Monuments and Site-Specific Sculpture in Urban and Rural Space [1 ed.] 9781443892711, 9781443851794

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Monuments and Site-Specific Sculpture in Urban and Rural Space

Monuments and Site-Specific Sculpture in Urban and Rural Space Edited by

Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler

Monuments and Site-Specific Sculpture in Urban and Rural Space Edited by Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5179-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5179-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler Section I: Site-Specific Artworks: Monuments and Counter-Monuments Processing Memory: The Spectator as Archaeologist ............................... 12 Moran Pearl A Ubiquitous Memorial ............................................................................. 41 Adachiara Zevi Thomas Hirschhorn’s Monuments and the Politics of Public Space ......... 68 Vincent Marquis Section II: Reflections on the Modernist Monument The Monument in the Expanded Field of Minimalism – The Case of Dani Karavan's Monument to the Negev Brigade ................ 104 Katya Evan Formal autonomy versus public participation: The Modernist Monument in Costantino Nivola’s Work ........................ 134 Giuliana Altea and Antonella Camarda Section III: Site-Specific Artworks: Between Physical and Virtual Space Reassessing Spatial Theory of Permanent Site-Specific Artworks of the American Southwest, in the Information Age ............................... 164 Mira Banay

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Overfed and Undernourished: Cultural Cartographies of Memory ......... 193 Shelley Hornstein Epilogue................................................................................................... 215 Where Memories Meet: The Monument as a Site of Private and Collective Memory Dalia Manor

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume and the symposium that inspired it were made possible by a grant from the president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Prof. Rivka Karmi. The book itself was also generously supported by a further grant from Sapir Academic College. I would like to thank Dalia Manor, Adi Engleman, Tamar Dekel, and Noa Karavan, who conceived the idea of celebrating 50 years of the Negev Monument and honoring its creator, Dani Karavan, with a symposium, an exhibition, and public tours, which made this a citywide, rather than simply an academic, event. Deep gratitude is extended to Dani Karvan, whose creations worldwide inspired this project, and whose intellectual and artistic revisitation of the Negev Monument during the Jubilee events provided all of us with food for thought about monuments and site-specific sculpture in urban and rural space. I am also grateful for the advice and assistance of the authors themselves – Giuliana Altea, Antonella Camarda, Mira Banay, Katya Evan, Shelley Hornstein, Dalia Manor, Vincent Marquis, Moran Pearl, and Adachiara Zevi. Over and above their presentations, their ideas and their cooperation were of major import in bringing this volume to fruition. I would also like to thank Danny Unger, head of the Department of the Arts at Ben-Gurion University, for bringing me on board for this project, and for his constant support and advice. Thanks also to my colleague and friend Merav Yerushalmy for her work on the symposium. I am grateful for the patient administrative assistance I have received from Ben-Gurion University and Sapir Academic College, particularly from Ainav Omer, Carmelit Manor, Or Barzani, Nelly Pakhladjan, Rosalin Mamman, and Michal Dvir. At Cambridge Scholars Publishing I would like to thank Victoria Carruthers and Sam Baker for their excellent work and help. Evelyn Grossberg, our language editor, has done a wonderful job in bringing the essays to their final form, and I wish to thank her for her comments and meticulous attention to every aspect of the written work. My family, as always, is a part of this project, and I thank them for their patience and their love. Finally, I am most indebted and wish to express my gratitude to Shira Gottlieb, who was my research assistant for this project. This book would

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not have been possible without her thorough reading, insightful comments, and the wonderful and participatory working atmosphere that she creates. Be’er-Sheva, December 2016

INTRODUCTION INBAL BEN-ASHER GITLER

I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; But I already know this would be the same thing as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past…” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities1

A war memorial is perched on a hill on the outskirts of Be’er-Sheva, a city in the (relatively) vast desert region of Israel known as the Negev. Officially named the Monument to the Negev Brigade, it is usually referred to as the Negev Monument, while the locals call it simply the Monument (Ch. 4, Figures 1–4). The monument was created by the renowned Israeli sculptor, Dani Karavan, between 1962 and 1968.2 It commemorates the fallen soldiers of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, who lost their lives in battles in the Negev region. At the time of its completion, the Negev Monument was one of the first site-specific sculptures created in Israel, and has since become a landmark of Israeli art and of the city of Be’erSheva. Italo Calvino’s opening lines echo the crucial role that the past and its memorialization have in the construction of space itself. Site-specific sculpture and monuments can be seen as artistic interventions in their surroundings – interventions that inscribe, reveal, and shape memory and its perception. They reflect specific historical events, the cultural and ideological circumstances of their times, and the relation of those events or circumstances to the space in which they are erected. The Negev Monument is just such a memorial as it relates the battles that it

1 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974), 10. 2 The monument was planned between 1962 and 1964 and built in 1968. See Adi Englman (ed.), Dani Karavan: The Negev Monument (Tel Aviv: Marcel Arts Project, 2016), 113, 160.

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Introduction

commemorates to the space of the city and the desert in which they took place. In honor of the Jubilee of the Negev Monument and in honor of Dani Karavan, the Negev Museum of Art in Be'er Sheva initiated a series of programs and activities for the winter of 2014 that included an exhibition, a symposium, and public events at the monument itself. The museum mounted an exhibition entitled “50 Years to the Negev Monument/50 Years to Dani Karavan’s Public Art,” curated by Adi Englman, and the Department of the Arts in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in cooperation with the exhibition team, organized an international symposium entitled “Monuments, Site-Specific Sculpture, and Urban Space.” The present volume is a collection of essays presented at the symposium and additional papers that relate to its theme. Daniel Unger, the then head of Ben-Gurion’s Department of the Arts, brought me on board for this symposium and constantly reminded me that site-specificity is not a twentieth-century invention. As an art historian of the early modern period, he pointed out that Baroque-era sculptors and architects thought no less about potential sites for their works than their more recent counterparts. This was also true, of course, for many ancient projects and locales. So what has changed? The relationship between the artist and society, as well as the perception of his or her role and authority when planning and creating a monument, has undergone significant transformation, as have the formal language and the theoretical premises of our times with regard to historical narrative, memory, and art. The essays presented here discuss these aspects of twentieth and twenty-first century monuments and site-specific sculpture. The subjects of the various chapters range from war memorials in Europe and Israel to commemorations of individuals and other large-scale projects. Within this rich assemblage we also find discussions of theories of art as a producer of collective or individual memory, historical narrative, and cultural meaning. The scholars contributing to this volume open up new perspectives and propose novel frameworks for approaching and analyzing these artworks. They look at their relationship to urban, semiurban, and rural space, such as public parks or privately owned land, where art is not an intervention in purely natural arenas. They address formalistic aspects, as well as issues of memory and commemoration in light of changing environments and spatial transformations. Moreover, these essays develop in-depth consideration of the discourse between site-specific sculpture and its viewers. With a view toward the individuals, communities, and tourists that experience these creations, both physically and virtually, researchers in

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recent years have been addressing the complex interactions between monuments and their publics. Monuments are not only viewed, but are often discovered actively, creating an interaction wherein the viewer is also a visitor and, at times, even a user. Moreover, these new experiences are suggested by the immense impact that media processing in the Information Age, and more specifically in the Internet era, has had upon public perceptions of sculpture and monuments. All of these aspects are discussed in depth in the essays presented here. The interrelationships among site, public space, and architecture have come under much scrutiny in recent years.3 The modern, postmodern, and contemporary engagement with works that are planned or born out of a specific space and have been created and themed with relationship to that space has grown. In her seminal essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” Rosalind Krauss discusses these changes and attempts to formulate the new relationship among architecture, landscape, and sculpture in the works of artists who worked in the 1960s and 1970s.4 In ‘expanding’ the definition of sculpture, Krauss considers the ways in which what we traditionally refer to as sculpture has developed to include earthwork, constructions in predefined architectural spaces or in relation to such spaces, and more. These creations, Krauss claims, are made “in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms.”5 One such ‘operation’ that has developed as a consequence of new cultural circumstances is the public, academic, and intellectual discussion of monuments and counter-monuments. This development was engendered by memory studies and the postmodern methodological investigation into how public memory is formed and how history is told.6 This discourse is especially relevant to monuments of commemoration, including those that evoke loss, such as war memorials and memorials to victims of the Holocaust. James Young’s work on these subjects has been groundbreaking and has provided important perspectives on the relationship among

3

Miwon Kwon, “Approaching Architecture: the Cases of Richard Serra and Michael Asher,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, State of the Art: Contemporary Sculpture (2009): 44. 4 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44. 5 Ibid., 42. 6 Natasha Lehrer, “Working through the Memories” (Review of At Memory’s Edge by James Young), Jewish Quarterly 47/ (2000): 81–83.

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monuments, sites, and memory.7 In his discussion of Holocaust memorials, Young exposes the unsolved dilemmas that characterize the processes of memorializing through architecture, sculpture, and monuments. He addresses the ways in which new approaches to memory, specifically approaches that evolved in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, countered established notions of monuments as the preferred form of memorialization. He argues that these counter-monuments have the capacity to express loss and evoke memory by using voids and the sensation of emptiness in architecture, by abstraction, and by working below ground rather than above it. Such architecture and countermonuments evolved as a response to public debates about what monuments should look like, as well as from the modern incentive to better accommodate individual as opposed to collective memories. Young’s discussion and certain other studies conducted at the turn of the twenty-first century have contributed to our perspectives on, and understanding of, the role of counter-monuments, which more often than not are site-specific and indeed more strongly reflect the interplay between private and public memory.8 An additional aspect central to the discourse on monuments and sitespecific sculpture is that of everyday life, which can perhaps be extended or explained by the centrality placed upon the visitors’ experience by the artists themselves as well as by art historians. As Miwon Kwon has observed, architecture and site have become pivotal for an increasing number of artists as “a source of visual/formal vocabulary, models of production and an avenue for accessing a sociality of ‘everyday life’”9 In her research of commemorative site-specific sculptures/monuments created during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Kwon has shown that elements of architecture and site-specificity are perceived as aiding the process of the socialization of sculptures and memorials. The use of architecture, site, and landscape is seen as an appropriate and efficient means of mediating both the event or the individual memorialized and the work of art to its publics. 7

James Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). 8 Tim Cole, “Review Article: Scales of Memory, Layers of Memory: Recent Works on Memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 1 (2002): 129–138. 9 Krauss, “Sculpture in Expanded Field,” 42; Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 156.

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Architectural elements were used for the creation of modern and postmodern monuments in many of the works discussed in this volume. These elements enhance visitors’ sense of space or counter-space: pillars or a partial ceiling delineate the sky; walls create passages or voids; primitive or temporary dwelling spaces – such as tents or caves – mediate transience or relate to death. Industrial construction materials also constitute a central aspect of this architectural vocabulary: glass, steel, concrete, and lumber, appropriated from architecture, have either replaced or supplemented traditional sculptural materials such as marble, granite, and bronze. Elements relating to the urban realm, such as stepping-stones and street signs, have also been enlisted for monuments and memorials, as has nature in the form of water, trees, and earth. All of these have become key elements in monuments and site-specific sculptures since the midtwentieth century. When conceiving the Negev Monument, Karavan incorporated architectural elements, as well as concrete, water, trees, and the desert sand to create the memorial. The integration of these elements in the 1960s locates this monument at the forefront of these novel ideas in site-specific sculpture and memory making through art. An important issue that relates to memory making through site-specific sculpture, as well as architecture, is that of historical context. As Richard Crownshaw has observed, the predominance of memory in postmodern discussions of history, which deconstruct the “grand” historical narratives, runs the risk of decontextualizing sculpture and architecture from their historical moment.10 In continuing this critical stance, a memorial such as the Negev Monument can be perceived as constructing both collective and private memory, but it should not be discussed solely in these terms. It must also be interpreted in the context of its sculptural and architectural moment – a moment of an Israeli artist’s adoption of an evolving abstract vocabulary, a moment of embracing site-specificity, at a time when architecture and sculpture were connecting in new ways. The Negev Monument’s cultural framework should also be considered and explained by investigating Israeli cultural production of the time. In the context of the Negev Monument, the desert, perceived as a no-man's land and a wilderness to be settled territorially and culturally, became the backdrop for commemorating those who have set out to conquer it (militarily). The architecture of the town of Be’er-Sheva, which embodies the aspirations of nation building in the recently nascent state, prominently exhibited exposed concrete. The gray, bare, pliable material used for constructing 10

Richard Crownshaw, "The German Counter-monument: Conceptual Indeterminacies and the Retheorisaton of the Arts of Vicarious Memory,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 44, no. 2 (2008): 212–214.

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Introduction

Be’er-Sheva’s new neighborhoods, built during the 1960s and 1970s, was thus also used for the town’s memory making in the construction of the Negev Monument. The town – and Karavan’s – material of choice was very much present in all of Israel’s built environment at the time.11 Today, Israeli architecture, urban elements, and sculptures executed in exposed concrete are receiving their overdue historical analysis and assessment. Concrete’s cultural and structural connections to, for example, béton brut and New Brutalism are revealed. Moreover, in the spirit of current ideas regarding place-making and the fostering of local identity, Be’er-Sheva is recognized as a place where exposed concrete has had a significant impact on urban space. As a result, the material is now revisited both structurally and culturally, so as to solidify and suggest a distinct urban identity.12 While planning the jubilee symposium, the small committee formed for its organization discussed what it means to commemorate, and even in this small assembly the answers varied, probing issues such as: How does the current use and negotiation of a monument affect its meaning? How did different monuments’ relations to architecture and urban space propel modernism into new directions? Do monuments and site-specific sculpture construct or deconstruct their surrounding space? To what extent do monuments created decades ago, such as the Negev Monument, remain a part of a national narrative? Does this aspect wane over time? These questions can perhaps be sifted through by applying three paradigms for site-specificity, which were identified by Miwon Kwon: the physical, or phenomenological paradigm, which relates to the physical site itself and its relation to the work, the artist, and the viewer; the social/institutional paradigm, which relates to the cultural sphere in which the sculpture is conceived; and the discursive paradigm, wherein sitespecific sculptures are ‘expanded’ beyond their physical and cultural 11

In Karavan’s work, the adoption of concrete could be detected in a slightly earlier nation- and town-building project – the Tel-Aviv courthouse, built in 1965. There, Karavan used white exposed concrete in square slabs for wall reliefs and placed a three-element sculpture of pure geometric forms in the courtyard. The Tel-Aviv courthouse was built by architect Ya’acov Rechter (1924–2001), who was among the most prominent architects working in Israel from the 1960s. See: Dani Karavan, “The Art Within: The Tel Aviv Courts,” in Ya’acov Rechter: Architect, ed. Osnat Rechter, Exh. Cat., Herzeliya Museum of Art (Herzeliya: Herzeliya Museum of Art and Tel Aviv: Hakkibutz Hameuhad Publishers, 2003), 84–91. 12 Kwon discusses the creation of urban identity as part of the discursive process of negotiating site-specific sculpture. See Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (Spring 1997), 105–109.

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circumstances and are distributed through various media, becoming part of critical and historical discussion, investigation, etc. 13 These artistic, cultural, and theoretical aspects are explored and analyzed in the essays presented here. The first section of this volume is devoted to counter-monuments. Moran Pearl researches Holocaust monuments in Germany. She analyzes the differences in monument making between East and West Germany prior to their reunification and discusses the emergence of the countermonument, posing new questions pertaining to the works she studies. She traces what she terms “site processing” to analyze the way in which counter-monuments induce a complex and multifaceted reaction on the part of visitors in an extended space and time, rather than at a single, isolated moment of remembrance. In “A Ubiquitous Memorial,” Adachiara Zevi discusses Gunther Demnig’s Stolperstein project, an ongoing counter-monument that consists of placing memorial stepping-stones all over Europe. She analyzes the unique phenomenon of ubiquitousness that underlies the project, adding an additional dimension to the concept of counter-monument. In this framework, she also provides a succinct account of the discursive aspects of site-specific monuments, as seen in the Italian discourse surrounding Demnig’s project, as well as other Holocaust memorials that have been the subject of public debate in Italy. Vincent Marquis’s essay takes us through a different memorial lane – that of Thomas Hirschhorn’s commemoration of philosophers. Marquis studies the role of traditional monuments in creating collective memory within the cultural contexts of nations and shows how Hirschhorn’s monuments to philosophers reject these on multiple levels. Although, as Marquis points out, Hirschhorn has not used the term counter-monument to describe his works, their temporality, location, and function, which constitute an ongoing invitation to social interaction and contemplation, create one of the clearest inversions of the idea of the monument and are among the most prolific forms of resistance to traditional memorials. The second section includes two essays that discuss monuments of the modern period and deal with some of the most important precedents for the monuments and counter-monuments of the past three decades. Katya Evan explores the art-historical roots of the connection between Minimalism and memorials, a connection that today seems almost inherent and taken for granted. Evan relates to Dani Karavan’s Negev Monument in light of the art-historical discourse on the sculptor’s site-specific works as 13

Ibid., 95.

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Introduction

well as new research on Minimalism as an art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She shows that Minimalism’s heightened engagement with the viewer/visitor experience is a central aspect of the Negev Monument and is a key component of its innovative approach, which launched novel directions in memorial design not only in Israel, but worldwide. This engagement, when interpreted culturally both as an exponent of the modernist art of its time and in the context of its national meaning as a memorial, exemplifies the breadth of content and interpretations that can be created by abstract memorials. Giuliana Altea and Antonella Camarda present one of the few essays written about Sardinian sculptor Costantino Nivola in the English language. They discuss the unrealized projects of this major Italian artist, who also worked in the United States for many years. The monuments he planned in the 1950s and early 1960s, such as the memorial to Antonio Gramsci and World War I and II memorials, anticipated the turn to the renewed emphasis on site-specificity, on integrating architectural elements in memorials, and on concern with the visitor’s experience. Although they remain only in the form of drawings and models, Nivola’s projects were publicized and known through his involvement in the international milieu of modern sculptors. Altea and Camarda show that the interaction between Nivola and his more famous colleagues was mutually influential. The similarities between Nivola’s work and Karavan’s Negev Monument are striking: Both artists were deeply involved in working with the physical site and embedding their sculptures within it; both made use of tunnels and enclosed voids; both possessed a vision of their monuments’ role in the daily life of the communities where they were placed. Such similarities in idea and form call for further reflection upon the broader issue of how modern artists interacted internationally and how they defined their role in society. The final section deals with the way site-specific sculpture functions within the cultural and institutional sphere and the changing approaches to producing memory in physical sites with the advent of cyberspace. In “Reassessing Site-Specific Artworks of the American Southwest in the Information Age,” Mira Banay studies Land art as a social product of American culture and its institutions, analyzing the transformations and developments in the discourse surrounding these works. She argues that the physical spaces of site-specific artworks, being ideological products in their own merit, remain of crucial importance in our time. Not only has their centrality not diminished, but specific cultural content can never be fully comprehended through communication media, and the proliferation of publicizing site-specific artworks through these channels makes this all

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the more clear. In her reassessment of the cultural and discursive “sites” that the famous Land art creations of the Southwest have become, Banay also unearths what these sites conceal – the displacement of Native Americans, economic and military interests, and more. Shelly Hornstein analyzes the new phenomenon of digitally or virtually enhanced memorials. She asks the very timely question of how new digital environments can enhance memory processes and the remembrance of events that site-specific memorials seeks to commemorate? She provides answers through her case study, Mapping Ararat, which is a mediatized and transmedial memorial dedicated to a place in New York State that was proposed as a site for a Jewish Homeland nearly two centuries ago. In analyzing virtual augmentation as an apparatus that can expand memory and create more layers of cultural heritage for the user/viewer/visitor, Hornstein presents the other side of Banay’s advocacy of the physical: she argues that digital interactions can function as a revelatory apparatus for constructing the cultural context and memory of architecture, sculpture, and their in-betweens and connects these recent developments to Krauss’s idea of an “expanded field.” Finally, Dalia Manor’s epilogue discusses how the Negev Monument has acquired significance in the individual memories of its visitors – a significance that is remarkably different from its commemorative function. Manor addresses these differences and shows how personal and private memories have been reflected in drawings, photography, and video art inspired by Karavan’s creation. The very diverse case studies presented here elicit further discussion on the differentiation and specification of sites and the events that they commemorate, as well as about what makes them geographic, cultural, and discursive products that embody the similarities engendered by the mutual flow of histories, events, ideas, and human invention. Whether intended as commemorative monuments or as a site-specific artworks, these creations should be considered as embodying both a presence – of ideas or of history – and an absence – of cultures and individuals that are gone. Whatever the case, these artworks, which indeed reside between art, architecture, sculpture, and human interaction with nature affect and construct our past, present, and future and lend themselves to both individual and personal contemplation, as well as collective interpretation. A friend recently sought my advice regarding a personalized way of conveying the historical import of the memory of the Holocaust to her son. He was joining a Masa, the Israeli youth voyage to Poland, made by thousands of Israeli high school students every year so as to preserve the

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Introduction

memory of the Holocaust and transmit it to future generations.14 Before entering Auschwitz, my friend explained, the young students get a gift from their parents as a token of their participation in the voyage from afar. Most parents, she continued, give their son or daughter a necklace with a Star of David. Her 16-year-old son had already heard of this and blatantly rejected the idea of jewelry. The gift that I suggested to my friend instead, and which she indeed gave her son, was derived directly from my engagement with the monuments, the counter-monuments, and site-specific art discussed in this volume with all their richness and multilayered meanings; thinking about Jewish burial traditions and Demnig’s Stolperstein, I said to her: “Give your son a stone from home, to place upon the earth or on one of the monuments, so as to leave a part of his everyday physical space in that distant site of memory and absence.”

14

There is extensive discussion pertaining to the youth trips to Poland, and they have been subject to much critical debate. See, for example, Jackie Feldman, Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008).

SECTION I: SITE-SPECIFIC ARTWORKS: MONUMENTS AND COUNTER-MONUMENTS

PROCESSING MEMORY: THE SPECTATOR AS ARCHAEOLOGIST1 MORAN PEARL

Introduction The Nazi book burning of 1933, in which some 20,000 books were consigned to the flames, was a watershed in German history. Yet, standing on Bebelplatz, the site of this traumatic event, one could easily be unaware of what had once transpired there. Only a small window on the pavement opens a symbolic door to this past when the persistent passerby catches a glimpse of the Empty Library. This installation exemplifies one phenomenon that I deal with in this chapter: sites that encourage individual spectators to actively process the memory of a given place and situate them in the position of an archaeologist. In the past three decades, our perception of monuments has been utterly transformed. Once, symbolic monumental figures, unconnected to their locational context and looming large above the viewer, were found throughout city spaces. Today we find more and more “silent monuments,” monuments on a smaller scale, which are hidden from the casual eye. Earlier generations of monuments were meant to be visited on specific days of the national calendar, in a ceremony or on a memorial day by some sort of group. These new monuments, by contrast, are designed to engage individuals and to create a dialogue with their unique spaces. Thus, the spectator is given an opportunity to process the particular memory hidden in the site’s past. This approach, which continues to gain ground, began in Germany at the end of 1980s, toward the beginning of the 1990s. In this chapter, I look at the roots of this phenomenal change and try to understand why, of all places, Germany served as the ground for such a development. The present essay analyzes several case studies through which I trace the character of those new monuments. I suggest a multivalent relationship among the monuments, the public, and politics, 1

In memory of my beloved mother-Batya and grandfather-Yoav, who left a void in their absence.

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and I demonstrate that monuments can sometimes shift the discourse on collective memory. Within this context, this study will contribute to our understanding of the diverse ways in which monuments engage spectators and become sites for processing memory. I deal here with several monuments that commemorate World War II and the Holocaust: the Empty Library, the 1995 Berlin memorial by Micha Ullman; Horst Hoheisel’s 1987 Kassel monument titled Aschrott-Brunnen; the Stolpersteine project (Stumbling Stones), created by Günter Demnig in 1994; Christian Boltanski’s Missing House 1990, located on Grosshamburger Strasse in Berlin; Gleis 17 in Grünenwald Berlin; and The White Rose monument, created in 1998 by Robert Schmidt-Matt at the University of Munich. My exploration sheds light on “negative aesthetics,” a new way of commemorating the past that leverages the absence of monuments or monuments that require discovery, and I suggest a shift in the discourse on memory and monuments that points to creating sites of processing that address individuals instead of collectives.

Shifting Paradigm – East versus West Between Individuality and Collective Memory Today, as in other fields, the individual holds a prominent place in much memory scholarship. Nonetheless, collective memory remains a core object of inquiry. The notion of collective memory has been attracting scholarly attention for several decades, and there is a growing interest in visual commemoration in monuments and museums. However, the classic studies, such as those of the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, were limited to political interests and practices, focusing on acts of commemoration as top-down actions, which ultimately convey, by those in power, a unique memory of a singular event.2 In 1989, the French historian and sociologist Pierre Nora published a pioneering paper on monuments titled “Realm of Memory” (Lieux de mémoire).3 In that work, Nora defines a new perspective for understanding monuments and their relationship to space, society, and political practices. He contends that, owing to the struggle among different memory agents, history and memory are in constant flux. 2 Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Hand Book, eds, Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Walter de Gruyter: Berlin and New York, 2008), 109–18. 3 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26 (Spring, 1989): 7–24.

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Processing Memory: The Spectator as Archaeologist

In this essay, I engage with multiple memories by asking how art, artists, and private agents influence memory codes as bottom-up processes. Following research by James E. Young and Aleida Assmann, for example, which drew attention to a new kind of relationship among the artist, the monument, and the public, artists and designers have enjoyed a kind of academic heyday. Young foregrounded the work of German artists who wanted to involve the viewer actively by simultaneously establishing and dissolving the monument, thus challenging basic assumptions about traditional forms of commemoration.4 Assmann, for her part, has stressed how a new chapter on memory work began in the 1990s with a new generation of young people wanting to rediscover the past about which their parents had remained silent.5 Interestingly, she also points out that, “in Germany [these were] artist[s] of the generation of 1968 (who challenged the complicit silence of their parents with the Nazi past) and not a research group of academic historians funded by the state.”6 This memorial work, she notes, was stimulated and carried out on a local level by the younger generation, which had neither an official mandate nor financial support. Much of what they initiated was eventually taken up by the state; nonetheless a great deal is still based on their personal efforts.7 Assmann’s research has opened up a new perspective that spotlights the role of individuals as carriers of memory, but it has also left us a new set of questions: Do those monuments effectively engage with memory and the spectator? Do they serve their original purpose and create a more dynamic memory, or are they also doomed to be forgotten? Can a “silent monument,” which displays emptiness and absence instead of materials, serve successfully as a vehicle to transfer memory? The present study addresses these issues by examining monuments’ ability to engage with the spectator. I discuss the case study monuments as “sites of processing”; hence, monuments that were created to be site-specific, connected to a particular location and time and designed to dialogue with individuals through active engagement physically and cognitively. I consider them in light of their historical, cultural, and theoretical backgrounds as well as the 4

James E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 267–96. 5 Aleida Assmann, “The Whole Country Is a Monument: Framing Places of Terror in Post-War Germany,” in Space and the Memories of Violence: Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance and Exception, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, eds. Estela Schindel and Pamela Colombo (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 135. 6 Ibid., 136. 7 Ibid.

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psychological and physical experiences they offer to the spectator. In order to learn what distinguishes these sites of process from traditional monuments, I begin by exploring the different cultural and political milieux in East and West Germany. I demonstrate such divergent environments by presenting traditional monuments: one from the East and another from the West.

East Germany and Traditional Monuments World War II ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, with the unconditional surrender of Germany. The Potsdam Conference divided Germany among the Allies: the Soviet Union received roughly the eastern part of the country including part of Berlin and Britain, France, and the United States were awarded the western sections. This laid the groundwork for the subsequent division of Germany into two states: the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which was part of the Soviet Bloc in the East, and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the West, a division that lasted until 1990. Both German states were for years preoccupied with recovery and reconstruction, and their respective World War II monuments reflect their relationship with the recent past. As we shall see, there is a connection between the political system, on the one hand, and social values, on the other, found in each society and their respective memory discourses. The GDR was highly influenced by Soviet policy in the Cold War: anti-Fascist, anti-capitalist, pro-Arab, and so on,8 which in turn shaped the GDR’s memory culture. The Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and Nazi ideology were marginalized to analyses of economic and social conflicts.9 The GDR viewed the Holocaust as merely one Nazi Fascist atrocity among many. The East Germans highlighted Soviet resistance and courage against the Nazis, who were, in their eyes, some sort of abstract Fascist enemy with which they had no direct connection. The struggle of East Germany against Fascism had less to do with the Nazi past and more to do with the Cold War and an interest in justifying its then current policy.10 Under the GDR government, dozens of massive stone and bronze monuments were constructed and multiple memorial days were designated. These monuments celebrated the victory of the Socialists and the Red Army over Hitler. Typically, the monuments depicted figures of leaders in an event 8

Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 362–63. 9 Ibid., 348. 10 Ibid., 163–64.

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related to the workers’ movement, anti-Fascist movements, or the GDR.11 The monuments were built in a top-down process designed to create a collective memory, which is in essence a comprehensive structure, common sphere, and convention based on shared memory and experience. 12 The collective memory created by this common sphere or shared identity was embodied by symbols, images, texts, practices, and monuments.13 One example of such a monument is Soviet artist Lev Kerbel’s 1986 portrayal of Ernst Thälmann (Fig. 1). Thälmann was the leader of the German Communist Party (KPD) and an outspoken and active anti-Fascist who was murdered in Buchenwald in 1944. His figure was used as a symbol of the GDR leadership. The monument, which marked a century since Thälmann’s birth, is located in the center of a residential neighborhood project on Prenzlauer Berg. Resting on a platform, Thälmann’s figure towers above the crowd. His face is in profile and his fist extends to the side; a flag flies behind him, completing the image of a mythical figure and a national hero. This monumental depiction exemplifies the prewar traditional monument in its figurative style and ideological aims. Notably, GDR Prime Minister Enrich Hooncker chose a Soviet artist for this project, demonstrating a lack of confidence in East German artists’ abilities to carry it out.14 Such a decision, in my view, might have been motivated by a fear that East German artists did not share the same values. Perhaps, too, it related to a desire to create a top-down collective memory, one that was designed by the Soviet authorities and not by local or individual memory agents or by other groups with a different concept of his character. Despite the attempt to integrate the monument into everyday life as a model of hope and inspiration, the work remained alienated from the local inhabitants. It thus joined the myriad other heroic monuments that both fail to inspire in the present and appear destined to a similar fate in the future. Thus, it cannot be assumed that collective memory imposed by the political echelon will be embraced by the public.

11

Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 192. 12 Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” 109–10. 13 Jan Assmann, “Ancient Egyptian Anti-Judaism: A Case of Distorted Memory,” in Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. Daniel L. Schacter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 365–78. 14 Ladd, Ghosts of Berlin, 202.

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Figure 1

West Germany and Sites of Processing As in the case of East Germany, the Cold War also affected the Western approach to memory prior to the unification in 1990. The postwar desolation and hunger were blamed on the Allies’ occupation, which enabled the FRG to avoid shouldering its share of responsibility for the war’s dire results.15 The longing for a brighter future, even at the price of forgetfulness, was partly supported by the United States, which wanted to keep West Germany on its side in the Cold War.16 However, in order to gain legitimacy among other free nations and rebuild diplomatic relations, West Germany felt obliged to assume full responsibility for World War II and the Holocaust. This encouraged politicians and individuals to assert that “more democracy required more memory and more justice.”17

15 Josef Foschepoth, “German Reaction to Defeat and Occupation,” in West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era, ed. Robert G. Moeller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 74–75. 16 Ibid., 76. 17 Herf, Divided Memory, 334, 370–72.

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Alongside the development of individualism and responsibility in the late 1980s and the beginning of 1990s, artists began questioning whether the monument in general was a suitable vehicle for memory in a democratic society.18 They also criticized the very essence and aesthetic of a monument as a static object that fails to reveal the past and encourages the spectator to shed the responsibility of memory. For these artists, memory is a dynamic entity that undergoes modification with the discovery of new historical information. Others raised questions regarding the aesthetics of monuments that in some respects echoed the victory monuments of earlier Fascist periods,19 contending that new monuments ought to have a modern, abstract or minimalistic aesthetic. Philosopher and urban theorist Lewis Mumford and art critic Rosalind Krauss both argued that modern monuments are inherently incapable of referring to anything but themselves, and therefore “if it’s modern it’s not a monument.”20 Against this background, a new form of commemoration called “Counter-Monument,” “Anti-Monument,” or “Vanishing Monument” was launched.21 Further on in this chapter I deal with those kinds of monuments and their specific style: I define them as a “site of processing” memory and “site specific.” I argue that these sites are products of the postwar German democracy, which expresses aspects of individualization and democratization of the Holocaust collective memory by designing a bottom-up memory. One example of this new type of monument is Hamburg’s Monument against Fascism, created by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz. This work, which, like Thälmann’s, was completed in 1986, reflects the opposing position by rejecting the tradition of heroic and monumental monuments. A 12-m-tall column made of soft metal, this structure invited viewers to write their names on it in order to protest against Fascism: “We invite the citizens of Hamburg, and visitors to the town, to add their names here next to ours. In doing so we commit ourselves to remain vigilant.”22 18 James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 5–6. 19 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 434–438. 20 Young, “The Counter-Monument,” 273. 21 James Young coined the terms “Anti-Monument” and “Counter-Monument”: See James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust, Memorial and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 5–8. 22 “Jochen Gerz Public Space”: Jochen Gerz Official Site, accessed June 9, 2016, http://www.jochengerz.eu/html/main.html?res_ident=5a9df42460494a34beea361e 835953d8&art_ident=76fdb6702e151086198058d4e4b0b8fc

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As more and more names covered the column, it sunk lower and lower into the ground. After 6 years it disappeared completely, leaving only a metal square and, to the signatories, the memory of the act itself.23 The aim was to convey the idea that monuments can raise a symbolic protest against injustice, but the duty to act lies with the viewer. The Gerzes stated as much: “In the end it’s only we that can stand up against Fascism.”24 The monument functions as a memory process that impacts individuals at the site and invites them to take responsibility. This is a democratic approach toward memory sites, representing the freedom of individuals to choose to engage with responsibility and the site itself. Spectators actually help to “design” the monument, determining its duration by the addition of comments. We see here no historic figure – only a clean sheet for spectators to offer their own contributions. In sharp contrast to the East German monuments, which attempted to engage with the society as a whole, the Monument against Fascism reaches out to each individual spectator. The sinking structure graphically depicts the dynamic nature of memory and the insufficiency of conventional monuments, frozen as they are in time.

Negative Aesthetics as a Trigger for Memory Processing We have seen how the styles of the East and West German monuments reflected each of these societies’ political cultures. Nevertheless, the question remains as to what caused the proliferation of those new monuments in West Germany and later in united Germany? In this section, I review the theoretical and cultural background that led to the creation of this new aesthetic form of sites of processing and examine how the relevant debates, theories, and techniques took shape in solid forms. Unlike East Germany, which raised traditional monuments marking its victory, West Germany decided that it had to commemorate the victims of crimes perpetrated under the Nazi regime.25 The ambiguity and an inherent conflict found in West German commemoration work is thus no surprise. The Federal Republic of Germany was constructed from Germany’s own ruins and carried in its core an “open wound”: on the one hand, the longing for recovery and rebuilding spurred the desire to leave the memory of past atrocities behind, but, on the other hand, Germany felt a moral commitment to remember its history. Holocaust survivor and 23

Ibid. Ibid. 25 Young, “The Counter-Monument: 270–71. 24

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historian Saul Friedländer noted that: “Germans found themselves in the last two generations on the border between the lack of desire to remember on the one hand, and the impossibility of forgetting on the other hand.”26 This conflict was graphically demonstrated in 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II27: German President Richard Karl von Weizsäcker asked the public to look bravely into the German past and to take responsibility for it,28 whereas Cardinal Joseph Höffner insisted that the public should look to the future of the German people, rather than dwell on its past.29 The opposing forces of memory and oblivion engendered vigorous debate concerning “appropriate” modes of remembrance. In 1945, poets and intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno contended that, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is a barbaric act.”30 Authors Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass joined him, saying that the “National Socialist ideology robbed the German language of its meaning and corrupted it and laid waste whole fields of words.”31 For Adorno, the solution was his “negative dialect,”32 26

Saul Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 142. 27 Ibid., 8–12. 28 For the speech see: The German Federal President’s website, Der Bundespräsident, (20 March 2015). 29 For the speech, see Kardinal Joseph Höffner, “Predigt im Ökumenischen Gottesdienst im Kölner Dom am 8. Mai 1985,” in Erinnerung, Trauer und Versöhnung: Ansprachen und Erklärungen zum vierzigsten Jahrestag des Kriegsendes, ed. Deutsche Bundesregierung (Bonn: Bundesregierung Verlag, 1985), 101–06. 30 The line was written in 1949 and published in 1951: Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 34. Original Source: “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” in Soziologische Forschung in untere Zeit,1949. 31 The quote is taken from Headright, Grass’s 1982 autobiography, and he refers to those ideas throughout his work (see his novel The Tin Drum published in 1958). These notions were also cited and emphasized in Böll’s work Trümmerliteratur (The Literature of the Rubble) and in his speeches when he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1967 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. 32 According to Adorno, negative dialect is: “‘anti-drama’ and the ‘anti-hero,’ all esthetic topics which might be called ‘anti system.’ It attempts by means of logical consistency to substitute for the unity principle, and for the paramountcy [sic] of the superordinate concept, the idea of what would be outside the sway of such

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which is the critical possibility of writing poetry that reflects the tensions between culture and the different layers of memory. Grass, for his part, set the past as an obstacle to the present: “The past made me throw it in the path of the present stumble (sic). The future can only be understood on the basis of past made present.”33 He demanded from the arts and literature, “to remember Auschwitz as a traumatic event that constitutes the present and future as well as our own identity.”34 This led many artists to portray the Holocaust through what I call here “negative aesthetics,”35 that is, a stylistic form influenced by Adorno’s notion of “negative dialectics.” Negative aesthetics is a form that is based on dialectic clashes, emphasizing an uncanny feeling through the use of unusual scales and locations, voids, and emptiness to convey what cannot be expressed in words or images. Artists using “negative aesthetics,” evoke curiosity in the viewer; the void, unexpected placement, and a sense of surprise motivate a process of investigation of the past. This leads individuals to undergo a psychological and cognitive process of judgment and discretion that goes well beyond the site and the event it commemorates.

Under the Ground We find an example of this approach in the Empty Library monument created in 1995 by Israeli artist Micha Ullman (Fig. 2). It is located in Bebelplatz for the commemoration of the “Night of the Burning Books,” orchestrated there by the Nazis on May 10, 1933. The monument is in the heart of a large square surrounded by eighteenth-century buildings: the National Opera, the Church of St. Hedwig, Humboldt University, and the library from which dozens of professors and their students set out to burn 20,000 books the Nazis deemed “dangerous” and “degenerate.” Twothirds of the books that were burned were written by Jewish authors.

unity.” Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B Ashton (London and New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007) after the original edition (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), 33 Cited in: Michal Ben Horin, Musical Biographies: The Music of Memory in Post-1945 German Literature (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2016); Günter Grass, “The Destruction of Mankind Has Begun, 1982,” in On Writing and Politics, 1967–1983, trans. Ralph Manheim (San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 137. 34 Ibid., 140. 35 In his book The Texture of Memory, in which he examines the new movement in Germany that created novel types of monuments from the 1980s, James Young uses the term “negative monument.”

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Figure 2

The monument, designed as an underground space, is covered with a 120-sq.-cm glass window set into the pavement. Peering through this window, pedestrians can glimpse the interior of the monument.36 The underground space is permanently lit with white neon light and in cloudy weather and at night, the monument can be seen by the light emerging from within. There are two small metal plates set side by side next to the monument. One of these is engraved with the well-known statement by the German writer and poet Heinrich Heine: “That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.”37 On the second plaque we read the following words, written by the artist: “In the middle of this square on 10 May 1933 Nazi students burned the works of hundreds of independent writers, journalists, philosophers, and scientists.”38 36 Friedrich Meschede (ed.), Micha Ullman, Bibliothek (Amsterdam: Verlag der Kunst, 1999), 19. 37 Memorial Transcript :“DAS WAR EIN VORSPIEL NUR, DORT WO MAN BÜCHER VERBRENNT, VERBRENNT MAN AM ENDE AUCH MENSCHEN. Heinrich Heine 1820.” 38 The original German text: “In der Mitte dieses Platzes verbrannten am 10. Mai 1933 nationalsozialistische Studenten die Werke hunderter freier Schriftsteller,

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Unlike traditional monuments, such as those found in the GDR, which attract the spectator through their impressive size, the Empty Library leaves the surface empty. The monument hardly calls attention to itself, and from above the ground all that is visible is a transparent square window embedded within the ground. The bare shelves are revealed through the glass, as though they were part of a mass grave, traces of a tragic event that occurred in this place and were buried beneath the ground.39 The pit of the Empty Library marks the opening of the collective repressed memory by anyone willing to take it up by discovering the memory it hides. The “Night of the Book Burning” was an emblematic event that demolished freedom of thought, an event that is revealed upon viewing the monument.40 The Empty Library can be seen as an attempt to deal with “The Nazi past which is too massive to be forgotten and too repellent to be integrated into the normal narrative of memory.”41 In this context, it is interesting to present a counterexample to the Empty Library, which was installed in the same square: the temporary installation of The Modern Book Printing, commissioned by the German advertising company Scholz & Friends Group for the FIFA World Cup Championship in 2006 (Fig. 3).42 Designed to show the influence of German literature from the beginning of the print revolution in the German city of Mainz in 1453, the installation consisted of seventeen castings of books made of metallic-colored polyester piled up in a 12-m-high tower. The setting for the monument made it controversial from the moment it was erected. Foreign journalists who came to view the championship Publizisten, Philosophen und Wissenschaftler. Bibliothek–Denkmal Die Bücherverbrennung vom 10. Mai 1933. Von Micha Ullman, Gebaut 1994/95. “ 39 For more information on the grave as a symbol in the Empty Library and Ullman’s works, see Moran Pearl, “Books and Libraries as Agents of Memory in Monuments for the Second World War and Holocaust,” MA thesis (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2013), 18–20,42–43. 40 Moran Pearl, “Books and Libraries as Witnesses of the Holocaust in Monuments: Vienna and Berlin,” in Contemporary Austrian Studies, vol. 24 (2015); Günter Bischof and Ferdinand Karlhofer, eds., Austrian Federalism in Comparative Perspective (Innsbruck and New Orleans: Uno Press – Innsbruck University Press and University of New Orleans Press), 158–59. 41 Yigal Zalmona, “Hfr (dig), Hafor-root of dig,” in Micha Ullman: 1980–1988, ed. Yigal Zalmona, trans. Judy Levy (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1988), 6–8. 42 The installation was part of a large project titled “Germany Land of Ideas,” initiated by the President Horst Köhler. The project was designed to promote the image of German culture and contribution to the Western world in the fields of literature, philosophy, society, politics, economy, culture, and science.

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games contended that the work in its present location seemed to be an attempt to deny the square’s notorious past.43 CNN reporter Chris Burns responded to the name of the exhibit “Germany Land of Ideas” by saying: “Germany is merely the land of bad ideas...the land of the gas Zyklon B invention.”44 Others, such as the journalist Benjamin Good, saw those monumental books as a megalomaniacal installation belonging to the Fascist era, glorifying Germany and blotting out its darkest hours.45

Figure 3 43 Benjamin Good, “Germany, Land of Ideas: Berlin Selectively Remembers,” European Jewish Press, accessed October 24, 2013, http://ejpress.org/article/in_ depth/world_cup/9170 44 Quoted in Chris Bruns, “Germany Tries to Fix Image for Upcoming World Cup,” CNN (published May 5, 2006), accessed October 24, 2013, http://www transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS /0605/05/ywt.01.html 45 Good, “Germany, Land of Ideas.”

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The Modern Book Printing stands in opposition to the Empty Library. Commissioned by an advertising company, it is a monumental piece glorifying the role of Germany and German authors in the print revolution in a patently unsuitable site – one that was dedicated to the memory of burning books. In contrast, the Empty Library is located below the surface and invites the spectator, like an archaeologist, to discover the hidden history of the site and to reflect upon the memory it holds without disturbing the public sphere. The Modern Book Printing monument makes perfect sense from a marketing point of view. The installation was to remain in its location for only a short period of time and thus it was made as bold as possible, so as to attract viewers. What the agency did not consider was the contradiction it conveyed with respect to Ullman’s monument and the historic event that the latter commemorates. Nevertheless, the two poles, beneath the surface on the one hand, and above it, on the other, epitomize the clashing forces in Germany of “memory” and “oblivion” – of an honorable legacy and a dark past .

Void and Absence The Empty Library monument is designed as a library with fourteen empty white shelves that cover three of the four library walls in a geometric grid. The fourth wall, which faces Humboldt University Library, has a blocked door. The shelves have the capacity to hold 20,000 books, the same number of books that fell victim that night to Nazi predations. Referencing ancient Greek notions of the art of memory,46 Umberto Eco argued that in order to remember the past, the human mind must make a connection between past events and a figurative symbol.47 The Empty Library raises a question as to what is a figurative symbol and how one is to visualize the concept of memory through void and absence – in this case, the absence of the books. Although the Empty Library is quite tangible, it is characterized by negative aesthetics. A library, by definition, holds books – this one, even if perceptible and figurative, is still somewhat surreal; it is empty and its doors are sealed. This induces a sense of the ‘uncanny,’ a feeling evoked by a known object, familiar, yet strange, which puzzles the spectator. 46

The “Art of Memory” is made up of mnemonic principles and techniques originated by the Greeks to improve the recall of speeches, events, and so on by using visual images. See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 19. 47 Umberto Eco, “An Ars Oblivionalis Forget it?,” PALMA 3, no. 3 (1980): 254– 57.

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Ullman’s denatured library invites the viewer to consider books as vehicles of liberal and critical thinking, both for individuals and for societies. Another example of this approach is Christian Boltanski’s 1990 Missing House, which also uses negative aesthetics, absence, and void to leverage memory. Boltanski recollects that while walking on a main street of the former East Berlin, Grosse Hamburgerstrasse, he noticed an empty space between houses number 15 and 16. Upon investigating, he learned that the two structures once comprised a single home, which was split into two after the Allied bombings of February 3, 1945. The central part was blasted away, leaving a gap between the two parts, which were eventually restored. Boltanski’s first step in creating the installation was to learn the history of the building and its former tenants, and he discovered that it had been the home of Jews who were deported in 1942. The new residents were Aryan. The installation consists of a series of twelve black and white plaques, 120 × 60 cm, mounted on the facing walls with empty spaces between them. The plaques record the family name, profession, and period of residency of each former occupant.48 The void and the empty space serve as an open invitation to stop and ponder this strange uncanny (unheimlich) appearance. Where one expects to see a normal street with one house after another, one comes upon a void as a monument whose purpose is to engender memories regarding the former residents of this house. The enigmatic appearance of the installation can function as a site of memory processing: the spectator observing the void should wonder about it, and by doing so take personal responsibility for this memory. Boltanski’s idea was to use the missing house to evoke the missing Jews of Europe. He conveyed the impossibility of filling certain gaps in history; those plaques will never tell the full story of the absent inhabitants. The Jews were an integral part of European culture and history, and their absence has left a palpable void in the public space.49

48 In addition to the plaques, he created a temporary exhibition in West Berlin made up of documents, photos, and other objects that were connected to the house and its Jewish residents. 49 Another example is the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which was built by the architect Daniel Libeskind and inaugurated in 2001. The building memorializes those who passed away by means of a large, almost empty building. The permanent exhibition only occupies the upper levels of the building, leaving the entrance floor and the rest of the museum permanently empty. For more information about the use of voids in Berlin, see Andreas Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 76–78; “The Jewish Museum Berlin:

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In Ullman’s words, “To express the unthinkable is possible only by use of the absent.”50 The “Night of the Book Burning” was an act of “cultural cleansing” of its “degenerate” influences by the so-called Aryan “superior race.”51 We are reminded of Heine’s quote engraved near the Empty Library: more than a century before the Holocaust, he wrote that the destruction of books, which represent culture and heritage, could ultimately lead to the destruction of this people. Although the monument does not make explicit reference to the Holocaust, both Heine’s ominous words and the fact that two-thirds of the burned books were the work of Jews lead the spectator to reflect on that epic catastrophe.52 The monument might thus be seen as an analogy for the post-Holocaust absence of Jews in German society.53 This absence extends to its very positioning, embedded in the ground of a busy square so that it is only seen by those who seek it out. The void, the underground library, and Heine’s quote serve as traces for the passerby to process.

