white or light-colored like all of the other memorials, to sink it into the ground, and to refuse to include an American flag is to produce an effect similar to the one Jimi Hendrix produced with his dissonant electric-guitar version of the national anthem...

...Classicists were rightly repelled in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when soldiers and statesmen in ordinary clothing, who appeared to have been bronzed like baby shoes, began to show up on pedestals and arches...

...The battle of trendy styles in big-city downtowns and expensive suburbs should not be transposed to the Mall in Washington or other focal points of civic memory...

...Not exactly a surprise from the creators of the bed-separating slot and the plazahacking metal dagger...

...Veterans' magazines are full of ads for prints of paintings showing ghostly, forever-young GIs reaching from behind the surface of the wall to touch the outstretched hands of aged former comrades or bereaved relatives...

...Here is Eisenman justifying his weirdlooking entry in a Barcelona hotel competition: "Thus it is not possible to look at this building and ask what it means...

...Those understated turn-of-the-century memorials in the tradition of Antonio Canova, with their somber goddesses or angels in timeless drapery slumped against polygonal tumuluses, have aged better than most monuments that include statuary...

...In classical art sentimentality is avoided by stylization ("idealization...

...They belong to the S&M wing of modernism...

...Nor should the first thing that impresses you on seeing a monument be the quainrness or freakishness of what was once fashionable...

...Caligari: "Eisenman Architects have explored a new concept of the Urban Villa by generating a central public circulation space as a sequential progression of threedimensional dislocations of the same absent space...

...Nevertheless, the veterans were right to be insulted...

...Members of the avant-garde establishment sneer at monuments capable of providing models for the paper weights tourists carry away as souvenirs...

...But the paperweight test is valid...

...All public monuments, it can be argued, have the same theme— the triumph of collective memory over evil, whether that evil be genocide or the unnatural deaths of soldiers or nurses or civilians in a war...

...The scattering of design elements—a statue here, a slab there—disperses attention and thus makes impossible the effect induced by an imposing monument whose elements are disposed according to a hierarchy of significance...

...Eisenman's most notorious architectural project demonstrates a damn-the-patron attitude similar to Serra's damn-the-public approach...

...Since realism is so valuable, they might go all the way and include an animatronic George courtesy of Disney World...

...The flaw in the imitative fallacy—the belief that depressing events must be commemorated by depressing memorials—is illustrated not only by the Eisenman/Serra design but by Maya Ying Lin's Vietnam War Memorial in Washington...

...Even if the Vietnam War was uniquely misguided or uniquely immoral or uniquely unpopular (and it was none of those things), that should have made no difference to the memorial's design...

...Furthermore, if a war memorial is simply a string of names on a group tombstone, by implication war is merely a series of deaths, one after another, of no significance beyond themselves...

...some have complained about the absence of FDR's wheelchair...

...The fresh horror from Germany is that Chancellor Helmut Kohl favors a Holocaust Memorial for Berlin designed by the American sculptor Richard Serra and the American architect Peter Eisenman...

...Here the ensemble brings to mind troops on a training hike carelessly desecrating a cemetery by trampling its headstones...

...If a historical event is worthy of commemoration, it is worthy of intelligent commemoration...

...The contempt for humanity exhibited by Eisenman and Serra in their previous work is manifest in their design for the Berlin Holocaust memorial—a monotonous field of looming, closely-packed slabs resembling tombstones...

...Civic memorials should employ the resources of art to strengthen citizens for contests with evil in the future, not invoke the evils of the past to demoralize the present...

...Lots of little modernist slabs, scattered through a pleasant garden are easier for the public to take than one big blank modernist slab...

...We should be grateful that wax-museum figures were not installed...

...Searching fora singlename, even making a rubbing, may be a legitimate activity in Arlington National Cemetery...

...People included in public monuments should be allegorical, not petrified...

...The wall itself has been coopted by the public in a way that the artist may be tempted to claim credit for, but cannot have intended...

...It is a commissioned house in which, thanks to the mathematical "dislocation" of axes, a slot splits both the master bedroom and its bed, rather in the way that Serra's arc sliced the plaza like a carving knife...

...The fact that great numbers of visitors deposit gifts at the memorial is often hailed as proof of Lin's genius, but it is really proof that what she has done is poorly suited to its purpose...

...It is bad enough to be broke and living in public housing without having to find your way through a dislocated hall to a deconstructed bathroom...

