I went to see the Oklahoma City Bombing memorial last night, which was every bit as terrible as the pictures make it out to be. In my opinion, this memorial is the worst public monument in the United States--or was, until the New York City Sept. 11 Memorial was completed. It is a soulless, blank space of anonymity, not a place of reflection, or sorrow, or faith in ultimate victory. It has taken the language of minimalism--introduced in Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial and successful in only that instance--and ruthlessly scrubbed the awful episode of any human meaning, replacing it with...empty chair-things, one for each of the killed. These identical chairs reduce the victims literally to faceless statistics. Although each is inscribed with a name (of course), the names are unreadable. The result is to portray the victims not as individuals, but as automatons; machines; things only to be counted, not considered. Which happens to be what Timothy McVeigh thought of them.
The Vietnam Wall is a great work of art. It is a supremely effective monument. It expresses the senseless horror of that conflict as a black gash in the hillside--and the human cost of that war in the individual names, each one readable, and the highly polished, reflective surface in which viewers see their own faces. The Oklahoma City Memorial does the reverse. There is nothing here to make one think of people...except for the preserved graffiti left by one of the cleanup crews, which is the only meaningful part of the display, and the only part visitors stopped to look at.
Even as minimalism itself, this monument fails. It lacks the unity and simplicity of the Vietnam Wall. It is not a single entity; it jumbles together arches, names, lights, a sort of balcony thing... There is no real center to it. And that fits, because the viewer experiences only an unfocused sense of awkwardness.
Still, it's better than the New York Sept. 11 Memorial--which is almost literally a permanently bleeding wound in the ground; a memorial that goes no further than to weep, eternally, and to draw attention not to the heroism of the rescuers, not to the determination to overcome evil, not to the innocence of the victims, but only to the attack itself. It is a monument that (rather effectively) commemorates exactly the opposite of what it ought to commemorate. It is the closest any artist could hope to come to sculpting falling, when it ought to be a sculpture of rising. It is, in fact, a permanent Sense of Defeat, planted on the spot where Gratitude for Rescue, or Resolve to Triumph, or at the very least, Anger at Injustice, ought to be. Clay Risen said it very well ten years ago: "Beyond abstract references to absence and loss--such as the abyss-centered reflecting pools of 'Reflecting Absence,' according to polls the most popular scheme-there is no attempt to grapple with the meaning of Sept. 11, to mark the attack as an historical event."
That sense of absence and loss was appropriate to the Vietnam Wall. It is not appropriate in Oklahoma or New York. These were not grinding, technocratic wars that sent drafted men to their ultimately pointless doom. These were cruel and shabby crimes against the innocent, by petty thugs who wanted to draw attention to their own empty selves--who wanted only to announce a gospel of vacuity that the world's creators had already long ago outgrown. To create monuments that do nothing more than dwell upon grief, to make permanent a sense of suffering, seems to me in some sense to give the perpetrators what they wanted-- to accept guilt, or at the very least, to shrug at the defiance that is the proper reaction to such crimes. These monuments ought to speak to the survivors--but instead, the only thing they tell survivors is hopelessness. They ought to remember the victims, but all they do is identify them. These monuments ought to be about life--but in their unfocused sense of bleakness and their diffused, constant grieving, they are only about death. In fact, they seem to be death. Just as early modernists tried to capture the sense of rapid motion in their work--so post-Lin monumental architecture has, at best, managed to make permanent the moment of dying. That is what they express.
I suspect this is only partly the fault of artists who, as Risen says, lack vision. I suspect it is also due to the lack of shared values, or the perception thereof, among our intellectual elite. This lack of commitment to the values of our society--to liberty, to justice, to progress, to reason and science--is
mostly, but not totally, expressed in cultural relativism. It makes it impossible for the elite, and those who, like artists, are beholden to the elite, to say anything definite about something like Sept. 11, beyond vague cliches of loss and sorrow. A century ago, that wasn't the case. You may think Sargent's World War I paintings jingoistic--but at least they said something, and did it memorably and powerfully. Augustus St. Gaudens and Daniel Chester French could memorialize great men for specific virtues--or could even memorialize abstract values in specific and meaningful ways. They were great artists who said something they could be confident audiences would understand and appreciate. Today's artists don't have that confidence. And so they try to please everyone and no one, and say everything and nothing. They succeed only in this last.
I think they should have more confidence. As Prof. Michael Lewis said recently, the public hunger for meaningful monuments is obvious--it is expressed constantly in the roadside memorials and spontaneous flower-leaving that has become so popular over the past decades. If artists could only penetrate the commissions, committees, bureaus, clubs, and cliques responsible for these commissions, I believe we could see a renaissance of public monumental art in America. Until then, our best memorial art is likely to be found in churches, or in private art not noticed by critics.
Comments policy