The Spectator Experience as an Archaeologist: Site Specific and Site of Processing In the following pages, I deal with monuments that were designed to be experienced by individuals. We have already seen how the Empty Library and the other monuments discussed above function differently than traditional monuments: they are not massive and do not serve as gathering places; nevertheless they are no less influential to the people who interact with them. These monuments represent a shift in discourse, moving from concern with “collective memory” to preoccupation with more direct and individual memory. The term “sites of processing” reflects the goal of the creators: these works are not to be solely static gravestones, but are to trigger an interest and to start a chain of actions and exploration as a result of the encounter with the unique objects of memory and the site itself. In a psychological sense, the spectator here is put in the position of an archaeologist who sifts through clues to arrive at a hidden enigma. Between the Lines,” Daniel Libeskind, April 18, 2007, accessed, October 24, 2014, http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/projects/pro.html?ID=2 50 Micha Ullman, Interview with Moran Pearl in the artist’s studio, Ramat Hasharon, 2013. 51 To read further about the connection between the Empty Library and the memory of the Holocaust, see Pearl, “Books and Libraries (2015),” 162. 52 Ibid., 161. 53 Interestingly, the Hebrew word for “void” also refers to a soldier who dies in battle and leaves a void in the nation.

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Accordingly, the monuments discussed above can be considered “sitespecific,” which is a term that refers to a modern and contemporary work of art made for a specific location; the installation interacts with this location and draws its meaning from the site.54 These monuments are designed to be experienced by individuals. Differently than other sitespecific works, these are intended to leverage their location so as to interact with the spectator and deliver a message whose import extends far beyond the place itself. Although a site-specific monument is not detachable from its location, it is only a door leading to the possibility of future investigation and action. The Empty Library is site-specific. The location of the monument is bound up with the event it commemorates and allows the spectator to engage with the memory and history of the site by spotting small clues. For instance, as it is lit from the inside, it is visible from a distance at night. Its shimmering glow draws wandering spectators to approach and serves as a clue to the commemorated event. It encourages the viewer to search his visual collective memory and retrieve relevant images from films, photos, and books. The light and the surrounding buildings of the monument emphasize the site-specific quality of the Empty Library: it is inextricably bound to the Bebelplatz. Daylight, however, is a different story. During the day, it is difficult to see the interior of the underground room owing to the spectator’s reflection in the glass. With some effort, and by bending one’s knees and shielding one’s eyes, one can see white empty bookshelves. Sociologist and psychologist Jen Brockmeier contends that when the spectator does find the monument and confronts it, it is “like vague remains of a library recently discovered in an archeological dig.”55 Then, the curious viewer will notice his own reflection in the windowpanes of the square buildings that were the setting of the fiery 1933 event. Thus, Empty Library is not a monumental memorial but an invitation to process the site’s past and to make it relevant today. One is intended to confront the monument, explore it, and come to terms with the event that it commemorates in one’s own time and with one’s own perspective. Ullman deals with the German past as a layer of memory that requires excavation. According to the artist, digging a pit in a public space “exposes” the historical, political, and social levels of the site itself.56 54

For more information on the definition of “site specificity,” see Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (1997): 85–110. 55 Jens Brockmeier, “Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural Memory,” Culture & Psychology 8 (2002): 16. 56 Zalmona, Micha Ullman: 1980–1988, 8.

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In this context, it is interesting to compare Ullman’s work to Horst Hoheisel’s counter-monument Negative Form, 1987, situated in Kassel’s City Hall Square. It was erected in memory of the Jewish entrepreneur Sigmund Aschrott, who had a fountain built in the square in 1908. That fountain was destroyed by the Nazis in 1939, and Hoheisel commemorated the destruction in an underground installation.57 He claims that “restoring the original fountain will contribute to the forgetting of the past.”58 The monument is a 12-m-long hole in the ground in which a model of the original Neo-Gothic fountain was placed upside-down. Water flows beneath the ground and the stream can be heard but not seen. By using a negative form, Hoheisel invites spectator participation. In the words of the artist: “The sunken fountain is not the memorial at all. It is only history turned into a pedestal, an invitation to passersby who stand upon it to search for the memorial in their own heads. For only there is the memorial to be found.”59 Ullmann’s and Hoheisel’s works share context and form; both artists created memorials for cultural objects that were destroyed. Moreover, rather than reconstructing objects (the books that were burned, the fountain that was destroyed), the two works ask that the passerby actively seek them by following traces. These monuments startle spectators by their very locations: placed under their feet, they prompt one to gaze downward and search for an object or meaning. The spectator qua detective is thus introduced to the scene of a crime. In Kassel, a passerby will hear a trickle of water but not see a fountain. In order to find the source of the water one has to continue to the center of the square, where, by peeking through a glass plate embedded in the pavement, he or she will discover the subterranean fountain. Back in Berlin, the light from Ullmann’s monument at night draws the viewer to look for the sunken library. Even so, the spectator must actively struggle with reflections in the glass and his/her own positioning. Neither monument offers a close-by informative plaque: information is about 150 cm away in Ullman’s case 57 James E. Young, “Memory, Counter-Memory and the End of the Monument: Horst Hoheisel, Micha Ullmann, Rachel Whitered and Renata Stih and Frieder Schonk,” Image and Remembrance: Remembrance and the Holocaust, eds. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 61–63. 58 Horst Hoheisel, “Rathaus-Platz-Wunde,” in Aschrott Brunnen: OffeneWunde der Stadtgeschichte (Kassel: City of Kassel Cultural Office, 1989) 59 Horst Hoheisel official website, accessed June 15, 2016, http://www.knitz.net/index.php?Itemid=3&id=30&option=com_content&task=vie w&lang=en

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and about 300 m away in Hoheisel’s. Consequently, the viewer first experiences the image and only later is told about it. Step by step the spectator becomes an explorer.

Site Specificity and Individuality We can see that the counter-monuments and the processing sites described thus far, such as the Empty Library, the Aschrott-Brunnen monument in Kassel, and the Monument against Fascism all call for the individual to learn from the past and to bear responsibility for the future. It was not happenstance that these monuments were erected in West and united Germany from the end of the 1980s through the mid-1990s. The approach that they reflect is linked to ongoing debates on the question of collective and personal responsibility during the Third Reich and to “collective guilt” concerning Nazi crimes. The Allies demanded that West Germany and later on united Germany confront and take responsibility for the recent past, but this thesis of collective guilt was typically rejected by the Germans, who preferred to ascribe blame to the Führer and the Nazis.60 Nevertheless, with the Americanization of the population and the implementation of democratic values, German society became more individualized. The importance of individual conscience gradually spread and mirrored the lack of such conscience during the Third Reich: in Weizsäcker’s words, to “look truth straight in the eye,”61 and know that each individual bears responsibility. On November 9, 1978, the fortieth anniversary of the November-Pogrom (Kristallnacht,) Chancellor Karl Schmidt, arguing for individuals to take responsibility for the past, stated that even though most Germans living in 1978 were “individually free from blame […] German young people can also become guilty if they fail to recognize their responsibility for what happens today and tomorrow.”62 Germans also witnessed such events as the Auschwitz trials (1947), the Eichmann trial (1961), and the screening of related TV series and films such as Holocaust (1979) and Schindler’s List (1993), which portrayed the suffering of the victims as individuals. The results are monuments that reach out to individuals, charging them with the responsibility of keeping memory alive, not as a burden but as a personal moral obligation and a political necessity. Furthermore, we can see that these monuments evoke not only events, but also individuals. 60

Foschepoth, “German Reaction,” 76–77. Quoted in Herf, Divided Memory, 359. 62 Ibid., 346–47. 61

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Each commemorates a specific event limited to a certain place and time, as well as to individual victimized people. This is true, for instance, of The White Rose (Die Weiße Rose) monument, created in 1998 by Robert Schmidt-Matt, which is located in front of the entrance to the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Geschwister-Scholl-Platz in Munich. The White Rose was a group of Munich university students led by Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were later executed by the Nazi authorities. Many White Rose students had been members of the Hitler Youth, but their exposure to Nazi policies and ideologies gradually led them to reject National Socialism. The group aimed to engender nonviolent resistance by distributing pamphlets among educated circles in Germany, as well as by spreading political graffiti throughout Munich and other southern German cities.63 Whereas the Empty Library silently attests violence that individuals chose not to oppose, The White Rose uses the same aesthetic tools to highlight the opposite reaction. On February 18, 1943, members of the White Rose distributed anti-Nazi pamphlets in the university’s main atrium. The monument is composed of small bronze pamphlets with replicas of the original texts, portraits of the group’s members, and photos depicting the mood in the city at the time embedded in the pavement of the square. Made to look as though they were dropped accidentally, the bronze pamphlets invite passersby, mostly students, to follow the traces of the White Rose. The monument brings to mind the Empty Library. In both cases, one sees from a distance a gathering of people around a mysterious object that is just out of reach. Curiosity created by the interest of others rather than by the monument itself may prompt the initial approach. Both of these monuments were executed on a scale that addresses the individual spectator. As the passerby stands over the embedded glass or the small pamphlets, he himself becomes the memorial. Only by standing directly above these bronze pamphlets is it possible to truly view them. The Empty Library and The White Rose alike recall the responsibility of the individual to protest against cruelty. In other words, the scale is human, a fact reflected in both the monuments’ size and in the fact that they require active engagement on the part of the viewer. The book burners and the Germans that cooperated with the Nazi regime were not “members of another planet” or “Planet Auschwitz,” like the famous

63

For more information see: Inge Scholl, Students against Tyranny: The Resistance of the White Rose, Munich, 1942–1943 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1970).

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saying of Ka-Zetnik.64 Rather, they were normal and even educated people who were conscious of their acts. The Empty Library reminds us of the choice of highly educated people to take a part in an atrocity, whereas The White Rose reminds us of students who did precisely the opposite. Both works imply that history is in our own hands. Moreover, the unmovable bronze pamphlets of The White Rose and the intentionally blocked door of the Empty Library both teach us that although we cannot change the past, we had better learn from it. Both of the above works accent the power of the individual in history.

Site of Processing and Bottom-Up Memory Thus far, the works that I have discussed are examples of monuments that serve as sites of processing, in which the spectator is an active participant. In other cases, the place itself is a trigger for a future active engagement with the past, leaving space for viewers to continue their memory work. Striking example of this type of memorial are the Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones; Fig. 4). This memory project, which can be seen throughout Germany as well as in other places in Europe, is ever expandable in that the public is invited to place more and more stones. In 1995, the same year that Ullman created the Empty Library, German artist Günter Demnig initiated Stolpersteine in his hometown of Cologne in memory of the Jews, the Sinti, and the Roma that were deported in 1940. To commemorate that deportation, Demnig embedded fifteen golden blocks (each 10 × 10 cm) in pavements in places where the victims used to live, work, or study, so as to commemorate them in the everyday space of which they were a part. As the memorial stones are a half-centimeter higher than the rest of the cobblestones, passersby can quite easily stumble upon them, hence their name. Symbolically, the viewer may stumble upon history, as the golden color of the stones catches the eye and spurs thought. “Here lived” are the first words on each small stone, and then the name, date, and place of execution of an individual killed by the Nazis.65 64

Ka-Zetnik is the pen name of Yehiel De-Nur, who was among the few who met Eichmann during the Holocaust and survived. He was a witness in the Eichmann trial, held in Jerusalem in 1961. Ka-Zetnik’s testimony, during which he fainted, was short and remains etched in the collective memory as one of the symbols of the trauma of the Holocaust. He coined the term “The other planet” at the beginning of his speech and later the term “Planet Auschwitz.” 65 Mary Rachel Gould and Rachel E. Silverman, “Stumbling upon History: Collective Memory and the Urban,” GeoJournal (Berlin: Springer Science, 2012), published online.

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This basic information about the fate of one among more than six million victims has the power to individualize the catastrophe and raises questions in the minds of pedestrians. The stones give identity and voice to the victims.66

Figure 4

Demnig tells that while he was working on a different installation in his hometown in which he marked the 1940 deportation route of the Gypsies in chalk, an old woman remarked: “There were no gypsies in our neighborhood.”67 Demnig understood that “She just didn’t know that they had been her neighbors, and I wanted to change that.”68 The Stolpersteine was Demnig’s answer to the oblivion; the golden stones made what had been erased from the public space visible and tangible. The stones transform the site from an everyday space to a memory space. Each stone emplacement constitutes a specific site. The site itself, which might have 66 See the Stolpersteine Project offical site :Stopersteine Gelsenkirchen Gemeinsam gegen das Vergessen, accessed July 8, 2014 http://www.stolpersteine-gelsenkirchen.de/stumbling_stones_demnig.htm 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid.

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been the scene of the victim’s home or work, is a trigger for further memory processing. After encountering the stones, the viewer may turn to the online project archive and learn more about the victims. Menasheh Fogel recalls the inauguration ceremony of stones for his family members: When I learned that the Stolpersteine project was actually a private art project and not something done by a public agency, I actually got a little upset. I realized that while there are quite a few Stolpersteine throughout Berlin, the streets would be literally covered in them if all of the victims were memorialized. It really made me realize how many people could easily be forgotten.69

Fogel makes two important points that I address below: the first of these is the awakening of individual responsibility and the private agency of memory, and the second is the individuality of the object of memory, namely, a stone for each individual. The artistic goal was to deal with the tendency to forget the city’s recent history by raising awareness of the victims, who are now absent from the cities. According to Demnig, exposure to Stolpersteine in every part of the city raises awareness of the fact that normal people in their everyday lives cooperated at least passively with the Nazis, and that the destruction of the Jews and other minorities occurred in every part of their country.70 Nora distinguishes between “milieux de mémoire,” a substantial environment for memory in which the remembered event has occurred, and “lieux de mémoire,” the production of layers of memory that society creates when there is no such environment.71 In that sense, the Stolpersteine could be both, as they are located in a liminal realm, in the public sphere, on the one hand, and in private residence space, on the other. In the absence of the individuals and community that once lived there, the Stolpersteine become a realm of memory, thanks to the engraved names of the former residents and the dates and death camps where they were murdered. If the Stolpersteine had been placed in the camps themselves or in deportation stations, they would have pointed to the bitter fate of the victims without taking into account their actual lives. Hence, the placement of the stones encourages a cognitive memory process. The urban and public sphere functions as a real environment of memory, with 69 Andreas Kluth, “Stumbling over the Past,” The Economist 1843, May/June 2013, accessed July 8, 2016, https://www.1843magazine.com/content/places/andreas-kluth/stumbling-over-past. 70 Ibid. 71 Nora, 14–17.

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the location providing a reference point for the Jewish life now missing from the cities’ spaces. Stolpersteine function as a site of processing in another way as well: they constitute a growing and democratic monument, as anyone can order a stone after conducting research on a victim and thus add new stones to the spaces of cities. Individuals, groups, schools, and various associations actively contribute to the project by donating money and conducting research.72 The ever-expanding monument is inseparable from the memory processing available on the streets or in the project website. The moment of embedding the stones in the pavement further enhances the memory work: local residents, students and their families, and perhaps the victims’ relatives participate in the ceremony. Thus another layer of public involvement is created, as described in Adachiara Zevi’s chapter in the present volume. In this way, the memory work is not solely dependent upon political decisions nor is it left in the hands of the elite. Rather, individuals are encouraged to create a bottom-up memory. One example of a site that was driven by a bottom-up process is Gleis 17, the Berlin-Grünewald station, Track Number 17, from which 50,000 of Berlin’s Jews were deported between October 18, 1942, and 1945 (Fig. 5). For many years, the German national railway companies in both West Germany (Bundesbahn) and East Germany (Reichsbahn) refused to take a critical look at the role they played in the Nazi crimes against humanity. In 1985, the year that marked the 150th anniversary of the national railway company, Deutsche Bahn, the managements of the railways in both West and East Germany “still found it difficult to even mention this chapter of railway history.”73 Nevertheless, on October 18, 1987, the 41st anniversary of the first deportation, the Protestant community of Grünewald placed a bronze plaque on the railway tracks. The plaque was stolen a year later, and was returned only on October 18, 2005.74 Subsequently, Grünewald residents promoted the erection of a monument at the entrance to the station, a move that was finally endorsed by the city of Berlin. Polish sculptor Karol Broniatowski was chosen as 72

Although it receives government support, much of the project’s funding derives from private initiatives. 73 See the Deutschebahn official site, accessed, June 17, 2016, http://www.deutschebahn.com/en/group/history/topics/platform17_memorial.html 74 Hans Christian Jasch, “Memorialization, Remembrance, and Acts of Commemoration in Postwar Germany,” in Dealing with the Past in Spaces, Places, Actions, and Institutions of Memory: A Comparative Reflection on European Experiences, AICGS- American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, vol. 18 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University: German American Issues), 13–14.

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the artist, and his work, which depicts a “negative casting”75 of human figures marching to Platform 17 and to their deaths, was inaugurated on October 18, 1991 (Fig. 6).76

Figure 5

The monument reflects the absence of people using negative aesthetics – human-shaped black holes in a white concrete wall. This imagery causes passersby rushing to their trains to consider for a moment those missing figures, sent to their deaths from the same terminal they use today. The proximity of the train station and Platform 17 to the homes of Grünenwald raises the question of resistance and reminds us that the atrocities occurred under the eyes of the German people. Following the acknowledgment of the responsibility of Deutsche Bahn in 1998, the company commissioned

75 Negative casting is the first step in creating the mold for the statue, from which, in the second step, a positive and three-dimensional object is derived. Stopping at the first step of casting leaves an empty space instead of a three-dimensional object. 76 Ibid.

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another plaque and a memorial.77 In this case, we are clearly aware of the alternative to the traditional course as seen in the East German monument: not a top-down monument of coercion but a bottom-up one of memory. The company took responsibility and erected the monuments only after individuals took personal responsibility. The Gleis 17 monument was mounted in 1998, more than 50 years after the last Jewish deportation. Created by three architects, Nikolaus Hirsch, Wolfgang Lorch, and Andrea Wandel, it consists of 186 cast steel plates arranged in chronological order and set in the track, next to the edge of the platform.78 Each plate carries the date of a transport, the number of deportees, the point of departure in Berlin, and the destination. A walk along the tracks is a poignant and powerful reminder of the human toll of the Holocaust, as well as of the complicity of German industry of the period. The Deutsche Bahn memorial is an effective site of processing, and several factors contribute to this efficacy. First, voluntary memory work that was initiated by a group of Protestants motivated individuals to insist that the city create a prominent monument. Second, this ongoing process of individuals and groups to voluntarily commemorate and shape monuments engenders future engagement with the memory of the place and the responsibility of the German railway company and thus points to bottom-up memory. Today travelers who pass by Platform 17 find the original railway reconstructed. Engravings on the platform depict the names of the fiftythree death camps, but the tracks themselves are harder to see. Out of use for more than 70 years, most of them are caked with mud and leaves. The only clues to the ancient rails are the recent traces of candles and stones placed by previous visitors. Here the spectator truly acts as an archaeologist, for he must dig with his hands to reveal the historic rails by which 50,000 Jews were sent to their deaths.

77

Deutschebahn, official site. For more information about the role the German railway company played in the Holocaust, see Alfred C. Mierzejewski, “The German National Railway Company, 1924–1932: Between Private and Public Enterprise,” German Business History Review, vol. 67 (Harvard: The President and Fellows of Harvard College Stable URL: 1993), 406–38. 78 Brian Ladd, “Center and Periphery in the New Berlin: Architecture, Public Art, and the Search for Identity,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 22 (Berlin: 2000), 7–22.

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Conclusion The sites of processing discussed in this chapter point to a profound change in memory work and discourse toward the individual. As we have seen, those sites of processing are based on the concept of the individual’s free will to engage the past and serve as a door for active exploration that transcends the site itself. The driving forces to rediscover traces of the past develop from the bottom up, first by artists and later embraced by official institutions. The Gleis 17 monument in Grünenwald exemplifies the fruit of an ongoing processing of the place by locals that was eventually supported by the authorities. This particular development took place in West and united Germany, not in East Germany, which, as I have noted, could indicate a direct relationship to a democratic environment. The democratic values inculcated in West Germany, together with an ongoing debate about the duty to remember the past and learn from it, led to the production of the memory works presented here. In East Germany, which was under the control of the Soviet Union, such topics were never broached; hence, the monuments erected there were very different. The sites of processing I described above encourage spectators to act as archaeologists by revealing traces of the buried past, in effect asking them to remember the site and what it represents. In this chapter, I have discussed the ways in which artists have realized the memory process through negative aesthetics: void and underground monuments. Those elements integrate the sense of absence into the fabric of a city as a way to confront what is missing. As Grass declared, the void functions as an obstacle to the present. The void is one example of a negative aesthetic technique that serves as a tool to raise questions and provoke spectators’ curiosity. The spectator who chooses to confront the hidden, negative, or enigmatic site places him/herself in the position of an explorer or an archaeologist who sifts through clues in order to discover the secret past of the site. Hoheisel, for example, chose not to reconstruct the destroyed fountain in Kassel, but rather to create a negative form buried beneath the ground, thus creating a memorial that demands continual rediscovery, one that depends on the individual will to uncover what is concealed. Some monuments go even further in their engagement with the spectator. The Hamburg work invites the viewer to commit his signature, thus declaring his responsibility for the future. The Stolpersteine literally stop the spectator in his/her tracks, providing information, personal research, and stone emplacement. The memory work transfers to the field of individual responsibility and thus becomes diffused among different

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levels of society. The site itself becomes a trigger for future investigation and engagement with the past and leads to ongoing memory processing.

Figure 6

These monuments point to a dramatic shift in the sphere of memory and commemoration. One might ask: Why did this shift take place only in the past three decades? In Germany the changes were yoked to the past and to the difficulty of confronting such a past in a suitable way. Further, more and more monuments in Europe and around the world are being built along these lines. Again, one might wonder: Are we dealing here with a passing phenomenon, or, alternatively, with a concept that will endure? Monuments that prompt the processing of memory by individuals through a specific site seem to reflect a society in which the individual is the most significant unit. In the postwar period, designers of monuments had to take account of a growing individualism and democratization, but this change only became manifest in public space over time. The end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s witnessed the beginning of this process. Thus, I would argue that the phenomenon at hand has not yet reached its peak and that we will see more examples of monuments that function as “sites of processing.” Like those I have related to in Germany, as well as the 9/11 World Trade Center monument and others of a similar

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kind, these works engender a kind of alchemy, transforming passive spectators into active archeologists.

List of Figures Figure 1. Lev Kerberl, Ernst Thälmann Memorial, 1986, Berlin, Photo: Moran Pearl. Figure 2. Micha Ullman, Empty Library, 1995, Berlin, Photo: Moran Pearl. Figure 3. Scholz & Friends Group, The Modern Book Printing, 2006, Berlin, Photo: Leinhard Schulz. Figure 4. Günter Demnig, Stolpersteine, begun 1996, Berlin. Photo: Moran Pearl. Figure 5. Nikolaus Hirsch, Wolfgang Lorch and Andrea Wandel, Gleis 17 (Platform 17), 1998, Berlin, Photo: Moran Pearl. Figure 6. Karol Broniatowski, Memorial to the Deported Jews of Berlin at Grünewald, 1991, Berlin, Photo: Moran Pearl.

A UBIQUITOUS MEMORIAL ADACHIARA ZEVI

A Contradiction in Terms Set against the vast backdrop of monuments and memorials, the following essay deals with the Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones) by the German artist Gunter Demnig, focusing on their properties through a comparison with similar or antithetical examples. Two preliminary aspects of this work should be explained at the outset: First, what are the Stolpersteine? The Stolpersteine are an art project dedicated to the memory of all the people deported by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 all over Europe for whatever reason: racial, political, military, Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled, victims of euthanasia. Simple 10- × 10-cm paving stones, covered by shiny brass plaques, etched with only few details, prefaced by the words “here lived”: the deportee’s name, date of birth, date and place of deportation, and date of death in an extermination camp. Set in the sidewalk in front of what was the deportee’s home, they mark the boundary between domestic life and the unknown. Second: what makes the Stolpersteine a turning point in the history of memorials to the extent that they deserve to be included in the category of “counter-monuments” or “monuments by defect“1 ? Their very structure and position contravene many attributes of traditional monuments. They do not take up any space: embedded in the street, they are invisible until we stumble upon them, not by intention but by pure chance – not a physical, but a mental and psychological stumbling. Despite this discreet presence, once installed they become an integral part of the city, of its toponymy. This renders them extremely unsettling, as demonstrated by repeated acts of vandalism. Some of the Stolpersteine have been spattered with paint to obliterate the truth they proclaim and others have been pulled from the ground, which was the case of three stones dedicated to the 1

See Adachiara Zevi, Monumenti per difetto: dalle Fosse Ardeatine alle pietre d’inciampo (Rome: Donzelli editore, 2014).

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Spizzichino family, which were installed right in front of the Ministry of Justice in Rome.2 Yet, what makes the Stolpersteine truly unique is their ubiquity. They are the first Europe-wide “ubiquitous memorial”: a contradiction in terms. If we consider uniqueness, a hypertrophic dimension, centrality, staticity, hierarchy, persistence, symmetry, rhetoric, indifference to place, durable materials, eloquence, and the expropriation of emotions as specific characteristics generally attributed to monuments, the Stolpersteine represent a radical alternative. In the seminal text The Culture of Cities, written in 1938 as Europe stood on the brink of World War II, the great American sociologist Lewis Mumford expressed a contradiction of comparative importance when referring to the binomial “monumentmodernity“: “The very notion of a modern monument is a contradiction in terms; if it is a monument, it cannot be modern, and if it is modern, it cannot be a monument.”3 Mumford reconsidered his position in 1957 and, with reference to the Mausoleum of the Ardeatine Caves in Rome built in 1950, wrote: “Images and words do not render justice to this monument; we must live and experience its contrasts, the eloquent omissions; we must repeat the pilgrimage.” 4 To paraphrase Mumford and speak of the Stolpersteine, then, it can be said: “If it is a monument, it cannot be ubiquitous, and it if is ubiquitous, it cannot be a monument.” The Stolpersteine are in fact a “horizontal” monument that expands like an oil slick, impossible to predict, potentially infinite, and transnational. They catch one by surprise, attracting attention with their shiny surfaces while one is walking in a city’s historic center, in middle-class and residential districts, or in housing estates and working-class suburbs, wherever the opponents of Nazi Fascism once lived. The Stolpersteine refute the centrality and centripetal force of the monument, the occupation of a prominent urban site to centrifugally expand out into the city and draw a map of the deportations that occurred within it. Their ubiquity derives from the fact that, unlike a monument that represents a plurality of individual stories in one unique work, the Stolpersteine, as the historian Régine Robin points out, deconstruct and

2

Via S. Maria in Monticelli 67, Rome. Lewis Mumford, The Cultures of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 438. 4 Lewis Mumford, “The Cave, the City, and the Flower,” The New Yorker, November 2, 1957. Reprinted as “Memorial of a Nazi Massacre,” in Lewis Mumford, My Works and Days (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 408–12. 3

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split so-called “collective memory”5 into a multitude of individual stories, translating the abstract and incommensurable number of 10,000,000 victims of Nazi Fascism, into ten million individuals whose dignity is restored simply by recording their names and tragic fates. As Gérard Wajcman noted in regard to the memorial 2146 Stones – Monument against Racism (2146 Steine – Mahnmal gegen Rassismus) by Jochen Gerz (b.1940) erected in Saarbrücken in 1993, which I discuss further on: “In this case, memory is above all a memory of names. Auschwitz is the proper name for the heart of darkness of the twentieth century. It is the proper name for that which was the Shoah: the destruction of six million names.”6 Equal in form, dimensions, materials, typeface, and value, differing only in the stories they recount, though all with the same tragic end, the Stolpersteine can be defined as the first “democratic” and nonhierarchical memorial: each neighborhood has its own monument to its own fallen. On the day announced for an installation, in each municipality the families of victims, residents, institutions, students, and their teachers await the arrival of the artist, who installs “their” monument. It is not the inhabitants of a neighborhood who converge toward the “center” to visit the monument, but it is the monument that comes to them, teaching them about the history of their part of the city. With a daring and blasphemous comparison, it could be said that between the monument and the Stolpersteine there exists the same difference as that which separates Temple Mount from the plurality of the synagogues of the Diaspora, the centrality of a nation from the nomadism of dispersion.

The Artist Born in Berlin in 1947, Gunter Demnig began his studies in art pedagogy at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin with Professor Herbert Kaufmann some 20 years later. He studied industrial design at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin between 1969 and 1970; art at the University of Kassel with Harry Kramer from 1971 to 1977, and restoration, planning, and management of monuments, again in Kassel from 1977 to 1979. In 1985 he opened a studio in Cologne, where, since 1994, he has also been 5

Régine Robin, I fantasmi della storia. Il passato europeo e le trappole della memoria, Italian trans. C. Saletti and L. Di Genio (Verona: Ombre corte, 2005), 92. The Italian book is a collection of essays and does not exist in that form neither in French nor in English. 6 Gérard Wajcman, “Un monumento invisibile,” in Quando è scultura, eds. C. Baldacci and C. Ricci et al. (Milan: Et al., 2010), 53.

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curating a series of exhibitions at the IGNIS Cultural Centre. Since 1987 he has been a member of the Internationales Künstler Gremium (International Artists Forum).7 In 2004 the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg awarded him the Max-Brauer-Prize and the Herbert WehnerMedal, followed in 2005 by the German Jewish History Award from the Obermayer Foundation. According to the sculptor Wolfgang Hahn, Demnig embodies the classic “can’t-be-done-doesn’t-exist!” type. He is an inventor and a designer, the kind of genius whose brain is in his fingers. Always in motion, he works continuously. The bigger the challenge, the better: work as deliverance.8 Between 1980 and 1985 Demnig produced eight works or “actions” in the landscape involving the continuous marking of his route. In 1980 he made an 818-km long white trail of letters using a “printing machine” to write the words Duftmarken Kassel – Paris from Kassel to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which took 24 days. Blood Trail (Kassel-London), executed in 1981, consists of a three-wheeled machine, adapted from parts of a bicycle and resembling a road or sports ground marker, and a strip of canvas 600 mm wide, marked with a line of pig’s blood. These objects survive from a 680-km trip that Demnig made from the Kunstakademie, Kassel, to the front steps of the Tate Gallery. The artist undertook the greater part of this journey on foot but also traveled by car and by ferry. The machine and the canvas are now part of the Tate’s permanent collection. Ariadne’s Thread (Ariadne-Faden), created in 1982, was a trail of thread from Kassel to Venice, linking the Kassel Documenta with the Venice Biennale. The next, related, project was the Kreidekreis, a chalk circle describing a 40-km radius around the city of Wuppertal, which he did in 1983. Since 1981 Demnig has been producing a series of “hydraulic sculptures” consisting of telescopic cylinders of soldered sheet zinc, each 7

The International Artists Forum (IKG) was founded in 1976 in Cologne by a group of well-known artists, including Joseph Beuys, Jochen Gerz, Gotthard Graubner, Klaus Staeck, among others. It was and is an association of artists, curators, and critics working in the field of the visual arts. The IKG is concerned with freedom of art, information, and press, the right of cultural self-determination, tolerance, and cultural diversity. It is a network that currently numbers 235 members in many countries aiming for continuous cooperation across borders; one main point has always been exchanges and meetings with East European artists. 8 Wolfgang Hahn, “Gunter Demnig, Helluva Guy,” in In Front of My Door: The ‘Stumbling Stones’ of Gunter Demnig, ed. Joachim Rönneper (Gelsenkirchen: Arachne Verlag, 2013), 50.

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marked with a brass plaque. This cycle includes Circuitus, a gravestone he erected in 2011 for the Artist Necropolis in Kassel. A project that was the brainchild of Harry Kramer, Artist Necropolis involved the construction of forty gravestones in an abandoned quarry on the outskirts of Kassel, near the Blue Lake, for the graves of the artists who designed them. In the words etched on plaques, on strips of lead, and on tree barks with the date, we can discern his favored “spokesmen” – people and public space. In 1992, at the height of a wave of racist attacks on foreigners living in Germany, Demnig stood up for human rights and etched the text of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 on billboards around Cologne.9

Figure 1 9

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

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Starting from the Sinti In 1990, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the deportation of 1,000 Sinti from Cologne, Demnig was invited to create an artwork by the Kölner Rom e.V., an association that fosters dialogue among Cologne’s citizens of all ethnic backgrounds. He traced the words Mai 1940 1,000 Roma und Sinti repeatedly on a 12-km-long banner, unfurled by a wheeled machine that he built himself (Fig. 1), which retraced the route from the Sinti dwellings to the railway station.10 The work marked the beginning of an ongoing artistic process in which Demnig addresses the crimes of the Nazi regime. After 3 years, as the banner disintegrated, pressure from local citizenry led to the same text being etched into brass plates and set into the ground in twenty-two places in the city. By 1992, at the time of the debate about welcoming Roma refugees fleeing former Yugoslavia, Demnig had already installed the first Stolperstein in front of the Town Hall in Cologne: the letters punched into the brass quote the first words of Heinrich Himmler’s 1942 decree ordering the deportation of the Sinti and Roma to Auschwitz. A complaint from a bigoted elderly woman who declared that gypsies had never lived in the neighborhood prompted Demnig to increase and expand his project.11 If it was possible to negate events in one’s own backyard, just imagine how easy it would be to deny those in faraway places! Hence, he made the decision, more ethical than artistic, to develop a project on memory that would neatly, but undeniably, recount the stories of all of the victims of Nazi fascism between 1933 and 1945. How could one claim that Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau, Bergen Belsen, Wolfsberg, Hartheim, Gross Rosen, Landsberg, Meppen, or the Ardeatine Caves had never existed when names, dates, and places are permanently etched in stone? These stones would be incontrovertible evidence of truths too uncomfortable for those who had yet to face up to the past. Hence the Stolpersteine were born out of a clamorous act of denial and represent an extraordinary antidote to negationism and revisionism. The first stones in Cologne’s Green Market District were installed at Demnig’s initiative in 1995 without any official authorization; the following year, fifty-one stones were installed in Berlin-Kreuzberg in connection with the exhibition Artists Explore Auschwitz (Künstler forschen nach Auschwitz) in the Neue Galerie für Bildende Kunst. The original stones in Cologne and Kreuzberg were only legalized in 2000, and 10

Karola Fings, Stolpersteine: Gunter Demnig und sein Projekt /Gunter Demnig and His Project (Cologne: Emons, 2007). 11 Related to the author in conversation.

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6 years later the ones set in the other fifteen municipalities of Berlin were also legalized. Many cities and countries still prohibit or create problems for the installation, primarily for two reasons. The municipalities prefer them not to be too visible, whereas the Jewish communities do not like the idea that people can walk on the names of their dead. The Munich city council, for instance, banned them in 2004, allowing them to be placed only in private spaces as the walls of houses where victims had once resided. Charlotte Knobloch, leader of Munich’s Jewish community and former president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany declared that the stones were not respectful of the victims they were intended to honor. Knobloch, who survived Nazi persecution during World War II by hiding with a Catholic family, explained her position: “People murdered in the Holocaust deserve better than a plaque in the dust, street dirt and even worse filth.”12 Nevertheless, Terry Swartzberg, an American Jew who has been living in Munich for more than 30 years and has headed the Stolpersteine Initiative for Munich to get the stones installed in the city since 2011, garnered nearly 100,000 signatures for his Change.org petition, “End the Shameful Ban on Stolpersteine in Munich!“ to lobby Munich’s city council to lift the ban, but it was reaffirmed in 2015. In France, several stones in Vendée are dedicated to forced laborers who were killed in the Hamburg bombings. They were placed centrally near the Monuments aux Morts, six stones in an open space in Cluny. In addition, four stones have been laid in Russia and seven in Ukraine. Despite obstructionism, to date 55,000 Stolpersteine have been laid in seventeen European countries and in 898 cities in Germany alone. These installations were made possible, above all, by the commitment of free associations of citizens, such as the Initiative Stolpersteine für München and Remembering and Learning for the Future in Munich, Rom in Cologne, and Arteinmemoria in Rome, which brought the project to Italy in 2010.13 Discreet, horizontal, and ubiquitous, the Stolpersteine are a work in progress: their number is not established a priori or completely defined but multiplies in time and space in response to requests made by the families of victims, institutions, or private citizens. Demnig is quoted as saying:

12 Stav Ziv, “Munich to Continue Ban of Stumbling Stone Holocaust Memorials,” Newsweek, July 29, 2015, accessed August 11, 2016, http://europe.newsweek.com/munich-continue-ban-stumbling-stone-holocaustmemorials-330985?rm=eu 13 See http://www.arteinmemoria.com/memoriedinciampo/home.htm

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A Ubiquitous Memorial I was not clear about the dimensions of the action at first. The undertaking as a whole, which is spreading all over Europe, is a growing, decentralized monument, an art work in perpetual progress. I regard the “stumbling stones” as a kind of “social sculpture.” Survivors who had said to themselves “Never again to Germany,” come to attend the installation of the stones. Witnesses turn up who had kept silent for decades. People talk, speak to each other again. I don’t think one can ask for more. A picture, a painting hangs in the museum, my art is at everyone’s feet.14

Demnig intends to personally install a stone for every victim, a total of 10,000,000 stones across Europe, a titanic and virtually impossible undertaking. He is fully aware that he will never achieve even a fraction of this goal: at his current pace it would take 4,250 years to lay them all, a truly biblical time. “When will I place my last stone? I don’t know, of course. Picasso worked until he was 90,” Demnig noted ironically. 15 In cynical and ephemeral times of rapid consumption and easy successes, dedicating one’s life to a work destined to remain unfinished only increases its ethical value and heretical strength. Owing to the fact that the artist is always on move, the organization behind such a vast undertaking is anything but simple. It is difficult to establish the first contact with the artist; it is difficult to translate the complexity of the individual stories into the concise and univocal language that Demnig demands for the texts etched into the stones; and, finally, it is difficult to find a date in his incredibly busy calendar. However, after these preliminary difficulties and reciprocal suspicions were overcome, the process became easier for those who commission the stones, almost automatic. The artist is a bit of an introvert, a man of few words, direct and sincere. A hard worker, he is fully aware of the mission he has undertaken, without presumption, narcissism, or arrogance; he suffers through ceremonial events, he adapts, and is not at all temperamental. With so little time at his disposal, he demands efficiency, rigor and precision. How, we may ask, does he see himself?: I am not a memory producer. We work as a team of four. Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer in Berlin cuts the stones, Anna Warda coordinates my timetable in Germany, Anne Thomas is responsible for the Stolpersteine outside Germany and I am on the move, installing the stones. At the beginning, I did everything myself: gathering data, planning the

14

Joachim Rönneper, “Between Mother and Father the Child,” in In Front of My Door: The “Stumbling Stones” of Gunter Demnig, 11. 15 Ibid., 12.

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placements throughout Germany, maintaining contacts with the various initiators, etc.16

Recalling the Past to Anticipate the Future “It is not just a monument to the past but an admonishment for the future,” declares Demnig. 17 By overlapping past and present, the stones recall history to ward off its repetition. Caught by surprise while walking, our reaction is instinctive and unpredictable. The Stolpersteine represent a powerful litmus test: they cannot be ignored by anyone stumbling upon them. A passerby may stop to read, meditate, or empathize, or he/she may keep walking or turn way with the same guilty indifference as the accomplices to the barbaric acts recounted on the stones themselves. Demnig is telling us that indifference is the antechamber to Auschwitz, yesterday as today. It is the same indifference that long before Auschwitz led German citizens to accept the sudden disappearance of their neighbors. So close and tangible, the stories told by the stones affect each one of us because we live in the same city and dwell in the same house. A woman living in a building in Rome in front of which are three stones, confesses: I am Spanish and I have lived in Rome for 25 years. I knew about the searches that took place on October 16, 1943, in Rome, and that without doubt they also took place outside the ghetto, but to find three Stolpersteine in my street, one being dedicated to a 9-year-old child, was very emotional. I cannot imagine living in 1943 on this street, hearing the trucks come to take my neighbors away knowing I would never see them again, knowing that it was the Nazis who came for them, perhaps aided in their identification by Italians. I wonder whether I would have had the courage to hide or help them.18

A Wellspring of History The information appearing on the stones is the result of painstaking research: the identification of deportees’ homes, often no longer coinciding with the current toponymy of the city, and the stories told by family members and verified in memory books and archives serve to augment research on World War II and the deportations. The urban map drawn by the Stolpersteine allows us to visualize both the presence of the 16

Ibid., 10. Ibid., 11. 18 Unpublished text written for the second edition of “Memorie d’inciampo a Roma” (Rome, January 13, 2011). 17

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Jewish population and the scale of resistance to Nazi Fascism, debunking simplifications and clichés: for example, the stones tell us that the Jewish and political deportations in Rome were not confined to October 16, 1943, or January 4, 1944,19 but continued until 1945, on the verge of liberation, owing to the collaboration of the Fascists and even common people, gainsaying the myth of the “goodhearted Italian.” 20 By decentralizing history, the stones become a powerful tool by which the city’s inhabitants, especially the young, can learn about their city. They prove that these horrendous acts, which may seem so distant, took place outside their own homes and that it was possible to resist, even at the risk of one’s life. As Demnig notes: “A consequence of my installing these stones year in, year out is that, as I can observe, time and again, and more and more, young people become interested in the Holocaust. Students question surviving witnesses, conduct on-site investigations, do research work with a real commitment.”21 Some of the stones in Rome, for example, tell for the first time the story of the courageous resistance of the Carabinieri (an armed force of the Italian Republic). 22 Judged unreliable by the German command led by Kappler and Graziani of the Italian Social Republic, owing to the assistance they offered to the Resistance against German occupation in Naples and Rome, some 2,000 Carabinieri, rank and file as well as officers, were arrested in their barracks on October 7, 1943. This occurred one week before more than 1,000 Jews were deported from the ghetto, packed into trucks, and shipped off to concentration camps in Austria, Germany, and Poland along with Italian Military Internees (IMI), who were imprisoned by the Germans on all fronts after September 8, 1943. The Carabinieri were stripped of their status as prisoners of war and deprived of the privileges of international protection. Unlike other prisoners, they were offered a choice: to remain in the camps or fight for the German army or the Italian Social Republic. Almost all had the 19

See Brunello Mantelli, ed., Il libro dei deportati. Deportati, deportatori, tempi, luoghi (Milan: Mursia, 2010); Giacomo Debenedetti, 16 ottobre 1943 (Turin: Einaudi, 2015) (orig. ed. OET, Rome 1945); Eugenio Iafrate, Elementi indesiderabili. Storia e memorie di un “trasporto,” Roma – Mauthausen 1944, ed. Elisa Guida (Rome: Chillemi, 2015). 20 Goodhearted Italian is the title of a 1965 film directed by Giuseppe De Santis from which originated the myth that Italians did not have any responsibility for the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II. 21 Rönneper, “Between Mother and Father,” 10. 22 See Anna Maria Casavola, 7 ottobre 1943. La deportazione dei carabinieri romani nei Lager nazisti (Rome: Edizioni Studium, 2008).

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courage to say “No,” paying the very high price of death by starvation, torture, and abuse. Since 2010, twelve stones in front of a barracks in Viale Giulio Cesare in Rome recall their sacrifice (Fig. 2).

Figure 2

Elsewhere, other stones have been placed within the context of a millenary history. In Via Urbana 2, in the heart of the Monti neighborhood in Rome, for example, a Stolperstein commemorates Don Pietro Pappagallo, the priest immortalized by Aldo Fabrizi in his extraordinary performance in Roma città aperta by Roberto Rossellini. During the Nazi occupation of the city, Don Pietro offered asylum inside the Convent of Bambin Gesù to the persecuted “of any faith and condition.” Denounced by a German spy, he was arrested on January 29, 1944, condemned to death, and assassinated in the Ardeatine Caves on March 24 of that year. The stone was commissioned by Don Francesco Pesce, the current pastor at the Church of Madonna ai Monti, the church that was founded by Pope Paul III in 1543 at the height of the Counter-Reformation. Until Italian unification in 1870 and the closure of the ghettos, it was the headquarters of the Pia casa dei catecumeni, the College of the Neophytes, which was the site of forced baptisms of Jews and infidels in general. Yet, this same church distinguished itself during the Nazi occupation as a safe haven for the persecuted. More than twenty stones alongside the building memorialize the relatives of Giulia Spizzichino who were

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A Ubiquitous Memorial

murdered in Auschwitz and at the Ardeatine Caves (Fig. 3).23 Those small and discrete signs set into the surface of the street thus embrace centuries of dramatic and controversial history, with which the world has yet to fully come to grips. Together they achieve what the artist Jochen Gerz judged to be the primary role of memory: transforming yesterday’s enemies into today’s friends. This is precisely the goal of The Future Monument (2004) in Coventry, England, with the involvement of more than 5,000 citizens, and of The Square of the European Promise (2011) in Bochum, Germany, where citizens were invited to sign their name on the pavement of the square.24

Figure 3 23

Via Madonna dei Monti 82, Rome. See Adachiara Zevi, “Memory’s Print,” in Art in Memory 6, exhibition cat., Ostia Antica Synagogue, January–April 2011 (Rome: Fondazione Volume!, 2011), 72–75.