...For two decades the media and the universities have whipped up admiration for it among educated Americans...

...Like the human-insect hybrid of The Fly, it has spawned others of its kind in Washington and elsewhere...

...There is a traditional public language of memorial architecture, and rejecting it suggests a rejection of the values it expresses...

...In this sense it means nothing...

...The chief danger is that people will subconsciously begin to associate not the Nazis but the millions they put to death with dreadful and oppressive imagery...

...The judges who selected Lin's work, whatever they said in public, undoubtedly believed that because Vietnam was a "bad" war (unnecessary, or unpopular, or immoral) it would be inappropriate to use the symbolism that has traditionally glorified fallen national heroes—like the flag, which Lin's advocates claimed could only ruin her art...

...Pity the Dutch poor...

...Looking at portraits in the White House, the first thing you tend to notice about Presidents is their old-fashioned outfits...

...It is chilling that the German government should contemplate selecting, as designers of a Holocaust memorial, two men whose shared esthetic unites technocracy with torture...

...Although no memorial can be genuinely timeless, a good one gives the impression that it is...

...But because of this meaning nothing, another level of potential significance—previously repressed by conventional meaning—is now liberated...

...Members of the American elite like to prove their overclass loyalties by sneering at populists like Ross Perot, who took the side of the veterans against the art professors awarding the commission...

...A monument to the victims of the Holocaust should not be a monument to the Holocaust...

...While the sentiment is beyond criticism, the depictions bring to mind the window-like puddles in the movie version of Mary Poppins and the illustrations for Through the Looking Glass...

...The effect of timelessness has usually been created by two means: simplification (ornament tends to be the most rapidly dated element of architecture), and allusion to established styles and buildings, the older the better...

...In the populist esthetic, art should be "true to life...

...Every memorable public monument is a simple and solid (or, in the case of the Eiffel Tower, semi-solid) structure that can be identified in an instant by its outline...

...The new Korean War Memorial recycles the slab-andstatue formula...

...Insofar as the subsidiary theme of every memorial is continuity, one that recalls a known tradition, however subtly, is more appropriate than what appears to be a relic of some unknown civilization or a futuristic extraterrestrial artifact...

...It appears that visitors would have to squeeze their way between the slabs, at risk, perhaps, of "dislocating" more than their "space...

...The average building lasts 60 years or so, and monuments usually last longer...

...To commemorate the victims of Hitler's gruesome tyranny with a gruesome memorial would be to award Hitler a second, posthumous victory over them by changing the subject to him...

...These designs are clever compromises between the taste of the public, which has always rejected 20th-century modernism, and the ideology of the university-credentialed oligarchy, whose members against their better instincts feel compelled to defer to a now-moribund academic avant-garde...

...Indeed, if you add a colorful Alexander Calder stabile to the Korean War Memorial or the FDR Memorial, you have a first-class playground...

...His loss was the public's gain...

...But the problem with the Vietnam Memorial is not limited to the jarring juxtaposition of realistic statues with the minimalist wall...

...In the case of memorials, objects are preferable to spaces...

...The Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial likewise mixes slabs for the highbrows with realistic sculpture for hoi polloi...

...government when, bowing to popular demand, it removed his sculpture Tilted Arc from the plaza in front of a Federal building...

...Where a fountain or a reflecting pool is part of the memorial design, we have, literally, modernism-andwater...

...Decentralized designs are more appropriate for parks, however, than for solemn public memorials...

...Instead, visitors perceive a giant tombstone, at which it is appropriate to leave flowers and mementos...

...Its purpose should be to honor the lives of the people who perished, not the way they died...

...Once such a poignant ritual is the primary response to a war memorial, the Army dissolves into the soldier, the nation into the individual, the public into the personal...

...Far from inspiring a revitalized sense of community, or the idea that sacrifice in the service of the country is worthwhile, visiting it becomes a pointless and macabre activity—akin to visiting a funeral home even though nobody you know has died...

...Eisenman is famous less for his buildings than for his success in promoting the faddish and now-dated rhetoric of deconstructionism among universitybased "'paper architects" like himself...

...There are real dangers associated with attempts to use horrifying monuments to evoke the Holocaust...

...To pretend not to notice is dishonest...

...They must therefore be tolerable through many cycles of change hi taste...

...If they all wore togas, or for that matter standard-issue wigs, the viewer would focus on their faces...

...this ensures that symbolic figures cannot be mistaken for any human being who ever lived...