This month’s Imprimis has a very good article by Williams College professor Michael Lewis on the state of public monuments. It’s worth reading in its entirety. Lewis is right that monumental sculpture has been taken over by politically-oriented elites who are so cloistered that they speak only to each other and not to the public of art consumers. This leaves the former in a privileged position—notwithstanding their shabbily professed democratic ideals—and leaves the latter bewildered, bored, or misled when they visit such failed public monuments as the FDR Memorial or the World War II memorial.
But I was particularly intrigued by this observation:
The spontaneous roadside memorials that mark the site of fatal traffic accidents are a relatively new phenomenon. As physical objects they are ephemera, but as a mass cultural phenomenon they are quite extraordinary, and they testify to a deep human need for memorials. It is a new form of folk art, and it is extremely conventionalized in its expression. For one thing, its repertoire of forms and materials is very narrow: crosses, flowers, hand-painted signs, and heartbreakingly, in the case of a child, stuffed animals. There is very little else, and no striving for originality. Their creators look for widely understood symbols, and they yearn for resolution and closure; they certainly do not aspire to an open-ended process.
In a way, these anonymous roadside sculptors understand what many contemporary artists do not—that monuments, because they are public art forms, must be legible. And this requires a great degree of convention. Thus most traditional monuments are paraphrases of a few ancient types: the triumphal arch, the temple, the colossal column, and the obelisk. Since the 1930s, it has been fashionable to disparage this as architectural grave-robbing, and to argue that we should create our own forms. But these forms are timeless, not simply ancient. After all, the arch is nothing more than a space of passage, made monumental; an obelisk or column is the exclamation point raised above a sacred spot; and a temple is a tabernacle, the sacred tent raised over an altar. These ideas are permanent, and it is not surprising that the one successful work of contemporary public art, the Vietnam Memorial, took its form from one of the most ancient—the mural shrine, the wailing wall.
I do disagree with Lewis on two things. I like the Martin Luther King Memorial—King is best represented as stern, I think, and the sculpture needs to be seen not in isolation but as a unit with the Jefferson Memorial at which King gazes. True, the politically leftist elements are a little off-putting, but King was a leftist, and there’s nothing wrong with incorporating that into the sculpture in moderation, just as Jefferson’s memorial refers to his University of Virginia rotunda. And while the hewing-a-stone-of-hope thing is a little bit literalist, I think it works well, with the visitor leaving through the hole to head toward the Lincoln Memorial. Second, I think Lewis is too lenient regarding the disgraceful September 11th “memorial” in New York City. That memorial is not just a failure, but a slap in the face, done perhaps without conscious intent, but done nevertheless. The waterfalls into the footprints of the buildings makes the monument entirely about the falling—actually gives the viewer the impression of falling—and not of the rising. September 11th was not a disaster, but an act of war by an enemy who detests us for our most basic virtues. A monument that encourages us simply to meditate on the loss itself conveys an obsessive and self-destructive message.
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