24

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For All Deportees As I already noted, Demnig does not favor one category of deportees, but relates to them all: “My ‘stumbling stones’ are a counter-model or supplement to the steles in Berlin, which I find good artistically but a mistake in terms of thematic content: the monument should from the start have been dedicated to all the various groups of victims.”ʹͷ He is against the “war among memories,” which, since the 1980s, has pitted victims, memories, memorials, and commemorations against one another. Whereas prior to the 1970s racial persecution was seen within the context of political persecution according to a paradigm that prioritized resistance to Nazi Fascism, with the advent of the “era of the witness,” 26 political persecution was overshadowed by racial persecution. Divorced from the historical context that generated it, memory of the Holocaust has gradually assumed an absolute universal value, which accounts for the proliferation of monuments, museums, research centers, university chairs, and publications dedicated to the Holocaust since the 1990s. The odyssey of the Italian Memorial in Pavilion 21 at the camp in Auschwitz,ʹ͹ created in 1980 by the National Association of Ex-Deportees into the Nazi Camps (ANED), is a telling example. Consisting of a prestigious architectural and artistic structure in the shape of a spiral, 80 m long, designed by the well-known architectural firm B.B.P.R. in Milan, it recounts the history of Italy from 1922 to 1945, before and after the deportations, because, as Primo Levi warned in his introductory text: “The history of the deportations and extermination camps, the history of this place, cannot be separated from the history of Fascist tyrannies in Europe.” ʹͺ Yet in 2008, with the excuse that the memorial would no longer adhere to the new didactic and museographic regulations, the museum’s director and the Polish government decided to dismantle it; fortunately the city of Florence decided to host it in a factory assigned beforehand to contemporary art. In reality, what was really questioned was the “politically oriented” nature of the memorial, as attested by the presence of the hammer and sickle and the faces of anti-Fascist fighters such as Antonio Gramsci. The political character of the ANED memorial, coupled with Italian Jewry’s wish to dedicate the memorial specifically to 25

Demnig, “Between Mother and Father,” 10–11. Annette Wieviorka, L’era del testimone (Milan: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 1999). 27 Elisabetta Ruffini, ed., “La vicenda del Memoriale italiano di Auschwitz,” in Studi e ricerche di storia contemporanea, no. 74 (December 2010). 28 See http://www.deportati.it/lager/alvisitatore.html 26

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the Jewish Holocaust, led the Union of Italian Jewish Communities to join the chorus of detractors of the memorial, despite the initial consensus regarding its construction in 1980. That instance accents how important it is for Demnig to dedicate his stones to all deportees, without distinction. A few cases can be cited as examples: Dozens of stones in the ghetto in Rome recall people deported after the October 16, 1943, raid. Other stones in Rome’s ™‘”‹‰Ǧ…Žƒ•• •—„—”„• and in front of the Regina Coeli prison evoke the anti-Fascist resistance of such individuals as Gioacchino Gesmundo, Alberto Pascucci, Jean Bourdet, and Paskvala Blazevic, who were murdered in the Ardeatine Caves; shipped to Mauthausen on the January 4, 1944, convoy, the first with political deportees; or rounded up in the Quadraro neighborhood on April 7 of the same year. Only one Jew was deported from Prato in Tuscany, whereas 150 workers, taken from the Lucchesi and Campolmi factories on March 8, 1944, guilty only of participating in a general strike the day before and murdered in Mauthausen-Ebensee, are memorialized by stones installed in front of the spaces where they once worked. In Genoa, a stone in the Galleria Mazzini recalls the figure of Chief Rabbi Reuven Riccardo Pacifici, arrested by the Gestapo on November 2, 1943, taken to Marassi Prison, loaded onto a train to Milan, and murdered upon arrival at Auschwitz. One could continue with such histories in Turin, Venice, Siena, L’Aquila, Brescia, Ravenna…

Private Memory Becomes Public “Deconstructing and splitting so-called collective memory,” 29 as Robin suggests, personalizes history, bringing it closer and making it more tangible. It signifies above all restoring a name and dignity to a person reduced to a number and “bringing home” those whose lives ended in a mass grave or in ashes. Those who never returned left no trace: the Holocaust, Wajcman notes, is a destruction without ruins. 30 The Stolpersteine thus mark the only places for recording those who never returned, sites as unique and personal as their own homes. Although obviously not a tomb, the stone represents the only place where it is possible to gather and remember, the smallest lieu de memoire31 we can imagine, just enough space to etch the essential information identifying the 29

Robin, I fantasmi della storia, 92. Gérard Wajcman, L’objet du siècle (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1998), 21. 31 Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). 30

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beginning and end of a life. Many leave flowers; some give up on commissioning a stone because they cannot stand to see passersby walk on the name of their beloved relative. The families of victims who commission the Stolpersteine offer the public a private memory, jealously held over time, and through this passing of the torch of memory, citizens and institutions assume the responsibility for its safeguarding and transmission. The positioning of a plaque on a building façade requires the approval of the house’s owners, but the sidewalk belongs to everybody and the permission to install the stones is up to the municipality that endorses the project. The fact that some of the stones are clean and polished, others tarnished and neglected, others still desecrated demonstrates how this responsibility is often shamefully neglected. To commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht in Berlin, on November 9, 2013, historians and students offered guided tours of the Stolpersteine to polish them and tell their stories. The same was done for the Stolpersteine in the ghetto in Rome to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the October 16, 1943, raid. Demnig notes: “What motivates me particularly is the always moving encounter with relatives of the murdered. During my last tour, for example, a family came from California, including a surviving daughter. Three generations came. A fourth one was still under wraps: a pregnancy, a big belly.”32 The “stumbling stones,” whose placement reveals degrees of relationships (children between parents, grandparents above children and grandchildren), bring together for the first time family members from the four corners of the world. The request for the stones, as well as the individualization of the places to install them becomes an occasion to strengthen or establish new connections among relatives. For the first time they have a place to remember and to transmit their memories to future generations. As Alberta Levi Temin explains: “My loved ones, at least their names, returning home, are no longer blowing in the wind. Here, on this sidewalk walks life, and their names will take part.”33 Thus, the placing of the stones is for the families a solemn ritual act, a true ceremony. Demnig confirms: “If some forty people attend with genuine interest and sympathy, something like joy arises among the relations, because now, finally, the memory has found a place in the midst of life.”34 Family photographs showing four or five generations reflect the history of an entire century. Family involvement is stronger in the case of 32

Demnig, “Between Mother and Father,” 10. Text written for the first edition of “Memorie d’inciampo” (Rome, 2010), http://www.arteinmemoria.com/memoriedinciampo/instal/flaminia21_s.htm 34 Demnig, “Between Mother and Father,” 10. 33

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Jewish deportation because whole families were deported at once, whereas political deportation involved single fighters, mostly men, opponents of Nazi Fascism. Stolpersteine in fact create not only an urban map of deportation, but also the genealogical tree of deported families: children and grandchildren dedicate them to their parents and grandparents, and through these same stones, children in turn transmit the memory of great-grandparents to their own sons and daughters, who are the great-grandchildren of the victims. Moreover, the German verb stolpern has a twofold meaning: “to stumble upon” and “to activate memory.” Precisely for their value as an act of remembering and presence, the Stolpersteine evoke the avanim (stones) that Jews leave on the tombs of loved ones. As the root of the Hebrew word even (stone) is the same as aba and ben, father and son, the stone is a unit that acquires strength through dialogue and the transmission of values from one generation to the next, from fathers to sons, from masters to students. That is why it is so important to involve students in the project, having them participate in the laying of the stones, learning, commenting, and hearing the stories of the deported translate into becoming witnesses to a continuing story – a role entrusted since prehistoric times to the stone, and not to the monument. Just one example of the transmission of memory through the Stolpersteine: In 2012, Augusto Piperno, together with his wife Daniela Temin, commissioned two stones in Viale Giulio Cesare 223 in Rome in memory of Augusto’s grandfather, whose name he carries, and his wife. Both stones bear the same text: arrested on 16 October 1943, deported to Auschwitz, murdered on 23 October upon their arrival in the camp, after the first selection. A year after viewing the two stones dedicated to her great-grandparents, Gaia Piperno, Augusto and Daniela’s daughter, came up with an idea. Her project, which involved thirty-five greatgrandchildren living in Italy, France, Israel, the United States, Argentina, and India, who had never had the occasion to meet, was named Masa (travel in Hebrew), was to retrace her great-grandparent’s journey from Viale Giulio Cesare to Auschwitz, but in the opposite direction. All the cousins met in Krakow: We then traveled in Auschwitz. For many of us it was the first visit to an extermination camp, but we wanted to do it together, to comfort one another and because the idea of arriving as a group of thirty-five

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descendants of our great- grandparents was as powerful a message as we could send.35

From Auschwitz, they traveled back to Italy, arriving in September 2014 at the Tiburtina station. The journey was not intended to be commemorative. “There is more than simple pride in saying: you may have killed our great-grandparents but not their future. There is also, and above all, the desire to reappropriate our past and make it a common heritage.” The cousins had gathered information about their greatgrandparents, prepared posters in three languages, and interviewed relatives and friends. The next day they met in front of the Stolpersteine in Viale Giulio Cesare, where everything began. This episode shows how the exchange between private and public memory is a two-way process. The decision to entrust the memory of a family to the community created an opportunity within the same family unit for the discovery of new ties and the consolidation of those that already existed.

A Stolperstein as a “Counter-Monument” It must be remembered that the Stolpersteine are an artistic project on memory. Of what kind? Dimension, geometric shape, and unlimited repetition of the same module make the Stolpersteine close to the Minimalist serial and modular structures, like those of Donald Judd or Sol LeWitt. On the other hand, entrusted to the cold and impersonal instrument of writing, an-iconic, a-chromatic, and devoid of gesture, they can certainly be ascribed to the field of conceptual art. Demnig noted in 2013, “Everything I have done artistically to this day pertains to conceptual art.”36 Adopting the same dimensions, the same material, the same graphic layout, and the same typeface, rejecting suggestions of concessions or exceptions, Demnig makes each stone unmistakably part of a unique project. The artist himself engraves the texts on the stones, but the conditio sine qua non for the authenticity of the project is that, after deciding on its location and position, he personally installs each stone. Thus, despite their conceptual nature, the Stolpersteine have a strong authorial impact. Each stone is Demnig’s testimony, and kneeling to lay it is his gesture of respect toward the victim:

35

Gadi Piperno, “16 ottobre – Riprendiamoci la nostra storia,” in Moked: Il portale dell’ebraismo italiano (http://moked.it/blog/2013/10/16/16-ottobre-riprendiamocila-nostra-storia/). 36 Demnig, “Between Mother and Father,” 11.

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A Ubiquitous Memorial I am horrified each time I etch the names, letter after letter. Yet this is part of the project, because in this way I remind myself that behind that name there is a single individual. Children, men and women who were neighbours, classmates, friends and colleagues. Each name evokes an image for me. I visit the site, the street, in front of the house where the person lived. The installation of each Stolperstein is a painful process, but also a positive one, because it represents a return home, at least of someone’s memory.37

The artist who first theorized conceptual art was the American Sol LeWitt. “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.” 38 Focusing on wall drawings, he wrote: “The artist conceives and plans the wall drawing. It is realized by draftsmen (the artist can act as his own draftsman); the plan (written, spoken or drawn) is interpreted by the draftsman”39 A wall drawing is conceived by the artist in unpredictable polyphonies, but is painted by his assistants “to avoid dirtying his hands.” In contrast, Demnig conceives the same work over and over, with an identical form, dimensions and materials, entrusting its variability, other than to text and site, to the fact of personally and manually installing each stone. In the dialectic between impartiality and authorship, art reflects the dispute between the neutrality of history and the empathy of the testimonial. Thus someone who imagines designing, actualizing, and installing Stolpersteine on his/her own underestimates their complexity, to the same degree that someone, standing in front of a work of abstract, minimalist, or conceptual art triumphantly declares “I could do that as well.” Demnig’s artistic process is so ingenious that it appears to exclude proselytes. Yet, also from the conceptual fold Stolpersteine are surprisingly similar to a coeval work of the Dutch artist Jan Dibbets (b. 1941), the Hommage à Arago (1994; Fig. 4). The work was done in memory of François Arago, the eminent astronomer and director of the Paris Observatory, who was commissioned in 1806 to extend the Paris meridian as far as the Balearic Islands, the line crossing France from north

37

Fings, Stolpersteine, 37. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June, 1967). Republished in Adachiara Zevi, ed., Sol LeWitt Critical Texts (Rome: I Libri di A.E.I.U.O e Incontri Internazionali d’Arte, 1994), 78. 39 Sol LeWitt, “Doing Wall Drawings,” Art Now 3, no. 2 (June, 1971). Republished in Zevi, Sol LeWitt Critical Texts, 95. 38

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to south. This line was the original prime meridian from 1799 until 1884, at which time it was replaced by the prime meridian in Greenwich.

Figure 4

In 1893, exactly 40 years after Arago’s death, Paris dedicated a bronze statue to his memory, which rested on a tall base in Place de l’Île-de-Sein,

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where the Paris meridian cuts Boulevard Arago. When the Nazis occupied Paris, the statue was removed and melted down for its lead. What was to be done, then, with a pedestal without its statue? A further 50 years would pass before Dibbets was commissioned to replace the monument. He conceived it as an imaginary monument along the imaginary line of the Paris meridian. A total of 135 bronze medallions, each 12 cm in diameter, bearing the name of Arago between two letters indicating North and South inserted into the street surface, like the Stolpersteine, trace a line from the pedestal of the original monument that extends north and south across six arrondissements. Thus, Dibbets’s counter-monument helps recall a legendary figure by repeating his name along the meridian he invented and for which he is famous.

Figure 5

Even more surprising are Stolpersteine (Fig. 5) by the Israeli artist Ariel Schlesinger (b. 1980), which he started working on in 2014. He came across the Stolpersteine in Berlin and was very curious to know what was beneath them, the invisible part buried in the ground. When he saw them on the Internet, he decided to deepen the physical aspect of the work. He liked the stones before their installation. What would be left of them once the aspect related to memory through the names and the texts carved into the brass surface was removed? He built Stolpersteine exactly like Demnig’s: paving stones of the same dimensions, same material, same

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brass plaques, and same title but with two crucial differences: without any text and without a specific site where they are to be buried, they are mute and alienated; they are, as the artist suggests, “displaced stones,” ready to host new names or to travel somewhere else. They are “stumbling stones” not only visually and emotionally but also physically. This is what the artist had to say during their presentation at the Dvir Gallery in Tel Aviv in 2014: The stones are detached from any restraints, from the characteristics that make them individual, stripping them naked from what makes them personal. First, detached from the ground, the place where they are laid in the sidewalk, the stones are free to travel. Second, erasing the name that is written on them, they are not associated with a person, an individual. Turning them into game blocks, suggesting new ways to use them, investigating the characteristics of a landmark, do we need a name and a place to evoke a memory? The actual materiality of the project itself attracted me, the warm brass embedded in the cold cement.40

Schlesinger likes their minimalistic aspect, which reminds him the works of Carl Andre. It is precisely the name, Schlesinger reminds us, that translates a simple minimalist sculpture into a dedicated space of memory. He considers his Stolpersteine as homage to Demnig and his work. It is not the same for Demnig who does not at all appreciate what he considers a dishonest imitation! Despite the fact that James Young inexplicably ignores Demnig’s Stolpersteine in his very well-known texts on memorials, 41 they undoubtedly belong to the field of counter-monuments, which he defines as “memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their existence.”42 If one looks at Memorial against Fascism, War, Violence – for Peace and Human Rights (Mahnmal gegen Faschismus Mahnmal gegen Faschismus, Krieg, Gewalt – für Frieden und Menschenrechte) by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev (b. 1948) (1986) or Gerz’s 2146 Stones – Monument against Racism (1993), discussed below, it comes as no surprise that most of these counter-monuments are designed by German artists or are located in Germany. In fact, the end of World War II marked 40

Notes sent to the author. James. E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000); James E. Young, The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, exhibition cat. (New York and Munich: Prestel 1994). 42 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust, Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 27. 41

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the first time a nation was called upon to commemorate not its heroes or victims, but its crimes and its guilt.43 This radical change in perspective neutralized the available artistic languages – basically realism and abstraction – and mandated the search for new forms that could simultaneously express the need, almost the obsession, to remember the past. This desire to remember reflects the need to set oneself apart from the generation of perpetrators – and a need to forget in order to build a new national identity free from nostalgia and the sense of guilt, yet still deeply aware of that same past. It is what Andrea Zach calls: a “decentered attachment to the past.”44 Gerz, the creator of the “invisible monument,” notes: Faced with Germany’s past, a number of people of my age have always been aware of not knowing how to behave. They exercise a sort of sublime repression of the past. Hence my idea of repressing the work of art. My intention is to turn this relation to the past into a public event.45… The most important factor in my life remains the war I didn’t fight.… Perhaps this explains why the notion of absence is so important in my life and work.46

For Gerz, memory is recalling something that he did not see and that the Germans did not wish to see: As a child I saw “nothing,” and even this belongs to memory. What was this “nothing”? My personal experience was swallowed by what I came to know when all was done and it was too late. Childhood, my life, disappeared. This is when I began the slow reconstruction of the fractured “self.47

Gerz’s most well-known counter-monument is undoubtedly the abovementioned 2146 Stones – Monument against Fascism. 48 As the title indicates, it is not a simple commemorative monument created to 43

Ibid., 21. Andrea Zach, “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin: The ‘Spectacular [A]ffect’ of Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” The International Journal of Žižek Studies, no. 2 (2012): 11. 45 Jacqueline Lichtenstein and Gérard Wajcman, “Jochen Gerz: Invisible Monument,” Art Press, no. 179 (April, 1993): E3. 46 Jean-François Chevrier, “Jochen Gerz, Trafic d’Origines et Images de Paix,” Galeries Magazine, no. 31 (June-July, 1989): 69. 47 Alexander Pühringer, “Das Mahnmal Bist du Selbst,” Untitled: The State of the Art, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 120–21. 48 See Moran Pearl’s discussion of this monument in Chapter 1 of this volume. 44

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passively recall victims, but is, rather, an “active” monument that is at the same time “counter” to a past of war and oppression and “in favor” of a future of peace and justice. Thus, remembering means working for a better future. A 12-m-high lead column in the commercial heart of Hamburg, which is inhabited largely by immigrants, literally sank into the ground over 7 years. How? Thanks to the public, which was invited to sign and thus endorse the memorial, wherein each signature caused an imperceptible sinking. After 70,000 signatures, the monument disappeared into the earth, leaving only a set of Instructions for Use in seven languages, which includes the following statement: “In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.” Like the Stolpersteine, Gerz’s work is now a horizontal memorial that belongs to the street and can be walked on: a “memory that burns beneath our feet.”49 Instead of entrusting memory to the monument, the public, active in its destruction, assumes the responsibility for remembering the past in order to affirm peace and human rights in the present. It was precisely the public’s signature, its testimonial, that produced the physical disappearance of the monument. Thus, the spectator, became the coauthor, an accomplice in the actualization-disappearance of the work. In fact, without the signatures, the column would have remained in place, as an abstract monument, a stele. Signatures, but also insults, swastikas, antiSemitic and xenophobic phrases, written not only by Fascists and racists, but also by those unable to tolerate the “indifference” of the monument, were in evidence. For the last, the fact that the monument expressed no emotions, that it neither consoled nor reconciled, but provocatively claimed a position and assumption of responsibility was obviously insupportable. The monument thus became a “mirror of society,” reflecting the attitudes and sentiments of the population, rather than a formal and deferential respect. In substituting monuments with living people, Gerz’s work becomes a living monument: another contradiction in terms. Wajcman opines: Gerz’s monument materially creates an oxymoron: it is a living monument, which is the opposite of the monument…. What we see is that there is nothing to see. We see the removal of memory. This signifies that Gerz’s monument has not fixed memory in history, as monuments generally do.… It is not a site where memory is petrified in history; it is an object that calls

49

Wajcman, “Un monumento invisibile,” 52.

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people to an act of memory. It renders them the bearers of memory and makes each of them a monument.50

Gerz’s monument represents a true revolution. After centuries, the antimonumental and anti-idolatry impulse finds its most proper expression in the physical disappearance of the monument and the assumption, by each individual, of the responsibility of remembering through the education of people to be different and aware. Moreover, according to Wajcman, absence is the “absolute heart of this modern century.”51 Only art, whose role is to exhibit, is capable of “exposing what cannot be represented in either words or images.”52 Gerz’s 2146 Stones – Monument against Racism was conceived from the beginning as an “invisible monument.” A total of 2,146 of the 8,000 stones paving the square in front of the Castle of Saarbrücken, the former Gestapo headquarters and now Parliament of the Saar, were uprooted; each base was etched with the name of one of the 2,146 German Jewish cemeteries that existed in 1939 and returned to its original position, thus becoming invisible. The only visible trace was the renaming of Castle Square to the Square of the Invisible Monument. An invisible monument: another oxymoron. It renders visible the oblivion, the very disappearance of 2,146 Jewish cemeteries from Germany: “It makes disappearance and oblivion present.”53 Unlike the Stolpersteine, the names of the dead are not restored to the living to be remembered but, as it involves cemeteries, they are buried, underscoring the Nazi’s total destruction of real people, of their names, possessions, tombs, and cemeteries: “A monument to absence in an absent monument and for the absent.”54 Facing the ground, invisible to the living, the names are metaphorically legible only by the dead or, according to Wajcman, “by future archaeologists.”55 Aschrott Fountain Monument in Kassel by the Polish artist Horst Hoheisel (b.1944; Fig. 6) is also an invisible counter-monument. It replicates the Aschrott Fountain, donated to the city by a Jew named Sigmund Aschrott, which was destroyed by the Nazis. Hoheisel reconstructed it in a form identical to the original but rather than placing it in the square, turned it upside down and buried it 12 m into the earth. “The sunken fountain is not the memorial. It is only history transformed into a 50

Ibid., 47. Ibid., 239. 52 Ibid., 23. 53 Ibid., 46–47. 54 Ibid., 54. 55 Ibid., 53. 51

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pedestal, an invitation to passers-by and those who stop to search for the memorial in their minds.”56

Figure 6

Empty Library: In Memory of the Nazi Book Burning (Bibliothek Denkmal Die Bücherverbrennungvom), designed by the Israeli artist Micha Ullman (b. 1939) in Bebelplatz in Berlin, where 20,000 books were burned by the Nazis on May 10, 1933, is also a nearly invisible countermonument. A transparent surface at street level, visible only when one actively searches for it, reveals a white, bright hypogeal room, wrapped in empty shelves designed to contain the same number of books that were burned. The Stolpersteine, as already noted, adopt writing as their artistic language, consisting of the names of the victims. The first countermonument to use that language was the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the black granite wedge bearing 57,000 names of those killed in Vietnam between 1959, the year the war began and when the artist Maya Lin was born, and 1975. With discretion and sobriety, it declares the costs of an unjust and lost war in terms of human lives. Mirrored in the 56

Young, The Texture of Memory, 46.

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black granite surface etched with names, today’s visitors come face to face with the past. The French artist Christian Boltanski (b.1944) also recalls people by their names. In The Inhabitants of the Hotel Saint-Aignan in 1939 (Les habitants de l’hôtel de Saint-Aignan en 1939; 1998), in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme in rue du Temple, Paris, the names of Jews who settled there at the turn of the last century, craftsman coming from Eastern Europe to open small shops, are randomly placed on the wall of the interior courtyard in the understated form of funeral announcements. In Missing House (La maison manquante;1990) in Berlin, in the historic quarter of Scheunenviertel, Boltanski placed similar announcements with the names, professions, date of arrest, generally the year 1942, and date of death on the walls of buildings adjacent to the one destroyed by bombings, in places that correspond to the storeys where the victims’ apartments had been. Finally, the Stolpersteine belong to what Régine Robin defines as “memories of proximity,”57 those memories camouflaged within our daily lives. In this respect, the Stolpersteine are comparable to Places of Remembrance in the Bavarian Quarter – Memorial in BerlinSchoeneberg. Marginalization, Loss of Rights, Expulsion, Deportation and Murder of Berlin Jews from 1933 to 1945 (Orte des Erinnerns im Bayerischen Viertel. Denkmal im Berlin- Schoeneberg. Ausgrenzung und Entrechtung, Vertreibung, Deportation und Ermordung von Berliner Juden in den Jahren 1933 bis 1945), created in 1993 by the German artists Renata Stih (b. 1955) and Frieder Schnock (b. 1953) in BerlinSchoeneberg. 58 In the latter project, eighty banners were hung from lampposts of the Bayerischen Viertel, known as the Jewish Switzerland and inhabited at one time by Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, among other well-known personalities. Each two-sided banner bears an antiJewish law issued in 1938 on one side and a stylized image of a familiar object illustrating the law on the other side: a razor, a set of keys, a thermometer, or a bench. Surreptitiously infiltrated into the present, these texts and images tested the population’s reactive capacities. How would we have reacted in the past to these posters and restrictions? How would we react today if the same conditions were imposed on other subjects? These are the same questions that are raised by the Stolpersteine, the same questions every contemporary monument or memorial should raise.

57

Robin, I fantasmi della storia, 97. Renata Stih, and Frieder Schnock, Orte des Erinnerns/Places of Remembrance in Berlin, (Bonn-Berlin: Bildkunst, 2009). 58

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Beyond the “Zero Degree” In these pages I have focused on what is unique about the Stolpersteine project: it is discrete, widespread, decentralized, and extended in time and space. I have highlighted its quality as a work of art, the characteristics that make it a counter-monument, the most radical examples of which are the ones that disappear physically and rely on the viewer for the transmission of memory. What lies beyond the “zero degree” of the disappearance, as epitomized by the heroic, titanic gestures of Gerz, Hoheisel, Ullman? How can a project on memory be discreet, almost invisible and at the same time proliferate and spread? This is what must have been on Demnig’s mind when, taking a step back on the road to invisibility, he came up with a small, discreet lieu de memoire, to be installed in the places where the deportees had their last homes – memorials that can be multiplied a million times, all the same and all different, distributed throughout the European continent, a map much more than a single monument. Like mosaic tiles or pieces of a puzzle, over an unimaginable period of time, the Stolpersteine will expose the hypertrophic dimensions of deportation. 

List of Figures Figure 1. Gunter Demnig, Mai 1940-1000 Roma und Sinti, 1990, Cologne, Photo by Andreas Pohlmann. Figure 2. Gunter Demnig, Stolpersteine, 2010, Rome. Figure 3. Gunter Demnig, Stolpersteine, 2012, Rome. Figure 4. Jan Dibbets, Hommage à Arago, 1994, Paris, Photo by Shira Gottlieb. Figure 5. Ariel Schlesinger, Stolpersteine, 2014, Photo by Elad Sarig. Figure 6. Horst Hoheisel, Aschrott Fountain Monument, 1987, Kassel, Courtesy of Horst Hoheisel.

THOMAS HIRSCHHORN’S MONUMENTS AND THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC SPACE VINCENT MARQUIS

Introduction: “I Want to Fight” Thomas Hirschhorn had been in Berlin for three months when he visited the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park in the fall of 1994. “It’s not really a fascinating place,”1 he wrote in a letter dated September 30 to chronicle his meanderings across the deciduous parks of Kreuzberg, Mitte, and Prenzlauer Berg. “It’s more a strange combination of cemetery and carnival; besides, I think it is so because of the huge lie they want you to believe.”2 Eleven years later, amid the Russian-Ukrainian crisis, the contentious role and character of the same memorial complex resurfaced as the target of acerbic criticism in Germany’s best-selling tabloid Bild and its affiliate the Berliner Zeitung. In a letter to the Bundestag, the media protested that “in einer Zeit, in der russische Panzer das freie, demokratische Europa bedrohen, wollen wir keine Russen-Panzer am Brandenburger Tor!”3 Hirschhorn’s remarks and the more recent critiques surrounding the Soviet War Memorial are but instances in a long and tumultuous history of controversial public spaces. The authors of these critiques see the urban fabric as interwoven with conflicting values, revealing the complex 1

Thomas Hirschhorn, “Letter to Pascale (On Berlin),” in Critical Laboratory: The Writings of Thomas Hirschhorn, ed. Lisa Lee et al. (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2013), 36. 2 Ibid., 36–37. Hirschhorn believed that this was a lie because of the MolotovRibbentrop Pact – the nonaggression treaty signed by Germany and the Soviet Union – and the fact that other nations helped to win over the Nazis. 3 “In an era when Russian tanks are threatening free and democratic Europe, we don’t want any Russian tanks at the Brandenburg Gate!” “Wir wollen keine Russen-Panzer mehr am Brandenburger Tor!” Bild, April 15, 2014. http://www.bild.de/politik/ausland/petitionen/keine-russen-panzer-ambrandenburger-tor-35509848.bild.html.

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political underpinnings of monumentality and its ever-shifting status in public space. Public monuments represent, as Hirschhorn puts it, “a strange combination of cemetery and carnival,” oscillating between lost individuals and everyday life, commemoration and perpetuation. But they also partake in the carnivalesque, Hirschhorn would say, because of their mask of atemporality, which hides a subtle didacticism. “I want to fight against hierarchy, demagogy, this source of power,”4 Hirschhorn insisted as he began to devise a new model of monumental space in the late 1990s. In the present chapter, I examine this new model, its rationale, and its objectives. Taking Hirschhorn’s series of monuments to philosophers as my primary focus, my aim is to provide an account of the works’ position within, and in opposition to, the models of monumentality and public space that currently prevail in Euro-American societies. I begin with the development of a theoretical foundation through which I clarify the nature and key attributes of the traditional monument. In the second section, I turn to a historiographic analysis of Hirschhorn’s proposal, drawing comparisons between its historical precedents and its innovative dimension. The third and last section considers this new model of monumentality in the broader context of Hirschhorn’s critique of public space, developing a framework with which we can understand and evaluate critical spatial practices. Ultimately, I argue that the Monuments’ critical potential lies in their production of an alternative space within the urban fabric, a productive environment that works against “architectureas-usual” and fosters free-thinking activity and social encounters. 5

“The True Masters All across the Land”: Understanding Public Monumentality On the crisp evening of October 23, 1956, thousands of protesters marched in Budapest toward the statue of József Bem to voice their support for the

4

Thomas Hirschhorn, “Direct Sculptures,” in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 39. Throughout this text, I use James E. Young’s conceptual distinction between monument and memorial, which he expresses thus: “I treat all memory-sites as memorials, the plastic objects within these sites as monuments. A memorial may be a day, a conference, or a space, but it need not be a monument. A monument, on the other hand, is always a kind of memorial.” James E. Young, “The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning,” in Theories of Memory: A Reader, ed. Michael Rossington et al. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 179. 5

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Poles and their recent political reforms.6 At 20:00, many halted to listen to a broadcasted speech by General Secretary ErnĘ GerĘ. “Ezért elítéljük azokat, akik ifjúságunk körében a sovinizmus mételyét igyekeznek terjeszteni, s a demokratikus szabadságot, amelyet államunk a dolgozó népnek biztosít, nacionalista jellegĦ tüntetésre használták fel.”7 In furious response to the leader’s accusations, the crowd began to march toward the ultimate symbol of Hungary’s Sovietization: the Stalin Monument in Városliget. By 21:30, the monument had been torn down and Hungarian flags planted in the dictator’s boots – all that remained of the statue. The bronze carcass was then hauled to the front of the National Theatre, where it was cut into pieces by people looking for “tokens of remembrance of the heretic October days.”8 Soviet monuments had been subject to modification, displacement, and dismantling over the course of the evolution of power structures and the Soviet pantheon. Destructions of many Stalin effigies, for instance, were organized and executed in the context of the de-Stalinization ordered by Khrushchev in 1956, following the leader’s death three years earlier. The destruction of the Stalin monument in Budapest, one of the triggers of the Hungarian Revolution, is one of the few instances in which iconoclasm came “from below.” The act was not only prompted by public contempt for the figure represented, but was also fostered in parallel with the history of the monument’s production. Indeed, part of the 23 tons of bronze needed to produce the statue had been melted down from other urban monuments that had been removed for political reasons.9 Attacking the monument was thus more than merely pulling down a “symbol of Stalinist tyranny and political oppression.”10 It was a way of resisting an externally 6

The “Polish October” refers to the culmination of a series of popular demonstrations and conflicts within the Polish political apparatus that occurred in 1956. The nomination of Wáadysáaw Gomuáka as First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party on October 21, along with the anti-Stalinist political reforms he announced, are widely considered to mark the end of Stalinization in Poland. 7 “Therefore, we condemn those amongst our youth who seek to spread the ulcer of chauvinism, those who have made use of the democratic freedom that our state provides for the working people for the purposes of their nationalist-like protests.” László Varga, ed., A forradalom hangja: Magyarországi rádióadások 1956. október 23–november 9 (Budapest: Századvég, 1989), 24. 8 Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion, 1996), 60. 9 Ibid. 10 “The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: 16 points,” The American Hungarian Federation, accessed May 3, 2014,

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governed manipulation of space and reclaiming the shattered history of Budapest’s public monuments. The history of the Stalin Monument in Budapest, both in its original production process and its destruction by the Hungarian people, highlights the particular matrix within which monumentality traditionally operates. On the one hand, the rationale behind the construction of the monument reveals the ideological role played by such structures in public space. On the other hand, the memorial’s rejection makes evident the social tensions it may raise by virtue of its position in the social domain. In the remainder of this section, I expand on these preliminary observations, explore the different vectors involved in monumental space, and define its primary characteristics.

Staging the Past: Temporality and Monumentality At the turn of the twentieth century, Alois Riegl, the first conservatorgeneral of monuments in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, drafted a law that defined the concept of monument. “In its oldest and most original sense,” he wrote, “a monument is a work of man erected for the specific purpose of keeping particular human deeds or destinies…alive and present in the consciousness of future generations.”11 A century later, art historians Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin would enumerate the functions of the monument in similar terms: “to commemorate, to mark a place, to represent the past to the present and future, to emphasize one narrative of the past at the expense of others, or simply to make the past past.”12 What both definitions clearly underscore is the monument’s operational premise: its particular position in time. In fact, it is by means of this patent relation to past, present, and future circumstances that the monument carries out its commemorative or narrative function. At the same time, a monument’s specific temporal position is never mere coincidence. “Memory is never shaped in a vacuum,” to borrow the words of James E. Young, “the motives of memory are never pure.”13 http://americanhungarianfederation.org/news_1956_16Points.html#magyarul. 11 Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and Its Development,” in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, eds. Nicholas Stanley Price et al. (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 1996), 69. 12 Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, “Introduction,” in Monuments and Memory: Made and Unmade, eds. Robert S. Nelson et al. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 2. 13 Young, “The Texture of Memory,” 178.

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Rather, monuments are actively or self-consciously positioned vis-à-vis the past, present, and future. Specific past moments (say, the Battle of Berlin) are singled out for specific present- and future-directed purposes (to commemorate 5,000 fallen Soviet soldiers). In this positioning process, temporal structures are not left “untouched.” In their interruption of the flux of historical process, public monuments manipulate or construct a certain temporality in accordance with their aims. In fact, this is precisely what the above definitions hint at – the commemorated past is to be “kept alive and present,” “marked,” “represented,” “emphasized,” or “made past.” At this stage, a clarification of these temporal operations is in order. When Yakov Belopolsky drew plans for the Berlin Soviet War Memorial in 1946, one of its primary functions was to depict the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War.14 One notable strategy that was taken with this aim in mind was to design the memorial around a central statue of a Soviet soldier atop a kurgan, or traditional Russian burial mound. The symbol was intended to depict the Red Army as “the destroyer of fascism and the liberator of future generations.”15 Similarly, the Stalin Monument in Budapest was one of the countless iterations of the leader’s cult of personality, a state-wide attempt to place Stalin on the pedestal of transcendental glory. In both cases, a certain past (an event or an individual) is represented “to the present and future.” More specifically, the object of commemoration is represented as impervious to the passage of time. This atemporal conception of the commemorated is an ethical one – it attributes historical and cultural value to a given past, presenting it as worthy of being kept “alive in the consciousness of future generations.” In other words, the public monument’s temporal operation consists in affirming that the preselected, and thus sanctioned, past should or must be “marked,” “emphasized,” or “commemorated.”

Power and/over Time: The Monument’s Political Roots To ponder the way morality and temporality intervene within monumentality is to grasp a constitutive aspect of its place in society. In 14 In his socio-geographical study of the memorial, Paul Stangl shows that the monument, by virtue of its strategic position in Berlin, also had a diplomatic function: “to help define and regularize Soviet-German relationships in the aftermath of World War II in a way that would allow a mortal enemy like Germany to be considered an ally against the West.” Paul Stangl, “The Soviet War Memorial in Treptow, Berlin,” Geographical Review 93, no.2 (April 2003): 214. 15 Ibid., 224.

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fact, the preceding observations identify power structures as the initiators of the monument’s temporal manipulations. In both the Soviet War Memorial and the Stalin Monument in Budapest, the atemporal representation of the event each commemorates originated from a political organization – indeed, from the same Stalinist government. Even when its status or sociopolitical context undergoes modifications, such as in the case of the Soviet War Memorial, the monument’s subject of commemoration is still made official by authoritative bodies. Thus, the neutrality of the monument’s purported atemporality is but a carefully contrived illusion. “What,” Henri Lefebvre asks, “is the durable aside from the will to endure?...Only Will, in its more elaborated forms – the wish for mastery, the will to will – can overcome, or believe it can overcome, death.”16 Monumental space, as defined by Lefebvre, becomes an extension of the political body, a living space through which the will to power hopes to endure. This nexus between the political body – be it a state, government, single leader, or social class – and monumental space may be obvious, as is true of most monuments built under totalitarian regimes. In the vast majority of cases, however, it appears that the two entities cooperate more subtly. For instance, it may not be immediately clear how the contemporary framing of the Soviet War Memorial – or indeed of most memorials designed in “democratic” contexts – emerges from, and serves, a political matrix. In order to clarify these political operations, I take a brief detour via the sociology of memory. Monumentality, along with other commemorative practices such as museology and national ceremonies, is one of the strategies employed in the consolidation of “collective memory.”17 In contrast to its individual counterpart, which broadly refers to a single person’s preservation of past experiences, collective memory denotes “a set of social representations concerning the past which each group produces, institutionalizes, guards and transmits through the interaction of its members.”18 Collective 16

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 221. cf. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989), 13. Here, Nora stresses that there is always a risk that the monument’s material form will supplant, rather than preserve, collective memory. In his view, “the less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward sign.” 18 Paolo Jedlowski, “Memory and Sociology: Themes and Issues,” Time Society 10, no.1 (2001): 33. The concept of “collective memory” was first developed in the work of the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. See his La mémoire collective (Paris: Albin Michel, 1950). 17

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memory, in other words, is a culturally specific and socially constituted body of public or official narratives of the past. In his survey of the major debates in the sociology of memory, the sociologist Paolo Jedlowski describes the production of collective memory as crucial for a society’s sustainability. On the one hand, Jedlowski ranks the production and generational transmission of cultural heritage, alongside biological evolution itself, in the fundamental operations of human preservation and development. “The characteristic evolution of the human species,” he explains, “requires that the task of preserving social memory be transformed into an intentional activity, and this gives rise to specific institutions, techniques and tools.”19 On the other hand, Jedlowski recognizes that the production and consolidation of a collective memory does not merely foster the biological development of the human species. Such development is much more political: “the main function of collective memory is…to permit cohesion of a social group and guarantee its identity.”20 The ability to refer to common representations of the past anchors the social member’s sense of belonging. Yet, collective memory is political in a still narrower sense. As Jedlowski is quick to point out, “the collective representations of the social past are designed to give legitimacy to the society’s beliefs and to inspire their projects, thus legitimizing the elites that represent them.”21 Young makes a similar point when he associates collective memory with the state’s imperative to self-sustenance: “If part of the state’s aim, is to create a sense of shared values and ideals, then it will also be the state’s aim to create the sense of common memory, as foundation for a unified polis.”22 As a society grows more complex or the number of elites competing to govern it increases, the construction of collective memory becomes a matter of providing the most consensual representation of the past. The preceding remarks help us to clarify the political underpinnings of the traditional monument. The current official framing of the Soviet War Memorial serves the elite that produces it not because of its implementation of an ideological agenda as much as because it attempts to consolidate collective memory and a certain narrative of the German past.23 In comparison, the Stalin Monument in Budapest clearly attempted 19

Jedlowski, “Memory and Sociology,” 33. Ibid., 34. 21 Ibid. My emphasis. 22 Young, “The Texture of Memory,” 182. 23 Of course, it may be argued that the consolidation of collective memory just is, albeit not obviously, a form of political agenda. I make this distinction primarily as 20

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both to consolidate a national history of the Soviet people and to disseminate the ideological principles devised by Stalin. Had the destruction of the Stalin Monument been orchestrated “from above,” the act would have been no less political. Indeed, the monument’s displacement would have been synonymous with the installation of a new political matrix. That being said, the fact that it was destroyed by the Hungarian proletariat deserves further attention, for that highlights a third facet of monumentality: its location in public space.

Tensions in Public Space: The Social Implications of Monumentality In light of what has been argued so far, I now wish to consider two broader implications of monumentality’s political foundations. The first concerns the particular form taken by the public monument’s narration of the past, a form best characterized as synecdochical. Traditional public monuments substitute an ideologically driven narrative or “part” of the past for a freer modality of collective memory.24 What is more, this part tends to be equated with, or made to stand for, collective memory per se. This appears to be the case in totalitarian monumentality – where part and whole are generally equated – as much as in the monumentality of democracies – which considers the chosen narrative an adequate consensus of the social past. Lefebvre describes this operation as a process of “condensation, involving substitution, metaphor and similarity”25 – a process whereby the plurality of engagements with the past is “condensed” into a singular, homogeneous entity. However, a corollary of privileging “one narrative of the past at the expense of others,” to borrow again the words of Nelson a way of emphasizing the basis of our intuition that the political operation of the Soviet War Memorial is not as evident as, say, that of the Stalin Monument in Budapest. 24 Here, I should stress that the ideological foundation of the public monument’s particular narrative – in other words, the political matrix that accounts for the choice of a specific “part” of the social past – is not unique or immutable. Rather, it is subject to modification depending on the particular ideological orientation of the political matrix in question. My point is that these ideologies – be they totalitarian, democratic, or other – share a tendency to use synecdochical narration, even if the extent to which they do so varies. As I discuss in greater detail in the second section, the Great Man model of monumentality uses a similar narrative method, even though it is founded on a quite idiosyncratic ideology of genius and heroism. 25 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 225.

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and Olin, is precisely the concealment of alternative narratives. As art historian Jon Bird has put it, “the other side of the memorial as a rendering of collective memory is the tendency to forget and the symptoms of denial.”26 Thus, monumentality embodies and imposes a clearly intelligible message through a series of signs and symbols, and yet in this process it also attempts “to conjure away both possibility and time.”27 A second implication of the public monument’s political underpinnings is its implementation of a strict behavioral and normative framework. On the one hand, monumentality dictates norms as to the specific things (events or persons) that should be remembered. In this sense, public monuments can be conceived of as instructions as to how to properly read official narratives of the past. On the other hand, monumental space also calls for certain corporeal behaviors, movements and responses, which are guided by the overarching demand for contemplation of, and respect for, the commemorated. Lefebvre explains that the “opposition between inside and outside, as indicated by thresholds, doors and frames...simply does not suffice when it comes to defining monumental space. Such a space is determined by what may take place there, and consequently by what may not take place there (prescribed/proscribed, scene/obscene).”28 It is a similar sense of behavioral normalization that compels Georges Bataille to label public monuments “the true masters all across the land, gathering the servile multitudes in their shadow, enforcing admiration and astonishment, order and constraint.”29 As such, if monumental space prescribes respect 26 Jon Bird, “Dolce Domum,” in Rachel Whiteread’s House, ed. James Lingwood (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 117. 27 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 143. 28 Ibid., 224. Lefebvre claims that this process of behavioral enforcement occurs not only in the case of public monuments, but also in “monumental buildings” such as churches. He writes that “the use of the cathedral’s monumental space necessarily entails its supplying answers to all the questions that assail anyone who crosses the threshold. For visitors are bound to become aware of their own footsteps, and listen to the noises, the singing; they must breathe the incense-laden air, and plunge into a particular world, that of sin and redemption” (ibid., 220–21). 29 Georges Bataille, “Architecture,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 21. Whereas Lefebvre clearly conceives of the monument’s enforcement of behavioral normalization as operating through specific spatial arrangements, Bataille’s understanding of this enforcement is more nebulous. For Bataille, this behavioral normalization is the product of a natural tendency of the State to express its being in architecture, thereby translating verbal or physical authority in the form of edifices. In his own words, “it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes” (ibid.).

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and contemplation, it will inversely relegate violent or derogatory behavior to the realm of the obscene. These two social implications of monumentality – behavioral circumscription and synecdochical narration – help us to understand the potential of public monuments to give rise to conflictual climates. We have seen that collective memory is the prism through which a social group attempts to crystallize its past experiences. As Bird puts it, “it is through the institutional forms of memory that we collectively reencounter the past in the course of its articulation.”30 Such re-encounters will go unimpeded and official narratives will be generally accepted, insofar as the institutions that craft these collective forms of memory are equally recognized and accepted. That being said, the monument’s position within a public space is bound to give rise to tensions, if not active resistance, at those moments when the sense of collectivity is lost. Monumental space, in other words, is inherently nodal: it is a site at which ideological pressures intersect with norms of social behavior and emotional, individual responses to the object of commemoration. Consequently, monuments that fail to convey a sense of collective memory, attempt to impose a unique “signified,” or proscribe certain patterns of behavior are likely to be met with criticism or hostility.31 In this section, I have offered an account of the traditional model of monumentality according to which the monument potentially constitutes one of the most politically charged sites we encounter in public space. Necessarily positioned in both place and time, between the elite and the general public, histories of monumentality reveal some of the tensions at the core of sociality. In the next section, I consider the alternative offered by Hirschhorn to this traditional model. I argue that by altering the primary aim of this tradition and mobilizing the temporality of the event, Hirschhorn offers a model of monumentality that activates the constructive rather than the destructive potential of social tensions.

30

Bird, “Dolce Domum,” 116. This is equally applicable to public art more broadly, albeit with potentially different criteria of (un)acceptability. See, for instance, Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), particularly the chapter entitled “Sitings of Public Art: Integration versus Intervention.” Taking Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc and John Ahearn’s South Bronx Sculpture Park as her case studies, Kwon examines how different conceptions of “site-specificity” operating in the field of public art are guided by sometimes conflicting criteria and values, notably the issue of whether site-specific artworks should be guided by an interruptive or assimilative function. 31

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“Coming from Below”: Hirschhorn’s Monuments as Events In one of the many statements he wrote regarding his artistic endeavors, Hirschhorn explained that “my critique of the monument comes from the fact that the idea of the monument is imposed from above.”32 Hirschhorn criticized the form of the traditional public monument as an incitement to admire the dominant ideology and proclaimed that his aim was rather to “make monuments that are just.”33 Toward the end of the 1990s, following an episodic series of artworks in public space, he began a sequence of four experiments that would radically alter this tradition of monumentality. Far from a purely spontaneous gesture, this attempt to devise a more collectively adequate or just model of monumentality is part of a succession of similar artistic experiments that emerged with particular strength in the second half of the twentieth century. Polish-born American artist and scholar Krzysztof Wodiczko, for instance, is well-known for his large-scale projections that critique the values that monuments support.34 In his 1987 Projection on the Monument to Friedrich II, images of a crate of axles belonging to Unimog S military trucks produced by the DaimlerBenz plant in Kassel were projected onto the base of a statue of Landgrave Friedrich II of Hesse-Kassel, along with a shirt, tie, and Daimler-Benz identity badge over the statue’s Roman armor. Wodiczko’s aim was to “link this Enlightenment figure’s imperial conquests to Daimler-Benz’s contemporary use of ‘guest workers’ to make military equipment employed in the subjugation of certain groups, for example, the black population in South Africa.”35 Other artists, such as Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, have chosen to explore the temporal dimension of traditional monumentality. Their Monument for Peace and against War and Fascism, a 12-meter-high pillar made of steel and lead, was designed to be slowly lowered into the ground until it finally vanished seven years 32

Hirschhorn, “Direct Sculptures,” 39. Ibid., 40. 34 For further discussion of Wodiczko’s monument projections, see, for instance: “Interview: Krzysztof Wodiczko on Alien Staff,” in Dialogues in Public Art, ed. Tom Finkelpearl (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 336–51; Sarah J. Purcell, “Commemoration, Public Art, and the Changing Meaning of the Bunker Hill Monument,” The Public Historian 25, no.2 (Spring 2003): 55–71; and Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Instruments, Projections, Monuments,” AA Files 43 (Winter 2000): 30–51. 35 Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 108. 33

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after its inauguration in 1986.36 Others have exploited the potential of the monumental form without resorting to conventional representationality. This is the case of the American artist Maya Ying Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. Lin sought to embody the pronounced American ambivalence toward the Vietnam War, as well as evoke private feelings rather than a clear political message, into an abstract, minimalist design. It is the choice of this particular aesthetic that, in the eyes of Anne Wagner, “means everything for the success of the work. Its implacable planarity underscores – even replicates – a central, irrefutable fact. Death is loss.”37 These works represent only a handful of a much larger ensemble of architectural and artistic practices that engage with issues of monumentality – issues that include those sketched above as well as the gap between collective and singular experience and the behavioral dimension of monumental space. As I describe in this section, Hirschhorn’s series of Monuments addresses similar issues, placing him in conversation with the work of his contemporaries. Indeed, whether or not the Monuments count as or resemble what has been termed “countermonumentality” – a term Hirschhorn himself never employs to describe his work – they all rejoin in the subversion of the premises of traditional monumentality and the radical revision of its broader ramifications.38 In

36

For discussion of this work, see, for instance: Thomas Stubblefield, “Do Disappearing Monuments Simply Disappear? The Counter-Monument in Revision,” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism 8, no.2 (2011): 1–11; and Richard Crownshaw, “The German Countermonument: Conceptual Indeterminacies and the Retheorisation of the Arts of Vicarious Memory,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 44, no.2 (2008): 212–27. 37 Anne M. Wagner, “Maya Lin’s Memorial,” in A House Divided: American Art Since 1955 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 73. The controversy surrounding the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has also been discussed in Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past,” American Journal of Sociology 97, no.2 (September 1991): 376-420; Karal Ann Marling and Robert Silberman, “The Statue near the Wall: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Art of Remembering,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1, no.1 (Spring 1987): 4–29; and Charles L. Griswold, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall: Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 4 (Summer 1986): 688–719. 38 For a succinct discussion of alternative models of monumentality in the past century, see Young’s section “Twentieth-Century Countermonuments” in Maria

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the remainder of this paper, I will argue that Hirschhorn’s constitutes one of the most complex yet successful attempts to provide a holistic reworking of this tradition. It is to Hirschhorn’s revised model and its four instantiations that I now turn.

Figure 1

Sturken and James E. Young, “Monuments,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 3, ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), http://www.oxfordreference.com/ view/10.1093/acref/9780195113075.001.0001/acref-9780195113075-e-0362. Young relates this countertradition of monumentality to the rise of the modernist idea that neither the past nor its meanings are ever a single thing.

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Hirschhorn’s Four Monuments to Philosophers “Spinoza, Deleuze, Gramsci, and Bataille are examples of thinkers who instill confidence in the reflective capacities: they give us the force to think, they give us the force to be active.”39 Hirschhorn has given this interest in, and enjoyment of, philosophical reflection as the primary motive for creating his monuments to great thinkers. “I like full-time thinking,” he writes, “I like philosophy, even when I don’t understand a third of its reflections.... That’s why I chose philosophers for monuments.”40 It is in similar terms that Hirschhorn described the rationale behind his first such work, the Spinoza Monument (1999, Fig. 1): “I like his purity, strength, and non-moralist thoughts…I like his logic.”41 Built on a lively street of the red-light district of Amsterdam for the exhibition Midnight Walkers & City Sleepers,42 the work revolved around what he called a “classical part”: a sculpture of Spinoza holding his Ethics placed on a horizontal pedestal, both constructed from cardboard, tape, and garbage bags. Hirschhorn appreciated the organizers’ wish to get involved in the life of the district, even though his interaction with the neighborhood essentially amounted to borrowing electrical power from a sex shop around the corner. Thus, the following year, Hirschhorn decided to build the Deleuze Monument (Fig. 2) in cooperation with the residents of Cité Champfleury, a public housing development in Avignon, where the work was located. Once again, Hirschhorn anchored the project around a “classical part”: a cardboard, plastic, and blue tape bust of the philosopher, looking straight ahead and leaning his forearms on the pedestal. This time, however, an “information part” was added to the whole: “a small construction…open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, where one can isolate oneself, sit down, study, and get information about the philosopher’s work.”43 The rectangular shed was intended to serve as a temporary book and video 39

Thomas Hirschhorn, “Four Monuments to Great Thinkers.” Paper presented at the Critical Issues in Public Art Lecture Series, Public Art Norway (KORO), Oslo, Norway, March 20, 2014, 45. 40 Ibid. 41 Thomas Hirschhorn, “Project ‘Denkmal-Spinoza.’” Point d’ironie 23 (October 2001): 2. 42 The 1999 exhibition Midnight Walkers & City Sleepers was a multisite art event in Amsterdam’s red-light district, which was curated by Hedwig Fijen, Maria Hlavajova, and Theo Tegelaers and sponsored by W139, a local space dedicated to the promotion of contemporary art. 43 Hirschhorn, “Monuments,” 45.

