I hate minimalist, Vietnam-like Memorials

[mot78]

Since we're having a nice architecture debate tonight, I though I'd add another thread. A problem with contemporary memorials is that they are too minimalist and bland. And, unfortunately, having to "personalize" the memorials by turning them into quasi-cemetaries has become required. Now I like the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial itself, but I HATE what it did for architecture. Every memorial has been Maya Lin-lite. A policemen's memorial near the WTC looks like the Vietnam Memorial, and so does the tribute to TWA Flight 800 victims. Another problem I've seen was the debate over the memorial at Ground Zero. What I thought was really stupid was the idea of outlining the "footprints" of the towers, simply because people died exactly on the buildings. The family activist groups kept demanding more and more features to the memorial, including requiring listing all of the victim's names, and adding a section for Pentagon and Flight 93 victims (which ruins the memorials for those events) and requiring people to have to see the "slurry wall" of the site. As a result, we're getting a pretty mediocre memorial right now, although it could have been worse.

[Dont Hurt Me]

1. I like

all of our memorials. It's not so much the architecture as the symbolic gesture of setting aside a place of prominence where people can grieve and reflect.

But I agree that the debate today over the WWII memorial was ridiculous

[sleepystudent]

2. I like the Maya Lin memorial...

but yeah, people have gotten lazy ( so has she) and reverted to simple black granite with names as a default for every memorial since. And to be honest, I am starting to think there are too many memorials in Washington D.C. on the Mall-it's becoming a remembrance theme park and it's crowding out the other uses that park could and should have. It's also compromising the integrity of the original plan for the city and the intended views. I almost think there should be a moratorium on monuments in that part of town and they need to be more creative with them.

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

5. "the orginal plan for the city"...and too many memorials.

You should read Elebert Peets' collection of essays on Washington DC planning. He contends that what we have now is pretty remote from L'Efants orginal concept.

Anyway, interesting comment on two many memorials.

this was a problem, too, at the Air Force Museum, where alot of units wanted to put up a display or memorial. So, what the museum did was creat this "memorial park", which is this landscaped garden area next to the museum where veterans and unit associations can put up little monmuments.

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

3. The Maya Lin memorial is closer to some small town memorials

...both in the USA and Germany, where the intent is more funerary....there is usually some big black slab of granite where the fallen from that town or villiage have their names inscribed....sort of like a big tombstone.

So, with the Maya Lin memorial we have a very big, modernist tombstone.

[Texican]

4. Antiwar

The Nam memorial was originally an antiwar protest. Vets managed to change it in the planning stage. It was supposed to be ugly and depressing.

[Toots]

8. "It was supposed to be ugly and depressing."

Not like war of course.

[TahitiNut]

6. Deceptive "minimalism"

When people regard the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as "minimalist" they're deluding themselves. The Wall incorporates the landscape of the Mall itself. The Wall reflects the observer and thereby includes the observer as part of the memorial. The Wall is, imho, the most effective "roll call" of the dead ever constructed in human history ... at least it was until cluttered with obscene statuary and other misanthropic political effluvia.

People who equate the "traveling Wall" with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial completely miss the symbolism and meaning of the People's Mall Escarpment that is bandaged by the names of those sacrificed on the altar of "Let George Do It."

It is a memorial that does not aggrandize war or pretend to demean and diminish the observer with the pretentious Power of the State. It is a memorial that cannot be merely observed without including the observer as a dynamic part of the memorial itself - and is effectively "buried" within the ground behind the Wall.

It's amazing how so many just plain don't get it.

[markses]

10. I agree; Lin's memorial is an outstanding statement on MEMORY and POLITICS

Two of the most interesting features of the VVM are its reflection of the viewer and its attention to place. It does, of course, also partake in the discussions of representation in memorial theory that have been around for 40 years or so, especially with respect to Holocaust Memorials (the point being, it seems, that one cannot represent the magnitude of the loss, so statues resembling people are not only inadequate for the memorial, they also serve to reduce full effect of the memory (see the debates, for example, around Nathan Rapaport's memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: how do you have a non-fascist statuary? how do you convey to the viewer a sense of absence when representative memorials operate by the presence of the statuary, etc?).

1) Reflection of the viewer - You are absolutely correct that the VVM includes the spectator in the memorial. This is not merely a sight effect, or a clever twist on the nature of memory and reflection. It is, rather, a profound political point: as a democracy (republic) we are never "outside" the decisions of the State; we are included in all State decisions, including the most horrible, the decision to go to war. One cannot stand outside a memory or view it from above in a detached and objective manner. Their is no transcendent power, any more than there is a transcendent memory. All power and all memory is immanent. The problem of the statuary is that a) you get to feel like you are outside the representation, detached from the action being depicted, and b) you get to feel like the action is OVER - a thing of the past. Statuary and representation are not an aid to memory, but a blockage of involved memory. Lin's VVM does a fantastic job of freeing up this blockage, making the memory something that has to be actualized, and including the viewer in both the political culpability for war, and in the act of making meaning of memory itself. Your meaning isn't packaged for you (here's what happened!); it must be created, and created, and created.