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library for Deleuze-related material, but did not last nearly as long as the “classical” component. When one of the VCR players was stolen only a week after the work’s inauguration, the rest were quickly removed, and the library closed its doors.

Figure 2

In response to this event, Hirschhorn decided that he would be present for the three-month duration of the Bataille Monument (2002, Fig. 3), which he made for Documenta 11.44 The artist located the work in the Friedrich-Wöhler-Siedlung housing complex in Kassel, whose predominantly Turkish-German residents contributed once again to the construction process. The monument placed a still stronger emphasis on its “information part,” setting the “classical part” as only one in an enumeration of eight constitutive elements, alongside a library, an exhibition space, workshops, a minitelevision studio, a food stand, a shuttle to and from Documenta, and an archival website. In fact, the form of the statue itself attests to the increased orientation of the Monuments toward interactive or social ends. With its abstract, yet organic form 44

Hirschhorn’s increased presence was part of the “Presence and Production” guidelines devised in the wake of the Deleuze Monument events. Hirschhorn applies the term to “specific artworks which require my presence on site and where my production takes place during a given time on a specific location with the cooperation of others.” See his “‘Gramsci Monument’ at Forest Houses, The Bronx, NYC” (unpublished manuscript, February 2013), PDF file.

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resembling a tree trunk, the sculpture was severed from its strictly representational aims and was meant to evoke the growth of ideas and “[take] on the function of a meeting place.”45

Figure 3

Even then, as the critic Julian Rose points out, “Hirschhorn felt in retrospect that the Bataille Monument’s abstract sculpture was a distraction for visitors, who mistook it for the entire monument, when the project’s real focus was the complex pattern of use and interaction in the surrounding spaces.”46 Thus, when he began to design the Gramsci Monument (Fig. 4) almost a decade later, he “realized there was no more need for a sculpture.”47 The figure of the philosopher, to be sure, was still a visible part of the monument – this time as a graffiti version of a famous photographic portrait of Gramsci painted on one of the outdoor walls. However, the project no longer revolved around this “classical part” and was rather focused on its increasingly architectural and functional spaces – a process Hirschhorn documented not only textually but also graphically. 45

Thomas Hirschhorn, “Bataille Monument” (unpublished manuscript, October 19–22, 2002), PDF file. 46 Julian Rose, “Building Complex,” Artforum 52, no.3 (November 2013): 235. 47 Ibid.

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Preliminary drawings for the project provide a highly compact view of the complex and its unnamed “pavilions” (Fig. 5). The official architectural plan, drawn in March 2013, reveals a much larger structure and confirms the location of the monument in Forest Houses, a public housing project in the Bronx. The plans were further amended by Hirschhorn during the construction process, when he added modules and reinscribed the contours of the structure. Upon completion, the Gramsci Monument was by far the largest of the four monuments. A miniature city of its own, it occupied an area of 6,000 square feet and integrated a range of communal spaces: a radio station, a newspaper office, a library (Fig. 6), a gallery, an art studio, a computer lab, a lounge, and an open-air theater.

Figure 4

Questioning the Great Men The trajectory I have traced is that of Hirschhorn’s increasing concern for the social dimension of his Monuments, one that I address in greater detail in the last section. A brief stopover is necessary, however, for we have to attend to their mode of dedication. In fact, what is striking about Hirschhorn’s Monuments to philosophers is their indebtedness to the theory of the Great Man, an idea developed in the nineteenth century

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according to which history could be largely explained by the impact of “great men” on the social fabric.48 The theory was popularized in the 1840s by the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle, who wrote of the Great Men that “Universal History consists essentially of their United Biographies.”49 Carlyle went on to write extensively on Muhammad, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and others, not only for history’s sake but also because “all souls feel that it is well with them.”50

Figure 5

The Great Man model of historicity had a significant influence on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, especially in France, Great

48

On the Great Man theory and its ramifications, see Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Gregor Wedekind, Le culte des grands hommes, 1750–1850 (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences et de l’Homme, 2009); Richard Wrigley and Matthew Craske, eds., Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); and Jean-Claude Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon: essai sur le culte des grands hommes (Paris: Fayard, 1998). 49 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 213. 50 Ibid., 4.

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Britain, and Germany.51 Collective biographies, dictionaries of celebrated contemporaries, and series of portrait prints were all means of graphically disseminating this ideology. Emerson Bowyer notes that in architecture, “with the rise of secular individualism and the waning of royal power and prestige, monuments began to be erected to individual private citizens: grands hommes who had distinguished themselves in battle, politics, the art, or the sciences.”52 One of the most prolific exponents of this trend was the French sculptor David d’Angers, who spent much of his career portraying the celebrated men of his time. On many occasions, he stated that “I’ve always tried to pay them the tribute of my admiration with the means provided by my art.”53 D’Angers’ Monument to Bonchamps, which dramatizes the death of a royalist general in the Vendée counterrevolution, is one embodiment of this desire to both commemorate the Great Man’s accomplishments and express gratitude for his contribution to the commissioning nation.54 D’Angers and his numerous artistic confreres thus critically revisited the eighteenth-century model of monumentality as a propagandistic tool for the monarchy of divine right. As June Hargrove has argued, the Great Man monument was an attempt to resolve the needs of nineteenth-century 51 On this phenomenon as well as public monuments more generally in the nineteenth century, see notably: Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, eds., The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), especially Part Six, “Visualizing the Past,” 233–86; Alison West, From Pigalle to Préault: Neoclassicism and the Sublime in French Sculpture, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Karen Ann Lang, The German Monument, 1790–1914: Subjectivity, Memory, and National Identity (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1997); June E. Hargrove, “The Public Monument,” in The Romantics to Rodin, eds. Peter Fusco et al. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1980), 21–35; and H. W. Janson, The Rise and Fall of the Public Monument (New Orleans: Tulane University Press, 1976). 52 Emerson Bowyer, “David d’Angers: Making the Modern Monument,” in David d’Angers: Making the Modern Monument, eds. Emerson Bowyer et al. (New York: The Frick Collection, 2013), 26. 53 David d’Angers, Les Carnets de David d’Angers, vol. 1, ed. André Bruel (Paris: Plon, 1958), 88. 54 The French Panthéon, the epitome of nineteenth-century Great Man theory, bears on its façade the inscription “Aux grands hommes, la Patrie reconnaissante” (To the Great Men, the Grateful Homeland). On a different note, I should briefly specify that producing a monument to Bonchamps was a particularly charged gesture, as it was thought that his last words commanded his troops to spare the lives of their Republican prisoners. Furthermore, d’Angers was especially invested in the work since his father, a Republican, had been one of the 5,000 prisoners who owed their lives to Bonchamps.

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societies “that wanted both to abolish individual control and to extol individual thought.”55 Yet, insofar as it was driven by historiographical, educational, and ethical objectives, the Great Man model of monumentality certainly partook in some form of elite didacticism. Indeed, Hargrove remarks that the persisting eighteenth-century idea of a linear progression to perfection positioned those “distinguished” individuals as examples to emulate. “Thus,” she writes, “the monument to genius both honored the specific individual and served as a universal role model.”56 Along similar lines, art historian David Bell emphasizes the Great Man’s function in supporting emergent nationalisms, arguing that they “helped consciously to build that community by their efforts and examples.”57 Therefore, even though they occasionally drew their subjects from more popular or “mundane” realms, the monuments to Great Men never completely did away with the doctrinal intentions of previous models of monumentality.

Figure 6 55

Hargrove, “The Public Monument,” 21. Ibid. 57 David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680– 1800 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 121. 56

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In light of the above, it is clear that Hirschhorn’s Monuments are partly indebted to the model of Great Man monumentality, if only because of their dedication to major philosophers. Like d’Angers, many of Hirschhorn’s works were motivated by his love for inspiring individuals, by the desire “to fix my heroes.”58 That being said, it is equally clear that Hirschhorn eagerly distanced himself from this tradition’s pedagogical overtones. He insisted that the Bataille Monument, for instance, “is not a memorial that seeks to intimidate or instruct. Rather, it seeks to convey information and promote friendship and a sense of community.”59 Hirschhorn described the Gramsci Monument in similar terms, insisting that “I’m not a missionary of Antonio Gramsci” and that to impart the philosopher’s ideas “is of course one of the goals but not the main goal.”60 The “information part” of the monuments is only “a proposition to make the philosopher’s work accessible to the public,”61 rather than a demand to admire or follow those philosophers. By extension, Hirschhorn’s rejection of the didacticism of Great Man monumentality is a critique of the broader political framework described above. Hirschhorn insists that what is crucial is that “no institutional power, no official, no historian, no scientist, no politician suggested I do a monument dedicated to Gramsci in New York City.”62 The Monuments do not emerge from or serve as an extension of the elite political body. Rather, they originate from, and are placed under the full responsibility of, their loving initiator.63 Although it is clear that Hirschhorn challenges this 58 Thomas Hirschhorn, “Altars,” in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 47. This motivation is also apparent in Hirschhorn’s series of four Altars dedicated to Piet Mondrian (1997), Otto Freundlich (1998), Ingeborg Bachmann (1998), and Raymond Carver (1998). Regarding this series, Hirschhorn wrote that “I have chosen artists I love for their work and for their lives: no cynicism, only commitment” (ibid., 47–49). 59 Thomas Hirschhorn, “Letter to Lothar Kannenberg (Regarding the Bataille Monument),” in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 229. My emphasis. 60 Thomas Hirschhorn, quoted in Whitney Kimball and Will Brand, “How Do People Feel about the Gramsci Monument?” Art F City, August 16, 2013, accessed April 30, 2014, http://artfcity.com/2013/08/16/how-do-people-feel-about-thegramsci-monument/. 61 Hirschhorn, “Monuments,” 45. My emphasis. 62 Thomas Hirschhorn, “Why Gramsci? Why New York?” (unpublished manuscript, April 2013), PDF file. 63 Hirschhorn frequently insists that he takes on full responsibility for the works that he produces. He sometimes goes as far as to say he is responsible for things he did not do. See especially the following texts: “Why ‘Where Do I Stand?’ and Why ‘What Do I Want?,’” in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 67–71; “Doppelgarage,” in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 241–42; and “Unshared Authorship” (unpublished

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premise of traditional monumentality, I now wish to examine how his “fight against hierarchy, demagogy, this source of power” seizes further weapons in the notions of temporality and event.

Temporality, Behavior, and the Event Ephemerality and precariousness are themes that recur in the scholarly literature on Hirschhorn. And with reason: Hirschhorn opens the statement regarding his Monuments saying: “I try to make a new kind of monument. A precarious monument. A monument for a limited time.”64 Much of this literature has shed light on the material implications of this peculiar temporality, interpreting Hirschhorn’s statement as concerning the formal ephemerality of his monuments.65 If the precariousness of the materials employed is an integral part of Hirschhorn’s intentions, I would argue that temporality in the Monuments operates on at least two further, more complex levels. Firstly, by positioning his Monuments in unofficial or nonceremonial locations, Hirschhorn consciously leaves the door open to nontraditional receptions of his work. Indeed, Hirschhorn acknowledges that the duration of his work relies on factors such as “the life of the neighborhood, the involvement and acceptance of its population, the artist’s preparation and follow-up, and the means made available.”66 In fact, Hirschhorn defines precariousness precisely as this man-made limited duration, which he opposes to the ephemerality observed in natural phenomena, insisting that “there is no such thing as an ephemeral artwork; there is precarious work, the product of a decision, whether it be suffered or accepted.”67 manuscript, 2012), PDF file. Of course, this might be challenged by pointing out that these monuments can only operate within certain legal boundaries, as Hirschhorn had to obtain public authorizations for his Monuments. The point is that Hirschhorn’s intention does not serve an elite political body, even if it might have to negotiate with that body. This is discussed further in the last section. 64 Hirschhorn, “Monuments,” 45. 65 See, for instance, Alison M. Gingeras, in “Alison M. Gingeras in conversation with Thomas Hirschhorn,” in Thomas Hirschhorn, eds. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh et al. (London: Phaidon Press, 2004), 15, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Thomas Hirschhorn: Lay Out Sculpture and Display Diagrams,” in Buchloh, Thomas Hirschhorn, 46. 66 Thomas Hirschhorn, “Regarding the End of the Deleuze Monument,” in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 217. 67 Thomas Hirschhorn, quoted in “Becoming One’s Own Museum: Conversation between Thomas Hirschhorn and François Piron,” in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 361.

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This places his Monuments in direct opposition to traditional models of monumentality, which, as we have seen, enforce or expect certain norms of behavior. If traditional monuments demand respect and contemplation and suppress their opposites, Hirschhorn avoids any kind of ethical framing of behaviors, stating that the factors outlined above determine the lifespan of a work regardless of the artist’s will or intentions. “What counts for me,” he wrote in an analogous context, “is that this sculpture is appropriated by its environment, signed, marked, changed…welcomed or not welcomed, confronted.”68 Hirschhorn’s attitude came up with particular intensity during the turbulent existence of the Deleuze Monument. In an apology to Hervé Laurent and Nathalie Wetzel, two individuals who were attacked by a gang while visiting the monument, Hirschhorn refused to accept the accusation of having intentionally generated dangerous conditions. “I don’t want to work with vigilantes and their dogs,” he wrote, “but one must say: Here is a project, here is its realization, here is what happened with the people.... The question of the audience of art today. That is what this work raises.”69 Even though Hirschhorn subsequently decided that he would maximize his presence during his last two Monuments, he always respected the durational impact of surrounding circumstances on his works. A second level at which temporality operates here is in Hirschhorn’s conception of the monument as event. An event is a significant thing that happens – one that, despite its ephemerality, never quite leaves the usual flow of things undisturbed. This is precisely what happens during Hirschhorn’s Monuments. If the physical aspect of the work entails its temporal limitation and physical precariousness, Hirschhorn nevertheless maintains that “my monument produces something, it generates something.”70 Once the Monuments are dismantled, what remains are the thoughts of the participants about Gramsci, Bataille, Deleuze, or Spinoza, as well as those about the work itself and the experience it provoked. In the words of Hirschhorn, “the form conveys the idea that the monument will disappear. What shall remain are the thoughts and reflections.”71 What is more, the unconstrained life of these thoughts after the dismantling is 68

Hirschhorn, “Direct Sculptures,” 39–40. In this text, Hirschhorn recounts being influenced by a monument to Ernst Thälmann in Berlin, of which the lower part was covered with graffiti by members of the surrounding population. 69 Thomas Hirschhorn, “Letter to Hervé Laurent and Nathalie Wetzel (Regarding the Deleuze Monument),” in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 215. Artist’s emphasis. 70 Thomas Hirschhorn, quoted in “Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: An Interview with Thomas Hirschhorn,” in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 337. 71 Hirschhorn, “Monuments,” 46.

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precisely what challenges the purported immutability of traditional monumental narratives. “What will stay is the activity of reflection.”72 Hirschhorn’s statement answers Young’s proposal that “by insisting that its meaning is as fixed as its place in the landscape, the [traditional] monument seems oblivious to the essential mutability in all cultural artifacts.”73 Rather than instructing visitors as to acceptable ways of reading their society’s past or following nineteenth-century monumentality by uplifting a notable man on the pedestal of national history, Hirschhorn’s temporary monuments are prompts for ongoing reflection. As such, the significance of building such ephemeral works lies not in its subversion of the monument’s traditional materials as much as in its critique of supposed atemporal narratives. This section has provided an account of Hirschhorn’s Monuments by contrasting them to previous models of monumentality, in particular the ones that I examined in the first section. I have argued that by subverting the political premises of these models – that is, by resisting any didactic or doctrinal intervention – Hirschhorn has opened up the behavioral and temporal dimensions of traditional monuments. In what follows, I offer ways of understanding these strategies – and the series of Monuments as a whole – in the context of Hirschhorn’s broader critique of the spaces of the everyday.

“A Space within a Space”: Hirschhorn’s Critique of Public Space Imagine a gallery space transformed into a repository of videos, photographs, books, and other publications – documents concerning economic, philosophical, and historical problematics – all linked together with thick strands of red plastic. Together, the paraphernalia constitute Critical Laboratory, a work Hirschhorn produced in the fall of 1999. The aim of this peculiar installation was to render criticality itself in form by evoking the content and reflective processes of a questioning mind and to give shape to the moment of conceptualization and the creation of criticism. By its formal description alone, the work is reminiscent of Hirschhorn’s series of Monuments, which he had inaugurated earlier that year. But the two works also join hands to carry a larger project of Hirschhorn’s. A small aperture into the space of the gallery, Critical

72 73

Ibid. My italics. Sturken and Young, “Monuments.”

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Laboratory is a space aside or, rather, a “space within a space.”74 Likewise, the Monuments are subversive places, yet they interface with more open and freely accessible zones, being rebellious stitches in the fabric of urban space. Specifically, and this is the focus of the present section, Hirschhorn’s model of monumentality is integral to his broader critique of public space. It is deployed within that space, and yet is an invitation to rethink it or engage with it critically.

Critiquing Public Space: Frameworks and Methods The authors I engaged with in the first section revealed monumentality as one of the pillars of political apparatuses. At this juncture, I take a step back and briefly consider the more general permeability of public space and politics – an essential detour if we are to understand Hirschhorn’s Monuments as a genre of spatial critique. This relationship between politics and space has yielded an extensive body of literature, one that I can unfortunately only touch upon. Lefebvre’s The Production of Space is arguably the best place to begin this outline. As one of the foremost analyses of the social and political underpinnings of spatial environments, Lefebvre’s text is widely regarded as having initiated a paradigm shift in the way we conceive of space. “(Social) space is a (social) product,”75 he declares in the first pages of the book. Rather than an established, immutable fact, Lefebvre argues that space is a complex construction founded on particular sets of values and meanings. Every society and every mode of production generates its own particular space. As this space provides relatively stable physical environments in which socioeconomic relations can take root and multiply, Lefebvre claims that the production of urban space is fundamental to the reproduction of political and economic structures – of capitalism, he would insist.76 “The space thus produced,” he writes, “serves as a tool of thought and of action…in addition to being a 74

Thomas Hirschhorn, “Critical Laboratory, Project for ‘Mirror’s Edge,’” in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 199. 75 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 26. 76 The British human geographer Noel Castree makes a similar point when he argues that “the ‘production of space’ is, then, a necessary aspect of normal capital circulation. It is umbilically connected to time in capitalism in that the daily motion of productive capital thoroughly depends on the fixity of various built environments. These built environments are also essential to the well-being of many financiers and bankers, who sink the pooled money of countless others into them.” “The Spatio-temporality of Capitalism,” Time and Society 18, no.1 (2009): 49.

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means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power.”77 Following Lefebvre, a number of geographers, sociologists, and philosophers have labored to reassert the centrality of space in society.78 In his Postmodern Geographies, Edward Soja exhorts us to “be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life.”79 It is the recognition and analysis of these politically charged geographies, of the intertwining of space, architecture, and power, that a growing body of work has attempted to map: studies as diverse as Michel Foucault’s discussion of Bentham’s Panopticon as a “mechanism that [improves] the exercise of power,”80 Jean Baudrillard’s targeting of Disneyland as the epitome of American simulacra,81 or Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles as a “full-blown postmodern building.”82 Although directed toward different aims and framed with different methodologies, these studies shed light on the role of public space and architecture in the founding, organization, and consolidation of social relationships. Public space, in this sense, is fundamentally political. The concern now arises as to how spatial practices can be political differently, 77

Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 26. See, notably: Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001); Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005); Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen, eds. What Is Critical Spatial Practice? (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012); and Lukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research and the Production of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 79 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 6. 80 Michel Foucault, “Panopticism (Extract),” in Leach, Rethinking Architecture, 367. 81 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. F. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 12. See also Baudrillard’s America, trans. C. Turner (London: Verso, 1988). 82 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review I/146 (July/August 1984), 55. Cf. Baudrillard, America, 59–60; Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 243–44; and Mike Davis, “Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism,” New Left Review I/151 (May/June 1985): 106–13. 78

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how spaces can be critical of their surrounding environment, how art and architecture can subvert patterns of sociopolitical organization through space. Jameson phrases this concern forthrightly when he asks, in an uncanny echo of Hirschhorn’s own musings: “If an architecture wished to dissent from the status quo, how would it go about doing this?”83 This is not merely a question that can usefully be asked about other art forms. On the contrary, in the case of architecture it assumes a particular urgency, for “even a painting demands a glance; whereas architecture can be lived in, be moved around in, and simultaneously ignored.”84 I would argue that a critical modality of spatial practice is one that subverts “the apparently innocent spatiality of social life” and rethinks or reorganizes the parameters of its operation. What I have in mind is similar to Jameson’s suggestion that “the political relationship of works of art to the societies they reside in can be determined according to the difference between replication (reproduction of the logic of that society) and opposition (the attempt to establish the elements of a Utopian space radically different from the one in which we reside).”85 In such a framework, the touchstone of spatial critique is the distance that obtains between a given space or work and its broader spatial context. Jameson’s approach has the merit of both confirming that architecture and spatial practices reside in a sociopolitical context, and acknowledging their potential to replicate or oppose the logic of that context. By itself, however, this proposal remains nebulous, and thus more needs to be said about the specific, practical forms that a critical distance may take as well as the social logic that it resists. One obvious way to define these concepts further is in physical or geographical terms. Young, for instance, has argued that critical distance between a monument and its surroundings is a function of whether it is perceived as a seemingly natural extension of the site or as a physical incongruity. Consequently, critical monument makers will “provoke the landscape with an obtrusive monument [rather] than to create a form so pleasingly balanced that it – and memory – recede into the landscape (and oblivion) altogether.”86 Although Young is certainly right in identifying geography as a potential site of critique, I am interested in less visible, albeit no less radical, strategies. In what follows, I argue that Hirschhorn’s Monuments adopt a critical stance that runs much deeper into the logic of

83

Fredric Jameson, “Is Space Political?,” in Leach, Rethinking Architecture, 258. Ibid., 259. 85 Ibid. 86 Young, “The Texture of Memory,” 183. 84

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their spatial context. The works, I submit, invite us to rethink two basic premises of the workings of space: social time and social encounters.

Social Times In my face-to-face conversation with the artist in May 2014, Hirschhorn emphasized his desire to come to grips with the current temporality of public space. In general, he noted, public space is used as a mere space of transit, one that becomes instrumental to our going somewhere or fulfilling some further end of ours. The time spent in public space is seen as lost or fruitless, whereas the time devoted to work or the home is regarded as truly productive or valuable. Most of us, it seems, live according to social standards of speed and performance – standards that not only give shape to our expectation of time’s flow, but also affect our perception and use of the space we live in.87 Hirschhorn’s remarks corroborate an increasing number of attempts to theorize the current, idiosyncratic Euro-American relationship to time and its impact on our experiences of space and place. This has notably given rise to the field of time geography, an approach that focuses on the effects of time and temporality on the spatial domain and, in particular, on understanding the effects of how events such as home-to-work journeys are sequenced in time and space.88 Other scholars have attended to the specific notion of “time-space convergence,” that is, the acceleration of the pace of life owing to increasing time-space compression – the requirement to “shrink” space owing to time rarefaction – and time-space distanciation – the interconnectedness and interdependence of people and places around the globe.89 Be they merely descriptive or also prescriptive of certain 87

Cf. Vito Acconci, “Public Space in a Private Time,” in Art and the Public Sphere, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 169: “Public space, in an electronic age, is space on the run. Public space is not space in the city but the city itself. Not nodes but circulation routes; not buildings and plazas but roads and bridges.” 88 Studies that adopt this approach include: Torsten Hägerstrand, “The Domain of Human Geography,” in Directions in Geography, ed. R. J. Chorley (London: Methuen, 1973); Allan Pred, “Social Reproduction and the Time-Geography of Everyday Life,” Geografiska Annaler 63B (1981): 5–22; and Nigel Thrift, “On the Determination of Social Action in Space and Time,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1 (1983): 23–57. 89 This concept of “time-space convergence” and its implications are discussed further in the following: Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell,

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modes of relating to time, most of these studies share similar and plausible conclusions, notably that an obsession with the immediate and the easily consumable has had the effect of instrumentalizing the spaces and places we inhabit. If it is true that this temporal logic instrumentalizes public space, then how does the space produced by Hirschhorn subvert or rethink that logic? Hirschhorn illustrated this subversion to me through the example of strikes and demonstrations – events where individuals mobilize public space for political purposes and take the time to occupy, reclaim, or transform this space. The Monuments generate something similar: not only do they invite their visitors to reduce the tempo of their daily life, to take the time to read a book or hear a lecture; they also, by the same token, interrupt the passivity and instrumentalization of public space and turn it into a productive environment. The Monuments reassert the importance of creating accessible physical and temporal stopping points, where one can think, discuss, argue and learn. Another way to understand how Hirschhorn rethinks the temporal logic of public space would be in terms of parity or equality of social times. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière recently argued that many of those who were involved in the construction and use of Hirschhorn’s later Monuments “are those who have too much time, those whose time is not taken up by work.”90 Although this is certainly partly accurate, I would emphasize that those individuals were only a fraction of a sum of participants that included art critics, students, guest philosophers, journalists, political representatives, and simple passersby. The Monuments became assemblages of divergent social times, rather than the territory of a single, hegemonic temporal logic. In fact, such an engagement with different temporalities is precisely what Rancière perceives as “the condition for a public space – that is to say, a space affirming anybody’s ability to see, produce, and think – to be created. The political power of art, rather than being in teaching, demonstrating, provoking, or mobilizing, is in its ability to create public spaces thus conceived.”91

1989); Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” Marxism Today 38 (June 1991): 24–29; and Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998). 90 Jacques Rancière, quoted in “Conversation: Presupposition of the Equality of Intelligences and Love of the Infinitude of Thought,” in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 375. 91 Ibid.

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Encounter, Involvement, Engagement: The Monument as Meeting Place Alongside the goal of producing sites that challenge the temporal logic of public space – that is, of creating a productive public space in which it is worth spending time; one we transit to – Hirschhorn aimed to transform this space into something socially productive or bonding. When asked to explicate his conception of the monument as event, Hirschhorn answered that “I wanted this cluster of meanings, since it is many things – not only a sculpture but also a meeting place.”92 In Hirschhorn’s view, the event is not only the triggering of reflection I analyzed above, but also the production of something inherently social. Little wonder, then, that he opens one of his statements regarding the Bataille Monument with the following question: “Am I able to initiate encounters through my work?”93 And he was, even weeks before his Monuments took physical shape. Hirschhorn’s thirteen-page postscript to the Bataille Monument begins with an account of his numerous meetings with community members and organizers. Likewise, the Gramsci Monument archival website abounds in photographic witnesses to Hirschhorn’s encounters with local supervisors and administrators. In all stages of the projects thereafter – from their construction to their dismantling, through their use and occupancy – Hirschhorn never lost track of his social objective. In lieu of facing an impersonal, impermeable structure, “the inhabitants are the ones who are helping [the Monuments] to be carried out to completion.”94 If the Monuments are built on, and indeed exist through, collaborative relations, it is important to note that Hirschhorn does not conceive of the visitors as naive participants to be activated in the space of the artwork. As he puts it, “I do not want to invite or oblige viewers to become interactive with what I do. I want to give of myself…to such a degree that viewers confronted with the work can take part and become involved, but not as

92

Hirschhorn, quoted in “Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: An Interview with Thomas Hirschhorn,” 337. My emphasis. 93 Thomas Hirschhorn, “Letter to the Residents of the Friedrich Wöhler Housing Complex (Regarding the Bataille Monument), in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 225. 94 Thomas Hirschhorn, “Gramsci Monument.” My emphasis. Hirschhorn has always paid the residents who participated in the construction of his monuments. “I hate volunteerism for the sake of art!,” he wrote in “Letter to Iris (Reflections on the Bataille Monument),” in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 234.

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actors.”95 In “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” Claire Bishop builds on this assertion to argue that Hirschhorn complicates what Nicolas Bourriaud has termed “relational aesthetics”: an aesthetic that seeks “to establish intersubjective encounters (be these literal or potential) in which meaning is elaborated collectively.”96 In Bishop’s words, the visitor “is no longer coerced into fulfilling the artist’s interactive requirements, but is presupposed as a subject of independent thought.”97 Hirschhorn would add that this subject is equally of independent action, as he insists that he does not “distinguish between a person who could be a ‘receptive participant’ and the person ‘hanging around.’”98 If he hung a banner of Gramsci’s famous slogan “Every human being is an intellectual” on a nearby building of Forest Houses, it was because it echoed his belief that everyone has the capacity and freedom to harness the power of ideas and act autonomously. As such, Hirschhorn’s Monuments convey the idea that public space can be something other than a façade or, as Marianne Doezema has suggested more specifically, that there is much more to the monument’s performance than its mere style, or its school of design. “The public monument,” she writes, “is not only the private expression of an individual artist; it is also a work of art created for the public, and therefore can and should be evaluated in terms of its capacity to generate human reactions.”99 I would argue not only that Hirschhorn was able to initiate encounters through his work,100 therefore offering a view of public space 95 Thomas Hirschhorn, interview with Okwui Enwezor, Thomas Hirschhorn: Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake; Flugplatz Welt/World Airport (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2000), 27. 96 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 54. Nicolas Bourriaud defines relational art as “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.” Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les Presses du réel, 2002), 14. 97 Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 77. 98 Hirschhorn, “‘Gramsci Monument’ at Forest Houses.” 99 Marianne Doezema, “The Public Monument in Tradition and Transition,” in The Public Monument and Its Audience, eds. Marianne Doezema et al. (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1977), 9. 100 A number of testimonies by participants corroborate this claim. See for instance: Claire Bishop, “‘And That Is What Happened There’: Six Participants of the Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival,” in Establishing a Critical Corpus (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2011), 6–51; Kimball and Brand, “How Do People Feel about the Gramsci Monument?”; and Steven Thomson and Cameron Blaylock, “Thomas Hirschhorn’s Precious and Precarious Bronx,” Urban Omnibus, July 31, 2013,

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as socially generative, but also that he did so with a conception of agency that is loving, respectful, and ultimately the most effective one. Indeed, in Bishop’s view, to consider the Monuments’ participants in such a way constitutes “the essential prerequisite for political action.”101 In the first pages of The Production of Space, Lefebvre notes that “space and the political organization of space express social relationships but also react back upon them.”102 This dual relationship is what Soja has described as the “the socio-spatial dialectic: that social and spatial relations are dialectically inter-reactive, interdependent; that social relations of production are both space-forming and space-contingent.”103 It is precisely the critical potential of this sociospatial dialectic – the capacity to generate different, productive, and loving social relations and temporal models through space – that Hirschhorn’s model of monumentality seizes and exploits. The Monuments are invitations to reconceive the public space we live in ways that activate the constructive rather than destructive potential of social presence and interaction.

Hirschhorn’s Model and the Limits of Critical Spatial Practice The model of monumentality that Hirschhorn proposes is one that reasserts the possibility of a more just, collectively adequate, and productive public space. Despite what this model achieves, I want to devote these last paragraphs to exploring its limitations. One of these limitations comes into relief with the observation that Hirschhorn works within a certain socioeconomic system, one that exercises an overwhelming purchase on any attempt to question it. How can one create something different or dissident within all-encompassing capitalism? From within this system, Jameson writes, one “cannot hope to generate anything that negates the system as a whole or portends the experience of something other than the system, or outside the system.”104 In this context, it seems that any effort http://urbanomnibus.net/2013/07/thomas-hirschhorns-precious-and-precariousbronx/. 101 Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 77. 102 Henri Lefebvre, quoted in David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 306. 103 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 81. 104 Jameson, “Is Space Political?,” 260. Cf. Sebastian Egenhofer, “What Is Political about Hirschhorn’s Art?,” in Establishing a Critical Corpus (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2011), 99. Egenhofer makes a similar point on a smaller scale when he argues that “insofar as criticality has long been a highly traded value in this market, the

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to insert political critique into the socioeconomic landscape will either be relegated to the realm of the utopian or be absorbed by the system as a sign of capitalism’s capacity to accommodate even its fiercest adversaries. One way to address this concern is to insist, as Hirschhorn does, on the necessity and unavoidability of operating from within this system, of creating “a space within a space.” The Monuments succeed, even if on a small scale, in rethinking and physically remodeling one of this system’s fundamental constituents: public space. In this sense, I would argue that the impossibility of negating the system as a whole does not cancel out the possibility of rethinking or critiquing aspects of that system’s logic. Jameson himself suggests that “we might start to do this at the existential level, at the level of daily life, asking ourselves whether we can think of spaces that demand new kinds or types of living that demand new kinds of space.”105 In fact, this is precisely how Hirschhorn formulates the mission of art: “To give a form that can create the conditions for thinking something that has not yet existed.”106 At the same time, I appreciate Jameson’s concern to highlight the critical boundaries of spatial practices per se. Even though such practices, including Hirschhorn’s, do have the potential to bring about tangible social change and critical reflection on the context in which they operate, their political ambit has its own limits. In particular, I would emphasize the naiveté of any disregard for the fact that the creation of a just and productive public space requires the support of paraspatial interventions. Following Foucault, I believe that “it is somewhat arbitrary to try to dissociate the effective practice of freedom by people, the practice of social relations, and the spatial distributions in which they find themselves.”107 Hirschhorn does create alternative, productive, and valuable public spaces, but without broader social, political, and legal measures, the dream of a total remodeling of that space remains elusive.108 explicitly political orientation of a work is always in danger of being absorbed into its aesthetic autonomy as a distinctive characteristic and consumable quality.” Cf. Chantal Mouffe, “Cultural Workers as Organic Intellectual,” in The Artist as Public Intellectual? (Vienna: Schlebrügge Editor, 2008), 150. Similarly, Mouffe is concerned with the following question: “Can artistic and cultural practices still play a critical role in societies in which every critical gesture is quickly recuperated and neutralized by the dominant powers?” 105 Jameson, “Is Space Political?,” 260. 106 Thomas Hirschhorn, “Crystal of Resistance,” in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 320. 107 Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge and Power (interview conducted with Paul Rabinow),” in Leach, Rethinking Architecture, 372. 108 Here, one might argue that this dream also remains elusive because of the very fact that Hirschhorn produces temporary monuments. In other words, there seems

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This is not only to envision, as Julian Rose does, that future works by Hirschhorn might “have to interface more directly with the powers that regulate the spaces they enter.”109 The work lying ahead is not just the artist’s. My suggestion is also an appeal to these powers, a call for the public realization that the space in which we live – the space of activists and strikers, of students and workers, of politicians and revolutionaries – is more than a collection of parks and stone sculptures. Public space is where we learn, protest, and negotiate, where we meet, reflect and remember. It is, in other words, quite a fascinating place.

Conclusion: Spaces that Matter The Gramsci Monument, along with its three siblings, is the material result of an experiment Hirschhorn launched around twenty years ago, one that led him miles away from the cold, inflexible monuments he once observed in Treptower Park. Hirschhorn devised structures that “come from below,” concentrating on the reactions and interactions they produce rather than on the quality of their constituting materials – “Quality should be attributed to human beings, not to things,”110 read a white banner nailed to the wooden bridge connecting the two wings of the Monument. A moral call for greater human respect, this phrase from Gramsci echoes the purpose of Hirschhorn’s Monuments: to celebrate love, reflection, and the force of encounters, and propose freer ways of engaging with the past and the practice of commemoration. In a short note he wrote in 1994, Hirschhorn expressed his desire to “make a necessary work, a work that is something and that doesn’t signify something. Something essential.”111 He certainly did, in the end, for the to be a paradox in the expression of a desire for more just public spaces through the creation of ephemeral artworks. Although I understand the appeal of this hypothetical argument, I want to resist equating spatial temporariness with the impossibility of just spaces. I would argue that more just or socially productive discourses about public space can be motivated by spatial interventions (artistic or architectural) regardless of the duration of these interventions. 109 Rose, “Building Complex,” 312. 110 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol.1, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 226. The original reads “men” instead of “human beings.” Gramsci criticized the bourgeois pursuit for quality, which creates a system where poorer classes are prevented from accessing this category of goods. He claimed that quality is “a formula for idle men of letters and demagogic politicians who bury their heads in the sand to avoid witnessing reality” (ibid.). 111 Thomas Hirschhorn, “What I Want,” in Lee, Critical Laboratory, 27.

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Monuments rethink and re-create the spaces in which we live our lives, spaces that matter. Together, the Monuments invite us to reassess a temporal logic that instrumentalizes public space, suggesting instead that we seek the socially productive potential of the spaces we share. Once the works are dismantled, what remains is not merely, as Hirschhorn suggested, the thoughts of the participants and the encounters they made. Most importantly, Hirschhorn’s fundamental insight is that the consolidation of a societal logic built on a truly human scale – even though it eventually requires the hands of all actors of the sociopolitical apparatus – begins in public space.112 As Lefebvre once proclaimed in a tone that anticipates Hirschhorn’s own passion: “‘Change life! Change society!’ These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space.”113

List of Figures Figure 1. Thomas Hirschhorn, Spinoza Monument, 1999, ‘Midnight Walkers City Sleepers’, W 139, Amsterdam, 1999, Copyright Thomas Hirschhorn, Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Figure 2. Thomas Hirschhorn, Deleuze Monument, 2000, ‘La Beauté’, Avignon, Courtesy DRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Aix-enProvence. Figure 3. Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument, 2002 (TV Studio), Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002, Photo: Werner Maschmann, Courtesy the artist and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York. Figure 4. Thomas Hirschhorn, Gramsci Monument, 2013, School Supplies Distribution by Forest Resident Association, Forest Houses, Bronx, New York, Photo: Romain Lopez, Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Figure 5. Thomas Hirschhorn, Preparatory drawings, Gramsci Monument, 2013, Copyright Thomas Hirschhorn, Courtesy the artist. Figure 6. Thomas Hirschhorn, Gramsci Monument, 2013, Gramsci Archive and Library, Forest Houses, Bronx, New York, Photo: Romain Lopez, Courtesy Dia Art Foundation.

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cf. “A model of political culture appropriate to our own situation will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental organizing concern.” Jameson, Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 89. 113 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 59.

SECTION II: REFLECTIONS ON THE MODERNIST MONUMENT

A MONUMENT IN THE EXPANDED FIELD OF MINIMALISM: THE CASE OF DANI KARAVAN’S MONUMENT TO THE NEGEV BRIGADE KATYA EVAN

Introduction The interface between memorial art and Minimalism offers the opportunity for a fascinating encounter in the context of the recent discourse on monumental sculpture and on Minimalism itself.1 In this chapter I seek a deeper understanding of this interface through an analysis of Dani Karavan’s Monument to the Negev Brigade (1963–1968). Examination of the monument in the context of Minimalism has become possible owing to the recent expanding discussion on Minimalism, which challenges the canonical conventions in regard to the movement. As this chapter further demonstrates, placing Karavan’s monument in the expanded field of Minimalism serves to reveal its complex expression of personal memory and bereavement. Minimalism is generally perceived as supporting autonomy of form, rejecting all content and context, and demanding to be studied solely on the basis of what is seen, whereas monumental sculpture is loaded with historical and political content, which is often particularly complex. Yet many of the memorial sites erected in the last few decades are characterized by an abstract geometrical language and an inclination toward austerity and simplicity, and for this reason have come to be called

  1 I base my use of the terms “memorial” and “monument” on the generic distinction proposed by James Young, wherein “memorial” is a broad expression of commemoration: memorial books, memorial activities, memorial days, memorial sculptures. etc., and “monument” is “a subset of memorials: the material object, sculptures, and installations used to memorialize a person or thing.” James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 4.

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“minimalist.”2 The most prominent of these are the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) by Maya Lin, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005) by Peter Eisenman, and The National September 11 Memorial (2011) by Michael Arad and Peter Walker. These are national commemoration sites that have an ascetic and appearance and thus evoke mixed responses and vivid discussions that make a clear connection between their visual practice and Minimalism, mainly in the popular press. For instance, in 2002, the New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman pointed out that “[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.”3 Similar contentions can be found in the work of many researchers, critics, and professionals, who see Minimalism as a universal language to be used for commemoration in the present era of multiculturalism.4 The discussion that takes place on newspaper pages does not, of course, aspire to thoroughly analyze the complex connection that was suggested several decades ago between memorial sites and minimalist aesthetics, nor does it look deeply into the complex problems implicit in the very definition of Minimalism. However, the frequent references to the relationship between Minimalism and commemorative art create a discourse in which this connection is presupposed. There has not been much relevant research but two major books concerned with the post-World War II commemoration of the Holocaust – James E. Young’s The Texture of Memory: Holocaust

  2

It is probably necessary to identify Minimalism as an American art movement of the 1960s and to distinguish it from the expansive reductive aesthetics and tendencies that prompted widespread, sometimes jargonish, use of the term “minimalist.” Yet, it is also important to keep in mind that Minimalism is “neither a clearly defined style nor a coherent movement.” I adhere to James Meyer’s view, i.e., that the entire range of distinctions and definitions of the Minimalist movement is its main polemic. According to Meyer, “We come closer to the truth in viewing minimalism not as a movement with a coherent platform, but as a field of contiguity and conflict, of proximity and difference.” James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 3–4. 3 Michael Kimmelman, “Art/Architecture: Out of Minimalism, Monuments to Memory,” The New York Times, January 13, 2002. 4 See, e.g., Julie V. Iovin, “Are Memorial Designs Too Complex to Last?,” The New York Times, November 22, 2003; John Zeaman, “WTC Memorial Is Minimalism with Flourishes,” The Record (Bergen County, NJ), January 15, 2004; Harris Dimitropoulos, “The Character of Contemporary Memorials,” Places Journal 21, no. 1 (May 2009): 52–55.

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Memorials and Meaning (1993) , and Mark Godfrey’s Abstraction and the Holocaust (2007) – highlight important insights in regard to the transition from the figurative to the abstract in the language of commemoration and the impact of abstract monuments on memorial art. According to Young, artists who were commissioned to commemorate the events of World War II rejected figurative language so as not to fall into the trap of glorification or mythologization of the horror. In their turn to the abstract they were able to confront the harsh reality and open up meaning, thus creating a private sensation for the viewer and a range of expressive modes for the artists.5 Godfrey also focuses on understanding the interaction between the abstract language and the idea of commemoration. He discusses the different ways in which the abstract language creates historical and public meaning and shows how the artist copes with the memory and the trauma by way of the abstract.6 Still, when dealing with the manifestly minimalist projects by Sol Le’Witt, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, and others, Young and Godfrey do not develop a specific discussion of the minimalist practice.7 Minimalism in their studies is implicit in the wider field of the abstract and receives little discussion either in its own right or in its historical and national contexts. Attempts to treat Minimalism as a distinct category in commemoration research are rare and somewhat hesitant, not only in the work of Young and Godfrey. The most widespread approach sees Minimalism, similarly to the abstract in general, as a reserved and universal language that is most suitable today for addressing painful and charged topics.8 One example of such an argument can be found in the article by Harris Dimitropoulos, “The Character of Contemporary Memorials,” where he points out the reflective component of the minimalist language, which makes Minimalism an “effective strategy for contemporary memorials.”9 Using psychoanalytic tools, but not examining Minimalism as such, he argues

  5

Young, The Texture of Memory, 9–11. Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 4–9. 7 Thus Godfrey discusses the problematics of reception in Stella’s commemorative work in light of the artist’s avoidance of content and contexts external to art, yet does not examine this escape as part of the problematics of Minimalism in general: Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust, 95–98. 8 See also Carolyn J. Dean, “Minimalism and Victim Testimony,” History and Theory 49 (December 2010): 85–99. Dean examines the contribution of the minimalist language of victims’ testimonies in fiction to descriptions of horror and suffering in a historical context. 9 Dimitropoulos, “The Character of Contemporary Memorials,” 52. 6

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that contemporary (abstract-minimalist) memorials, as opposed to representational ones, “provide a perfect surface for the projection of our egos and desires,” and can “teach us something about ourselves without having to be didactic.” In this way, he maintains, contemporary memorials manage to “play the double and contradicting role of addressing both loosely defined collectivity and the needs and desires of diverse individuals at the same time,” and in the era of late capitalism and globalization “to sacrifice specificity.”10 In other words, Dimitropoulos perceives the minimalist language of memorials as emphasizing the individual and de-emphasizing the collective, an approach that avoids the conflict between memory and identity that can arise in the context of commemoration among different social groups. Nearly the only example of a specific analysis of connections between Minimalism and a memorial site is provided by Daniel Abramson in his discussion of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial.11 On the one hand, Abramson considers that Lin’s memorial “was insulted by populist critics as minimalist” and that the connection between this work and Minimalism is no more than perfunctory. He argues: Instead of using the alienating, nonart, industrial materials of Minimalism – steel, aluminum, or concrete – Lin used luxurious, polished, artful granite. Instead of being emptied of extrinsic, referential meaning, Lin’s monument clearly possessed a subject outside of itself. Instead of being in conflict with its environment, Lin’s monument gently worked with the earth and paid respect to its neighbors.12

On the other hand, Abramson reveals the complex affinity between the memorial and Minimalism, which, in his opinion, lies in the “depersonalized, industrial information presented by the monument.” In the endless list of tens of thousands of names of the fallen, carved on the walls of the memorial and presenting the “present facts” of the loss in an almost bureaucratic sequence, Abramson recognizes “rawness, seriality, objectivity and neutrality: the formal vocabulary of Minimalism.” In light of the minimalist reading, he notes “a strong sense of alienation from the information” and suggests that it contains an element of politicalideological critique.13

  10

Ibid., 52–55. Daniel Abramson, “Maya Lin and the 1960s: Monuments, Time Lines, and Minimalism,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 4 (Summer 1996). 12 Ibid., 703–704. 13 Ibid., 705–709. 11

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The approaches proposed by Abramson, Dimitropoulos, and Godfrey cause me to think of similar contexts for the Monument to the Negev Brigade (1963–1968) by Dani Karavan, which, being an abstract sculptural site, marks a turning point in the notions of commemoration in Israel and even in the world. Following Abramson’s reading of Minimalism for its conceptual content, I study Karavan’s memorial in minimalist contexts and ask whether certain aspects of Minimalism can help expose new content in this memorial and contribute to an understanding its abstract language. Following Dimitropoulos’s analysis of the reflexive aspect of monuments, I deal with the prompts for reflection that the Negev Monument provides and focus on the viewer’s subjective experience of the site. In accord with Godfrey’s model of abstract language creating historical and public meaning, I examine the charged encounter of Minimalism with history and memory and investigate their mutual challenge. I would like to point out that this discussion has only become possible owing to the renewed research evaluation of the discourse and practice of Minimalism, which broadens the minimalist field beyond its formalistic definitions and allows narrative and subjective examination of the field.

Figure 1

The Negev Monument – History of Creation and Reception The Monument to the Negev Brigade (generally referred to as the Negev Monument) by Dani Karavan (Figs. 1–4) is dedicated to the role of the

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Palmach’s Negev Brigade14 in the war of 1948 (termed in Israel the “War of Independence”) and is approached in the professional literature as marking a turning point in monumental sculpture in Israel. The monument was built as a complex of abstract architectonic structures spread out over an area of 100 × 100 meters in a desert landscape on the outskirts of the city of Be’er Sheva. The elements that make up the monument are cast from concrete, and some of them have inscribed texts commemorating the story of the battles and the names of the fallen. The elements are halved, pierced, twisted, and tilted, and the conditions and phenomena inherent in their environment, such as the shadows created by the rays of the sun, the sounds made by the wind blowing through the pieces, the desert sand that covers them, the desert acacias planted in their vicinity, are all officially listed in catalogue descriptions as materials of the monument.15 Water flowing in an aqueduct and a continually burning fire in the memorial dome were also planned for in the complex, but for various reasons, mostly technical, they could not be implemented and were given up with the artist’s consent.

Figure 2

  14

A military force before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Mordechai Omer, ed., Dani Karavan: Retrospective, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2008), 573. 15

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Figure 3

When Karavan began planning the Negev Monument in 1963, a figurative language of commemoration, combining classicism with primitivistic tendencies of ancient Eastern origin, still prevailed in Israel. As Esther Levinger explains in her book War Memorials in Israel (1993), the conventional style of memorials in Israel stood in contradiction to the up-to-date trend of modernist sculpture in Israel, which was mainly abstract, a contradiction that was an expression of values and an ideological choice of a period that consecrated the human figure and the collective.16 She notes that from the late 1950s on, there was a tendency toward abstraction in memorial sculptures in Israel, although they still retained a reference to the human body or some narrative figure, as one can see, for example, in Munio Gitai’s and Alfres Mansfeld’s Memorial to Fallen Soldiers at Beit Shean.17 The reception of these semi-abstract sculptures was ridden with problems, primarily owing to the openness of interpretation.18 According to Levinger, early models and attempts to plan an abstract memorial that would emphasize the connection among its forms, materials, and environment started appearing at the end of the

  16 Esther Levinger, War Memorials in Israel (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, Ltd., 1993) (Hebrew), 81–84. 17 http://paxisraeliana.tumblr.com/post/51711496671/memorial-at-beit-shean-bymunio-gitai-and-alfred 18 Esther Levinger, War Memorials in Israel, 85.

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1950s and the early 1960s, as, for example, in Yigael Tumarkin’s model Little Monument (1958) and Yitzhak Danziger’s proposal for the Jerusalem Road Memorial (1960).19 Yet Karavan’s proposal for the Monument to the Negev Brigade was among the first to be accepted and finally realized.20

Figure 4

Since it was erected, the innovation of the Negev Monument seems to have deterred contemporary critics from discussing it in depth. According to Manfred Schneckenburger, contemporary art critics in Israel “remain silent…because they have failed to identify the pioneering act [of Karavan’s monument] which…located itself at the forefront of the development of international art.21 More recent scholars do not hesitate to refer to the monument as a groundbreaking modernist work in the field of commemoration and public sculpture. Idith Zertal describes it as a “groundbreaking work of landscape design and architecture…a new

  19

Yigael Tumarkin, Tumarkin: In the Centre of the Margins (Tel Aviv: Massada and Y. Tumarkin, 1986), 9, 55; Mordechai Omer, Itzhak Danziger (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1996), 406. 20 Esther Levinger, War Memorials in Israel, 95. 21 Manfred Schneckenburger, “An Israeli as a World Citizen in Art,” In Dani Karavan: Winter 97, Ramat Gan, Israel (Ramat Gan: The Museum of Israeli Art, 1997), 96.

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language of memorial sites and of public art.”22 Mordechai Omer defines it as a “masterpiece of Israeli art, the first site-specific Israeli artwork.”23 Levinger argues: The Negev Monument by Karavan marks a turning point in the perception of a memorial site, because of its dimensions…and because it presents a sculptural reconstruction of a battlefield, in which the viewer is invited, as it were, into the experience of war. It is also the first one to be built with a deep consideration of its environment.… In addition, Karavan integrated into the sculptured environment the blinding sun, the whistling wind, the scarce vegetation of the desert.24

These descriptions point to a range of features that matured in the Negev Monument and have been elements in Karavan’s public works ever since: creating a sculptural site adhering to architectural principles, with an attention to spatial and environmental conditions, taking into consideration the human body and the way it moves within the site. In spite of the innovation that the Negev Monument represents, it is discussed in the literature primarily in connection with the modernist sculptural heritage of the early twentieth century and in light of the figurative commemorative tradition in Israel. Marc Scheps expresses the conventional point of view about Karavan’s sources of inspiration, saying that the artist was inspired by “the new definition of sculptural space undertaken by Brancusi, Giacometti and Noguchi.”25 Furthermore it is clear to Scheps that Karavan “assumes consequently this historical heritage while questioning it and opening it to new perspectives.”26 Scheps’s argument, which seems to hint at the new categories of sculptural practice as site-specific, earth, and environmental art, is clarified in Schneckenburger’s descriptions of the Negev Monument as “an original expression of Land Art.”27 However, these new categories have not yet been perceived as constituting an important enough context in which to

  22

Idith Zertal, “Tikkun Olam – Mending the World: On Art and Politics in the Work of Dani Karavan,” in Dani Karavan: Retrospective, vol. 1, ed. Mordechai Omer (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2008), 390. 23 Mordechai Omer, “Early and Late in Dani Karavan’s Oeuvre,” in Dani Karavan: Retrospective, vol. 1, ed. Mordechai Omer (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2008), 404–405. 24 Levinger, War Memorials in Israel, 95–96. 25 Marc Scheps, “An Axis for the Future,” in Dani Karavan: Winter 97, Ramat Gan Israel (Ramat Gan: The Museum of Israeli Art 1997), 107. 26 Ibid. 27 Schneckenburger, “An Israeli as a World Citizen in Art,” 95.

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examine the Negev Monument, but were only mentioned to emphasize its innovative spirit. In the commemorative perspective, it is also conventional to examine the monument in the historical context of local monuments and as a step in their development. Zertal recognizes in the monument’s concepts and figurative shapes a reference “to some key conceptual and formal images of the Zionist-Israeli narrative” and a correspondence to the “most branded sites of the hegemonic Zionist metanarrative of Holocaust and redressing, destruction and redemption.”28 Levinger also notes that “in spite of its abstraction, the memorial tells the stories of the fights and the victory,”29 which suggests that the narrativity of the monument brings it closer to the traditional figurative sculpture.

Minimalism as a Relevant Context for Interpreting the Negev Monument The conventional readings of the Negev Monument are rooted mainly in the history that preceded it – in sculptural modernism and in the ideological patterns of the early, formative years of the state. The innovations it introduced in terms of the artistic language and the way of commemoration, which are definitely surprising in light of the early year in which it was first planned (1963), were barely looked at in terms of the relevant context of the period, nor have they been examined in retrospect. Moreover, many writers insist on emphasizing the hermetic and unique character of Karavan’s work, radically detaching it from all the trends of the period: “Karavan’s work has been misleadingly pigeonholed in terms of international art categories. He is neither a practitioner of Arte Povera nor of Land Art, neither a conceptualist nor a minimalist. He is neither a photo artist nor a light-and-video artist,” writes Cristoph Brockhaus.30 Yet the noticeable echoes of the international artistic trends of the 1960s in the innovative features of the Negev Monument (which can be summed up as acting upon the interrelations among the sculptural site, the environment, and the viewer) highlight the need for new perspectives on the ways in which Karavan’s sculptural complex works. In the 1960s, when the monument was designed and built, far-reaching changes were taking place

  28

Zertal, “Tikkun Olam,” 388. Levinger, War Memorials in Israel, 96. 30 Cristoph Brockhaus, “Public Commissions: Dani Karvan’s Site-Specific Environments,” in Dani Karavan: Retrospective, vol. 2, ed. Mordechai Omer (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2007), 838. Given his cautious avoidance of pigeonholing Karavan’s art, Brockhaus’s title is surprising. 29

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in the centers of artistic activity in Europe and especially in the United States, principally in the sculptural medium, which was being redefined by minimalist practices on the basis of the triangle of relationships among the artistic object, the space, and the viewer. The concept of “Minimalism,” which sets the framework for discussion in the present chapter, is mentioned more than once in theorizing about the Negev Monument, yet it is almost immediately hedged or denied, or, as Michael Gibson declares, “The paradox of Dani Karavan’s art is that it often enlists a minimalist form to achieve something that is in fact quite incompatible with the minimalist perspective.”31 Many critics, including Mordechai Omer, Christoph Brockhaus, and Michael Gibson, agree that in spite of the reductive language of the Negev Monument, it is wrong and misleading to view it in minimalist contexts, since its sensitive treatment of the human being, the environment, history, and memory is completely opposed to the minimalist nihilism, which produces primary, hermetic shapes devoid of all context. This convention clearly rests on the orthodox readings of Minimalism that were crystallized in the 1960s by the artists themselves and the circle of writers who were close to them. In early research on Minimalism, such core minimalist artists as Robert Morris, Frank Stella, and Donald Judd, as well as key scholars, including Lawrence Alloway, Lucy Lippard, Barbara Rose, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krauss, shaped the traditional interpretation of Minimalism as a formalist practice concerned exclusively with form devoid of content and context, objective and hermetic.32 This interpretation continues to underlie many arthistorical analyses and is echoed in the reception of the Negev Monument. The rejection of Minimalism by scholars studying Karavan’s monument is explained by what they see as an unnatural connection between the formalist practice apparently proposed by Minimalism and the historical and emotional baggage that any monument carries. Yet the relevance of this line of reasoning fades in light of more recent readings of Minimalism. The later literature, that published since the 1990s by such researchers as Anna Chave, Briony Fer, Hal Foster, and James Mayer, offers a new way of thinking about Minimalism and aspires to gauge its scope and character.33 According to these authors, the minimalist field

  31

Gibson, “Time and Space, Memory and Identity.” For instance, see Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 33 Anna Chave, “Minimalism and Biography,” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 1 (March 2000): 149–63; Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000); Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of 32

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raises a series of questions and definitions that reveal that, in contrast to the previous assumptions that used to be common in research and discussion, Minimalism does not offer a clear-cut practice that follows a certain set of rules, but presents a wide and dynamic field of diverse praxes. Among other things, recent studies uncover the subjective, biographical, political, and gender contexts within Minimalism; they discuss the experience of the viewer, psychological aspects, the rhetoric of power, and the spatial impact of the works, thus diverging from the formalist approach and undermining the canonical reading of Minimalism. As I pointed out above and will further demonstrate, certain issues (such as the viewer’s experience and spatial and psychological aspects of the work) that were raised in the second wave of research on Minimalism have also been discussed in relation to the Negev Monument, so it definitely appears that Minimalism is a highly relevant frame of reference for understanding the monument, The object-space-viewer relations were elevated to the utmost significance by American minimalist artists in their practice and discourse, which constituted one of their most original moves – turning the art object into a phenomenological source. Phenomenology of Minimalism examines the physical and perceptual responses of the viewer to the formal and material aspects of the work and the conditions of the environment in which the encounter between the two is taking place. According to this notion, the bodily response of the viewer serves as the exclusive source from which the work’s meaning can be extracted. The phenomenological idea is embodied, for instance, in the well-known work by Robert Morris Mirrored Cubes (1965), in which a number of wooden cubes plated with mirrors are installed indoors as well as outdoors.34 The cubes reflect the surroundings (the space of the gallery or the landscape on different occasions) and partly merge into them, so that the viewer experiences a situation of reciprocal invasion between him/herself and the object and the space, and perceives the material, the light, and the space and even him/herself reflected in the cubes in a particularly confusing way. By using mirrors, Morris exemplifies in an almost didactic way how vital the spatial conditions are for experiencing the work of art. He contends that the relationship among the object, the space, and the viewer inform the

  the Real (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 35–71; James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). 34 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/morris-untitled-t01532

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entire meaning of the work.35 The phenomenological thrust of Minimalism turns out to be a significant framework for examining the complex relationship that exists in the Negev Monument among the sculptural site, the environment, and the viewer, and it is likely to contribute a fruitful reading of this relationship in the context of commemoration. It is reasonable to assume that the minimalist phenomenology, on which I base what follows, is only one example of a relevant reading that arises from the artistic and historical background of the monument. Karavan was certainly aware of the minimalist aesthetics that began to appear in American art during the period in which he created the monument. It is possible that designing the scenery for the ballet The Legend of Judith by renowned dancer and choreographer Martha Graham in 1962 contributed to this awareness, as he visited Graham in New York and they became friends. Karavan’s involvement in performance arts is interesting in its own right, in light of the mutuality and close cooperation that developed in those years between the American minimalist artists and performing artists and dancers.36 Thus, the choreography and performances of the dancer Yvonne Rainer (who studied in the Martha Graham School in 1959–1960) clearly expressed her close acquaintance with the minimalist milieu and the aesthetic principles of Minimalism.37 For example, in the course of her performance Carriage Discreetness (1966), minimalist objects designed by Carl Andre appeared on stage, while Robert Morris played the role of a dancer receiving instructions from Rainer.38 For Morris, participating in the dance performance and creating stage designs with minimalist objects represented an important additional avenue of phenomenological exploration of the relationship among the body, the object, and the space. For Karavan as well, the conceptualization of the sculptural site, which began with the Negev Monument and continued throughout his public work, matured to a great extent owing to his involvement in stage design between 1960 and 1973.39

  35

Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1966] 1995), 232. 36 For instance, on Morris’s cooperation with dancing troupes, see James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 39, 51. 37 Yvonne Rainer, “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 263–73. 38 http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=626 39 An early example of a public work is Courtyard (1963–1967), Tel Aviv, Israel, and a later one is Mizrach (1997–2005), Regensburg, Germany.

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As Brockhaus points out, “Karavan has increasingly been taking the stage set outdoors and transferring the role of actor or dancer to members of the public.”40 These connections are additional evidence that planning a sculptural environment to serve as a spatial context and to give rise to bodily and sensory response in the viewer is a fascinating and powerful interface between Karavan’s sculptural practice and the minimalist field.

# Figure 5

  40

Brockhaus, “Public Commissions,” 840.

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Karavan himself conceded, over the course of years, that he always functioned in an “artistic no-man’s land”: “I moved across borders and disciplines and between Minimalism and Conceptualism, narration and abstraction, sculpture and architecture, earth art and landscape design.”41 This formulation indicates several artistic affiliations and traces certain boundaries of creative action, which, even if they were supposed to be crossed from the start, left their imprint on Karavan’s art and thus merit scholarly attention. If, as many suppose, the Negev Monument “serves as the primary reference for all analyses of…[Karavan’s] work,”42 then the strengthening of the minimalist turn in his late commemorative project Passages: Homage to Walter Benjamin (1990–1994; Fig. 5) is an additional justification for exploring the minimalist affinities of the Negev Monument. Homage to Walter Benjamin is not only reduced to minimalist austerity through form and material, but also conveys a single motif, a markedly minimalistic one, already present in the Negev Monument: that of the passage. Sculptures of the passage, embracing and imprisoning the viewer within them, are very common in the praxes of minimalist artists and their followers, including Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, and Michael Heizer; Rosalind Krauss saw in them the last stage in the genealogy of the modernist sculpture and the pinnacle of the phenomenological move that Minimalism had led.43

Architecture and the Viewer’s Experience in the Expanded Field of Minimalism As I show further on, specific discussion of the major components and motifs of the Negev Monument in light of Minimalism reveals interesting modes of action and the influence of the sculptural complex on the viewer and offers something new about the viewer’s experience of this site. The monument is built from a number of autonomous sculptural bodies identified on the basis of explanations provided by Karavan himself as architectonic elements: tent, dome, bunker, watchtower, tunnel, aqueduct, and square. These elements are described in the literature as components that have an expressive character and a narrative-symbolic baggage, which, along with the names of the dead, dedications, and documentaries

  41

Dani Karavan, “Thoughts about a Path.” Scheps, “An Axis for the Future,” 106. 43 Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1977), 282–87. 42

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from the battle journals, commemorate the story of the battles, the heroism, and the fallen.44 The combination of the sculptural and the architectural in the monument has been viewed in research not only as assigning meaning to abstract shapes but also as an act that cancels their alienated minimalist quality. Brockhaus writes: “In the period of art history characterized by minimalist and conceptualist purism Karavan was building bridges between architecture and sculpture…in order to reconcile art with its environment, to see the beholder as a user, to facilitate dialogue, communication and action.”45 In Brockhaus’s view, Minimalism rejects every possibility of dialogue and cooperation with the viewer, goals that Karavan accomplishes through the connection to architecture. However, not only does the affinity to architecture exist in minimalist practice, but it also acts and becomes manifest precisely with regard to the viewer. Early works of Robert Morris, such as Column (1961), Portals (1961), Steles (1961), were inspired by the ancient Egyptian architecture the artist admired as a child, and they remind one of the square components of the Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara.46 As James Meyer writes, “Morris was attracted to these references because, like architecture, his sculpture was built to bodily scale.”47 The fact that Column was created for a performance of La Monte Young’s Living Theater in New York in 1962 and designed to contain an actor inside, who had to make it fall in the course of the performance by means of his body’s weight, indicates a close connection among architecture, the minimalist object, and the human body. An additional instance of manifest connection to architecture is provided by the sculptures of Richard Serra. Hal Foster explains that the monumental curves and labyrinths in Serra’s sculptures have a dramatic effect upon the viewer, an effect that owes its inspiration to Baroque architecture.48 One can confidently say that in Morris’s and Serra’s work, the reference to architecture as an environment designed for human use is made to provide and ensure the understanding that in spite of its hermetic appearance, the sculpture does not stand on its own but “looks out” for the viewer and seeks to evoke his/her response. As Brockhaus points out, the reliance of the sculptural forms of the Negev Monument on architectural

  44

Eran Neuman, “The Dialectical Meaning of Form,” in Dani Karavan: Retrospective, vol. 2, 849; Scheps, “An Axis for the Future,” 106. 45 Brockhaus, “Public Commissions,” 841. 46 Meyer, Minimalism, 50. 47 Ibid., 51. 48 Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex (London and New York: Verso, 2011), 160–65.

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language ensures preservation of the human dimension in the monument’s array and strengthens the reference of the forms to the human body. Such an approach does not pose any contradiction to Minimalist experience; moreover, it is intrinsic in this practice. In her article “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power” (1990), Anna Chave expands on this issue while pointing out illuminating connections between minimalist sculpture and classical architecture. She writes: Formally, Minimalism is simple in many of the same ways as classical architecture and complex in some similar ways as well: both are distinguished by the use of plain, lucid forms that tend to reveal themselves in their entirety from any viewpoint…a pleasing sense of proportion and scale coupled with a clarity and austerity of design.49

Chave marks the fact that classical orders were reproduced by modern democratic and liberal societies as concepts of balance, wholeness, and authority (as, for instance, in public buildings across the United States), but were also borrowed by the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy and became symbols of absolute power (autarchy). She notes that the same characteristics of classical architecture traced back to the minimalist practice allude to this history of authority and power in order to evoke in the viewer a sense of estrangement, detachment, and reluctance, and thus make the disturbing reality of their lives tangible.50 The comparison between minimalist sculpture and classical architectural modes supports the main thesis of Chave’s paper: in the minimalist practice there exists an irreducible domain of violence, negation, authority, and power that points to the political-critical response of Minimalism to the current events of its time.51 It is quite clear that, as opposed to classical and minimalist rigor, the general appearance of the Negev Monument is rich in elements and characterized by an almost expressive complexity. Yet each element separately, as well as the entire complex, adheres to the internal logic of symmetry, rhythm, and balance. Moreover, the principal components of the monument embody archetypes of a pyramid, a column, a dome, an arc, and a colonnade. It is intriguing to look deeper into the combination of sculpture and architecture in the Negev Monument in light of Chave’s

  49

Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine (January 1990): 53. 50 Ibid., 53–54. 51 As an example, Chave mentions only the events of 1965: America’s intervention in Vietnam, the Watts riots, and assassination of Malcolm X: Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” 53.

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ideas. In order to connect Chave’s reading of Minimalism with the monument and understand how drawing inspiration from architecture imparts its immanent authority, I turn to Ronald Bladen’s minimalist work Three Elements (1965).52 Bladen’s work comprises three tilted rectangular elements each about 3 meters high, installed separate from each other and tilted at an angle of 65 degrees. The elements are made of plywood and their outer sides are faced with black enamel, whereas those turning inside toward each other are aluminum-plated. When the viewer stands between the tilted elements, it is as if the sculpture itself disappears and the viewer is reflected in the dim weightless aluminum surfaces and experiences an enveloping and containing environment. Yet when one leaves the internal space of the sculpture and is exposed to the mass, the height, and the threatening tilt of the three elements, one finds him/herself in a tense and deterring environment, under the authoritative power of the sculpture. The tension between the internal and the external space in the work is architectonic in nature: the autonomous structure does not exist for the person who is inside it, and is only revealed when the person goes outside. Thus Bladen uses the architectural language in order to create sculptural elements that combine the human and the subjective with the monumental and the autonomous.53 Juxtaposing Bladen’s Three Elements with the components of the Negev Monument highlights a similar tension between the object and the observer: massive elements comprising structures such as the tent and the bunker gradually rise up from the ground and surround and envelop the viewer till they overwhelm, break in, threaten to fall, block, and change in a continuous interplay between the inside and the outside. In fact, these are the elements that maintain a dialectical relationship with each other and create a dynamic of closeness and remoteness at the same time. On the one hand, they offer themselves to the viewer as containing spaces and as sites for action, and many visitors (especially children) enjoy climbing, crawling, and jumping among them. On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore the disturbing apprehensiveness that arises in the presence of an array of massive forms and the ever-changing perspectives, which surprise the visitor making progress through the site. A lonely person visiting the

  52

http://www.wikiart.org/en/ronald-bladen/three-elements-1965 Daniel Marzona, Minimal Art (Cologne: Taschen, 2004), 40. Marzona explains that Bladen attempted to show in his sculpture the architectural tension that he looked for but did not find at Stonehenge in England: “His disappointment lay in what he felt was a lack of tension between the standing architectural forms.” 53

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site may feel especially strongly the deterring aspect of the authoritative power present almost in every structural element of the monument. This encounter unfolds through Oz Almog’s analysis of sculptural memorials as bearing a significant symbolic role in “civil religion” and serving the cult of the nation.54 According to Almog, Zionist ideology became the “civil religion” of the Israeli State; therefore the monuments throughout Israel, among their other missions, mark the national identity and strengthen the collective values of the Zionist State. Regarding Almog’s view, I argue that the authoritative power of the Negev Monument has to be considered (also) as an expression of sovereign power and, as such, marks a new climax in this approach. The dialectical character of the architectural elements of the Negev Monument is increased by their being part of an array that in its turn produces a complex effect on the viewer. As Eran Neuman explains, the structures of the monument are ostensibly independent objects, but their exact placement in the overall composition was chosen by Karavan based on a meticulous examination of the relationship among its various components. Moreover, according to Neuman, the establishment of those relationships creates not only the visual but also the narrative syntax of the site, which he describes as a political meaning of memory and history55: While conceiving of the composition and lending meaning to the various components, Karavan forms a political narrative which is offered to viewers through the use of the work: wandering amongst its various sections, climbing on its constituent elements, the visitors’ location in relation to its various parts – all these generate intricate interrelations between the subjects, the audience, and Karavan’s artistic text. This relationship exposes users to the political dimension taking place through the physical experience.56

The central idea of Karavan’s monument is an insistence that its meaning is revealed to the viewer not only through passive contemplation, but mainly through physical use of its components or, as minimalist phenomenology has it, the bodily experience of the viewer that serves as the main channel for understanding the monument. Karavan makes a radical move, which is most closely associated with minimalist practice: transferring the emphasis from the work itself to the viewer and thereby changing the traditional paradigm, which made Hal Foster see Minimalism

  54

For more details, see Oz Almog, “Israeli War Memorials: A Semiological Analysis” (Hebrew), Megamot, no. 2 (1992): 179–210. 55 Neuman, “The Dialectical Meaning of Form,” 848–47. 56 Ibid., 850.

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as “an apogee of modernism, but…no less a break with it.”57 The issue of the viewer was the basis of the famous critique of Minimalism by Michael Fried, a critique that succeeded in clearly (although sarcastically) conceptualizing the minimalist practice and expressing the tension at the end of the modernist era. In his seminal article “Art and Objecthood” (1967), Fried refuses to see Minimalism as a movement in art and defines it instead as a new genre of theater, because of what he sees as the exaggerated need of the minimalist object for the viewer and because of Minimalism’s aspiration to create a site that unites the object with the viewer. He sees the shift in emphasis from the artistic object or art itself to the viewer and turning contemplation of the work into an active and temporally continuous experience as an existential threat to art.58 Indeed, as is clear today, Minimalism’s heightened engagement with the viewers’ experience has prompted dramatic changes in the artistic field since the 1960s.59 This is especially true in the sculptural medium, in which new categories arose that challenge the passive spectatorship required by the traditional work of art. Among these categories, defined by Krauss in her article “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979), there is one known as “site-construction” – a sculptural work connecting to its environment and creating an array defined by two domains outside of art: architecture and landscape – a fitting definition for the Negev Monument.60 According to Morris, the array of relationships between the object and the viewer has to involve “actual circumstances” of the space, and thus the minimalist work aspires to create “the entire situation” and “spatial context” where everything present in the viewer’s field of vision is taken into account by the artist.61 Spatial context, which Morris bases on Gestalt theory, strengthens the phenomenological experience of the viewer, who responds not only to the object but also to the fact of its situatedness in space, and to the space as a whole. In the Negev Monument, the spatial context is extended significantly beyond Morris’s idea and presents an

  57

Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 42. 58 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 10 (June 1967): 12–23. 59 In “The Crux of Minimalism,” Foster claims that Minimalism marks a decisive crossroad in the genealogy of art since the 1960s and until today. See an example of an interesting affinity between minimalist sculpture and video art and performance in Anne M. Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” October 91 (Winter 2000): 73–74. 60 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30– 44. 61 Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” 232–33.

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absolute model of Morris’s concept that “everything counts.” The way in which the materials of the monument are listed – “wind, sunlight, water, fire, desert acacias, grey concrete, text” – indicates Karavan’s detailed interest in the visitor’s maximal sensual stimulation, created by means of spatial components and the conditions of the environment in which the monument is placed and set to work. All these create the experience of visiting the monument and emphasize the active nature of that experience, and perhaps even more importantly – its duration in time. The dimension of time or the “duration of the experience” receives an interesting treatment in Fried’s article. He believes that the experience acquires duration because the minimalist work is “inexhaustible” for the viewer, not because of the “fullness,” which is a basic characteristic of art, but because of the literality – because “there is nothing to exhaust. It is endless the way a road might be: if it is circular for example.”62 Fried describes something like a shock response to a hermetic and literal object in which there is nothing, a shock that does not allow the viewer to stop wondering and deciphering the object (also physically). However, as opposed to the fullness of a “good” modernist work, the minimalist work is not exactly “empty” but has a dimension of gradualness (or something like a delay), and this becomes clear when Fried points out that in “modernist painting and sculpture, at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest.”63 In other words, the modernist work declares itself all at once in its entirety, and because it is completely autonomous and separated from the viewer, it requires from him/her only contemplation, in other words, a static, passive, and isolated kind of response. As opposed to this, the minimalist work is not complete, not autonomous, and contemplation alone does not suffice. In fact, it is a trigger that engenders the spatial context and “inexhaustible” environment of the viewer, which move him/her to action. Furthermore, how does Fried explain the relationship between the viewer and this minimalist environment? “ [O]nce he [the beholder] is in the room, the work refuses, obstinately, to let him alone – which is to say, it refuses to stop confronting him, distancing him, isolating him.”64 Why does minimalist work contend with the viewer in such a way? Because it evokes “a sense of temporality, of time both passing and to come, simultaneously approaching and receding, as if apprehended in an infinite perspective.”65 In spite of the interaction with the viewer, the experience of a work that

  62

Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 143–44. Ibid., 145. 64 Ibid., 140. 65 Ibid., 145. 63

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requires time and is not received immediately in its entirety is fraught with a sensation that cannot be realized or completed, a sensation that by being delayed and ever-receding creates a dimension of detachment and remoteness. The Negev Monument certainly provides the “fullness” that Fried values in “good” modernist works, yet by being a site-construction it cannot “wholly manifest” itself and exist autonomously from the viewer. The dimensions and components of the monument create an inexhaustible space of a continuous and changing experience. The composition of the monument is characterized by the absence of a route, by the countless circular and labyrinthine tracks, and the shapes themselves, which are strewn around, halved, mutilated, fragmented, and multilayered, provide innumerable angles and combinations at any particular moment and create a powerful sense of duration to the experience. It is a duration that emphasizes infiniteness as well as temporality and evokes a sensation that in many senses is, according to Fried, “incomplete and inconclusive.” The freedom of action at the monument is in a sense also a burdened freedom – it involves a sense that these forms and structures will never give themselves to complete knowledge and exhaustive understanding. By continuously acting in the monument’s space, the viewer discovers sculptural objects that arouse great interest and curiosity and make one want to become acquainted with them, but at the same time, they also create estrangement by their surprising complexity. The dialectical array of the monument acts in such a way that the dimension of time, which produces remoteness and delay, counterbalances and completes the closeness and belonging that also exist in its spatial structure. In these senses, Karavan’s monument relies on the minimalist viewer’s experience, which involves the viewer in the same array with the object, space, and time. In analyzing the Negev Monument within the framework of Fried’s minimalist reading, I posit an additional dimension and a clearer formulation of the viewer’s experience of the work. The place of the viewer at the monument is discussed mainly in didactic terms of memory and commemoration: texts that tell about the course of the battles, documenting the names of the fallen, running water and an ever-burning fire, along with the active presence of the viewer in the narrative-historical space, serve to commemorate and impart the memory to future generations. In light of these readings, Neuman’s interpretation provides a more complex understanding of the viewer’s experience and promotes a more in-depth examination of this issue. Neuman claims that the very action of the viewer in the space of the monument is a protest against

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separation between the private and the public, between life and death, whereas “the link between memory as a historical act and its mythification is dissolved, and memory is brought into the present.”66 In other words, the visitor, acting in the innermost heart of the site, experiences memory as an inseparable part of his/her “here and now,” and the idea of commemoration exceeds the narrative-didactic domain and becomes part of the experiential level. The important turn in understanding the experience of the visitor that Neuman proposes gives rise to the question, What is the memory that is brought to the immediate experience of the viewer? I now proceed to explore the idea of what it might be from the minimalist point of view.

The Psychology of the Viewer’s Bodily Experience of the Negev Monument Recent studies on Minimalism are discovering a great research potential in the phenomenological body of the viewer and interpret it by means of sociological, gender, psychological, and other approaches.67 In Fried’s very early accounts, one clearly sees his intuitive interest in the viewer as a psychological body. He wrote about Morris’s work that “the largeness of the piece, in conjunction with its nonrelational, unitary character, distances the beholder – not just physically but psychically.”68 Krauss in her seminal book Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977) presented tentative explorations regarding the psychological domain in minimalist phenomenology. With regard to the earth-work sculpture by Michael Heizer, she wrote: Because of its enormous size, and its location, the only means of experiencing this work is to be in it – to inhabit it the way we think of ourselves as inhabiting the space of our bodies. Yet the image we have of our own relation to our bodies is that we are centered inside them: we have knowledge of ourselves that places us… at our own absolute core.69

Further on, Krauss points to the fact that in the extended categories of sculpture the body of the viewer becomes the heart of the work, so that

  66

Neuman, “The Dialectical Meaning of Form,” 847–46. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power”; Chave, “Minimalism and Biography” 68 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 126. 69 Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 280. 67

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one experiences the work as his/her own body.70 This claim lays a significant foundation for psychological analysis. Subsequently, Fer, in her analysis of minimalist practice, clearly distinguishes the psychologicalemotional body (internal body) of the viewer as distinct from his/her physical and sensory body (external body). In light of that, it is clear that the discussion of the phenomenology of the Negev Monument requires dealing with the psychological body of the viewer. Even if the framework of this chapter does not allow an in-depth survey of psychoanalytic research and the concept of the “psychological” has to be used in its general sense, it is important to point out certain mental aspects of the Negev Monument by way of a primary probing that needs further research. The psychological aspects of Karavan’s work still have not been thoroughly discussed, although their indirect treatment in some studies can serve as a springboard for a fruitful reading. Thus, in relation to a later project by Karavan, Homage to the Prisoners of Gurs (1993–1994), Zertal recognizes that by placing railroad tracks in the former internment camp in Gurs,71 Karavan made the “final destination,” which was still unknown in the late 1930s, tangible: “to retrieve from the sub-conscious and bring to awareness the threatening repressed, the Freudian uncanny (das Unheimliche), and to transport the final horror to its most remote and distant point of origin, to the beginnings of the process at which Auschwitz was still an unknown.”72 Zertal hints at the sense of a split among the physical, the conscious, and the sensory, which the viewer feels when being returned by the power of art to the past about which he/she holds a complete knowledge of its horrible future, a future that, although it is already a historical past, is still alien and incomprehensible. The approximation to a psychoanalytic reading of the Negev Monument can be seen in one of its interesting artistic affinities – the one that connects it to Surrealism. One of the experiences that contributed to Karavan’s work on the monument, according to the artist and the researchers, was his visit to an exhibition of Giacometti in a private gallery in Basel a short time before he started the project.73 Models of the monument, as well as the small sculptures that Karavan made after it was erected (Fig. 6), reveal an evident similarity of plan and form to

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Krauss, “Sculpture in Expanded Field.” Gurs internment camp became one of the early Nazi concentration camps. 72 Zertal, “Tikkun Olam,” 391. 73 Brockhaus, “Public Commissions,” 841; Dani Karavan, “The Monument to the Palmach Negev Brigade, Be’er Sheva or How a Historical Event Is Transformed into a Plastic Form,” in: Dani Karavan: Negev Monument catalogue (Tel Aviv: Gordon Gallery, 2015), p. 45. 71

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Giacometti’s “sculpture – as board-game,”74 created in the spirit of Surrealism. Both the small sculptures and the models for the Negev Monument are characterized by the use of independent geometric objects spread over a horizontal surface, the dramatic shadows cast by these objects, and the integration of masses that are emptied and filled. All of these characteristics also reflected in drawings by Miro and De Chirico.75

Figure 6

The dimensions of the monument also evoked a comparison with the architecture of Le Corbusier, in particular with The Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, based on the connection between architecture and sculpture (according to Scheps) and the “figurative quality” of the church (according to Neuman).76 The comparison to Le Corbusier also highlights the surrealistic quality of the monument. In his article “The Ghost in the Machine: Surrealism in the Work of Le Corbusier,” Alexander Gorlin emphasizes the surrealistic aspects in the architecture of Le Corbusier as existing in an “ambiguous relationship between interior and exterior

  74

Term used by Krauss to describe Giacometti’s horizontal sculptures as Man, Woman and Child (1931) and No More Play (1932). Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 118. 75 Neuman, “The Dialectical Meaning of Form,” 848. 76 Scheps, “An Axis for the Future,” 106; Neuman, “The Dialectical Meaning of Form,” 848.

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space.”77 Le Corbusier’s borrowing of internal elements for the exterior and external elements for the interior (a reversal often observed in his buildings) is seen by Gorlin as manifesting a surrealist tension that can also be found in the paintings of De Chirico and Magritte. He writes: “there is a strong contrast between the otherwise normal setting and an image of disorder or chaos, the emptiness of either the void or wild nature. There is also a feeling that human beings are absent from a place that they had just occupied”78 Based on Gorlin’s descriptions, the surrealist dimension of the Negev Monument has similar roots. The geographical remoteness of the monument, its ostensibly abandoned, ruined buildings, turned inside out, fragmentary, and casting shadows, create a surrealistic experience, which, being sculptural-architectonic, has an increased psychological impact on the viewer. The treatment of the surrealistic qualities of the monument was never extensive and never went beyond the accepted ideas about its influence on the viewer. As Omer hastens to qualify: “Nevertheless, Karavan’s assimilation of the natural landscape into man-made works is not imbued with the sense of alienation and Surrealist quality.… Rather, sculptures opens up into a more holistic experience, which unifies the dimensions of time and space.”79 Yet, as I have been arguing throughout these pages, there is no contradiction between what Omer calls the “natural, holistic, unified” qualities of the monument and its other aspects, which produce strangeness, detachment, and a surrealistic sensation. All these effects coexist in the complex dialectical array, for which we need a deeper understanding. The discussion on surrealistic aspects of the monument leads us back to my main concern – the minimalist reading of the Negev Monument. The connection between Minimalism and Surrealism has not been sufficiently researched. Yet, in spite of the dearth of studies, there is a noticeable interest in this issue on the part of some key researchers, which suggests a fascinating potential in this connection. As early as at the beginning of studies on Minimalism, in a long footnote in “Art and Objecthood,” Fried pays special attention to the closeness of these two movements: The connection between spatial recession [the duration of the experience – K. E.] and some such experience of temporality – almost as if the first were the kind of natural metaphor for the second – is present in much surrealist

  77

Alexander Gorlin, “The Ghost in the Machine: Surrealism in the Work of Le Corbusier,” Perspecta 18 (1982): 51. 78 Ibid., 55. 79 Omer, “Early and Late in Dani Karavan’s Oeuvre,” 403.

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A Monument in the Expanded Field of Minimalism painting (e.g., De Chirico, Dali, Tanguy, Magritte…) Moreover, temporality – manifested, for example, as expectation, dread, anxiety, presentiment, memory, nostalgia, stasis – is often the explicit Surrealist sensibility…which ought to be noted. Both employ imagery that is at once holistic and, in a sense, fragmentary, incomplete; both resort to a similar anthropomorphizing of objects or conglomeration of objects; both are capable of achieving remarkable effects of “presence”; and both tend to deploy and isolate objects and persons in situations.80

The connection to Surrealism that Fried describes in a language loaded with mental and emotional terms lays a foundation for a turn in the research on Minimalism – from a phenomenological reading proper to a psychological reading that both grows out of and diverges from the phenomenological. Such an affinity and turn can be found in the writings of Hal Foster on the sculptures of Richard Serra: [W]ith the torqued pieces the viewer appears to be inside and outside the sculpture at once, so that the subject-turned inside-out is also a spaceturned-outside-in, as if it, too, were made a function of subject. In this way Serra has opened up a psychological spatiality in his work, one of evocative interiors often associated with Surrealism.81

The exteriors and interiors of the Negev Monument, which are characterized by a similar discrepant surrealistic spatiality of separated elements, merit a deeper psychological examination. The analysis offered by Fer regarding Eva Hesse’s art can contribute to the idea of an affinity between Minimalism and Surrealism and enhance the understanding of the phenomenological and mental influence of abstract sculpture that has a surrealist aspect. Fer examines the formal and material qualities of Hesse’s works within the Minimalist framework and focuses on their relation to “Surrealist desire to put the unconsciousness to work in representation.”82 She recognizes the symbolic structure of the loss in separation of surfaces and spaces, emptiness and obfuscation that arise from the tangles of metal wire in Hesse’s works (as, e.g., in Metronomic Irregularity, created in 1966).83 In a complex analysis that

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Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 145 (f. 19). Foster, “The Art-Architecture Complex,” 159. 82 Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 118. Fer refers to Lucy Lippard’s comment on Hesse’s relationship to Surrealism: Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 185. 83 For the work, see http://www.evahessedoc.com/#!metronomic-irregularity/ zoom/cowp/image_co7 81

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relies on psychoanalytic and gender approaches, Fer writes: “Hesse’s work makes a drama of that loss, in that it is encountered by the viewer as a fraught series of disconnection.”84 In other words, the formal lack in Hesse’s works arises as a result of disassembling and isolation of the materials and the components that are nevertheless contained in one compositional array. By focusing on the internal (psychological) body as opposed to the external (phenomenological) body, Fer continues to explore Hesse’s artistic strategy and concludes that formal lack in her works is translated through the bodily sensation of the viewer into a psychological sensation that “something is lacking in the body.”85 Thus she clarifies the sensation described by Fried, who says that a minimalist work “distances the beholder – not just physically but psychically.” Fer contends that the minimalist work creates a split between the literal (physical) space in which the viewer is situated and the psychological space that he/she senses: “[T]he external bodily orientation and the ‘internal body’ do not work in neat unison, but are split. Rather than continuity, which suggests a kind of mirroring or empathetic identification, the emphasis here is on the something lacking, some lacuna in the body`s schema.”86 That is, a minimalist work, similarly to a surrealist one, builds its composition in an almost absurd way on the principle of disconnection and separation between its parts, and thus creates a conflict between the bodily and the psychological. Fer defines the space of the conflict and the gap between the physical and mental sensations of the viewer as the space of loss; referring to the writings of Julia Kristeva, she contends that “loss is the founding fact of psychic life… Death cannot be represented in Freud’s unconsciousness, but imprinted only ‘by spacing, blanks, discontinuities’ which amount to the ‘destruction of representation.’”87

The Negev Monument as a Site of Personal Memory and Bereavement Fragmentation and wholeness exist simultaneously in the Negev Monument and explain its dialectical influence on the viewer. Physical action, continuous and delayed in time and taking place in a discontinuous space, filling up with unexpected masses and emptying out in irrational

  84

Fer, On Abstract Art, 123. Ibid. 86 Ibid., 128. 87 Ibid., 124–25. 85

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hollows, creates an unstable experience in which closeness and belonging alternate with disquiet and apprehension. In the terms of Krauss and Fer, we see in this monument a split between the bodily and the mental that arises as a result of “destruction of representation” of a three-dimensional environment that is experienced by the viewer as “his absolute core.” Returning to the question of what is the memory that is brought to the present experience of the viewer, I suggest that the answer seems to be found in Fried’s binding of memory together with “expectation, dread, anxiety, presentiment, nostalgia and stasis.” All of these describe memory as something that is lacking in the whole and from now on is absent from it, that is, a mental experience of loss, death, and bereavement. In the Negev Monument, memory is embodied in discrepant surrealistic spatiality of separated elements that reproduce “fragmented wholeness” and lacunae. In retrospect, this is the memory that is brought to its tragic extreme in Karavan’s late work, Passages: Homage to Walter Benjamin (Fig. 5). The rusty and narrow corridor down to sea level represents nothing but the enclosed void, while its sharp 33-meter-deep descent provides an intimate journey, full of presentiment and anxiety as an expression of losing the way and loss of life. As an ideological mechanism, commemorative art strives to strengthen the national identity and values, set apart and glorify death in battle, and convey a historical-mythical content that derives from this death. Alongside this, every monument also contains, folded within it, the private mourning of individuals.88 However, the theme of personal bereavement does not necessarily arise in connection with memorials of such dimensions (nationally and spatially) as the Negev Monument. As I pointed out above, the monument has always been discussed as raising commemoration and memory to a mythical, heroic, and didactic degree, while death and bereavement in their existential sense are weakened in it, if not completely absent. Yet today, at a time when the individual is strengthened and the collective is weakened, as Dimitropoulos explains, national memorial sites often lead us to focus on the thought of the tragic fate of the human being, and we seek in them a more personal experience of memory and loss. It seems that the minimalist reading of the phenomenological and psychological bind offered here helps us to understand why, in contrast to other monuments from the same period, the Negev Monument still remains relevant: some of its aspects manage to exceed the collectivist ideals of the period and illustrate a subjective state in which the viewer is exposed in a dim and momentary way to the

  88

Almog, “Israeli War Memorials,” 206–208.

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experience of death and bereavement. These are effects that imply the changes in the perception of commemoration that have taken place since the 1960s and have led to the creation of memorials such as those of Lin, Eisenmann, Arad, and others. These effects place the Negev Monument at a decisive crossroads of artistic, social, and national paradigms, pointing at the change in the Zeitgeist.

List of Figures Figure 1. Dani Karavan, Monument to the Negev Brigade (Negev Monument), 1963–1968, Beer Sheva, Israel. Figure 2. Dani Karavan, Negev Monument (detail), 1963–1968, Beer Sheva, Israel. Figure 3. Dani Karavan, Negev Monument (detail), 1963–1968, Beer Sheva, Israel. Figure 4. Dani Karavan, Negev Monument (detail), 1963–1968, Beer Sheva, Israel. Figure 5. Dani Karavan, Passages: Homage to Walter Benjamin, 1990– 1994, Portbou, Spain. Figure 6. Dani Karavan, Wave, Slant, Ball, 1973. All images Courtesy of Studio Dani Karavan.

FORMAL AUTONOMY VS. PUBLIC PARTICIPATION: THE MODERNIST MONUMENT IN COSTANTINO NIVOLA’S WORK GIULIANA ALTEA AND ANTONELLA CAMARDA*

“Normalizing” Sculpture The issue of monumentality and its significance to collective life are central to the work of Costantino Nivola (1911–1988), an artist who has recently started to attract scholarly attention for the role he played from the 1950s on in the integration of sculpture and architecture. In his 1996 essay “Monumental Seduction,” Andreas Huyssen noted that in the twentieth century the idea of the monument was repudiated by modernists and postmodernists alike. Monumentality was synonymous with the poor taste and mass culture associated with nineteenth-century nationalisms and twentieth-century totalitarianisms. It also reflected a sadomasochistic desire for authority and power, that is, in Foucault’s words, “for the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” 1 However, monumentalism is not just about size, permanence, and the grandiose display of power; it is also about collective memory and the celebration of shared values. Huyssen suggested reassessing the concept of monumentality and considering it historically, taking into account its *

The views expressed in this essay are the result of an ongoing dialogue between the authors. Sections 1–4 were written by Giuliana Altea and Sections 5–8 by Antonella Camarda. 1 Michel Foucault, Preface to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), quoted from Andreas Huyssen, “Monumental Seduction,” New German Critique 69 (1996): 181–200, esp. 190.

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inherent opposing tensions.2 Following Huyssen’s lead, we contend that these tensions are not due solely to the coexistence of rhetorical magniloquence and communitarian drives. A second oppositional pair emerged in the aftermath of World War II: a renewed aspiration to express the unity of the social body and the need to affirm the artist’s authorial subjectivity. In the West, on both shores of the Atlantic, the 1940s and 1950s saw the appearance of a new idea of monument: after the experience of totalitarian regimes, the widespread sense of disillusion with the monument’s public role engendered the modernist search for a recovery of its social meaning. As early as 1943, in a manifesto entitled “Nine Points on Monumentality,” Josep Lluís Sert, Sigfried Giedion, and Fernand Léger noted the demise of the traditional monument, irremediably compromised by the past, and proposed the creation of a new concept of monument that would reflect human aspirations and ideals.3 Although their call remained largely unanswered, the concept of a different type of modernist monument began to emerge, a projection of the artist’s subjective vision, attuned to the artistic climate of the 1950s, centered on a celebration of the exceptionality, originality, and uniqueness of the “creative genius.” These tensions are strikingly apparent in Nivola’s work. Our focus here is on a small group of unrealized projects, chosen because they reveal the artist’s true intentions, without regard to any demand by clients or patrons, and above all because they show the modernist tension between the assertion of subjectivity and the aspiration toward a collective dimension. However, before we discuss Nivola’s works, it is useful to look at his biography, which offers some clues for an understanding of his approach to monumentality.4

2

Andreas Huyssen, “Monumental Seduction.” Sigfried Giedion, Fernand Léger and Josep Lluís Sert, “Nine Points on Monumentality” (1943), in Sigfried Giedion, Architecture, You and Me. The Diary of a Development (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 48–51. 4 Giuliana Altea and Antonella Camarda, Costantino Nivola: La sintesi delle arti (Nuoro: Ilisso, 2015). See also: Fred Licht et al., Nivola. Sculture (Milan: Jaca Book, 1992); Luciano Caramel and Carlo Pirovano (eds), Costantino Nivola: Sculture dipinti disegni, (Milan: Electa, 1999); Micaela Martegani (ed.), Costantino Nivola in Springs (Southampton, NY and Nuoro: The Parrish MuseumIlisso, 2003); Carlo Pirovano (ed.), Nivola: L’investigazione dello spazio (Nuoro: Ilisso, 2010); Giuliana Altea (ed.), Seguo la traccia nera e sottile: I disegni di 3

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Born in 1911 in a village in rural Sardinia, Nivola studied graphic design at the ISIA (Higher Institute of Artistic Industries) in Monza. He started his career by collaborating with one of his masters, the architect Giuseppe Pagano – a leading figure in Italian modernism – on some important public-sponsored exhibitions, including the 1936 Milan Triennale and the Italian Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Expo. By using avantgarde art and design as tools to aestheticize politics, these exhibitions created “total” environments designed to involve the spectator at a sensorial and emotional level. In Pagano’s eyes, they exemplified a type of fusion of the arts different from Mario Sironi’s muralism, which prevailed in Italy at the time.5 An important part of the fascist spectacle, they were ephemeral monuments that communicated collective values while managing to avoid much of the contemporary rhetoric found in permanent public art.6 At the same time, Nivola was hired by the Olivetti firm in Milan, a typewriter manufacturer which, under the guidance of its forward-looking owner Adriano Olivetti, had recently started to develop an innovative approach to management, putting a strong emphasis on design. Nivola soon became art director of the company’s “Ufficio Pubblicità” (Publicity Department) and made a significant contribution to the creation of what later came to be known as “the Olivetti style.” 7 However, the artist’s promising début in Milan was soon to be interrupted: in 1938 his opposition to the fascist regime and his marriage to a Jewish woman, Ruth Guggenheim, prompted him to move first to Paris and then to the United States. Costantino Nivola (Sassari: Agave, 2011); Renato Miracco (ed.), Costantino Nivola: 100 Years of Creativity (Milan: Charta, 2012). 5 Giuseppe Pagano, “Parliamo un po’ di esposizioni,” Casabella Costruzioni, no. 159/160 (Mars/April 1941): 1–3. 6 Marla S. Stone, The Patron State: Art and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 130 ff. 7 A large body of literature exists on Olivetti, primarily in Italian. The most recent works include: Carlo Olmo (ed.), Costruire la città dell’uomo. Adriano Olivetti e l’urbanistica (Turin: Comunità 2001); Francesco Novara, Renato Rozzi, and Roberta Garruccio (eds), Uomini e lavoro alla Olivetti (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005); Manolo De Giorgi and Enrico Morteo (eds), Olivetti: una bella società (Turin: Allemandi, 2008); Mario Piccinini (ed.), Adriano Olivetti. Il lascito: Urbanistica, architettura, design e industria (Rome: INU Edizioni, 2011); Rossano Astarita, Gli architetti di Olivetti: Una storia di committenza industriale (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2012); Caterina Cristina Fiorentino, Millesimo di millimetro: I segni del codice visivo Olivetti 1908–1978 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014).