2) Place - There are, of course, no end of treatments about the symbolic geography of the VVM - the way it points to the various mall features, the way you discover it in surprise, the way it is invisible from the White House. And, of course, its "submerged" nature speaks of scars and mourning. True. But another interesting feature of its place is its thorough involvement of all the organs of government, and its grounding of the viewer in a location where memory must be produced. The viewer's body is at stake in the VVM in a way that the body simply isn't at stake in the, say, Lincoln Memorial (the only real effects their being verisimilitude and the sublimity of the giant Lincoln). You have to walk the VVM; you get disoriented at the VVM; you track back and forth in time at the VVM; you are restricted to a specific distance by the chains at the VVM, not how close you can get to it, as other memorials, but how far away!

I disagree that the VVM is modernist funerary, although it clearly draws on that tradition. The Menin Gate in Ypres is modernist funerary, as are the small town "lists" accompanied, in most cases, with the statue of the heroes.

Now, have the architectural tropes of the VVM been overused? Perhaps. The Memory Park for the Victims of Political Violence in Buenes Aires considered similar themes, for instance. Rather than deplore this, we might see it as a new grammar of memory, a grammar of memory that was needed when the old way of remembering (the grand statue, for instance) had finally gone bankrupt.

[TahitiNut]

11. Very well said, sir. You again give me hope ....

... through your evident comprehension that the 'experience' of such appropriate memorialization is not lost upon all people. From how altogether too many DUers (but happily not the majority) responded in my rant against the grandiose memorialization of War, I've been depressed at the degree to which this is misapprehended.

It took me 15 years to muster up the courage to visit The Wall for the first time. Somewhat sadly, by that time the impact was somewhat polluted by the obscene statuary (idolatry) and the completely misguided design and intent of the Korean War Memorial. It's very much as though, by changing the reflective reflections in The Wall history can be revised yet again.

It really is about "walking the walk" and not merely "talking the talk."

[markses]

13. Welcome home

And I say that in the spirit of the closing words of Michael Herr's Dispatches, something like a memorial itself:

Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there. . .

[Lisa]

14. Lin's design was very site-sensitive ...

... in a way that most other monuments are not. (I wonder if her interest in environmental art played a role?) Even the monuments which were inspired by it tend not to live up to the original. I agree with some of the criticisms that designers who attempt to copy it are being lazy, because quite often a low profile and black granite reflective surface are just not appropriate for a particular location and purpose. I guess that inappropriate knockoffs are a price we have to pay for having great art in the first place, though. (And there have been bad neoclassical imitations too ... e.g. the Nazi designs that we've all been slamming.)

I still marvel at how a lot of people who dislike minimalism "get" the VVM and admire it intensely. (See TahitiNut's discussion on this ... the minimalist works which I like the most are actually quite complicated upon reflection, no pun intended -- I suspect I've got some company in this.)

But that was the amazing thing -- an improbable site, a just-as-improbable architect and group of organizers, and from it sprang a timeless statement about not just that war, but all wars. And what Markses says about the importance of place -- even with the same design, if it were at Arlington, say, the effect wouldn't be the same. But the same site constraints that shaped the essence of the design wouldn't have existed at another place, anyway. It's all interwoven.

Once I thought the VVM was modernist, but comparing it with other 20th century works I am now thinking it may be late-modernist or even post-modernist in terms of how different it is from, say, the Canadian WWI memorial at Vimy Ridge (white, ascending, idealistic).


p.s. Ever since I learned that marble once used to be limestone (and therefore made up of millions of tiny skeletons of once-living creatures) I've had mixed feelings about marble monuments. Especially ones dedicated to military victories.

[mopaul]

7. ready to kill, by carl sandburg

READY TO KILL
TEN minutes now I have been looking at this.
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver
on him.
I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be
hauled away to the scrap yard.
I put it straight to you,
After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory
hand, the fireman and the teamster,
Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,
Shaping them on the job of getting all of us
Something to eat and something to wear,
When they stack a few silhouettes
Against the sky
Here in the park,
And show the real huskies that are doing the work of
the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,
Then maybe I will stand here
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag
in the air,
And riding like hell on horseback
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men
all over the sweet new grass of the prairie.

[LWolf]

9. I have no opinion on the form.

Just the point of having a memorial. To remember an event and the people involved.

On edit: maybe I do have an opinion after all. I'm thinking that a "minimalist" style allows me to more easily contemplate the actual people I'm remembering. And it removes some of the opportunity for bias. I don't want a memorial that offers propaganda, or an official spin on the event. It just needs to offer the chance to remember. No spin.

[bigtree]

12. Ready to Kill

Can't we accept that we will see whatever we want to in these memorials, as we are not dupes or morons? They are art, subject to our own interpretations. That will never change.