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After his arrival in New York, where he initially earned his living by working as an art director for the architectural magazines Interiors and Progressive Architecture, he experienced a serious creative crisis, owing to the cultural shock of exile and the overwhelming plethora of suggestions emanating from contact with the milieu of the European masters of architecture and art. An encounter with the architect Le Corbusier in 1946 put an end to his uncertainties. As a member of the international team in charge of constructing the new United Nations headquarters, Le Corbusier became Nivola’s mentor and friend and strongly influenced his artistic research by steering him toward modernism.8 In 1950, following the development of a particularly effective sandcasting technique,9 Nivola turned to sculpture, a move that turned him into an important figure on the international scene of architectural sculpture and he became an active participant in the debate on synthesis of the arts. Nivola saw sand-casting as a type of sculpture ideally suited to modern architecture: it was created out of the same material – concrete – with the same tools and on the same construction site as the building. Moreover, it could be transported in trucks without any special packaging and at very reasonable insurance costs. In Nivola’s view, sand-casting put to rest the notion of sculpture’s exceptionality, or – as the artist noted – it “normalized” it,10 by doing away with the barrier that divided the artwork from the functional parts of the building and reestablishing the continuity

8

Maddalena Mameli, Le Corbusier e Costantino Nivola. New York 1946–1953 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2012); Letizia Tedeschi, “Modanature e sand-casting. L’incontro newyorkese di Le Corbusier e Nivola,” in L’Italia di Le Corbusier, ed. Marida Talamona (Milan: Electa, 2012), 313–29. 9 Nivola first discovered the technique (a cement cast from a sand mold) while playing with his children on a Long Island beach. He later refined the process to make it suitable for monumental sculpture. First, he poured a thin layer of liquid cement to strengthen the surface, then filled the deepest cavities with a trowel. Second, he applied a wooden frame reinforced with iron and fitted with hooks that made the lifting and hanging of the finished work possible. Third, he poured the cement directly from a concrete mixer. The dried relief could finally be lifted with its frame which, furnished with a cover, worked like a crate, allowing for practical and economic transport. Arranged into panels, even of exceptional dimension, the reliefs could endure the elements owing to the roughness of their concrete surface. 10 Costantino Nivola, unpublished interview with Paolo Baggiani and Carlo Pinna Parpaglia, 1980, Ilisso Archives, Nuoro.

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between the task of the artist and that of the architect, which had been lost since the Middle Ages.11

Figure 1 11 See many of Nivola’s public statements since the mid-1950s, e.g., the press release issued by Harvard University for his show in the Graduate School of Design’s Robinson Hall, February 26, 1956, Nivola Archives, Long Island.

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This technique – ethical, but also practical and economical – became Nivola’s favorite for monumental realizations; he used it for three-quarters of his career, until, in the mid-1970s, his ideas concerning monumentality started to be influenced by his rediscovery of traditional materials such as marble and bronze and by the creation of a series of solemn, semiabstract figures alluding to motherhood as a universal symbol of generative power. This turn led to a reaffirmation of the autonomy of the plastic object. After the success of his great wall relief for the Olivetti showroom in New York’s Fifth Avenue, designed by the Milanese BBPR studio in 1954 – a project that garnered international acclaim and attracted attention to the growing popularity of “Made in Italy” – the artist was launched as a “sculptor for architects.”12 He was given commissions by such important figures as Josep Lluís Sert (who also appointed him first director of the Workshop of Design in the Harvard Graduate Center of Design in 1954), Marcel Breuer, and Eero Saarinen. So high was Nivola’s reputation in the 1950s that in 1955 he was shortlisted for the decoration of the UNESCO building in Paris, alongside masters of the stature of Picasso, Miró, and Moore. In 1962, already considered an expert in the relationship between art and architecture, Nivola was named a member of the international team in charge of moving the Abu Simbel temples to make place for the Aswan Dam. .

Monumentality and Participation Nivola’s first project for a monument implied a very limited use of sculptural techniques. The Pergola Village - Vined Orani (Fig.1), published in 1953 in Interiors magazine, was a proposal for the artist’s birthplace, a very poor village of 4,000 people. 13 The idea was simple: Nivola imagined connecting all the houses to one another with vine pergolas. A traditional element of Mediterranean architecture, the pergola had been used by the artist three years earlier in the garden he designed for his home on Long Island in collaboration with the Austrian émigré

12

Daniel Sherer, “BBPR on Fifth Avenue: The Olivetti Showroom in New York City,” in The Experience of Architecture: Ernesto Nathan Rogers 1909–1969, ed. Chiara Baglione (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2012), 255–60. 13 Giuliana Altea, “‘Fantasia degli Italiani’ as Participatory Utopia: Costantino Nivola’s Way to the Synthesis of the Arts,” in Investigating and Writing Architectural History: Aubjects, Methodologies and Frontiers, ed. Michela Rosso (Turin: Politecnico di Torino, 2014), 285–95.

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architect, Bernard Rudofsky.14 There, as proposed in the Orani project, the idea was to create a series of open-air rooms as a place for socializing. In Orani, the pergolas were intended to transform the streets into intimate spaces for children to play in, for women to talk, for old men to sit together; and at the same time they were to be a means of visualizing (and in so doing strengthening) the community’s social ties. The only uncovered place was to be the central square, that was to have a large statue dedicated to the masons of Orani as its focal point,15 as the Orani’s were traditionally masons. Nivola himself was the son of a mason and had learned his father’s trade, and the mythical image of the mason was a recurring motif in his oeuvre. The Monument to the Mason, studied in a series of sketches, was to be the first of an unrealized series of sculptures “as big as buildings,” made of interlocking blocks of stone or concrete, that Nivola called “Building Blocks” and with which he started to develop the idea of a sculpture increasingly identified with architecture. However, in the Pergola-Village the symbolism of the project was to be conveyed more by the pergolas than by the statue. It was the pergolas – which were not sculptures, nor paintings, nor proper architectures – that were to constitute the center of the work. By expressing the desire for a more authentic communal life, they were to shift the focus from art as object to art as social relationship. Nivola had developed a similar idea some years before, in 1943, when he discussed what to do in Sardinia after the end of the war with other Italian antifascist émigrés. At that time, he had suggested painting all the houses white with blue baseboards, a proposal that was rejected by his comrades as ineffective and foolish.16 Today, the notion of the Pergola-Village may sound like a forerunner of postmedia relational art, although it was also profoundly of its time. During the war years, Nivola – a close friend of Sert and a member of the émigré circle gathered around him in New York – had been exposed to the debate on the “new monumentality” started by the Catalan architect with Giedion and Léger. In “Nine Points on Monumentality” they had suggested creating architectural ensembles using stone as well as light

14

Giuliana Altea, “La stanza verde. Bernard Rudofsky e il giardino di Nivola,” 24– 37; Alessandra Como, Riflessioni sull’abitare, (Rome: Aracne, 2011) (largely based on an interview with Ruth Guggenheim). 15 O. G. (Olga Guelft), “The Pergola-Village, Vined Orani,” Interiors CXII, no. 6 (January 1953): 80–85. 16 Costantino Nivola, unpublished interview by Carlo Baggiani and Gian Carlo Pinna Parpaglia, p. 112. Ilisso Archives, Nuoro.

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projections and mobile elements.17 In their view, the ephemeral spectacle, the dematerialized artwork, were just as important as the bronze or marble sculptures, an aspect that Nivola, trained in the climate of the great expositions of the 1930s, no doubt found interesting. The modernist monument was a key component of Sert’s thoughts on urbanism. 18 Since 1944 he had been criticizing the modernist tendency toward urban decentralization, promoting instead the concept of a “civic core” as a focus for community life. He imagined a network of covered pedestrian streets surrounding a monumental plaza, to be created in collaboration with visual artists. The notion was that in providing public spaces where people could socialize, the civic core would foster democratic life: The social function of the new community centers or Cores is primarily that of uniting the people and facilitating direct contacts and exchange of ideas that will stimulate free discussion. People meet today in our cities in factories and busy streets, in the most unfavorable conditions for a broad exchange of ideas. The organized community meeting places could establish a frame where a new civic life and a healthy civic spirit could develop.19

Sert’s positions were close to those of Adriano Olivetti, who, as noted above, was another significant figure in Nivola’s life. Olivetti, with whom the artist resumed contact soon after the war, was a visionary entrepreneur, prompted by a strong social philosophy.20 In 1945 he published an essay entitled “L’ordine politico delle comunità” (“The Political Order of Communities”), wherein he noted the importance of social cohesion for a democratic state: 17

See note 4. See Sert arquitecto in Nueva York, eds. Xavier Costa and Guido Hartray (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporary de Barcelona, 1997); Mardges Bacon, “Josep Lluís Sert’s Evolving Concept of the Urban Core,” in Josep Lluís Sert: The Architect of Urban Design, 1953–1969, eds. Eric Mumford and Hashim Sarkis with Neyran Turan (New Haven and London-Cambridge: Yale University Press and Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2008), 77–114. 19 Josep Lluís Sert, “Centers of Community Life,” in The Heart of the City: Toward the Humanisation of Urban Life, ed. Jane Tyrwhitt, Josep Lluís Sert, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers (London: Lund Humphries, 1952); now in Sert arquitecto in Nueva York, eds. Xavier Costa, Guido Hartray (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporary de Barcelona, 1997), 126–44. 20 See Davide Cadeddu, Reimagining Democracy on the Political Project of Adriano Olivetti (New York: Springer, 2012). 18

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Formal Autonomy vs. Public Participation We think of a life environment not too large nor too small ordered and proportioned to the human dimension: a happier place where fields and factories, that is, nature and life, brought to unity, would reach that full harmony residing only in peace and freedom.21

It is worth noting that for both Sert and Olivetti the village was the basic unit of community life. In spite of appearances, the Pergola-Village was not the nostalgic dream of an exiled artist, although there were elements of nostalgia within it. Rather than the recovery of a past ideal of society, the idea was a demonstration of Sert’s theories, to be carried out simply by intensifying the “architectural character and unified communal organization” of the village.22 Extended to the whole of the village, the pergolas were to be signs of an integrated community, assembled around what was the quintessential center of European sociality, the public square – one of those gathering places that were absent in America and that the émigrés (Sert and Nivola among them) so sorely missed when, during the war, the hypothesis of a new monumentality had emerged.

The Pilgrimage and the Flight Completely different from the Pergola-Village was the project for the monument to the fallen in the battle of Bataan-Corregidor (Fig. 2), in which Nivola’s tendency to think big, which had already surfaced with the Building Blocks, took on environmental aspects. The small island of Corregidor in the Philippines and the Bataan Peninsula, invaded by the Japanese in 1942, was retaken by the American and Philippine armies in 1945 in what was regarded as a crucial step in the final victory of the United States and a symbol of solidarity between the two peoples.23 The model for the memorial was designed by Nivola with the architect Richard Stein, a friend who had already collaborated with him on other public projects, for a 1957 competition launched jointly by the governments of the United States and the Philippines. Nivola and Stein had discarded the idea of a traditional monument in favor of a sort of ante-litteram earthwork, the entire island to be transformed into a sculpture through the 21

Adriano Olivetti, in Urbanistica, October-November 1952, quoted in Bruno Caizzi, Camillo e Adriano Olivetti (Torino: UTET, 1962), 269. 22 O. G. (Olga Guelft), “The Pergola-Village, Vined Orani,” 85. 23 Antonella Camarda, “Monumento alla battaglia di Corregidor,” in Nivola: L’investigazione dello spazio, ed. Carlo Pirovano (Nuoro: Ilisso, 2010), 104.

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good offices of marine construction battalions. The artist fantasized: “This weary, passive island – we must bring energy here. Let’s sculpt the island. Let’s suggest that the navy, the marines, who have nothing to do, make it by moving the earth, by creating dramatic events.”24

Figure 2

The model shows affinities with Isamu Noguchi’s 1943 unrealized project, This Tortured Earth. Influenced by his experience of voluntary detention in an internment camp for Japanese citizens in Arizona, Noguchi expressed his vision of war as a wound inflicted on humanity in a work intended to shape the landscape by cuts and folds. More interestingly, Noguchi also wanted to use the “war machine” as “excellent equipment for sculpture, to bomb it into existence.”25 Nivola and Noguchi were part of the same artistic milieu and in the 1950s, in the then small world of the New York avant-garde, their paths crossed frequently; the former might easily have been aware of the project for This Tortured Earth. On the other 24

Costantino Nivola, unpublished interview with Paolo Baggiani and Carlo Pinna Parpaglia, 1980, Ilisso Archives, Nuoro. 25 Isamu Noguchi, in The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum (New York: H. Abrams, 1987), 152.

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hand Nivola and Stein may have envisaged the same concept independently; the initial suggestion is likely to have come from the architect, who had served in a wartime construction battalion leveling the terrain of the Pacific islands Okinawa and Saipan to make airfields.26 However, even if Nivola looked at Noguchi’s example, his way of developing the project did not resemble that of the Japanese-American artist. The bronze model of This Tortured Earth has a soft, rounded, almost eroticized look, hinting at a feminization of the landscape. Nivola’s maquette is more dramatic, with a rugged surface crossed by triangular, pointed cuts, evoking the violence enacted on the place more directly. More importantly, unlike Noguchi, Nivola included several sculptural pieces in the project. Walking through the island along a pathway connecting the harbor to a central square, the visitor, as though on a pilgrimage, would have encountered a series of tunnels and terraces (“scars”) symbolizing the major battles fought in the Pacific, with wall plaques, bronze busts of the fallen marines, and a freestanding sculpture portraying two clasped hands. As with the sculptures that adorned the churches on medieval pilgrimage routes, the plastic episodes punctuating the pathway would have prompted memories and invited reflection. The itinerary from the coast to the center of the island was meant to be an experience of individual transformation, a metaphorical progression from mourning for the dead to repudiating war. It would have culminated in the central square, where a great elevated structure was to be the meeting point of an institute devoted to peace27: The entire island rises as a huge sculpture, culminating in the monument, a symbol of peace and hope soaring above it…a huge star-like complex of two interrelated concrete shell forms. Here, within the shell and above the island, the forum convenes, from the sea the monument is silhouetted against the sky, floating over the island, from the air it is a brilliant prismatic white object seen against the island’s rocks and trees. At night it is illuminated as a glowing symbol.28

Most interesting to the artist was the aerial view, which reproduced a perspective that was central to the sculpture’s planning process. That view 26

Richard Stein, ”Corregidor-Bataan Memorial Competition,” in Richard Stein. Forty Years of Architectural Work (New York: Arthur Houghton Jr. Gallery – The Cooper Union, 1980), 16. 27 Ibid. 28 Costantino Nivola and Richard Stein, “Corregidor-Bataan n. 10,” undated photograph with notes (1957), Costantino Nivola Archives, Long Island.

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of the scale model showed the island as it would have appeared from a bomber’s cockpit; the viewer was led to imagine him/herself as looking at the model from the air. Although Nivola intended the maquette as preparatory material, the aerial view was to have played a most important role in the finished work as well. In fact, given the location of the monument, it would, like many subsequent Land art works, have been experienced mainly through photographs. The environmental, Land-art-type project merged with an objectcentered intervention, creating a tension between a demiurgic, totalizing view from above and the multiplicity of sights the spectator would encounter by walking through the island. Dematerialized perception would have been coupled with the subject’s physical participation, even if in this case, as we have seen, participation would have been mostly theoretical. Although environmental interest coexisted with sculptural preoccupations typical of more traditional modernist monuments, the latter took the renewed form that had emerged in the postwar years in the wake of the famous Roman memorial to the Fosse Ardeatine victims, designed by a team made up of the architects Nello Aprile, Cino Calcaprina, Aldo Cardelli, Mario Fiorentino, and Giuseppe Perugini with the sculptors Francesco Coccia and Mirko Basaldella, which was completed in 1951. The first example of a monument “conceived as a dynamic parcours instead of as a static object,”29 in 1957 the memorial was warmly praised by Lewis Mumford in the New Yorker as an achievement whose significance could not be expressed by words or images, as it had to be lived and experienced personally as in a pilgrimage. 30 The dynamic dimension of fruition, already present in the concept of the PergolaVillage, was to reappear in other projects by Nivola in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and these will be discussed in the following sections.

A Body in Pieces In 1959–1960 Nivola revived the concept of Bataan-Corregidor monument on a smaller scale for the Sassari Brigade memorial (Fig. 3), which was to be built in the town of Sassari to honor a corps of the Italian Army composed entirely of Sardinian soldiers who distinguished themselves for 29

Adachiara Zevi, Monumenti per difetto. Dalle Fosse Ardeatine alle pietre d’inciampo (Roma: Donzelli, 2014), 6. 30 Lewis Mumford, “Sky Line. The Cave, the City, and the Flower,” The New Yorker, November 2, 1957: 93–94.

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their heroism in World War I. Like the model for Corregidor, the project, designed with Richard Stein, again unites an environmental route with a series of sculptures.31 Along one side of the monument the model called for a 7-meter-high statue evoking both a shepherd and a “nuraghe” (a Sardinian ancient tower). Other sculptures surrounding the central structure were to represent the mother, the sentinel, and the returning soldier. Upon entering the monument, the visitor would have discovered trenches and corridors recalling the battlefield, and negative impressions on the concrete walls were to depict human forms, arms, and hand prints, alluding to the terrible experience of war. In addition, the project would have complicated the horizontal/vertical, body/mind opposition by introducing a reference to the human figure. Seen from above, the monument would have evoked a reclining soldier and at the same time the outline of Sardinia, to suggest a conflation of the individual and the collective. For the Sardinian people, the Sassari Brigade was a strong symbol of cultural identity, which helped to engender an enhanced sense of belonging among the people of the island that extended beyond class differences.32 The spread of this new awareness set the stage for the birth of the Sardist Party, founded in 1919 under the leadership of a former officer of the Brigade and Nivola’s friend, Emilio Lussu. Nivola, without a direct commitment, shared the party’s ideology, which focused on achieving autonomy and sovereignty for Sardinia. When the project took form, at the end of the 1950s, such a precise reference to the war experience – although expressed in terms of suffering, sacrifice, and loss – was rather uncommon. As Bruno Zevi, one of the competition’s jurors, commented that Nivola’s model combined a series of subjects typical of traditional monuments to the fallen and that apart from the allusion to Sardinia, it featured “the hero, war, peace, and even, at a distance, the veteran.” 33 After 1945, Italian attitudes toward the commemoration of the conflict that had just ended were influenced by the 31

The project is known from photographic documentation (Nivola Archives, Long Island) and from a bronze drawn from a later maquette made in 1963 (Muso Nivola, Orani). See Rita Pamela Ladogana, “Costantino Nivola e il Monumento alla Brigata Sassari: documenti inediti di un progetto mai realizzato,” in Arte Documento, no. 30 (2014): 138–45; Giuliana Altea, “Arte e spazio pubblico nell’opera di Costantino Nivola. Tre progetti non realizzati per la Sardegna, 1953– 1968,” in L’Uomo Nero, n.s., a. XI, no. 11 (May 2015): 204–21. 32 Giuseppina Fois, Storia della Brigata “Sassari” (Sassari: Gallizzi, 1981). 33 Bruno Zevi, “Il monumento alla Brigata Sassari. Modesto come i suoi eroi,” in L’Espresso 19 (June 1960): 20.

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Figure 3

collective reaction against the fascist regime. In most cases, in Italy, the names of the fallen in World War II had simply been added to those already inscribed on the existing monuments honoring the dead from 1915–1918. The new monuments that were built, expressed a generic celebration of the values of peace and antifascism. 34 The fact that the projected Sardinian memorial was specifically devoted to the Sassari 34

George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 220.

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Brigade and would have been more closely associated with World War I than with World War II enabled the artist to make a direct reference to the fighters, disconnecting them from the fascist past. Although the Sassari Brigade had fought in 1940–1945 as well as in 1915–1918, the soldiers honored by the monument were not seen as soldiers of a “wrong” war. Owing to the Brigade’s earlier record, the combatants were seen in a positive light and viewed as symbols of regional identity if not as defenders of the nation. The model’s double allusion to the fallen warrior and to the shape of the island visualized the identification between the Sassari Brigade and the Sardinian community. The soldier’s body and the body of the nation/region (the two concepts overlapping in the ideology of the Sardist movement) conflated. Separated into several sections by means of corridors lined with reliefs, the architectural structure would have been a metaphor of a body in pieces, dismembered by the violence of war and at the same time recomposed as the symbol of a community. The communal dimension was central to the memorial’s concept. Nivola explained that his intention was not to lead the spectator to a state of passive contemplation, but rather to involve him/her aesthetically through a multiplicity of perspectives and visual encounters and emotionally through the pathos of the representation.35 In spite of the detailed symbolism of the project, for Nivola the commemorative function was less important than the social use of the monument and its ability to improve the city’s environment. The artist had already imagined a series of monuments “to celebrate life,” all of them unrealized: one was the Pergola-Village, another a labyrinth designed to stimulate sensorial experiences (1954), and a third was a huge sculptured stove with many fires to be lit on special occasions to cook special food (1955). Dore Ashton, a critic who was particularly interested in the communal undertones of the sculptor’s work, was keen to stress this aspect in the Sassari memorial: Nivola thought of the monument as a part of Sassari’s daily life. The monument’s corridors are a perfect shelter for lovers, for children who adore labyrinths and for aged citizens in search of a bit of shade in the heat of southern days.

35

Costantino Nivola, “Concorso per il progetto di un monumento alla ‘Brigata Sassari’,” undated (1960), Writings by Nivola about his own work, Constantino Nivola Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (from now on AAA).

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For her, the memorial was clearly not “a commemoration of death.”36 A series of photographs of the Sassari memorial model taken by Hans Namuth and published in Architectural Forum confirms Ashton’s view: next to the image of the solemn concrete structure, among the great archaic figures in white marble, Nivola had sketched, instead of anonymous passersby, small silhouettes of children playing as a way of indicating the scale of representation, but also discreetly signaling the character of the work as a “monument to celebrate life.”37 Once again, the formal logic of the modernist monument met the search of a participative element in tune with the earlier interests of the artist. On the one hand, the monument would have addressed the individual spectator, fostering his/her emotional and aesthetic involvement; on the other, it would have implied a collective fruition owing to its urban scale and its location in an animated bustling area in the town (in front of the railway station).

“Americanness” An almost coeval project started in 1959 offered Nivola the opportunity to question his roots and his attachment to his homeland as well as the “Americanness” he had been developing from the time he settled in New York. That year a competition was launched for a memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be erected in Washington D.C., on the shores of the Potomac River, ideally completing the National Mall with homage to one of the most beloved American presidents. The winning project by Pedersen and Tilney was never built, 38 but the model was widely circulated in the media, engendering a debate on monuments and monumentality. Nivola, who was deeply involved in the coeval debate on monumentality, must have been aware of the competition and it is likely that it would have inspired him to create his own version of the memorial. In view of his personal history and his idea for this monument, it is clear that, for the Sardinian sculptor, the concept of an American monument 36

Dore Ashton, “Costantino Nivola,” Aujourd’hui Art et Architecture, no. 34 (December 1961): 23. 37 “Memorial to a Gallant Band,” Architectural Forum 114 (June 1961): 124–27. 38 The same fate awaited Marcel Breuer’s subsequent attempt. It was only in 1990 that a project by the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin was finally approved. See Isabelle Hyman, “Marcel Breuer and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 54, no. 4 (December 1995): 446–58.

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was more a way of connecting with his adopted country than of celebrating a late American president. The discourse on “Americanness” flourished in his circles at that time,39 and for Nivola, traveling back and forth between Italy and America, it must have been a matter of constant reflection. In several drawings and in a small terracotta maquette, Nivola studied a spatial solution similar to the one he had used for the Sassari Brigade model, but, in place of the still embodied image of the soldier-nation, he chose the more abstract shape of the flag, an emblem of the collectivity as political body. According to Albert Boime: The American flag is a classical example of the polyvalent meaning of a national emblem. Despite its apparent simplicity, the flag is an enormously complex symbol, a lightning rod for a whole range of emotions and attitudes based on the implication that all Americans can find themselves somewhere within its folds.40

Whereas the totalitarian regimes’ channels for disseminating propaganda were designed to isolate and exclude part of the population – political dissidents, ethnic or religious minorities, specific social groups – the American flag was an inclusive symbol, despite the attempts of the right wing to monopolize it. It thus could be used to express both consent and dissent to the political and social establishment. Despite his radical beliefs, Nivola’s use of the flag was, from a political point of view, neutral. Years later, taking hints from the Civil Rights Movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, Nivola underscored the contradictions in American society in a series of drawings devoted to the riots in Chicago during the Democratic convention in 1968.41 He depicted the acts of brutal repression by the police by showing the policemen as deprived of any individuality, turned into a symbol of 39

In 1958 both Saul Steinberg–one of Nivola’s closest friends –and Leo Lionni – a good acquaintance that he met at the Olivetti–addressed the issue for the Bruxelles Expo, the first presenting a large mural depicting American types and habits, the second showing an alternative, reflective pavilion called “Unfinished Business,” which exposed the most serious problems in American society. 40 Albert Boime, “Waving the Red Flag and Reconstituting Old Glory,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 4, no.2 (Spring 1990): 2–25, esp. 5. 41 Chicago August 1968. Let Us not Forget. An exhibition of drawings by Costantino Nivola, Graduate School of Design, Harvard, November 17– December 5, 1969.

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state violence. But even then Nivola, drawing on his own life experience, never stopped believing in his own version of the “American dream.” The reference to the flag was both homage to the country that welcomed him in 1939 and an allusion to an artistic practice of quoting/displacing/satirizing the national symbol that dated back to the 1950s. According to Thomas Crow, during those years the Stars and Stripes was an object of veneration “as a totem of nativist conformity,”42 which became a recurring reference in the work of such American artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Frank, Claes Oldenburg, and many others. Even if their intent was, in most cases, iconoclastic and ironic – Johns’s painstaking and impersonal painting technique, for example, designed to mock the abstract expressionist emotional intensity and neutralize the authority of the Stars and Stripes – the artists of the 1950s took the national symbol from media and political propaganda to establish it in the realm of high art. As noted by Sidra Stich, “the prominent appearance of the U.S. flag in postwar art emphatically indicates a shift within the sphere of vanguard art from European to American culture, and the forthright entry of American imagery into the pantheon of artistic icons.”43 In his interpretation of the American national symbol, whose monumental scale recalled that of the historical Star Spangled Banner at the Smithsonian, Nivola’s projected rendering of the Stars and Stripes transformed the plane surface into a three-dimensional environment capable of hosting and sheltering the visitors, creating a dense and overfilled space. Two different elements could be observed within the model of the monument that were supposed to interact in the public space and complement each other. The stripes were arranged as if they were flapping in the wind. Straight lines became gentle waves, molded in smooth, organic forms repeated in a slightly varying pattern. The same module returned several times, but the regularity of the forms was concealed by the overall feeling of movement and variety. The stars on the banner followed a different logic: each star on the flag was turned into a column neatly ordered in regular lines. The length of each column corresponded to that of the horizontal side of the structure, creating a perfect cube.

42

Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties (London: Calmann and King, 1996), 19. Sidra Stich, Made in U.S.A.: An Americanization in Modern Art, the 50s & 60s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 17. 43

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The construction of the American flag monument was never realized, but haunted the artist for more than thirty years, finally leading to a revised, updated project that we discuss further on.

Gramsci, “The Greatest of Sardinians” In the meantime, a new project for a monument drew Nivola’s attention once again to Sardinia, causing him to question his own complex sense of identity.

Figure 4

The earlier autobiographical reference in the FDR memorial emerged more clearly in a projected memorial to the philosopher and politician

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Antonio Gramsci, as the artist wrote, the “greatest of Sardinians.”44 The monument was supposed to be built in Ales, where Gramsci was born. Nivola, who started the project without a commission, working on it from 1968 to 1977, strongly identified with Gramsci, whom he saw as the prototype of the engagé artist and, on a deeper level, as a humbly born Sardinian raised to greatness owing to his qualities and commitment. The monument (Fig. 4), which he designed together with Richard Stein, would have consisted of a small roofless rhomboidal cell made of limestone blocks. The visitor, entering the room through a1.55-meter-high bronze door, would have been forced to bend in a sign of respect. Inside, he/she would have seen a double effigy of Gramsci, as a child hanging from a beam (a reference to the naive attempt by his mother to cure him of his physical disabilities) and as an adult, languishing in his fascist prison. This double image of constraint was to be in opposition to the sense of expansion conveyed by the absence of a roof. Gramsci’s personal tragedy would have been contrasted with the universal reach of his thought. The long-lasting influence of Surrealism on Nivola’s art resurfaced in the references to both the Boule suspendue by Alberto Giacometti (1930– 1931) and the experimentations that Frederick Kiesler – a close friend of the artist – conducted in the 1960s on sculptures made up of different pieces, distributed from floor to ceiling, suspended in a void.45 At the same time, the project reflected Nivola’s critical engagement with Minimalism, adopting the principle of the grid and of simple, clearly drawn geometric objects. Nivola imagined a squared platform separating the monument from the dirt, divided into countless smaller squares, reflecting both the primary structures of Sol Lewitt and an autonomous study of the configuration of space. This rational frame exalted the spirituality and mysticism of the “chapel,” engaging both the Expressionist sculptures and the natural element, which was made up of six olive trees. More than any specific

44

“Un mausoleo per Gramsci” and “Un piccolo mausoleo per il più grande dei Sardi,” Costantino Nivola Papers, AAA. The project is discussed in Concettina Ghisu, “Monumento ad Antonio Gramsci ad Ales,” in Nivola: L’investigazione dello spazio, ed. Carlo Pirovano (Nuoro: Ilisso, 2010), 134–38 and in Giuliana Altea, “Le incompiute di Nivola. Tre progetti non realizzati per la Sardegna, 1953– 1968,” L’Uomo Nero XI, no. 11 (May 2015). 45 Frederick Kiesler, Inside the Endless house, Art, People and Architecture: A Journal, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 482-484.

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religious belief, this holy precinct 46 surrounding Gramsci would have symbolized the regenerative power of nature and the aspiration for peace. The Gramsci project might be considered more as a piece of architecture than as a work of sculpture, despite the two bronze portraits being its emotional and visual focus. In addition, the monument was designed to be experienced by one visitor at a time, marking the final step in the process of disrupting the collective ideal reflected in the PergolaVillage – a disruption that could first be seen in the Bataan-Corregidor scheme of 1957. Aiming at creating “a hallucinating, clear atmosphere, at the same time tragic and poetic,” 47 the monument was specifically intended as a mausoleum more than a memorial, a symbolic “payback” for Gramsci’s actual tomb in the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome, where his ashes rest, in the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini, “on foreign ground […] still the outcast.”48 The body – both of the honored hero and of the visitor who came to pay homage – was thus to be the core of the project. The atmosphere of the late 1960s fostered a widespread feeling of identity between private and public, leading to the overlapping of the political and individual bodies.49 Further, the proposed choice of bronze for the sculptural pieces and of stone for the architectural elements was symptomatic of a radical change in Nivola approach and, on a more general level, in twentieth-century monumentalism. Bronze and marble became a replacement for concrete, which in the postwar years had been a viable choice for a less rhetorical and pompous form of celebration and remembrance. Now the competition 46

Ghisu, "Monumento ad Antonio Gramsci ad Ales,"136. “Un piccolo mausoleo per il più grande dei Sardi,” handwritten notes, undated, Costantino Nivola Papers, AAA. 48 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Le ceneri di Gramsci (Milan: Garzanti, 1957). Edited and translated by Stephen Sartarelli, in The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 169. 49 The body as a political entity was at the core of the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s. Black Power, feminist, and LGTB movements saw in the liberation of the body a break from the repressive, racist, and patriarchal society. Despite avoiding any direct political commitment, Nivola sympathized with the protesters: in the1968 series on the Chicago riots, he devoted several drawings to the depiction of police violence and especially to the August 28 event in Grant Park, where a young man lowered the American flag, triggering a massive assault by the police. The image of the boy beaten up, martyrized with the American flag at his feet, recurs in Nivola sketches, clearly a symbol of the oppression of the state. 47

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among artists and architects in the field of public sculpture had led to the analysis and the rediscovery of the specificity of different materials. In 1967 Marcel Breuer noted: “With all my love for the material, concrete does not suggest, if I may use a banal word, eternity.”50 Bronze and marble did. As early as 1966–1967 Nivola chose a combination of granite and bronze for a monument to a local poet, Sebastiano Satta, in Piazza Sebastiano Satta in Nuoro (Sardinia). The overall look of the piazza was anything but traditional owing to the use of roughly cut rocks from the surrounding mountains, benches rising directly from the pavement as organic concretions of the ground, and rejection of the usual central bronze statue in favor of six small stations embedded in the rocks, depicting different aspects of Satta’s life. Nonetheless, it marked a shift in Nivola’s thought on monumentality: concrete had been a material symbolic of the ideal of the synthesis of art and architecture, charged by the artist with ethical and aesthetic meaning, but from that point on its use would gradually diminish, eventually being confined to school planning, where there was a chronic lack of funds. In Nivola’s writings on his proposed Gramsci memorial project, concrete was described as a fallback solution in case of a shortage of public funding.51 After more than ten years of bureaucratic, financial, and technical problems, in 1977 a memorial to Gramsci was actually built in Ales, but not by Nivola. Following a political change in the administration of the village, the new mayor accepted the offer of the association Amici della Casa Gramsci in Milan to install a monument by Gio Pomodoro.52 It was the end of any hope Nivola might still have had for the actual possibility of building his own Gramsci mausoleum. He had already lost the competition for the Sassari Brigade memorial, and this second episode left him bewildered and bitter, as if his motherland, Sardinia, had ultimately betrayed him.

50 Marcel Breuer, Audition in front of the Commission of Fine Arts of Washington D.C. for the project of the monument to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1967, quoted in in Hyman, “Marcel Breuer and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial,” 454. 51 “Un piccolo mausoleo per il più grande dei Sardi,” 52 Nivola wrote in vain to Pomodoro to ask him for an explanation about the commission and to let him know that there was a previous agreement with the municipality of Orani (Letter of Nivola to Gio Pomodoro, March 1977, Costantino Nivola Papers, AAA).

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Toward a New Monumentality “My Italianness does not count for much, and neither does my Sardinianness. The balance tips completely in favor of American democracy,”53 Nivola wrote to a friend in 1980. Almost at the same time he started working on a new version of the monumental American flag (Fig. 5). A large styrofoam and plaster maquette and a new series of drawings were the output of the process of rethinking the monument that he imagined in the 1960s. Now the artist was free to develop a spatial intervention detached from any specific occasion, such as commemorating Roosevelt, and approached the theme of the flag in a way that was at the same time personal and universal.

Figure 5

Marble or travertine was to replace concrete and white, smooth walls were to be substituted for the polychrome graffiti of the first design. The project was in line with the new wave of patriotism in the United States, of which the presidency of Ronald Reagan was both a symptom and a consequence, but even more with the retrospective attitude of Nivola himself, rethinking – on the verge of old age – his own history and beliefs. Part of this process had been the creation of a series of sculptures in bronze, travertine, and marble dedicated to the Sardinian mothers, for Nivola a universal symbol of the eternal feminie and the power of nature. 53

Letter of Nivola to Miriam Chiaromonte, January 18, 1980, Nivola Archives, Long Island.

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The shapes of these sculptures recalled the totemic figures that had been part of his imagery since the 1950s, but the formal refinement and the polished surfaces were unprecedented, expressive of a new monumentality detached from any architectural context. The maquette of the monument to the American flag reflected a crossroad between these new expressive urgencies and the usual concerns for the community and the public use of space. The solemnity of the white walls and the sense of immersion conveyed by the wavy paths brought the unitary and rarefied atmosphere of the Mothers to an environmental scale. The intended use of the monument would have demanded the active engagement of the viewer just as the previous monuments to the Battle of Bataan-Corregidor and the Sassari Brigade. Compared to the 1961 version, Nivola added here a series of sculptures – expressionist portraits of notable Americans on tall plinths – crowding the space among the star-shaped columns. Although intended to celebrate American “heroes,” their function was not of landmarks in the monumental complex but of diffused punctuation marking the rhythm of the path. The abstract, organic imposing shapes, permeated with light and air, defined the space both from a distance and during a walk-through, dwarfing the figurative sculptural elements. The monument, whose idea harked back to the early 1960s, was thus updated to the postmodern era, when art and architecture tended to diverge and artistic traditions were constantly quoted, twisted, deconstructed, and rearranged. The idea of a fluid identity, of an eclectic approach to both art and life was demonstrated in the maquette by the insertion of a couple in traditional Sardinian costumes, hinting to the latent autobiographical content of the monument. Two opposing worlds were united in the artist’s own life experience. Once again the individual and collective spheres collided.

Questioning the Monument, Asserting the Self Finally, in 1983, Nivola’s last unrealized project exemplified in an almost paroxysmal way the ambivalence between art as an expression of its maker’s personality and art as a way to achieve social integration. In that year the One Times Square Building, once briefly the headquarters of The New York Times and later used intermittently by several companies during the twentieth century, seemed destined to be demolished. Completely shut down since 1977, its offices and retail spaces had become more and more inadequate, and the building was reduced to an empty shell whose outer walls served as a giant surface for billboards.

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High maintenance costs and the functional obsolescence of the building, increasingly surrounded by new up-to-date skyscrapers, made its replacement likely, offering the opportunity to redefine the entire urban structure of the area. Nivola, working with the architectural studio Pomerance and Breines, gave a proposal to the city of New York for the construction of a new entrance to the subway, conceived as a pedestrian facility, with a central 25- meter-high column dedicated to the Pursuit of Happiness (Fig. 6).54 Literally “extracting” the old building with its foundations would have made a large space available for the construction of a piazza surrounded by an arcade below street level. The column would have been at the center, attracting pedestrians’ attention without interfering with air and light. Spiraling around the shaft, he conceived a bronze stream of people climbing the column in the frantic search for happiness. The truncated shape of the end seemed to be a melancholic suggestion of the impossibility of success. A wide stairway would have connected the piazza with the street, allowing for easy access to the subway. The arcade would have hosted a huge polychromed wall graffito depicting “various gestures of popular dance, of course… plastically interpreted so as to integrate them harmoniously with the architecture.”55 Nivola consulted with his, long-time acquaintance Simon Breines (with whom he had collaborated in 1958 on an unbuilt project for a new Carnegie Hall in Manhattan). The architect strongly advocated transforming cities to make them functional for the needs of their inhabitants, and was a key figure in the postwar years in favor of careful planning of American megalopolises. 56 A vigorous opponent of the ruthlessness of architects, contractors, and politicians and of the discriminating and racist logic of New York’s urban development,57 he fought his personal battle against cars and traffic in support of pedestrians’

54

“A Time Square Column and a Window to the Subway,” project draft, October 1, 1985, Nivola Archives, Long Island. 55 Constantino Nivola, Handwritten and undated note, Nivola Archives, Long Island. 56 Andrew M. Shanken, 194X. Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the America Home Front (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), X. 57 Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 110, 125.

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rights.58 The quality of life and the idea of a more human, slower way of experiencing the city was a common ground for the architect and the sculptor, both of whom envisaged the possibility of a communitarian way life even in the big American cities.

Figure 6 58

Simon Breines and William J. Dean, The Pedestrian Revolution: Streets without Cars (New York: Vintage Books, 1974).

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Reminiscent of the Trajan column as well as of Rodin’s unrealized Tower of Labor, the project revealed the contradictions in Nivola’s vision between the drive toward self-affirmation and social commitment, the desire to a be a protagonist and the embracement of anonymity. On the one hand, the large decorated surfaces were designed to reduce the space devoted to the invasive billboards, inviting the passersby to slow down and look at the artwork, intended basically as means to create a positive inclusive atmosphere. On the other hand, Nivola was actually advertising himself, leaving his personal mark right in the middle of Manhattan, the heart of the city that welcomed him back in the 1940s, refusing to be one of the thousands of daily passersby and reclaiming instead his exceptionality as an artist. The planned column-shaped monument, the most Freudian of symbols, was in many ways naive. In its attempt to rescue a crucial area of Manhattan from the market and speculation, the project was actually unfeasible, and it is for that reason that it is of some interest today. Its utopian challenge to the capitalist logic of exploitation would have reclaimed urban space for a free collective use. At the same time, while celebrating the pursuit of happiness, or, in Proust’s words, the search for the lost time, Nivola celebrated himself, as a further demonstration of the changes evident in his vision of monumentality. The proposed project was very receptive of the kitsch aesthetics of the 1980s; at the same time, it reflected the new climate of urban optimism typical of the decade. In spite of its apparent assertiveness, this sculptural extravaganza – a subway entrance-cum-column – was designed to be used more than contemplated, in line with the tendency toward the construction of interactive public spaces that characterized the 1980s, a tendency that had its principal example in Maya Lin’s celebrated Vietnam Veterans Memorial, inaugurated in 1982. Nivola sat on the jury, and his active support was paramount in securing the final victory of Lin’s proposal.59 Lin’s statement on the anonymous folder submitted to the committee noted: Walking through this park-like area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth, a long polished black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth. Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward,

59

The Nivola Archives in Orani holds several letters written by the artist to fellow members to convince them of the quality of the project.

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and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead.”60

The name of every one of the fallen was engraved on the wall to convey the enormity of the losses, accounting at the same time for each individual soldier. The report of the jurors, selecting Lin’s proposal from some 1420 entries, clearly shows the reasons for Nivola’s enthusiastic endorsement. The phenomenological dimension of the work, the cut in the earth like an open wound, the absence of rhetoric emphasis in favor of a harmonic connection with the environment, a project based on “the simple meeting of earth, sky and remembered names,”61 were elements strikingly attuned to Nivola’s own poetics. It was as though the project for the monument to the Battle of Bataan-Corregidor had, at least partially, come to life. It is not surprising, then, that Nivola was furious about the decision, shortly after the inauguration of the memorial, of adding a sculptural group of three soldiers by the figurative artist Frederick Hart to please the most conservative elements in the American public. Lin’s work, “outraged visually and conceptually by unqualified but energetic individuals” looked now, according to Nivola, “like a Soviet army monument.”62 Nivola was strongly against the idea of an aesthetic of opposition in the field of public art. In the controversy about Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, for example, he took the side of the administration, as the artistic intervention not only defied the audience, but made it difficult for the citizens to access the plaza. This did not mean that he thought that art could be manipulated according to political agendas or that administrators should uncritically bend to the whims of the audience. Thinking about the monument meant rethinking and questioning its purpose and the values it had to memorialize. Nonetheless, in Nivola’s view, the artist was solely responsible for the formal design of the monument and the only warden of the appropriateness of its meaning. Throughout his long career, Nivola pursued the ideal of artistic practice as a means of enriching communal life. His monuments were never designed to be simply contemplated; rather they were meant to be stepped 60 Maya Lin, In Memoriam, entry 1026 to the National Competition Vietnam Veterans Memorial Design Competition, 1980. 61 Report of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Design Competition, Costantino Nivola’s Papers, AAA. 62 Handwritten note by Nivola in a letter of Hugh Drescher to the artist, September 15, 1982, Costantino Nivola Papers, AAA.

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on, explored, physically engaged. A shift from the idea of the spectator as a viewer to one as an active agent in the making of the artwork characterizes every project he designed. At the same time, his works were informed by a strong subjectivity, intended not only as the assertion of an artistic credo, but as the surfacing of an autobiographical undercurrent. Thus his monuments reveal both a modernist preoccupation with form and a not less modern entanglement of psychic drives. Oscillating between participation, urban design, and modernist autonomy, Nivola’s conception took different directions according to the changing debate on the role of sculpture in the public sphere, making the artist a perfect case study for a less obvious history of twentieth-century monumentality.

List of Figures Figure 1. Costantino Nivola, Pergola-Village, Vined Orani, 1953. Figure 2. Costantino Nivola, Maquette for the Monument to the Battle of Bataan Corregidor, 1956, Nivola Museum, Orani. Figure 3. Costantino Nivola, Maquette for the Monument to the “Sassari” Brigade, 1960, Costantino Nivola Archive. Figure 4. Costantino Nivola ,Maquette for the Monument to Antonio Gramsci, 1968, Nivola Museum, Orani. Figure 5. Costantino Nivola, Maquette for the Monument to the American Flag, 1985, Nivola Museum, Orani. Figure 6. Costantino Nivola, Maquette for the Monument to the Pursuit of Happiness, 1985, Costantino Nivola Archive. All images courtesy of Nivola Foundation.

SECTION III: SITE-SPECIFIC ARTWORKS: BETWEEN PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL SPACE



REASSESSING SITE-SPECIFIC ARTWORKS OF THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST IN THE INFORMATION AGE: IMPLICATIONS FOR SPATIAL THEORY MIRA BANAY

The first site-specific artworks of the late 1960s and 1970s were temporary installations set up in remote sites, primarily in the United States and Europe, rather than in conventional exhibition spaces. The term “sitespecificity” 1 was coined in parallel to “offsite projects,” used by many contemporary galleries and curators to refer to films and photos documenting art in process that was taking place outside the physical confines of the gallery or museum. Also known as “Land art,” most site-specific projects, such as environmental art, installations, performance art, body art, and so on, relied heavily on video to provide real-time coverage of the series of activities that went into the work’s creation. Moreover, it reflected an interdisciplinary approach, with the artists integrating both academic disciplines (philosophy, geography, anthropology, sociology, zoology, etc.) and a range of praxes, including the visual arts, motion pictures, performance, and social and spatial practices, into their works. During the 1970s, the canonic American Land artworks 2 tended to become permanent. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty,3 a 1,500-ft-long, 15-ftwide coil of mud, rocks, and salt crystals that extends counterclockwise 1

See Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 11. 2 The images of the following artworks can be viewed on the website. As most artists do not accept visual representations for their artworks, but recommend visiting the artworks in situ, I suggest relevant websites for each work of art. 3 Smithson’s Spiral Jetty: © Holt-Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photo: George Steinmetz (last retrieved: June 20,2016). http://www.diaart.org/visit/visit/robert-smithson-spiral-jetty/



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into the red waters of the Great Salt Lake in Utah; Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field,4 which consists of 400 stainless steel poles arranged in a grid, 1 mi by 1 km in size, in Catron County, NM; Michael Heizer City Complex, 5 in the shape of a mastaba, 6 constructed from reused sand, alluvial soil, and gravel mixed with cement, reinforcing bars creating a rigid framework, in Lincoln County, Nevada; and James Turrell’s Roden Crater,7 constructed in the mouth of the volcano, transforming it into a space flooded with natural, although carefully designed, light near Flagstaff, AZ, were all constructed in remote desert locations in the United States. Those artworks link American art with the concept of enormous scale in open space, their installations arousing associations with the deeply rooted doctrine of Manifest Destiny. At one time many Americans believed that Manifest Destiny represented God’s will to expand across the entire continent and to control and inhabit the country. Considering it as a wilderness to travel in search of the “Promised Land,” Americans have been turning toward the Western frontier ever since.8 The romantic pull of the settlers is expressed in the artworks in an ethic of physical labor (Heizer’s City Complex, Smithson’s Spiral Jetty), on the one hand, and the rational (De Maria’s The Lightning Field, and Turrell’s Roden Crater), on the other. This approach, representing an expanded field purportedly outside of the mainstream artistic systems and subsystems, codes and subcodes in the American culture industry, replaces urban aesthetics with spatial culture, thus creating the visual sign of an alternative space. My intention in this chapter is to re-examine permanent as well as impermanent site-specific artworks in the Information Age by linking aesthetics and art history in the 4

Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977. Long-term installation, western New Mexico. Photo: John Cliett (last retrieved: June 20, 2016). http://www.diaart.org/sites/page/56/1375 5 Michael Heizer’s City, originally taken by Tom Vinetz, Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company (last retrieved: June 20, 2016). http://www.nytimes.com/library/arts/121299heizer-art.1.html. 6 A mastaba is a rectangular ancient Egyptian tomb-chapel initially constructed in the earliest dynastic era (around 3500 BCE). A structure with flat roofs, normally built from mud brick or stone, the mastaba had burial chambers that were often dug deep into the ground. 7 James Turrell’s Roden Crater (last retrieved: June 20, 2016). http://tlmagazine.com/james-turrell-gives-us-an-insight-into-his-roden-crater/. 8 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness,” in Landscape and Power, 2nd edition, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 269, note 15.



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context of the problems of practices in social space, addressing material conditions and cultural complexities. Over time, site-specific art has raised new questions of terminology and method in respect to site, place, space, and time. This is analogous to one of the principal interests of modern philosophers, sociologists, and cultural geographers: the role of space in social theory. Geographers David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity, 9 Yi-Fu Tuan in Space and Place, 10 and Edward William Soja in Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory 11 all argue on the significance of space in producing social relationships. In The Production of Space, the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre12 notes that one of the key problems regarding studies of space is the understanding of spatial practice as the “projection” of the social onto the spatial field. He contends that the terms “space” and “spatiality” are themselves social and cultural, as well as quasi-material productions. Consequently, space and the politically oriented organization of space not only express social relationships, but also affect them, as can be seen in regard to the foundations 13 that support the creation of permanent sitespecific artworks in the American Southwest. Moreover, these tangible art objects evoke a somatic response in the viewer. The powerful visual experience provides a one-on-one confrontation with the pure limits of the body’s boundaries, expanding the viewer’s sensory perception beyond the object to place, space, and time. Today, our historical and physical distance from Land art makes this experience largely speculative. Both literary and visual representations (i.e., textual, photographic, and/or cinematic documentation) have become 9

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 201–307. 10 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). 11 Edward William Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso Press, 1989). 12 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 13 The foundations to which I refer are the Dia Art Foundation, the Lone Star Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Brown Foundation, and more that funded The Lightning Field, City Complex, and the Roden Crater. These foundations have the power to influence the production of social space through financial support of monumental artworks created in public space. David Harvey describes how space becomes a commodity in a capitalist economy (David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 227–239).



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the viewers’ most substantial and accessible alternative to experiencing art in general, and Land art in particular. In the contemporary world, new and different spaces for social interaction have their own dynamics and characteristics. The domination of media space works through a fundamental mechanism: the presence or absence of a message in this space. Anything or anyone that is absent from media space cannot reach the public consciousness, and thus becomes a nonentity. Cyberspace is characterized by constant movement and exchanges of information, images, and sounds between physically disconnected people who interact in a sort of “non-place.”14 It is a new kind of space, unperceivable through our senses, which seems to have become more significant than physical space itself and is layered on top of, within, and between the fabric of traditional geographical space. Hence, in this day and age, art has passed into the realm of the “virtual,” where the unreal is the most real thing there is. People now live with the Internet and its huge content of unlimited, uncontrolled, and unsorted information, including almost every work of art ever created.15 The change in our visual perception began with the camera and other film-based media, which led to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”16 Benjamin argued that film and other mechanical technologies were destroying the aura that once belonged to traditional art. Today, the Internet has speeded up the change. Digital technology is constantly producing new media forms that attempt to generate a kind of auratic and/or corporeal experience. Benjamin’s concept of aura is now applied to new (digital) media and, in particular, to “mixed reality” and 3D-projection, which may simulate such visual effects as lens flares, depth of field, or motion blur. These effects can lend an 14 Mahyar Arefi, “NonǦPlace and Placelessness as Narratives of Loss: Rethinking the Notion of Place,” Journal of Urban Design 4, no. 2 (1999): 179–193. 15 Zizi Papacharissi, “The Internet, the Public Sphere, and Beyond,” Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics, eds. Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard (New York: Routledge, 2008) last retrieved: July 4, 2016, http://www.ciberdemocracia.net/victorsampedro/wpcontent/uploads/2012/12/Papacharissi-The-Virtual-Sphere-RevisitedHandbook.pdf ; Athina Karatzogianni and Andrew Robinson, Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies (London: Routledge, 2010). 16 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1937)," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Jerusalem: Schocken Books, 1969).



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element of realism to a scene, even if it is merely the simulated artifact of a camera. However, whereas the technologies that blend computergenerated visual, aural, and textual information into the user’s physical environment take advantage of the optical characteristics of cameras and the human eye, they cannot stimulate the whole corporeal sensorium, which is in line with Terry Eagleton’s understanding of the word “aesthetics” (aisthitikos): “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body.”17 Susan Buck-Morss expands the discourse, “a form of cognition, achieved through taste, touch, hearing, seeing, smell—the whole corporeal sensorium”: The terminae of all of these – nose, eyes, ears, and mouth, some of the most sensitive areas of skin – are located at the surface of the body, the mediating boundary between inner and outer. This physical-cognitive apparatus with its qualitatively autonomous, non-fungible sensors…is “out front” of the mind, encountering the world pre-linguistically, hence prior not only to logic but to meaning as well. Of course all of the senses can be acculturated – that is the whole point of philosophical interest in “aesthetics” in the modern era.18

The result is a leveling not only of visual information such as a sense of place, space, and scale, but also of materials, so that film/photography becomes the prime source for the dematerialization of the art object. In other words, the visual information is flattened, negating actual place and space. Experience is thus replaced with immersion into virtual reality, which performs a new version of “simulacrum.”19

17

Terry Eagleton, a cultural theorist: see Terry Eagleton, “The Ideology of the Aesthetic,” Poetics Today 9, no. 2, The Rhetoric of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Rhetoric (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), 327. 18 Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork,” October 62 (Fall 1992), 6. 19 When the work of art reflected in media material is recognized as the “real” thing and media material integrates into the “real” experience to such an extent that the unmediated sensation is indistinguishable from the mediated, the simulation becomes confused with its source: Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman, Foreign Agents Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).



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Diverse Attitudes to Art-Site Practices in Socially Produced Space: From Impermanence/Transience to Permanence/Infinity The Land art that was initially produced in the United States and Europe in the mid-1960s utilized a range of channels. Materiality, actuality, and geography were experienced not only in situ, but also as media material, which is by definition immaterial and metaphorical, everywhere and nowhere. Nonetheless, artworks demanded an experiential perception of the site, whether a gallery, an alternative exhibition space, or an expanse of wilderness marked with random patterns. 20 Even Heizer, 21 who considered media an irrelevant component of Land art practice, and De Maria22 acknowledged the presence of media material as an alternative to their projects, Mile Long Drawing (1968) and Munich Depression (1969), which no longer exist. Thanks to visual representation, we can at least have an idea of the artwork. However, since the image shows a framed fragment of the work, there can be no territory or real space, and without territory and space the image becomes an object or thing but lacks the qualities that can become expressive and that can intensify the expression of the living body. Originally, artists that created Conceptual art, Land art, and Environmental art embodied an anti-institutional stance,23 although most 20

As Land art spread around the globe, artists from different continents and countries, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Europe, Israel, Japan, the Philippines, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States, created such artworks. Most of the media material of those artworks was displayed in Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon’s exhibition, Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012. 21 Michael Heizer, Munich Depression (Final Stage) (1969), Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich. On a plot of land near Munich, Heizer directed the excavation of a conical pit, in the process removing or “displacing” about 1,000 tons of dirt and rock. Courtesy Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich (last retrieved: 5/7/2016). http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/one-to-one/ 22 Walter De Maria, Mile Long Drawing, Mojave Desert (1968) consisted of two chalk lines drawn on the ground, which were blown away by the wind within a month (last retrieved July 5, 2016). http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/earthart/ 23 Prior to Land art, Fluxus artists practiced ephemeral art with mail art, happenings, etc., outside of galleries and museums. Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Anna Dezeuze, ed.,



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of them were privately or institutionally funded, and their works were defined as “not place-specific.”24 However, the artists and their sponsors were well aware that these were temporary artworks, destined to dematerialize or be dismantled, so that the only way they could endure was through visual documentation. Within a short time, De Maria, Heizer, and Turrell adopted a different approach, and beginning in the 1970s they constructed permanent sitespecific installations in remote desert locations in the American Southwest. This represented a major break with historical criticism, including European modernism, as they were creating an association between the artwork and its site and space, which all came together as a point of reference. Heizer and De Maria asserted time and again that they were not ready to accept any conceptual representation such as photographic reproductions, drawings, videos, or film documentations. They insisted that since the works were installed permanently on specific sites, they could only be properly experienced in situ, “out there,” where the viewers/visitors would be able to fathom their entire scope and meaning.25 Thus, for example, Heizer’s Double Negative (1969–1970), a 1,500-ft ditch cut into the side of a mesa in the Nevada desert, was allegedly designed as an escape from the museum system. However, it was, in fact, in the collection of Virginia Dwan, who donated it to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Similarly, the second version of De Maria’s Lightning Field (originally created in 1974 in Arizona), 26 constructed in Catron County, NM, in 1977, was fully supported by the Dia Art Foundation (a nonprofit organization based in New York City, which financed and supported site-specific and site-

The ‘Do-It-Yourself’ Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012). 24 Most of the artworks are documented and were displayed in Harald Szeemann’s 1969 legendary exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form. It was one of the first shows that bought together new trends in 1960s art, such as Minimalism, Arte Povera, Land art and Conceptual art. A different exhibition arranged in Los Angeles a few years ago was Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon’s Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974. 25 Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, eds., Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012), 30. 26 In June 1974, De Maria erected thirty-five 18-ft stainless steel poles, spaced 200 ft apart, in a five-by-seven-pole grid on northern Arizona land owned by collectors Emily and Burton Tremaine. The work was dismantled in 1976, and Virginia Dwan eventually gave the poles to Dia.



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oriented artworks). 27 Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) was meant to disappear in time, but it became part of Dia’s collection in 1999 (26 years after Smithson death in 1973 in an airplane crash while surveying a site for another temporary Earthwork in Texas).28

Patronage and Support of Permanent Site-Specific Art The production of the artworks described above would not have been possible without the support of private Maecenas, among them Robert Scull, a distinguished New York art collector and patron; Virginia Dwan, an art dealer from Los Angeles and New York; Leo Castelli; and John Weber; as well as other organizations, the most consequential sponsor being the Dia Art Foundation. Hence, from the start, the permanent site-specific artworks, whether finished or still in progress, open to visitors or not, were dependent on financial support from entities that operate within the dominant space, the centers of wealth and power.29 The German art dealer Heiner Friedrich in collaboration with Philippa de Menil, the heiress to the Schlumberger oil exploration fortune, 30 the directors of the Dia Art Foundation, were dedicated to a mode of art that was, from its inception, very costly and not for sale. The foundation’s funding reflected its cultural intentions and included the purchase of large stretches of land and the funding of monumental artworks by a select group of artists, thereby introducing a revolutionary concept into the field of art.

27

For a historical chronology of the Dia Art Foundation, 1974–2006, see Mira Banay, The Making of a New “Differential Space”: Permanent Site-Specific Art in America and the Dia Art Foundation (1974–2006) (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2014), 53–85. 28 Spiral Jetty was a gift of the estate of the late artist and his wife, Nancy Holt: see Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, eds., Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty (Berkeley: University of California Press and New York: The Dia Art Foundation, 2005). 29 Despite the funding provided by the Federal government, patronage of the arts is widely perceived in the United States as a private responsibility as well, and is encouraged by tax incentives to donors. Funding arrangements affected by tax incentives have long been a key component of the American art industry. It is believed that broad-based support for the arts is necessary in order to promote principles such as democracy, integration, and active participation in society. 30 Jonathan Martin and David E. Salamie, “Schlumberger Limited,” International Directory of Company Histories 59 (1988).



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Land Art – a Media Practice vs. an Unmediated Spatial Experience in situ? Unlike Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Morris, Heizer and De Maria did not wish to share the process of their work with viewers or visitors. They forbade nearly all documentary material, permitting the publication of just a few photographic reproductions that they chose themselves, and later insisted that anyone wishing to view the work make the journey to the site itself. Smithson did not adopt the same approach as Heizer and De Maria. During the construction of Spiral Jetty, Smithson directed a 32-min film documenting the process, and in so doing accentuated the importance of the structure’s actualization in time and the temporal experience it engenders. Moreover, the artwork is inherently relational, wherein emphasis is placed on the role of the viewer or spectator in its conceptual realization and reception. Different perspectives change the perception of the spiral form of the jetty. Most people are familiar only with the aerial view (shot from a viewpoint inaccessible to most visitors). This perspective can be seen mainly in Smithson film and stills, which include signs, photographs, and maps that provide a range of information, part visual and part verbal. According to Craig Owens, “this complex web of heterogeneous information…challenges the purity and self-sufficiency of the work of art; it also transforms the hierarchy between object and representation.” 31 Thus, the film and other forms of representation become: [O]ne link in a chain of signifiers which summon and refer to one another...the jetty exists mainly in the film which Smithson made, the narrative he published, the photographs which accompany that narrative, and the various maps, diagrams, drawings, etc., he made. The spiral form of the jetty is actually visible only from a distance, which is achieved by imposing a text/image between viewer and work. Smithson thus accomplishes a radical dislocation of the notion of point-of-view, which is no longer a function of physical position and “the production of space,” but of the mode (photographic, cinematic and textual) of confrontation with the work of art.32

31 32

Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” October, 10 (Fall 1979): 127. Ibid., 126–127.



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Smithson transformed the visual field into a textual one (including the medium of film), which represents an aerial view (the only possible way to view the complete form of the Spiral Jetty), and thus created a distinct aesthetic perspective. This transformation can be explained by considering Lefebvre’s spatial logic of conceived-lived-perceived spaces, which contain in themselves social relations of production and reproduction, accumulation and domination. Lefebvre contends that “social space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity – their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder.”33 For Lefebvre, space is a product of something that is produced materially, while at the same time “operate[s]…on processes from which it cannot separate itself because it is a product of them.”34 Historians have embraced Lefebvre’s theory of spatial experience, debating the questions it raises regarding the meaning of this experience, how spatial experience is connected to the production of space, and how spatial relations are constructed. In “What Is Spatial History?,”35 Richard White suggests a single answer to all these questions: movement, or what I would term, the “lived experience.” We produce and reproduce space through our movement in space, through “living” in the space. In the case of the artworks in question, spatial relationships are established through the visitor’s movement among real objects at a specific site at a certain moment in time, which he/she produces time and again. Indeed, most Land artists in the 1970s used media material as an instrument of self-documentation and part of the artistic act testifying to what happened in a certain time, place, and space. Nowadays, documentation of “the process” through visual and verbal representation can be found everywhere: in international biennials, 36 Documenta exhibitions, and related coverage, as well as on the Internet and social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter, 33

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 73. Ibid., 66. 35 Richard White, “What Is Spatial History?,” Spatial History Lab: Working paper; submitted February 1, 2010. 36 At the 14th Istanbul Biennial, “SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms,” 2015, crystals gathered by Christov-Bakargiev and a friend at Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in early 2015 were exhibited together with Smithson’s film documenting the construction of the artwork. Landscape images, taken about 6,200 miles away and 45 years ago in Utah, were associated with the British writer J. G. Ballard’s short story “The Voices of Time.” 34



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which reach global populations. This aspect of artistic activity coincides with postmodernism and the techniques of poststructuralist theory, most specifically Derrida’s deconstructive reading, 37 by using forms that are neither a word nor a concept.38 Derrida coined the term “différance”39 to refer to the way in which any single meaning of a concept or text arises only by the effacement of other possible meanings. Hence, différance describes and performs the situation, or the conditions, under which all identities and meanings can occur. Any text can be repeated in an infinite number of possible contexts for an infinite number of potential but undetermined addressees. This provides partial justification for the removal of the “boundaries” between opposites, such as art and politics or center and periphery, as well as texts and photos, photos and real objects, and theory and practice. Accordingly, the concept of Earthworks or Land art indicates a dialectical, nonhierarchical relationship between here and there, inside and outside; it is documented and simultaneously invalidates documentation of the process; it resides between site-specific artwork (by means of geographical reality, a particular place) and the means of its “shift” into another reality (through media material) in a gallery or any other art system. This issue has occupied many poststructuralist theoreticians.40 It was also reflected in the 2012 exhibition Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, curated by Miwon Kwon and Philipp Kaiser at the MOCA in Los Angeles. The curators sought to shatter four myths regarding Land art. The first is that the artworks created in the American wilderness should be deciphered through the dominant geography. The second is that the artists sought to escape from the marketplace (galleries, museum policy, critics, etc.), a 37

Jonathan D. Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 85–89. 38 For Derrida, an “anti-concept” is “neither a word nor a concept” (Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3), which teaches us that all signs are all subjects of difference and constant deferral. 39 Derrida’s new term, spelled with an “a” instead of an “e,” should be taken to mean both difference and deferral. 40 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” (1979), in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 281–298; Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: New Press, 1998); Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism (Brighton, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988).



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myth that persists, although art dealers, gallerists, and the wealthy were involved in their projects from the start. The third myth is that Land artists fled from the urban art industry in search of a place of purity, untouched by history. Rather, according to Kwon and Kaiser, Land art cannot separate itself from the artists’ desire to integrate it with historical moments of our age, such as industrial growth, the technological expansion of suburbia, and urban renewal. The final myth is the supposition that Land art is mainly a sculptural endeavor; rather, Kwon and Kaiser contend that it is predominantly media praxis.41 The exhibition consisted mainly of documentation,42 including films and video art from all over the world, and covered approximately a 15-year period up to 1974.43 Thus, the curators chose to historicize and contextualize Land art, while showing other practices associated with it. From this perspective, art becomes a laboratory for the development of documentary expressions. The extensive range of documentary modes is still designed to “touch the real” and create forums for debate. In line with Kwon and Kaiser’s basic contention that Land art is not necessarily “out there,” much present curatorial practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment. 44 Hence, photographs, films, models, etc., are relevant to Land art, owing to the fact that most of the artworks are temporary, so that the momentary “process” 41

Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, 19–30. For example, artists such as Ben Vautier inserted text painting into the landscape, anticipating the interventions of the heavy-duty Land artists. Vautier was also ahead of the curve in using photography to document an essentially conceptual piece. Land art was an activity (literally) outside of galleries and museums. Cf. Jane McFadden, “Ends of the Earth and Back,” in the MOCA Catalogue (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), 44. 43 Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, “Ends of the Earth and Back,” in: Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Distributed by Prestel, 2012), 19. In their article Kaiser and Kwon refer to major institutions and specifically to the Dia Art Foundation, which has obscured other contexts, approaches, and practices. The Dia Art Foundation was founded in 1974, and was a key supporter of permanent site-specific artworks. For Dia’s founders and directors, Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil, permanent sitespecific Land art meant remoteness and isolation. In my view, for Kwon and Kaiser it meant aloofness. 44 Kwon avoided a critical discussion about Heizer, De Maria, Smithson, and Turrell as they had already been mythologized, canonized, categorized, and defined in her book One Place after Another: Site- Specific Art and Locational Identity. 42



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of their creation, a time-based event, is significant, as well as is the object or finished product. Kwon and Kaiser’s project was inspired by exhibitions organized as early as 1968, both in open spaces and in interior gallery, museum, or alternative spaces, in the wake of antiwar demonstrations on American campuses and in a number of European cities. The first exhibition was mounted at the Virginia Dwan Gallery in 1968. Entitled Earthworks, it featured fourteen artists, mostly young, who had already established an approach involving a spatial relay between the gallery’s inner space and earthworks outside. Robert Smithson presented a few of his nonsites 45 ; Robert Morris worked with a pile of dirt, wire, and gasoline oil46; Michael Heizer displayed large transparencies of work he had already done in situ; Walter De Maria, Carl Andre, Claes Oldenburg, Sol LeWitt and several others demonstrated a similar methodology. Albeit “Earthworks,” the exhibits were mainly photographic images, drawings, blueprints, (indoor) sculptures, written proposals, a film, a photo light box, and a large monochromatic painting. The following year, Willoughby Sharp, the curator of the Andrew Dickson White Museum at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, organized the first institutional exhibition of Land art, featuring the American and European artists Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Long, Hans Haacke, Jan Dibbets, Neil Jenney, Gunther Uecker, Robert Morris, Walter De Maria, and Michael Heizer. Sharp documented the process of the artists’ work throughout the preparations for the exhibition daily, so that from the beginning it was a media-oriented event. The 16-hour raw film footage is still untouched in Sharp’s archive. This filmed documentation is a very important resource for understanding certain artworks as well as the atmosphere of this period. Since most of the artworks have been dismantled, the documents remain the only material, which is media material that reflects a social production of knowledge. 45

Robert Smithson, A Nonsite (Franklin, NJ; 1968): painted wooden bins, limestone, and gelatin-silver prints and typescript on paper with graphite and transfer letters mounted on mat board 16½ × 82 × 103 in., Collection of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. In the Dwan Gallery he also exhibited photographs, drawings, written proposals, and a film (last retrieved July 13, 2016). http://onasecretmission.blogspot.co.il/2011/01/designer-of-month-robertsmithson_14.html. 46 Robert Morris, Earthwork 3 (1968), mixed media, ca. 20 × 25 in.: Earth Works (1968), Dwan Gallery, New York. Photo: Walter Russell (last retrieved August 19, 2016). https://www.pinterest.com/pin/539446861586212632/



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Sharp invited Les Levine47 to take pictures during a trip to Ithaca by New York critics and press people, who came to attend the opening in March 1969. Again, this was basically a media event. A month later, Levine exhibited 31,000 of his photographs, randomly piled on the floor and covered with Jell-O or stuck to the wall with chewing gum. The rest of the photos were intended for sale. Levine’s remarks on Software (the name he gave his work) help toward understanding the place of Conceptual artists in the exhibition: Software is the programming material which any system uses, i.e., in a computer it would be the flow charts or subroutines for the computer program. In effect, software in “real” terms is the mental intelligence required for any experience… Images themselves are hardware. Information about these images is software. In many cases, an object is of much less value than the software concerning the object. The object is the end of a system. The software is an open continuing system. The experience of seeing something first hand is no longer of value in a software controlled society, as anything seen through the media carries just as much energy as first-hand experience.… In the same way, most of the art that is produced today ends up as information about art.48

In other words, according to Levine, ephemeral or dematerialized art is media. There is no such thing as no material; the material is converted into media material. Levine’s words support the appending of documentation in interior spaces to the “out there” experience. Gerry Schum, who founded the Television Gallery in Berlin, also arranged a media exhibition in 1969. His aim was to reach a large audience through regular television broadcasts of film sequences of works by Richard Long, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, and Jan Dibbets. Like many media, television deals with illusion and reality, the difference between what the camera catches and what the eye sees. The German gallerist Konrad Fisher commented that both – image and apparatus – become objects.49 Schum claimed that the 47 Les Levine, an American born in Ireland in 1935, is a Conceptual artist and one of the founders of Media art. 48 “Software - Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art,” Exhibition at the Jewish Museum (1970). Documentation of projects by Ted Nelson, the Architecture Machine Group, and Les Levine: http://monoskop.org/images/7/70/From_Software_exhibition_1970.pdf. 49 Joy Sleeman, “Like Two Guys Discovering Neptune,” Transatlantic Dialogues in the Emergence of Land Art (last retrieved: June 16, 2016).



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exhibition offered a temporary, modern media for young progressive art that negated traditional generic concepts. “Television,” he said, “turns into a museum and the television screen into an exhibition area.”50 The opening took place in Studio C of SFB (Sender Freies Berlin - Free Berlin Radio) on March 28, 1969, prior to the TV broadcasts. In the Information Age, art objects in “real space” undergo a conceptual transformation from the material object to immateriality in the virtual images of the web. Dematerialized art objects such as the aforementioned media practices, paved, almost naturally, the way to Art on the Internet, by means of net art, digital art, and documented art online through images, tweets, essays, etc. Hence, the former system of imposing a text/image/film between the viewer and the work is extended nowadays by the use of the Internet as the main medium of production and distribution. Moreover, images are never stable on the Internet, which means that art online is unfixed and might disappear. Paul Virilio’s discourse on dematerialization and disappearance attributes a new logic to the visible, framed, and virtual on screen. He contends that the speed of communication triggers the fading of the visual image before we even sense it, creating an “aesthetics of disappearance” rather than an “aesthetics of appearance.” As we watch the screen, our gaze distorts the field of the visible, thereby indicating our involvement with the image from which we seem to be excluded.51 The approach of Heizer and De Maria from 1969/1970 on, which contradicts media practice in favor of unmediated spatial experience, is significant in connection with this discussion. They vehemently negated relying on documentation and/or any photographic or cinematic images as an alternative to encountering the work in situ. Although their works are to

https://www.getty.edu/museum/symposia/pdf_stark/stark_sleeman.pdf. 50 Ursula Wevers, “Love Work Television Gallery,” in Ready to Shoot: Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum, Videogalerie Schum, eds. Ulrike Groos, Barbara Hess, and Ursula Wevers (Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2004), 29; “Gerry Schum: TV Gallery at EAI” and “Gerry Schum, ‘Television Gallery,’” in Louis Anderson Art (Feb. 1, 2015) (last retrieved: September 6, 2016). https://louiseandersonart.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/1st-february-2015/. 51 Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman, intro. Jonathan Crary (Los Angeles: Semiotexte(e) Foreign Agents/MIT Press, 2009), 22; Steve Redhead, Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture, 2nd rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division;, 2004), 61– 62.



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be found in far-off locations, they offer visitors the opportunity to take the time and the effort to enjoy a singular aesthetic experience. There is, therefore, a dichotomy between the two approaches to Land art: one adheres to the relevance of media practice, in the spirit of the new media age, whereas the other focuses on site specificity, insisting on the importance of experiencing the work in a particular place and space. These divergent approaches amalgamate as a result of the direct and the indirect connection among the artist, the artwork, and the viewer. This can be seen in the light of post-nineteenth-century Romanticism, in which painting and sculpture were viewed as extensions of the artist’s body. In this sense, according to Kaiser and Kwon and Owens, temporary Land art involves not only the drawing lines in the desert, the cut into the ground, or the earth that is moved from one place to another, but also the processes and the artist’s actions that ensure that these “do not go unseen.” The artist’s presence during the process creates an image of a living body as the only perspective on an ostensible immortality. At the moment that it is exposed, “this working body also reveals the value of labor accumulated in the art institution.” 52 It is precisely in this manner that the artists communicated with their audience. As to permanent Land artworks, De Maria as well as Heizer contended that this kind of work requires direct physical involvement with the piece through the experience of time, space, and climate, which are all essential to the work. By walking through the installation, visitors examine their own experience and perception, while at the same time, they literally follow in the artist’s footsteps. It was Smithson’s approach, representing the first of the two attitudes above, that led to Owens article “Earthwords” (1979) and to the concept underlying Kwon and Kaiser’s 2012 exhibition, which was mounted within the Los Angeles museum’s interior. Interestingly but not surprisingly, the canonical Land artists Heizer and De Maria were absent from the show. The curators chose to discuss the language of spatiality rather than the spatial experience. However, spatial experience, with its associated historical references, is an integral part of the permanent American site-specific works. In my view, this discussion is still relevant

52

Boris Groys, “Marx after Duchamp, or The Artist’s Two Bodies,” e-flux Journal 19 (October, 2010), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/marx-after-duchamp-or-theartist%E2%80%99s-two-bodies/; Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).



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owing to fact that Land art has a specific influence in the production of space53 “out there.”

Reassessing Spatial Theory in Respect to the Permanent Site-Specific Art in the American Southwest The permanent desert artworks that were not included in Kwon and Kaiser’s exhibition are functional installations at specific sites in the American Southwest. Each contains the seeds of a new that is, different space, which redefines the site of the work of art. Lefebvre termed it as “differential space,” meaning a form of reparation for what came before in the same location. As Lefebvre explains, “inasmuch as abstract space tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences.”54 The site-specific artworks erected in the deserts of the American Southwest are “real” objects produced in “real” spaces. In contrast to museums, which seek to “constitute a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages,”55 they are isolated and integral to their environment. Unlike their images, the physical and mental experience of the artwork strengthens our connection to it. When Benjamin attacked film and other mechanical technologies for destroying the aura that had belonged to traditional art, he did not mean to say that there was no longer an aura, but rather that the perception of it was changing in the direction of social, political, and economic conditions that influenced and repressed practices of art. Those who see this as a crisis in the experience of aura are mistaken. Indeed, De Maria’s assertion that The Lightning Field is intended to be experienced over an extended period of time is a reference both to Benjamin’s “aura” and to Terry Eagleton’s thesis 56 of experience through the corporeal. De Maria and 53

Regarding this contention, in Heizer’s and De Maria’s views an artwork cannot be divorced from associated images and symbols. “[T]he only products of representational spaces are symbolic works. These are often unique; sometimes they set in train ‘aesthetic’ trends and, after a time, having provoked a series of manifestations and incursions into the imaginary, run out of steam”: Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 42. 54 Ibid., 52. 55 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 25–26. 56 See note 17.



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Heizer probably would have objected to the “aesthetics of disappearance” of the new digital media era.  The abstract conception of space is deeply rooted in Western philosophical tradition. My re-evaluation of spatial theory in respect to the permanent site-specific art in the American Southwest adheres to the “aesthetics of appearance.” I contend that only by visiting the actual sites, by personally experiencing the artwork physically and mentally, can visitors unravel the social and political meanings that are perceptible solely in situ. This contention relies chiefly on the writings of Harvey and Lefebvre. There is broad agreement in social-scientific spatial studies that space is a relational category; that is, the activities enacted in space consist of experiencing objects relating to one another as parts of larger networks, systems, and processes, both physically and ideologically. 57 Lefebvre defines social space itself as a national expression of modes of production, thus referring to space as something produced by human activity.58 In the age of globalization, however, human activity is viewed as simultaneously global and local. It is therefore of the utmost importance to analyze the disparity between the social production of space and the social production of knowledge. Since permanent site-specific artworks are located in a variety of areas that have seen substantial change in terms of sociopolitical activity, my discussion considers the space of social practice and the physical properties of the actual space. Since the mid-twentieth century, American art has been expected to create new paradigms not just by producing artistic objects for the international art market, but also by generating cultural icons befitting a world empire such as the United States.59 Lefebvre suggests that territory is the political form of space produced by, and associated with, the modern state. The juxtaposition between a visual phenomenon and its location is of interest because it enables references to, and the inclusion of, far broader issues than visual representations alone. In my book The Making of a New “Differential Space”: Permanent Site-Specific Art in America and the Dia Art Foundation, I analyze the issue of spatial practice projecting aspects of a society onto a spatial field, with specific reference to the leading 57

David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 296. 58 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 46–47. 59 Morris offered a conceptual perspective of the evolution of mega images erected in the “natural world” of America: Robert Morris, “From a Chomskian Couch: The Imperialistic Unconscious,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003): 282.



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American desert Land artists allied one way or another to the Dia Art Foundation. The American desert is a space without boundaries, untamed and unregulated by conventional practices. As the artworks in question are an integral part of this space, I argue that it is important to consider it not just from the basic geographical point of view. Space is not a neutral container or void within which social and artistic interactions take place, but rather an ideological product and an instrument in and of itself. Accordingly, it conveys a complex web of messages that connect past and present, physical and cultural, public and private, local and national. These messages tell a story with many interwoven meanings, and thus create significance for the future. In the words of Lefebvre: “The history of space cannot be limited to the study of the special moments.… It must deal also with the global aspect – with modes of production as generalities covering specific societies with their particular histories and institutions.”60 The nature of the sociopolitical activity in the American Southwest underwent considerable change starting in the mid-nineteenth century. After most of the native societies had been driven out, the desert became a hub of intense settlement activity, including the construction of roads and railways, as well as forts. After World War II, certain uninhabited areas in Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Texas were allocated for nuclear testing, and in the 1970s one of those areas became an MX missile base site.61 Moreover, while nature creates, rather than produces, it can only provide resources for productive activities. The presence of oil, gas, and strategic minerals also made the American Southwest a profitable source of income for drilling and mining companies. Thus, the desert became a multifunctional space. I am referring here to what is known as “absolute space,” which Lefebvre defines as “made up of fragments of nature located at sites which were chosen for their intrinsic qualities.”62 Artworks installed as aesthetic products within a certain space should therefore be conceived, perceived, and experienced as such, since the associated images and symbols create a new “differential space.” In other words, they are objects that have the power to create a sense of meaningful place by their very physical presence.

60

Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 48. Lucy R. Lippard, Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West (New York: The New Press, 2014), 118. 62 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 48. 61



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Since the works of De Maria, Heizer, Turrell, and Smithson are embedded in the American frontier, their character as artistic productions within this social space must be closely scrutinized. The artists were affected by the Zeitgeist regarding this space and understood the impact of their act. This understanding had implications for various aspects of the artworks: their monumental size; their link with a particular piece of land and space; and their effect on the observer’s body. These features, along with the social, financial, and political contexts of the works, can only be fully appreciated through visits to the sites, which have become assets of permanent value.63 No set of photographic or cinematic images, or indeed any other media format on the web, can produce the same effect. Moreover, the photos and films, although meticulously controlled by the artists, were largely taken years ago, in the 1970s. Since the works are installed outdoors, most of the images do not reflect their current state. Heizer’s monumental site-specific works in Nevada are perhaps the most salient examples of art that confronts and differentiates a space. His still incomplete City Complex,64 with the first structure in the shape of a mastaba, erected in 1972, is located in Garden Valley, NV, and was initially supported by the Dia Art Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the Brown Foundation, among others. The work derived from Heizer’s concern that we live in a nuclear era, which is likely to lead to the end of the world.65 Indeed, the work lies in the shadow of Nevada’s nuclear test sites and adjacent to Yucca Mountain, where the US Department of Energy buries the nation’s nuclear waste. For years, the Garden Valley area, as well as the artist’s own living space, was under threat from a series of projects: the MX missile railroad and silo network in the early 1980s; a proposed water pipeline scrapped in 2005; and yet another railroad project that same year.66 Heizer owns the land on which City Complex is being constructed, which is an exception in Lincoln County, where for the most part of the land belongs to the Federal government. The artistic project is therefore surrounded by Federally-controlled land held by the Bureau of Land Management, and protecting it has, from time to time, necessitated

63

Banay, The Making of a New “Differential Space,” 221–227. For image see note no. 5, http://doublenegative.tarasen.net/city.html (last retrieved in July 10, 2016). 65 Banay, The Making of a New “Differential Space,” 228, note 712. 66 Michael Kimmelman, “Art’s Last, Lonely Cowboy,” The New York Times (February 6, 2005), Arts Section. 64



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visits from various state and national legislators and officials.67 The Triple Aught Foundation formed by Heizer and his supporters has had to fight against those with a vested interest seeking to maximize revenues from public lands. Even after defeating successive threats, the mining question remains unresolved, and its lingering uncertainty still constitutes a problem for the institutional management of the artwork. Nevertheless, both Heizer and his many patrons carry on, despite the potential risk of exposure to nuclear waste. They have even managed to involve the White House, which has agreed to protect City Complex, hailing it as “one of the most ambitious examples of the distinctively American land-art movement.” 68 Thus, the abstract space is home to contradictions and conflicts of interest, some of them historical and others more recent, and some generated by the very presence of Heizer’s huge installations and their perception as assets of permanent value. After 44 years City Complex is still a work in progress and visits to the site are not yet possible. The measure of control exercised by Heizer over the viewer’s access to the work, his physical experience of it, and his exposure to information and documentation about it preclude any independent discussion of the work as such and constrains an effective disengagement between what one sees and what one is expected to see. The isolated experiences in the desert that De Maria offered as early as 1962 were in fact antidotes to the increasingly mediated lives that most artists live. De Maria’s The Lightning Field and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty demonstrate a different and controversial experience, as almost all the images the artists revealed to the public were totally different from what one might see in situ. The Lightning Field (1977–present) 69 in Catron County, NM, consists of 400 stainless steel poles (average height: 20 feet [627cm] in response to the terrain), spaced 220 feet (67m) apart in an array approximately 1 mile by 1 kilometer in size. Each mile-long row has 25 poles and runs east–west; each kilometer-long row has 16 poles and runs north–south. In contrast to City Complex, the installation reconstitutes the space it occupies by removing its former content and creating a totally

67

Mostafa Heddaya, “The Long Fight for Michael Heizer’s “City”; www.blouinartinfo.com 68 Tim Murphy, “This Guy’s Crazy Art Project in the Nevada Desert Is 2016’s Sleeper Campaign Issue,” Mother Jones, July 21, 2015. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/basin-range-national-monumentrepublican-opposition-carson-bush (last retrieved: December 18, 2015). 69 For image see: http://www.diaart.org/sites/main/lightningfield.



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different content through the symbolic forms70 of a work of art that is itself abstract. With The Lightning Field, De Maria offers a new mode of inclusiveness, which cannot be grasped, except through personal experience: The point I’m making here is that the most beautiful thing is to experience a work of art over a period of time. So by starting to work with land sculpture in 1968, I was able to make things of scale completely unknown to this time, and able to occupy people with a single work for periods of up to an entire day.71

In line with De Maria’s vision, The Lightning Field is open from May to October, seven days a week, for a maximum of six visitors a day. Reservations must be made in advance through Dia’s office in New Mexico. The foundation maintains The Lightning Field and administers the visits, which require a stay of about 24 hours. Visitors are picked up in Quemado, NM, where they must leave their cars, and are then taken by jeep to a cabin at the site, where they will spend the night. The necessity of making an appointment almost a year in advance, signing a release against claims in the event of an accident, and being delivered to the Field by Dia’s representative all conspire to induce a feeling of reverence and awe. Visitors are not allowed to take photographs. In fact, photographing of the installation is strictly controlled. Moreover, publishers and other media sources of any kind who submit a request to reproduce images are carefully screened, and, as a rule, the reproduction of no more than one or two images, approved by the artist and Dia, is permitted. Nevertheless, since relatively few people have actually visited The Lightning Field since 1977, the general public is familiar with the work only through photographs, and more specifically with its most iconic image – as lightning strikes at the site from a distance.72 The first images

70

The Lightning Field’s vertical objects introduce, inter alia, a phallic element. The installation was designed to convey an impression of authority, with its verticality and height representing a spatial expression of potentially violent power. In addition, as we move among the vertical poles, we become acutely aware of the smallness of our own dimensions in the space. 71 Paul Cummings, “From an Interview Held with Walter De Maria,” The Smithsonian Archives of American Art, tape 1, side 2 (October 4, 1972). 72 The Dia Art Foundation commissioned the New York-based photographer John Cliett to document the Lightning Field. Jeffrey Kastner, “The God Effect: An



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appeared on the cover of Artforum (April 1980), which published a special issue on the installation, written and designed by De Maria himself. 73 Seventeen years later, a photo of the work featured on the cover of Robert Hughes’s American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America.74 The choice of The Lightning Field to represent the art of the “sublime” West meant that it would always be associated in the public consciousness with American Earthworks, on the one hand, and deeply rooted cultural codes, on the other. Nowadays, given the difficulty of controlling images uploaded onto the net, one can readily find photographs of the work, as well as videos on YouTube. Consequently, those who visit the site today come already charged with visual representations of the work in different time periods and at different times of the day, unlike earlier visitors who had seen only the carefully controlled images released by the artist and Dia. It might be said that The Lightning Field as well as Charles Ross’s Star Axis,75 also located in New Mexico, help to blur the traces of the offensive history of the southern part of the state. Historical injustices and damages there included the widespread breaching human rights when the native populations were driven out and the environmental destruction caused by nuclear testing. Indeed, soon after political forces shattered the natural sites with nuclear bombs (although the fallout was later buried), the next generation established “a space of accumulation” nearby. As a result, The Lightning Field is situated near scientific centers – the Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research 76 and the National Radio

Interview with John Cliett," Cabinet Magazine online (Summer 2001) (last retrieved: September 7, 2016) http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/3/god.php 73 Walter De Maria, “The Lightning Field,” Artforum, 17/8 (April 1980), 52–59. 74 Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). 75 Star Axis, located in the New Mexico desert, was conceived by the artist Charles Ross in 1971 and is now nearing completion. The installation consists of a large stonework wedge dug into the ground “on a small mesa, where the Sangre de Christo Mountains meet the plains east of Albuquerque,” into which a stainless steel tube is fitted; Lippard, Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, 92. 76 Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research, built in 1963, provides a base for the study of cloud processes that produce lightning, hail, and rain. The need for the laboratory arose following the pioneering research into thunderstorms over New Mexico by E. J. Workman, which began in the 1930s (last retrieved: July 13, 2016). http://langmuir.nmt.edu/about



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Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array (VLA) 77 – creating a dialectical interaction between the installation and the space of scientific experimentation. Although they may not share the same physical space, they do share the same social space, which has been recast as a space of science and art.78 Moreover, starting in the 1970s, the ruined land of New Mexico became home not only to scientists and artists, but also to alternative communities, national parks, and other facilities, turning it into an experienced, “lived,” space. The abstract space was thus re-formed by means of a different mode of production, where social practice would be governed by different conceptual determinations, which can in no way be comprehended through photographic images that inherently limit viewing distance and the perception of space. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty,79 on the northern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, illustrates a different type of connection between a work of Land art and its location. The work became an icon immediately after its completion in 1970. Unlike some of the other artists working in the desert, Smithson related directly to the location, using materials found on site and designing the work to conform to the existing landscape. Nevertheless, despite his criticism of past political interventions in nature, he too manipulated the surroundings. 80 On the way to the site, one passes the plant of Morton Thiokol, a major military contractor specializing in the manufacture of rocket engines as well as a range of products deleterious to the environment.81 The last rest stop on the road is Golden Spike National Historic Site, a small theme park with antique steam locomotives and a visitors’ center commemorating the completion of the world’s first

77

David G. Finley, “National Radio Astronomy Observatory,” New Mexico Journal of Science 35 (November 1995): 21–33. 78 For further information regarding The Lightning Field, see Banay, The Making of a New “Differential Space,” 101–126, 231–233. 79 For an image see: http://www.diaart.org/sites/main/spiraljetty. 80 Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Oakland: University of California Press, 1996), 143–153. 81 Thiokol Chemical Company is an American corporation that initially produced rubber and related chemicals, and later rocket and missile propulsion systems. In the 1960s and 1970s, the company built the Minuteman and Peacekeeper missiles and made the defective O-rings for the space shuttle Challenger. On the other side of the lake is Tooele Army Depot, said to house the US’s largest stockpile of biochemical weapons: see Judith J. Dobrzynski “Morton Thiokol: Reflections on the Shuttle Disaster,” Business Week (March 14, 1988): 82–83.



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transcontinental railroad in 1869. 82 There, visitors are directed, as recommended by the Dia Art Foundation, to the last leg of the journey to Spiral Jetty. The road is rife with obstacles as the land is covered in rubble and volcanic rock, and there are no directional signs. Just before reaching the final destination, one can still see traces of a structure sometimes referred to as the “Oil Jetty,” hinting at the exploitation of natural resources.83 Today, Spiral Jetty is no longer the salt-rimmed prominence surrounded by reddish water that Smithson documented, but a dark-onwhite relief, which extends from the shore into the dry lakebed. Whenever the water recedes, it leaves a salt deposit behind. Hence, after the long drought of recent years, the work has been partially encrusted with a layer of hardened salt. Currently, Spiral Jetty’s visibility depends on the tide: it can no longer be seen at high tide. Given these circumstances, visitors today are likely to be disappointed, as the work looks much like a memento mori to the original work of art. Indeed, there is a huge gap between what they see before their eyes and the image in their minds, engendered by the many photographs and the film produced by Smithson himself in the early 1970s, which show the pristine installation in the red water. Despite the fact that Spiral Jetty is destined to disappear over the course of time, its acquisition by Dia, as a gift of the artist’s estate, means that the foundation is responsible for its preservation and for maintaining it as a site for visitors. Part of Dia’s job, as with The Lightning Field, is to protect the area from intruders, such as the Canada-based company that announced plans to drill for oil nearby in 2008. Thanks to Dia’s intervention, the drilling plans have been halted. Thus, under Dia’s auspices, Spiral Jetty, too, despite its condition, has officially become an asset of permanent value, altering the original perception of the work and its space.

82 Topics in Chronicling America - Golden Spike, 1869. https://www.loc.gov/rr/news/topics/goldenspike.html. Shortly afterward, the two railroad companies involved discovered that Promontory Summit was not the most efficient transcontinental train route, and at the beginning of the twentieth century the tracks were moved to a flatter terrain near the Nevada border. In 1959, the Federal government completed a giant rock-filled causeway that effectively dammed the lake and lowered water levels in the north arm. For this reason, the water level (4,195 ft above sea level in 1969) was lower when Spiral Jetty was built. 83 The “Oil Jetty” was built in the 1920s for oil exploration, and remained adjacent to the artwork until it was dismantled in December 2005.



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While Heizer’s City Complex and James Turrell’s Roden Crater are still closed to the public, and visits to De Maria’s The Lightning Field, constructed on private property, are restricted and closely controlled by the Dia Art Foundation, Spiral Jetty and Heizer’s Double Negative are open to anyone at any time. Given their remote locations, however, visiting these sites, whatever the arrangement, requires the type of journey that bears the distinct aspects of a pilgrimage, although they are not marketed as pilgrimage sites, or, for that matter, even as tourist sites. Pilgrimage entails a corporeal relationship with the site (place) and space. Indeed, the physical and mental responses of visitors to the desert installations are evidenced not only when they encounter the artwork, but throughout the whole trip to the site. The experience is in line with Terry Eagleton’s understanding of the word “aesthetics,” which connects it to the sensory experience of perception. 84 The desert of the American Southwest has always been viewed as a wilderness to explore in search of some hidden destiny. In order to reach the remote site-specific artworks, travelers who are looking for more than mere leisure or commercial tourist attractions must cross this desert. What motivates them to make such a pilgrimage is their previous acquaintance with photographs of the artworks, along with, in the spirit of Eagleton, their desire for a personal experience of art. Many of the same philanthropists who supported the mainstream art industry were not only willing, but actually eager, to invest in the desert installations. Such individuals and organizations endeavor to shape the spaces under their control, which was also the case in respect to the peripheral spaces where the site-specific artworks were erected. Here the projects they funded not only allowed the artists freedom to create outside conventional exhibition spaces, but also were designed to hide the marks of historical destruction in the area and to fill it with alternative content by installing artistic objects meant to serve as “reparation” for future generations. The site-specific artworks in the wilderness of the American Southwest have thus become part of a process of land reclamation, thereby fulfilling a function in the social space. The new space they have created is thus a “differential space,” a form of recompense for what came before. The change in attitude toward the space is exemplified by the construction of new attractions that accentuate the differences, such as national, historical, and archaeological parks, technological research centers, prestigious universities, and museums of all kinds, along with additional 84

Cf. note 10.



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site-specific art. These projects have sparked a re-evaluation of the space, resulting in it being redeveloped and repopulated, that is, “lived.” The features of permanency, exceptional size, production in a diversified and charged space, and transformation of the site into a destination for “pilgrims” all argue for the definition of the desert artworks as monuments. However, one basic element of the monument might seem to be missing. The word “monument” itself comes from the Latin word monere (to remind, warn), suggesting that such structures are meant to commemorate a certain individual or event. But the site-specific artworks appear to be more about forgetting than remembering. They serve to obliterate the dark side of human activity by means of phantasmagoria, using the concrete object to achieve repression through enchantment; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the repressive element has metamorphosed into exaltation. The artworks function as a visual sign of an alternative space created to right historical wrongs, a making of amends that secures an abstract space against further destructive forces. In this sense, they might be defined as a new type of monument, an abstract monument within an abstract space that functions as a memorial to the anti-monument. 85 Thus, through the abstract monument and the intervention of the artist, it may be possible to negate the repressed space of destruction and transfigure it into a living space. Such a transformation serves, primarily, governmental interests, presumably in the name of future generations.

Conclusion Images and any other information regarding Land art in the Information Age validate Kwon’s new discursive construction, affirming that Land art has been media-bound from the beginning. Whether one sees media material as the competitor of Land art “out there” or as an integral extension of it, its significance to the discourse is decisive. Still, making a special trip, a form of secular pilgrimage to a remote location, offers visitors a completely different experience than visiting a museum or a gallery space. Only on the way to the desert artworks, while driving through Atomic tourism in which visitors learn about sites where atomic weapons were detonated, national parks, research centers, and universities, etc., they can better comprehend the social production of space in which the works were implemented. A temporary exhibition 85

Banay, The Making of a New “Differential Space,” 242.



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focuses on an artwork, a group of artworks, shows fragments of action, so the experience remains partial, limited, and restricted. Moreover, curators have an impact on which artworks are exhibited and how they are to be mediated and distributed for the viewer. In contrast, walking around a work in situ draws one’s attention to the process of perceiving it; the view from ground level suggests participation, community, and the phenomenological effect of walking through space. Such an experience becomes exceptional and perhaps less well understood in the Information Age, when new, virtual, social spaces no longer possess the formal qualities of any geographic spaces outside “the wires.” Hence, in the ongoing revolution engendered by the Information Age, the current generation is more and more engaged with creating new relationships between image and reality through dromologistical86 media techniques that lead to a “derealization” of the world. The major changes that have occurred in the concepts of space, time, and matter, as well as those in economic and cultural patterns, are all indications of Virilio’s “aesthetic of disappearance.” The aesthetics of disappearance has more socio-critical force today than it had in the 1970s because of the transition to the network society. Despite artists’ objections, uncontrolled images of permanent sitespecific artworks are widely circulated on the Internet and exposed on social networks, with very few restrictions. This dissemination opens up the discussion and releases the limitations set by the artists and the foundations regarding the works’ actual condition and aloofness. Virilio’s extended meditation on these “absences” reinforces our experiences of reality that is shaped by strategic relations of power. Photographs, films, or any written documentation from the late 1960s and the 1970s regarding Land art are still controlled by the artists or their successors, so they are responsible for stimulating criticism. Physical objects, and most particularly monuments, that occupy real space, such as the permanent site-specific artworks in the American Southwest, are still sponsored. Moreover, they are linked to the very creation of national values. One of those values is the “magic” of the

86

“Dromology” is derived from the Greek “dromos,” which means acceleration or rapid advance. Virilio coined the term, adding the suffix “ology,” to mean the science of speed. He contends that if “time is money,” then “speed is power.” Acceleration of the transfer of information, rapid economic manipulations, and so on all create a new politics.



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work, 87 making it in the interest of all representatives of the system of production (in space) to preserve and protect the “sacred” artwork in its real, and not only in its virtual, form.

87

Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950, 1972), 10, 91–97.



MONUMENTAL ITINERARIES, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND THE EXPANDED FIELD SHELLEY HORNSTEIN

We crave evidence that the past endures in recoverable form. Some agency, some mechanism, some faith will enable us not just to know it, but to see and feel it.1

Memorials and Social Media Dezeen is an online website that curates “a carefully edited selection of the best architecture, design and interiors projects from around the world.”2 It fires off Dezeen Daily, an Internet-based, electronic digest designed to broadcast up-to-the-minute announcements with aesthetically captivating images that bring its devoted followers into what is trending and visually and culturally significant. One such dispatch (Nov. 20, 2014) signaled a dizzying array of the latest memorials: Take, for example, the feature, nine days after its inauguration on Armistice Day, November 11, 2014, by Paris architect Philippe Prost. His elliptical concrete Ring of Remembrance, memorial extends across the military cemetery of Notre Dame de Lorette. Looping 3 meters above the battlefield and mass grave site in a 328-meter oval in concrete, it includes 579,606 names inscribed on copper panels, the casualties from World War I, World War II, and the French-Indochina and French-North African conflicts (Fig. 1). 3 Dramatically captivating, these photos compel one to read further. The second story headline on the same page reads as follows: “Related Story: Porcelain poppies surround the Tower of London to commemorate World War I,” matched with a dazzling image of a field of ceramic red poppies planted at the base of the Tower of London (Fig. 2). 1 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 14. 2 “Dezeen,” n.d., http://www.dezeen.com/about/. 3 Ibid., http://www.dezeen.com/2014/11/20/notre-dame-de-lorette-internationalmemorial-philippe-prost-world-war-one/

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Figure 1

Monumental Itineraries, Digital Media, and the Expanded Field

Shelley Hornstein

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Figure 2

The site’s slideshow promises further visual play. Below this “Related Story” is yet another headline: “More memorials,” designed to encourage endless linking of story to story, feature to feature, of recent and future memorial projects worldwide, including The Clearing memorial for victims of the Norwegian island of Utøya, by Bergen architects 3RW. In turn, thanks to the narrative infinity of webpages, links to a competition proposal by Martin Papcún and Adam Jirkal of Atelier SAD at St. Jakob’s Square in Munich for a Memorial to All Victims. Moreover, somewhere along the way of the digital wanderings there is an invitational link marked: “Newer story/Older story” that can lead the reader to the following: “David Adjaye and Ron Arad Reveal Defeated National Holocaust Monument Design” (published May 19, 2014), leading one to continue to an asynchronous and circuitous ordered disorder of social media, where the paradigmatic and syntagmatic directional options are complicated by the way we browse randomly online, involving colliding and crisscrossing subjects and stories (Fig. 3).

Virtual Networks and Physical Places Although this seemingly vertiginous shuffling of memorials presented to us online is a case of gorging the reader with towering piles of information, I argue that the mediatized, digital technologies available to

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us evoke a metaphoric conjunction, a place mappable digitally, an itinerary of monuments that is capable of either undoing or indeed nourishing our experiential understanding of what a memorial in a physical site cannot achieve – necessarily – on its own. Indeed, we are overwhelmed with advanced technology systems that connect, even interconnect, us to each other in an increasingly dense Internet-based world. What has become known as the “Internet of Things” or IoT has been defined as “a global infrastructure for the information society, enabling advanced services by interconnecting (physical and virtual) things based on existing and evolving interoperable information and communication technologies.” 4 Aware of such prolific and pervasive technologies in our everyday lives and armed with the knowledge that the Internet is no longer an addendum but rather a central component in how we function, How we might further investigate memorials that are not necessarily located exclusively at a physical site?

Figure 3

Whereas some memorials are mapped on the physical, material ground where they are sited and are thus physically locatable, others embrace the intangible as well. Visits to physical sites are part of a tourist’s material connection to the physicality and localized, bodily experience of and at the material place. But touristic itineraries are created by tourists’ pre- and post-touristic nourishment: that is to say through textual, visual, audio, or other sensorial extensions experienced, at least in part, through digital mapping (Internet research, social media, and so on). One could argue that what is tangible and intangible extends to writing as well. In fact, Philip Ethington suggests that the “incalculable volume of historical writing on all subjects should be thought of as a map because the past can only be known by placing it, and the way of knowing places is to map them.”5 4 “Internet of Things Global Standards Initiative,” Recommendation ITU-T Y.2060 (06/2012), http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/gsi/iot/Pages/default.aspx, accessed July 3, 2016. 5 Philip J. Ethington, “Placing the Past: ‘Groundwork’ for a Spatial Theory of History,” Rethinking History 11, no. 4 (December 2007): 465–93.

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Mapping, therefore, is not only the charting of sites to a tangible place, but it is also the tracking of textual, visual, audio, and other sensorial experiences and expressions not necessarily mappable on a material site. Therefore, I propose to consider memorials differently by bringing to bear the collective existence of memorials over the digital landscape, and to ask the question: can monuments and memorials sustain memory by creating a memorial itinerary, one that links projects virtually and physically to each other across geographic and virtual sites?

Memorials as Tangible and Intangible Sites In 1904, Alois Riegl claimed that building a monument meant creating a work with the objective of safeguarding the memory of an event. 6 If monuments or memorials (and often these terms are interchangeable although a monument does not always memorialize) are the “works” that safeguard the memory of an event, then the corollary is: is it conceivable to imagine a world without monuments, and if so, how do we remember – or can we remember without memorials? What draws me to this subject is the fascination I have with digital technology. The world of networked, mediatized platforms and mobile device applications offers new intangible virtual opportunities to consider how they interface with physical sites or what we recognize as tangible, material objects in place. The question then becomes, do memorials encourage us to do the work of remembering when they are connected in physical and virtual space? Is it possible to recall past events as a result of visiting various online portals or across various platforms rather than, or in addition to, the material memorial that marks a physical, geographic site? Perhaps never before has the power of mediatized images been made so poignantly clear than with the destruction of archeological monuments in Syria, and elsewhere, which are now known to the world solely through global media dissemination channels. As Ömür Harmansah points out, ISIS’s acts of destruction (smashing and blowing up ancient archeological sites) are performative acts of violence made known to the world through

6

“A monument in its oldest and most original sense is a human creation, erected for the specific purpose of keeping singular human deeds or events…alive in the minds of future generations.” See Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions (Fall 1982): 21.

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the global social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.7 Does this suggest that without the material object – the tangible site – we can no longer remember? Do images of the object suffice to help us remember? Or rather, and particularly if we have never visited the sites in question, do these images (available in print or, more importantly for the argument here, through social media) fulfill the pedagogical needs to teach us about what was? I firmly believe that our emotional and visceral recall or activation is evoked only by geographically anchored and materially visible and tactile places. Andreas Huyssen elaborates on the role of memory discourses and our current obsession with memory and what he calls the “current memory narrative” or the “culture of memory” in the late modern period and up to today. These range from the: [M]obilization of mythic pasts to support aggressively chauvinist or fundamentalist politics…to fledgling attempts…to create public spheres of “real” memory that will counter the politics of forgetting.… The turn toward memory is subliminally energized by the desire to anchor ourselves in a world characterized by an increasing instability of time and the fracturing of lived space.8 But what I also believe has been part of the memory turn is the virtual alternative itinerary, which, through social media, has facilitated the knowledge of memory sites, memorials, and has, perhaps above all, been responsible for the touristic turn in remembering events of the past, both private and public. I should add, as an important aside, that this virtual, social, touristic turn is also the substance of new museal approaches that opt for, or have a paucity of, material artifacts and thus defer to the advances of technology to convey information as well as immersive affective environments for contemplation.

A Mediatized and Transmedial Memorial Let me note the obvious: we live in a world swollen with physical objects, and, particularly, memorials and monuments now marking or about to mark any and all sites of history, memory, and tragedy. Designers of in situ memorials are struggling to make meaning (seem) real: this is a complex endeavor because what is necessary is an emotional connection to 7

Ömür Harmansah, “ISIS, Heritage, and the Spectacles of Destruction in the Global Media,” Near Eastern Archaeology 78, no. 3, Special Issue: The Cultural Heritage Crisis in the Middle East (September 2015): 170–77. 8 Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 21–38.

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the event; and over time, those who did not experience that specific event being commemorated have no direct link to it. For example, in the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. Marita Sturken laments the rush to memorialize at Ground Zero and how this became an essential element that “arrested memory.” 9 Typically, these various accelerated scenarios to build memorials demonstrate the ineffectiveness of such a process. Similarly, monuments erected decades after a tragedy can reveal the complex layering and often overdetermined plans for emotional primacy, resulting in confused objectives trumped by pedagogical or political agendas. Moreover, in addition to this landscape of tangible objects, monuments and memorials raise questions about how their aging should be broached. Put another way, we are charged with the task of thinking about how we consider our cultural heritage with a view toward its conservation and preservation. Indeed, we are the keepers of the current memory monuments both physical and virtual. As a way to address the ironies and layering of memorializing and memorial culture today, artist Melissa Shiff and art historian Louis Kaplan bring a new dimension to remembering and memorials through their project: Mapping Ararat (Fig. 4).10 Rather than isolated memorials in situ, in designing Ararat they refuse the tangible object or its reconstruction and instead consider mobility and ephemerality as a pathway to remembering. This collaborative project conjures up the past through images of places of Jewish memory while considering the inability, for those who experience the project, to know the past. The project tells the story of Major Mordecai Noah, who, in September 1825, founded Ararat, or what he called a “city of refuge for the Jews” in Grand Island, New York, just one of many proposals for a Jewish homeland. An island just outside the city limits of Buffalo, Grand Island today is a largely residential community that is oblivious to this history. Indeed, it is only beginning to recognize its Seneca Nation past. 9

Marita Sturken, “Mourning the Arrested Memory of 9/11,” 10 Years after September 11: A Social Science Research Council Essay Forum (2011), accessed October 21, 2015. http://essays.ssrc.org/10yearsafter911/mourning-the-arrestedmemory-of-911/ 10 This project is spearheaded by Shiff and Kaplan. For the project website, see, Melissa Shiff, Louis Kaplan, and John-Craig Freeman, “Mapping Ararat: An Imaginary Jewish Homelands Project,” Mapping Ararat, n.d., http://www.mappingararat.com/. For detailed discussion of the project, see Louis Kaplan, “Mapping Ararat: Augmented Reality, Virtual Tourism and Grand Island’s Jewish Ghosts,” C/R: The New Centennial Review 13, no. 2 (2013): 239– 64.

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Figure 4

Shiff and Kaplan took this opportunity to give Ararat “a virtual chance to become the Jewish homeland that its founder had envisioned.”11 They turned to situated technologies (specifically augmented reality “augments” and simulated geo-spatial mapping) as tools for interactively exploring the physical site. The augmented reality 3D models (conveyed as pictures on a mobile device) of the synagogue, the cemetery, Mordecai Noah’s gravestone, and the sukkah, among others, offer an opportunity for visitors to engage with a fictional, imagined, and historically rich past through play – play that provides memory links to other places that have disappeared in Jewish and other cultural lives. By deploying these technologies, Mapping Ararat invites visitors to plot architecture in the form of “assets” on the geographic site of what became the failed homeland project of Ararat, raising questions for participants that complicate and problematize considerations of place and material culture, homelands, geography, and, ultimately, the notion of the diasporic fixity of identity as an inscription of place, but also inextricably of time. Ararat foregrounds narratives that are constructed with navigational digitized heritage images and a mobile device operated by the user-visitor. The visitor deploys a mobile phone or a tablet and proceeds according to 11 See “Mapping Ararat: An Imaginary Jewish Homelands Project,” http://www.mappingararat.com/project/, accessed 4 July 2016.

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itineraries suggested by the creators. The images that are rendered in augmented reality, or “assets,” such as a synagogue (Fig. 5), mikveh, graveyard, butcher shop, bank, and school, are introduced via these mobile devices and seem to pop up on the screens as one perambulates, bringing about an architectural reconfiguration of the space presented before the visitor’s eyes. Thus, the user-visitor’s performative actions reflect a personal sequencing of the story in piecing these images together. Ultimately, this is a visual story-telling project that can have unlimited numbers of sequencing. Each visit or walk can be told or visually viewed differently. Moreover, each walk is haunted by the memory, indeed the idea, that this never fulfilled past is echoed in countless other locations where communities were chased, destroyed, evacuated, or never even had the opportunity to settle – as was the case here. As such, this unique visitor-performed engagement with the technology and the site is deeply memorial to the extent that the project was never realized and the longing for homeland continued to be a diasporic theme for many other cultures as well.

Figure 5

The theoretical implications of this visit to the past is to consider the “what if?” question on site, that is, on Grand Island. Precisely through the act of choosing an asset or augment (as they are referred to in this type of augmented reality technology) and locating its place within the Grand

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Island geography through mobile technology, an evocative cultural heritage for a museum of an imagined homeland can be played out or, at the very least suggested and questioned. By recalling the history of what the site might have been and suggesting a configuration and reconfiguration of place, this symbolic, ironic, and problematic homeland offers the visitor a history to recall a place that has become essentially moribund, if not lost to memory entirely, by challenging our concept of objects and history in the present.

Figure 6

In forward-reaching subsequent projects to Mapping Ararat, Shiff and Kaplan, this time collaborating with Brian Sutherland, introduced Imaginary Jewish Homelands (Fig. 6). This newest iteration includes a tripartite arc of homeland investigations, this time in three other locations around the globe: Kimberley, Australia; Port Davey, Tasmania; and Paramaribo, Suriname. Each of these proposed sites for Jewish homelands were envisioned by the Freeland League, led by Isaac Nachman Steinberg (1888–1957). His objective was to seek a solution for Jewish settlement as a safe haven once Nazism’s intended extermination of European Jewry began to be implemented. For each of these, Shiff and Kaplan will be using vast archival resources to enable its “users to journey to these lands by means of augmented reality, and in so doing, become engaged in both the nostalgic poignancy and utopian possibility of imagining Jewish

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homelands.” 12 The project is designed to create historical contexts for augmented reality walking tours based on the Ararat model. Like memorials that attempt to mark an event at a site, this project and its elaboration calls upon the user to activate the placement of the asset (even the monument, as it were). That visual placement of the asset in a suggested location on the visitor’s screen changes from leading the user to momentarily believing it could exist in reality, to flickering (owing to the instability of the technology), to eventually disappearing as the user moves elsewhere. Put another way, by “moving beyond the territorial imperative, Mapping Ararat [and similar future projects and sites] responds to the ongoing dislocations of diasporas that are part and parcel of much of Jewish history (before and even after the establishment of the State of Israel) to imagine Ararat as a viable place to locate virtually in a digital era.”13

Where Is a Memorial? In light of these novel experiments with digital considerations of place, the questions that come to the fore are: Have we become immune to the underlying function of memorials as three-dimensional material forms in place? Are we weary of the idea of a monument? Is it possible to represent, that is, to convey in a physical container, the memory of all that should be remembered about a specific event or person? Can memory be recalled at sites unrelated to the geographic situatedness of the event being memorialized? So how can it be that, as Huyssen describes it, in the presence of such profound monuments, we have been gorged on memorials and saddled with the fatigue of memory? His despondency regarding the monumentalization of tragic events is predicated on how we have come to memorialize after Auschwitz. He laments that the Holocaust in particular has served as “a cipher for the twentieth century as a whole” and “a universal trope for historical trauma,”14 This in turn dilutes specific memories that seek or deserve attention, and, more importantly, it flattens the actual reference to the trauma of the Holocaust itself. As we increasingly accept social media and mobile platforms to stretch 12

Melissa Shiff and Louis Kaplan, The Imaginary Jewish Homelands of I. N. Steinberg: An Augmented Reality Project (Press Release, 2014), np. 13 Kaplan, “Mapping Ararat: Augmented Reality, Virtual Tourism and Grand Island’s Jewish Ghosts,” CR: The New Centennial Review 13, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 239-264. 14 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 13.

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how we experience things in a specific location, any experience in a localized place can indeed be assisted, enhanced, or possibly even diluted when seen or experienced outside that localized geography. For example, if we watch a video on YouTube that documents one person’s visit to a memorial site, we are stretching that on-site experience of place. This disconnect from the site and its context is still present in monuments today in that the history that took place in that site shifts to the monument erected on or near it.15 Let us consider the Negev Monument, by Dani Karavan, as a testimony to these sorts of memorial expressions. After 50 years, it remains timeless and moving. This symphony in the sand to mark tragedy is a haiku: spare elements that shape thoughts and sentiments and bring about an atmosphere that invites reflection. It delineates but also settles in a site. It creates a village, a castle, a dwelling, a fortification, but it is also none of these things. It honors. It pays tribute to an event. But in the end, it is separate from the event, alongside it, elsewhere, in site and not in site. Although the siting is subtly shifted to the extent that the meaning is now located in the sculptural memorial itself – and one could argue, of course, that it is still localized – the attention of viewers is fixed on the monument’s placement, rather than on the precise physical landmark of history (and this is true even when the monument is erected on the very physical site of the historical event itself). This redirection provides an opportunity to consider the role of social media, for example, as one element that can even be considered intrinsic to a monument’s existence. Furthermore, consider the mapping of culture as a cartographic event, both metaphorically and actually, and that the two operate in tandem, as a kind of inseparable evolution of the historic past or the traumatic event’s afterlife. Rather than see memorial culture as a one-off occurrence in a physical site, think of cultural heritage and consider that the memory it necessarily fixes for the viewer is associated with it as part of a cartographic whole, where the very concept of “place” is expanded – and expansion is the operative term here. There is an aura that meshes the digital and physical, or put another way, weaves together, even blurs, the tangible and the intangible divide. This is difficult to consider because however much we live in technologized worlds, architecture always seems to be tied inextricably to 15

Art Historian Miwon Kwon considers the tectonic shift of site-specific art of the 1960s from a physical tie to the land to the “dematerialization” and “deaestheticization” of works that presents strategies that are “aggressively antivisual.” See “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (Spring 1997): 85–110.

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the idea of a physical object in a geographic location; a physical object that is at once a thing that we take to be permanent and strong through its use of durable materials. This is best articulated in the writing of Marcus Vitruvius and specifically his concept of Firmitas. 16 Firmitas, often translated as durability, conveys a sense of solidity or strength of materiality, and this is often interpreted to mean structural soundness. As a result, we tend to imagine architecture and monuments – say of stone or concrete – as everlasting structures that will transcend time and eternally convey the story and memory of what took place at that site. To a certain extent this is true. However, the proliferation of memorials during this theory-based “memory turn,” and the increased concern that the digital age might cause us to forget by rendering the past obsolete without a trace (the malaise of forgetting, or what Huyssen suggests is the amnesia of cultural memory17) seems to have resulted in a determination to make the material more present: Indeed in an attempt to increase material objects, we have been overfed, even gorged, on material memorials in cities internationally and that we have established institutions that devote resources and time with a view toward intensifying the discourses on what we need to remember. As a result, as Huyssen argues throughout Twilight Memories, we have become obsessed, and this obsession, I suggest, has led us to a place of visual overkill, perhaps even desensitization or, worse, cynicism. We know this to be true when we look at memorials from past centuries that are no longer emoting forces but are rather serving strictly as landmarks in urban space or touristic photo opportunity sites. Taken more seriously, however, consider, for example, the monumentality of the Pyramids or the Eiffel Tower. In these examples, scale can be a critical factor in stirring drama, lamentation, or the poetic imagination. Through scale, the purpose or memory recall of the monument, as noted by architectural historian Françoise Choay, whose work has been dedicated to issues of preservation and conservation, is the “antidote to entropy, to the dissolving action of time on all things natural and artificial, it seeks to appease our fear of death and annihilation.”18 But as we witness in our cultures, the term: monument as a strictly memorial object of varietal form (which began with stones to mark a site) has altered. The term monument itself derives from the Latin monumentum or 16

Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus, The Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Morris Hicky Morgan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914). 17 Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995). 18 Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, trans. Lauren M. O’Connell, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1992], 2003), 6–7.

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the root monere (to recall). Choay reminds us about the importance of capturing the affective nature of the faculty of memory in this instance so that “it is not simply a question of informing, of calling to mind a neutral bit of information but rather of stirring up, through the emotions, a living memory.”19 Yet the term now elides the object itself, or can be conflated. Instead, the term monument suggests the scale of the architectural building or object itself, however tacitly. In this way, the monument no longer recalls or stirs up a living memory, that is, the intention of the monument is no longer necessarily commemorative. Furthermore, in order to inject an action of memory recall, new strategies have been introduced that mark a shift from the monolithic or material stand-alone monument. That shift was, in part, addressed by Rosalind Krauss in her groundbreaking work of 1979, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” where she examines the state of sculptural works that move well beyond the traditional concept of “sculpture-in-the-round.” She notes that these new works move away from the traditions of sculpture as monument to objects and installations. These radical gestures include elements that are not usually folded into the canon of sculpture such as “narrow corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms…”20 Moreover, Krauss argues that sculpture as a category is indeed a known quantity, even though its elasticized boundaries are more difficult than ever to define. Its definition is historical and not necessarily universal, and moreover its logic, as she puts it, “is inseparable from the logic of the monument. By virtue of this logic a sculpture is a commemorative representation. It sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place.”21 Her essay probes the limits of the sculptural form as a positive object in place to arrive at the conclusion that modernist sculpture, the kind that broke the barriers of what we took to be sculpture before, is now neither sculpture proper nor architecture or landscape. “In this sense sculpture had entered the full condition of its inverse logic and had become pure negativity: the combination of exclusions. Sculpture…had ceased being a positivity, and was now the category that resulted from the addition of the not-landscape to the not-architecture.”22

19

Ibid. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44. 21 Ibid. 22 Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), 282. 20

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The Expanded Field beyond Place Krauss’s “expanded field,” although related to sculpture of decades earlier, conjoins to another concept introduced by Julie Kristeva in literary criticism, which she names “intertextuality.” Kristeva suggests something broader beyond what might be understood as “text.”23 The concept, when first introduced in literary criticism, enjoyed an extended stay but failed to convince the other arts as successfully. Yet here is where it is pertinent to the Internet of Things, digital media and physical, cultural, and architectural heritage. Kristeva argues that texts run along two axes, both horizontal (connecting author and reader) and vertical (linking a text to another text), and necessarily that a text cannot exist independent of other texts: it is not a closed system. For both Kraus and Kristeva, the expanded field and intertextuality are spatial devices that allow objects and ideas to bulge and explode beyond their borders yet retain a relationship, indeed a strong relationship, to their origins. Kristeva references Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “spatialization” of language, where words intersect or are in dialogue with other words. 24 The concept accounts for the idea of the extra-literary to enhance and relate to the text itself that “is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.” 25 Each of these terms, as spatialization devices, positions mediatized monuments today. The expanded field and intertextuality – or intermediality – theorize about what takes place when social media and virtual spheres extend our physical media (such as newspapers, magazines, or books, and so on) by disseminating information about material monuments and places and their inherent tangibility beyond the site of tangible contact we have with them. Put another way, what results is a diffusion of information across new formats while also reaching potentially new audiences. But should one scroll through the Dezeen Daily and not pay attention to what is conceived to be “top” of the charts today is to bypass what is cool. There is a covert suggestion coded here that the architectural or design object in question on the virtual site or available through social 23

First introduced in English, Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), but first published in French: Julia Kristeva, Sèméiotikè. Recherches pour une Sémanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969). 24 María Jesús Martínez Alfaro, “Intertextuality: Origins and Development of the Concept,” Atlantis 18, no. 1/2 (June-December, 1996): 268–85. 25 Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 37.

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media is not only an oversight; it is, rather, to voluntarily assume ignorance. Dezeen is only one of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of blogs and online magazines populating the Internet and social media fora that contributes to expanding the physical “thingness,” or its physical existence. By this I mean that there is an ability to achieve at the very least two goals: first, it ensures exposure and branding of the bloggers and their sites; second, it provides the reader or viewer with a vastly arbitrary, read desirably random, option of choices to learn about what is “trending,” happening, existing and – certainly by virtue of the absence of being cited altogether – the disappearance or even nonexistence of what we do not see or read. If this is so, then what is our cultural heritage? How can we know what exists and what does not, or does not any longer? Is online “intangible” heritage or an online cultural legacy determined by what continues to be viewable and citable online? Can we tour heritage sites, for example, without physical heritage? 26 More important still, given the interconnectedness of technologies and intelligence being added to everyday items and everything such as cars, refrigerators, industrial machinery, and so on, these “products will be valued increasingly not just for their stand-alone functionality, but also for how well they work within the digital ecosystem.”27 We do know that our cultural heritage is about objects in places. We remember objects in their places. So when we think of Paris, to mention a common example, we think of the Eiffel Tower. Memories, as Edward Casey tells us, “belong as much to the place as to my brain or body,” and “being in a place is being in a configurative complex of things…places…gather experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts.” Place is, Casey continues, “more an event than a thing to be assimilated to known categories.”28 For example, Rebecca Solnit, in her poetic writing, captures the essence of place as a gathering of experiences 26 Liam Hoare asks “Is it possible to have Jewish heritage tourism in the absence of physical Jewish heritage” when discussing the historic market town of Troyes, France, the birthplace and home of Rashi, and where he “is nowhere to be found in modern Troyes.” See “In the Footsteps of Rashi” eJewish Philanthropy, 30 July 2015. http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/in-the-footsteps-of-rashi/ 27 Reggie Bradford, “Marketing’s Next Big Thing: The Internet of Things” Forbes Brand Voice, August 3, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/oracle/2015/08/03/marketings-next-big-thing-theinternet-of-things/ 28 Edward S. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena,” in Senses of Place, eds. S. Feld and K. H. Basso (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996), 26.

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and histories as much in physical place as in our bodies and brains – after Casey’s suggestion – when she collaborates with others and orchestrates her peregrinations across San Francisco or New Orleans to establish or set out an idea of an atlas in its “inexhaustibility.” As she contends, Places are leaky containers. They always refer beyond themselves …What we call places are stable locations with unstable converging forces that cannot be delineated either by fences on the ground or by boundaries in the imagination – or by the perimeter of the map. Something is always coming from elsewhere.29

That is to say that an event that took place in a place is far from the only way to remember. The impact on collective memory by electronic media/social media, however, “intrinsically change the way we create images of the past in the present,” according to John Urry in his “How Societies Remember the Past.”30 Elsewhere, the term “media memory” is referred to as “the systematic exploration of collective pasts narrated by the media, through the media and about the media.”31 That is to say that media (in all or any of its forms) can enhance or even complicate the work of memory studies. There is another multifaceted layering or networking of meaning or stories evolving as a result of the mediatization of ideas and information. How do we learn about anything today beyond what the popular and penny press did for the early phases of mediation of information in the nineteenth century? As Barbie Zelizer has demonstrated, history is made through journalism (and here she refers to the Kennedy assassination): “The story of America’s past will remain in part a story of what the media have chosen to remember, a story of how the media’s memories have in turn become America’s own.”32 The stories of the memorialization of place are told in situ, through the conventions of monument-making, but those ideas are disseminated primarily by social media as the mediating tool for collective memory, creating itineraries (and again here, read tourism) to memorialize events that have taken place, 29

Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), vii. 30 John Urry, “How Societies Remember the Past,” in Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, eds. S. Macdonald and G. Fyfe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 45–68. 31 Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers, and Eyal Zandberg, eds., On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1. 32 Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 214.

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and now others that are the result of the interface between the two. To return to Dani Karavan’s work, in particular, it strategically and poetically entangles here and there, site and un-sited, place-ment and that which is un-placed. In his Garden of Memories, as well as his Way of Peace, our ability to understand the cartographic and topographic location and how we shape space there is enabled by the pathways, borders, delineations, and boundaries Karavan sets up for the visitor to engage with the site performatively. But the way that Karavan’s piece works best is in its ability to stretch the definition of sculpture architectonically, as is the case with his work generally, to suggest that it is, actually, the demarcation of space, and specifically where these mappable Gardens or Ways only begin the journey, linking physical site to expansions beyond the space, to abstractions un-sited and intangible. In other words, architecture is, first and foremost, the carving out of space, a delineation of this place separate from that, to make a place of shelter, but also a carving out of a tangible place to a place that is intangible. We can only understand nature by how it is situated, how it is delineated within the larger concept of space. Moreover, here is precisely where we must take note: that is, the idea of a physical place and a place that is no longer physical – and this subtle point of connection between the tangible and the intangible, the carved out of and that which is not – is how we can create the link between the physical and digital realms. To illustrate the point, let us consider the Mass Extinction Memorial Observatory (MEMO), by architect David Adjaye, which will rise 30 meters on the Isle of Portland in England. Its purpose is to memorialize the 860 species that have become extinct since the demise of the dodo bird in the seventeenth century. As the website proclaims: “Life is a cosmic rarity.… But it is now under threat.”33 While drawing on form inspired by Stonehenge, MEMO anchors itself to the Jurassic Coast, a geological World Heritage site, which forms a good portion of the narrative context from which the website and project itself derive sustenance. “The stones of MEMO, quarried from these same cliffs, will embody the images of all species to have gone extinct in modern times, carved by sculptors all over the world.” 34 Referred to as a “cathedral of past life,” this spiritually guided project repeats the verb, “to reflect” as a mantra for remembering what was on Planet Earth. It challenges our concepts of what it means to remember and, moreover, who remembers.

33

“Mass Extinction Monitoring Observatory,” MEMO, n.d., http://www.memoproject.org/ 34 Ibid.

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Harriet Senie has written eloquently on what she calls the “spontaneous” memorial. It is defined by the location where a death occurred or the location associated with that person’s home or place of work and is a spontaneous marking of the site with flowers, notes, cards, stuffed animals, objects that carry meaning for those who want to mourn a loss: Whether commemorating a lone victim of a drive-by shooting or Princess Di…the response is identical – a rush to mourning manifest in traditional cemetery rituals. Sacred spaces are demarcated, objects are left, and people gather to grieve.35

But perhaps more poignantly still, following the 1989 university uprising in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, it was impossible to mark the physical site the way we can mark death in a spontaneous memorial. For the tragedy of Tiananmen Square, we witnessed the birth of the virtual memorial with the earliest website technology. Mourners lobbied for a physical commemorative place but were consistently blocked. As testimony to the surveillance culture of the Chinese government, that website is no longer accessible (if there is no memorial, has the memory disappeared?). The profound history of revolution and rebellion there is discussed at length by Wu Hung, where, in a word, he summarizes how the square has been a site of monument-making and monument destruction so that it is a highly politicized site haunted by the memory of these successive events. Yet the Internet remained then and even now as the only viable means of stirring public awareness.36 Deep emotional and visceral stirring arises acutely when we sense that we are in the presence of an aesthetically moving material “thing” that has a fixed exhibition lifespan. The London Tower memorial entitled Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red was inaugurated on Armistice Day yet was viewable between July and November 2014 during the installation by volunteers. That date marked a new high in collective remembering through social media (reported in every British online newspaper, the Tower of London website, BBC, the artists own website, and foundation that sold the poppies after the exhibition came down). More than 800,000 porcelain poppies were “planted” around the Tower of London, each representing a British military death in World War I. Hearts fluttered, it 35

Harriet Senie, “Mourning in Protest: Spontaneous Memorials and the Sacralization of Public Space,” Harvard Design Magazine (Fall 1999): 23–27. 36 Wu Hung, “Tiananmen Square: A Political History of Monuments,” Representations 35 (Summer 1991): 84–117.

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was reported widely, when 13-year-old volunteer, Harry Hayes, planted the last flower as the words of a Derbyshire serviceman’s poems were remembered to convey a floral allegory of “the blood-swept lands and seas of red, where angels fear to tread.”37 The memorial installation was initiated by a community of volunteers to create a conscious connection to the past through a participatory, impassioned, and monumentally scaled work. Ceramic artist Paul Cummins and stage designer Tom Piper claimed that they wanted the memorial to be remembered, even though the installation was time sensitive (4 months). Here we see an elision between the events of World War I and the commemorative exhibition, something that is relevant for every monument. All too often, in fact, the aesthetics of a monument override the story told or memorialized, or there is a conflation of the initial meaning of the memorial by the integration of a formal art project designed to assist in remembering the event. The complexities multiply: those who experienced the installation over the 4-month period will recall this monumental installation suggesting that what we remember is what we have experienced (either in real time or through social media dissemination). What we may never remember 150 years hence is this memorial, and perhaps, by extension, World War I’s close to 900,000 deaths. 38 As the Historic Royal Palaces, Tower of London website explained, the objective was to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of World War I with 888,246 ceramic poppies over a 4-month period and culminating on November 11, Remembrance, or Armistice, Day. Each of the poppies represented one fallen soldier.39 This particular memorial captured the collective imagination of locals and tourists as a result of aesthetic and nostalgic sentiment to memorialize heightened by the fixed time frame of its existence, which now circulates only through media venues. 37

“About the Installation,” Historic Royal Palaces, Tower of London Remembers, n.d., http://www.hrp.org.uk/TowerOfLondon/poppies/about-the-installation. 38 It is worth exploring how the experience of seeing a monument or installation such as this is carried forward as a memory into subsequent generations when the experience of an event is unrelated to trauma. Marianne Hirsch’s groundbreaking work on what she calls “postmemory” is a more elaborate consideration of how memory continues in successive generations and where the initial memory was created as a result of traumatic events. See Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), and “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 103–28. 39 “About the Installation,” Historic Royal Palaces, Tower of London, http://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/tower-of-londonremembers/about-the-installation/#gs.S4F5ods, accessed July 4, 2016.

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Canada’s own awkward dance with collective memory was recently made public. The National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa is seen as a “permanent symbol that will honour and commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and recognize Canadian survivors.”40 Announced on May 12, 2014, Daniel Libeskind’s winning entry will encourage visitors to “journey through a star,” where the memorial shape references the “triangular badges used to classify prisoners in concentration campus, including Jews, Roma, gay people, and mentally and physically disabled people.”41 Given the distance from the site where this history actually took place, this monument is being designed to create a coniferous forest as a symbolic reference to the forests of Eastern Europe and a “living symbol of how survivors and their children have changed Canada.”42 Who will visit this monument and for whom does it evoke memories? This monument will represent an attempt to understand tolerance and human rights among other issues, and perhaps it will really only be about the aesthetics that might move visitors to connect the dots. In the end, the monument will be largely political. But the critical point is the important siting of this work. Although it might be identified as a “drive-by” site (encircled by a highway network), and Ottawa remains a capital city in a small city visited primarily by diplomats, schools, and tourists, the monument is known above all by its international competition effectively delivered in the media and the announcement and ongoing knowledge of the project known exclusively through its website and social media campaign.

Conclusion Taken together across the digital and material divide, monuments move beyond the monolithic, and stretch beyond the parameters of the physical to welcome the intangible and sentient realms of the possible for touristic itineraries of memorialization. If one project summarizes this exciting beginning, it is the Imaginary Jewish Homelands project, in particular, as 40

Lord Cultural Resources, “Lord Cultural Resources and World Renowned Team Awarded Design of Canada’s National Holocaust Monument,” News Release, May 12, 2014, http://www.lord.ca/NHM/2014.05.12-nhm-press-release.htm. See also, http://holocaustmonument.ca/ 41 Alex Bozikovic, “National Holocaust Monument Design Unveiled,” The Globe and Mail, May 12, 2014, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/home-andgarden/architecture/national-holocaust-monument-designunveiled/article18613725/ 42 Ibid.

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it explores the theoretical, virtual, and cartographic entanglements of geographic and imaginary histories of place as a performative memorial to homeland and community in order to suggest that what we choose to remember is set out as part of a selective tour imagined, digitized, or traveled. Thus we come to think of this adventurous project as a catalyst for heightening our sense of the past in the present, for percolating a consideration of the landscape as a Museum of a Possible Homeland, for problematizing identity struggles of all kinds, and the difficulties of fixing geography to a people. By recalling the history of what the designated sites might have been – and thus memorializing them in the process – the artists suggest through virtual assets a configuration and reconfiguration of place. This sort of “reverse” diaspora and symbolic homeland calls upon us to remember place by challenging our concept of tangible (and memorial) objects. An agent of change through a digitized and a virtually invented heritage, this project is an emissary that comes out of an overfed culture of memorialization known through physical monuments. As such, it leads the way away from the overfed malaise of physical memorials. It is a sign of hope for memorials and monuments that are situated at the interface of tangible and intangible sites, dispatching virtual invitations for conversations hinged on the past, looking at the future squarely in the face, but rooted, physically all the same, in the present, to begin anew.

List of Figures Figure 1. Philippe Prost, Mémorial International de Notre-DameǦdeǦ Lorette, 2014, Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, France, AAPP © adagp – 2014 Yann Toma © adagp, 2014, ©Aitor Ortiz. Figure 2. Paul Cummis, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, 2014, London, England, MOD/Crown Copyright, http://www.defenceimagery.mod.uk/fotoweb/archives/5042Downloadable%20Stock%20Images/Archive/Royal%20Navy/45158/4 5158094.jpg Figure 3. David Adjaye, MEMO panorama CGI, 2015, Portland, England, Adjaye Associates. Figure 4. Mapping Ararat, 2014, Courtesy of Melissa Shiff. Figure 5. Mapping Ararat, Synagogue, 2014, Courtesy of Melissa Shiff. Figure 6. Imaginary Jewish Homelands, 2015, Courtesy of Melissa Shiff.

EPILOGUE WHERE MEMORIES MEET: THE NEGEV MONUMENT AS A SITE OF PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY DALIA MANOR

In any discussion of memorials and monuments key questions should be raised concerning the actual involvement of the visitors with the object that is created for the purpose: What is the role of the forms, the materials, the scale, and the landscape around the monument in evoking the particular memory sought by those who erected it? How significant is the text in and around the monument in commemorating historical events or individuals? What is the nature of our experience in situ when visiting a monument or indeed any environmental art as opposed to the flood of images on flat screens that we are exposed to nowadays? And perhaps the most difficult question of all: what is it that we actually remember when visiting a memorial – before and after (and, for that matter, who are we). These questions and others that are explored in the foregoing chapters converge in Dani Karavan’s Negev Monument (Figs. 1-4). The subject of various publications, often in relation to later works by the artist, the Negev Monument has often been analyzed in terms of its formal language and materials or in relation to its history as a war memorial. In the following pages I look at other points, which became evident when the monument was the subject of a historical exhibition at the Negev Museum of Art: the stage effect of the monument and the persistence of memory. “Collective memory” is defined as a storehouse of knowledge, images, myths, and narratives shared by members of a social group, distinct from the individual’s personal, autobiographical memory. In the national context, the coalescing of historical events in the collective memory tends to result from proactive efforts to instill and perpetuate historical milestones and a chosen form of interpreting and remembering them. In that sense, the monument that Dani Karavan designed to commemorate

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members of the Palmach Negev Brigade who fell in battles in the Negev during the 1948 War of Independence is a significant expression of such an initiative and of the desire to shape the story of the war for future generations by means of a monument – a sculptural work within the public space. Karavan’s monument – the initiative of veterans of the brigade, rather than state institutions – differs in more than one way from those previously erected in Israel. Written texts are carved on the monument – not tales of heroism, but simple documenting of the battles’ unfolding, reflecting the fighters’ emotional and human aspects.

Figure 1

Scattered across a hilltop, the three-dimensional elements that form the monument are open to interpretation. Indeed, a declaration was made during its construction that visitors are meant to move around, to become actively involved in the process of creation, and “to capture the space with their bodies.” In his final design for the monument, Karavan set out the meaning of the shapes in explanations that draw on the narrative of the war and its goals: the aqueduct; and the tower with its apertures, a tentlike structure through which one enters the monument; a bunker and communication channels; and the split, perforated dome of remembrance, like a room where one can communicate with the memory of the fallen soldiers whose names are carved there. Visitors to the monument, particularly organized groups of tourists, schoolchildren, or soldiers, are

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taken on a guided tour that tracks the monument’s official story, as dictated in its founding charter: to impart the memory of the Palmach Brigade’s heroism to future generations.

Figure 2

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Quite soon, however, the monument began influencing visitors in a different, unexpected way. Some saw this as reflecting failure: in her book Commemoration and Remembrance, Ilana Shamir notes: [T]he attempt to activate visitors to the monument is unlikely to reinforce its place within the collective memory, and through it – the place of the fallen. For a monument to have a dialogue with the general public, it must be declarative and instructive; its message ought to be clear and explicit. Here the message needs to be interpreted. At the same time, we can assume that Be’er Sheva’s citizens, for whom the monument is part of their quotidian setting, have internalized its significance. It has become part of the collective local memory because of its presence in the landscape, more than by actively participating in dramatic games.1

At the core of Shamir’s critical approach is the uniqueness of the Negev Brigade Monument, its successful reception by different audiences, the praise it has attracted, and its preservation in a new kind of collective memory: private memory that is shared by scores. This phenomenon emerged in the exhibition, “50 Years to the Negev Monument/50 Years to Dani Karavan’s Public Art,” held at the Negev Museum of Art in fallwinter 2014/2015. What transpired in the early stages of assembling the exhibition, curated by Adi Englman, and during the exhibition itself, was the surprisingly important role that the monument plays in people’s lives: residents of the city and the region, visitors, families with children, teenagers, photographers, musicians, and other artists. It has a powerful presence in the biographical memory of thousands. A typical reaction that emerged during the preparatory research and in visitors’ responses to the exhibition was the engaging with personal memory. Generally it entailed childhood memories of visiting the monument with one’s family or a school group, and the physical and emotional experiences generated at the site. People recalled clambering over the concrete elements, crawling through the “snake,” sitting in the shadowy dome of memory, where the echo effect compels people to sing, play music, or just make sounds, as well as other hidden corners and opportunities to race around and use one’s imagination – the monument as a playground (Figs. 2–4). For years the monument was not only part of the landscape, the highest place in the city, visible from everywhere, but also a destination for a weekend daytrip, one of the very few recreation sites in the area. Now that the city and those children have grown, they return as



1 Ilana Shamir, Commemoration and Remembrance: Israel’s Way of Molding Its Collective Memory Patterns (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1996), 65–66. (Hebrew)

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adults with their children and grandchildren: a visit to the monument has become an intergenerational event.

Figure 3

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The monument’s location some distance from the city, plus the fact that it has more than a few secluded corners, has made it a magnet for lovers, including those unable for social reasons to meet openly. Others go there for the solitude, to drink in the landscape, the wind, and light, to play music, dance, and just to be. Some of those memories were captured in My Monument (2014), a short film that Adi Frost produced for the exhibition. Visitors volunteered their own memories, intensifying the realization that the Negev Monument is more than a site commemorating a historical national event, which people visit on memorial days and for national ceremonies. It is also a living space, where individual and private events unfold: together they crystallize into a group memory that defines the monument in terms of emotion and experience – a place to play, to find refuge, to meet, and to create. Even today, nearly 50 years after it was built, when the city is liberally endowed with parks and leisure sites, when Israel is full of war memorials, the monument still fulfills those roles. Clearly, this is the source of the monument’s unique quality as a work of environmental art. Karavan has often noted that when designing the monument he was inspired by the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who had been close to the Surrealist movement in the 1930s. Indeed, in Karavan’s preliminary sketches, some of which were displayed in the exhibition for the first time, we can identify the formal language typical of the Surrealists, and they reveal parallels with Giacometti’s sketches Objets mobiles et muets (Moving, Mute Objects) from 1931. Karavan’s use of geometric and organic forms also echoes the work of Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) – the Japanese-American artist and designer who was influenced by Surrealism – particularly the latter’s designs for gardens and stage sets. Karavan had created stage sets for years, ever since his school days, in fact, for productions of the drama club of the Tichon Hadash high school in Tel Aviv.2 In the early 1950s, he designed sets for four programs of the Nahal Troupe – the Israeli army’s first entertainment group, and in 1958 he arranged the stage for the celebrations of the 10th anniversary of Israel’s independence. Two years later, he was invited to design stage sets for the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv, and over the next 20 years he fashioned dozens of sets for works staged by theater, opera, and dance companies. After designing a stage set for the Inbal Dance Company in 1961, Martha

 2 Information on Karavan’s stage sets from Shimon Lev Ari, “Dani Karavan’s Set Designs, 1960–1983,” Theater Arts Journals’ Studies in Scenography and Performance 2, no. 1 (2014). https://www.taj.tau.ac.il/index.php?option=com_content&view=article& id=23&Itemid=4

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Graham, the renowned American choreographer, invited him to plan the sets for her company’s Legend of Judith (1962). Other works for Graham’s dance company followed, as well as for the Bat Sheva dance company. It may have been Karavan’s association with Martha Graham that led to his familiarity with the work of Isamu Noguchi, who had been creating stage sets for Graham’s company since 1935. Noguchi was responsible for the set design for several major works that were milestones in modern dance. Graham disliked painted backdrops and preferred a minimal stage design, an approach that found favor with Noguchi, and he created sculptural objects that her dancers moved on and around. Noguchi’s influence was not yet discernible in Karavan’s stage sets, which not only were packed with details, but had a linear-sketched character and were located high above the stage. However, his influence is apparent in Karavan’s designs for open spaces and the integration of nature with sculptured objects – such as the Negev Monument. Noguchi is also famous as a designer of gardens and public spaces. One of his most important works is the Billy Rose Art Garden at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, which was commissioned in the early 1960s, when Karavan first met Noguchi.3 The sculpture garden extends over the folds of a hill, and features the organic shapes characteristic of Noguchi’s work, constructed using a range of materials, including several types of stone, concrete, plants, and water. Karavan’s first design for the Negev Monument, originally intended for a different site, reflects a rather stagelike concept, as the model and sketches show – a mostly empty rectangular surface, with a few sculptured points. When the intended site was changed to a hilltop, its design took a new direction. As well as relating to the surrounding desert setting, Karavan decided to create a new “landscape” made of shapes and structures standing closer together, facing the center of the circular ground. Perhaps this is the source of the monument’s interpretation as

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Dani Karavan told the author that he first met Noguchi when his father, Avraham Karavan, was invited to design the plantings for the Israel Museum’s sculpture garden. Karavan père decided not accept the commission, but a friendship developed between his son and Noguchi based on professional and collegial esteem. Karavan visited Noguchi’s studio in New York, and they met often over the years that followed. Perhaps at that first meeting, Karavan – still inexperienced in environmental sculptured art in natural spaces – drew inspiration from Noguchi’s integration of geometric forms and organic shapes. His biomorphic forms were close to Surrealism and were influenced by Brancusi, Giacometti, Arp, and Miro. Noguchi challenged the boundaries between art and design and gained renown not only as a sculptor, but also as a designer of furniture and stage sets.

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“architecture,” a frequently voiced comment – occasionally contemptuous and sometimes in praise.

Figure 4

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Asked some years ago to define what constitutes a stage set, Karavan replied: “The stage set is a place. It creates a place. Wherever actors are present in a certain place, it becomes the stage set.”4 Discussing the monument more recently, he used similar terms: “My aim was to create a site that people would enjoy visiting, spending time there in order to discover the place and through it to discover the landscape and themselves.”5 In Karavan’s artistic perception, conceptualizing the monument and the stage set as a place refines the important principle of presence in a place; being in the here and now, in a specific setting: “A sculpture that people could climb and walk on, touch, hear, smell, and see. A sculpture using all the senses that constitute the experience, that directs the flow of visitors to it.”6 It is among the secrets of the success of the monument, and helped engrave it in the memories of many. Those who commissioned the monument aspired not only to relate the story of the war, but also to help visitors to physically sense the events and the landscape. Thus the symbolic shapes and structures, accompanied by explanations from the military world (a tent, a bunker, a watchtower, a sand map), complied with their expectations. Yet the advantage of the sculptural elements that Karavan placed on that hilltop is that we can experience them separately from the historical narrative – in the present time, in the “here and now” of every visitor, through their individual, frequently physical, response to the place. One of the most notable achievements of the Negev Monument is that the response it elicits from visitors differs sharply from people’s usual reactions when encountering traditional sculptural monuments. Here, visitors move among the concrete elements; they climb, run, or dance; they listen and make sounds, sing, or play music; they stop and gaze and follow the trajectories of light and shade, seeking unusual viewpoints for photography. It is an interesting case in which the stage set “directs” the actors and objects seem to dictate an unseen choreography to the audience. The enduring impact of visits to the monument encourages many visitors to return again and again, at every age, in every season. A visit to the site goes beyond honoring the dead on Memorial Day. It becomes a personal experience, a unique private memory frequently marked by moments of

 4 Nurit Beretzky, “Dani – Speaking from the Wall,” Ma’ariv, April 24, 1969, p. 19. (Hebrew) 5 Dani Karavan, “The Monument to the Palmach Negev Brigade, Be’er Sheva: Or, How a Historical Event Is Transformed into a Plastic Form, “50 Years to the Negev Monument/50 Years to Dani Karavan’s Public Art,” Adi Englman (ed.), Be’er Sheva: The Negev Museum of Art, 2014, p. 74. 6 Ibid., pp. 72–73.

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happiness and elation. Indeed, over the years, as we learned during the exhibition, those accumulated personal memories suggest another interpretation of the concept “site of memory,” of which the Negev Monument is an example. The structured, historical, national memory that the monument engenders, and which it was intended to preserve, is not the whole story. Thousands of people who have visited over the decades and continue to come have built their own memories, many of them recorded in photo albums and home movies, memories that intertwine naturally with their own life stories. This is a triumph that only a great work of art or an iconic piece of architecture can achieve.

List of Figures Figures 1-4. Dani Karavan, The Negev Monument, Be’er Sheva, 19621968, Photos: Jacob Agor (taken in the early 1970s), Courtesy the Israeli Center for the Documentation of the Performing Arts, Tel Aviv University.