Art & the Public Sphere
Volume 6 Numbers 1 & 2
© 2017 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/aps.6.1-2.81_1
Sabrina DeTurk
Zayed University
Memory of absence:
Contemporary countermonuments
abSTraCT
keYWorDS
In 1992, James Young published an article examining the rise of the countermonument in Germany. According to Young, the counter-monument provokes its
viewers, demands interaction, has the possibility to change over time and insists
that memory work be the burden of the viewer, not of the monument itself. While
Young focused his attention on a particular set of Holocaust memorials built
in Germany in the late 1980s, his formulation can be usefully applied to other
contemporary memorials that increasingly incorporate particular design elements
that mark them as counter-monuments. This article considers the design of several
recent memorials in terms of their aesthetic and physical function as countermonuments and identifies a new trend in memorial design, the creation of memorial museums, which further expands and complicates the role of these memorials.
memorials
Holocaust
counter-monuments
memory
museums
9/11
inTroDuCTion
James Young coined the term counter-monument in the early 1990s to refer
specifically to several German monuments that shared a condition of invisibility, either by virtue of their initial placement or their eventual disappearance (1992: 270). Young considered the counter-monument a memorialization
strategy particularly suited to a country seeking to remember and honour
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the victims of its own national crimes. Although Young was particularly
interested in vanishing monuments within Germany, his description of a
successful counter-monument fits numerous monuments and memorials
erected in Europe and elsewhere in recent years. I argue that, in addition to
the Holocaust memorials with which Young was principally concerned, the
term and concept of the counter-monument can be usefully applied to other
contemporary memorial structures, notably memorials to terror attacks as well
as memorial museums.
THe CounTer-MonuMenT aS MeMoriaL STraTeGY
In his formulation of the concept of a counter-monument, Young provided
extensive analysis of three German monuments built in the late 1980s and
early 1990s. These were Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’ Monument
Against Fascism, War and Violence – and for Peace and Human Rights, unveiled
in Harburg in 1986; Horst Hoheisel’s Aschrottbrunnen built in Kassel in 1989
and Norbert Radermacher’s Gedenkstätte KZ-Auβenlager Sonnenallee in Berlin,
conceptualized in 1989 and realized in 1994.
When originally installed in an urban plaza in Harburg, a suburb of
Hamburg, the Monument Against Fascism, designed by Jochen Gerz and Esther
Shalev-Gerz, consisted of a twelve-metre high, one-metre square pillar, its
surface covered by a thin layer of soft lead. At each corner of the pillar a steelpointed stylus was attached and an inscription next to the monument invited
viewers to inscribe their name on the pillar. As a section of the pillar became
covered with names (and other graffiti), the column would be lowered into the
ground, presenting a fresh surface for inscriptions, until the entire pillar was
submerged. Between 1986 and its final descent in 1993, the monument was
lowered eight times (Gerz 2016). Today all that is visible at the site is a small
viewing window and a plaque describing the project with photos of the pillar
during the stages of its gradual descent.
In Kassel, Horst Hoheisel was awarded the commission to restore, or
rescue, a destroyed historical monument, the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain. This
was a neo-Gothic fountain that had been gifted to the city of Kassel in 1908
by one of its Jewish citizens, Sigmond Aschrott, and destroyed by the Nazis
in 1939, leaving only the remnants of the base. Hoheisel opted not to recreate or preserve the original fountain, instead constructing what Young terms
a ‘negative-form monument’ (1992: 288) by building a hollow concrete form
that followed the design of the 1908 fountain and then inverting it and sinking
it into the ground, leaving the hollow open for water to run down into, rather
than spraying upward.
Finally, in the Neukölln district of Berlin, on the former site of a forced
labour camp, Norbert Radermacher conceived a transient memorial using
projections of written text. In the Gedenkstätte KZ-Auβenlager Sonnenallee the
movement of passers-by triggered the projection of varying texts discussing the history of the site, which is now a sports field. The text moved slowly
downward until it reached the sidewalk, where it became most legible, before
it disappeared, to be triggered by the next person passing the site. The memorial thus occupied a space between presence and absence; neither permanently
vanishing like the Gerz monument, nor explicitly occupying a negative space,
like Hoheisel’s fountain, the perpetual appearance and disappearance of the
text may evoke the idea of a memory lapse and our need for continual reminders of the past.
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For Young, these projects meet the criteria of a counter-monument, which
[…] flouts any number of cherished memorial conventions: its aim is
not to console but to provoke; not to remain fixed but to change; not to
be everlasting but to disappear; not to be ignored by its passersby but to
demand interaction; not to remain pristine but to invite its own violation and desecration; not to accept graciously the burden of memory but
to throw it back at the town’s feet.
(1992: 277)
In a general sense, counter-monuments can be read as complicating the
act of remembering. Whereas a traditional monument, such as those to the
fallen soldiers of World War I, might be seen as providing a discrete, tidy
space of memory and commemoration, the counter-monument is messy,
challenging and provokes its viewers. It does not stay neatly within bounds
of space or time but calls our attention to the ongoing work of memory and
to those lapses of memory that threaten to compromise our reckoning with
the past.
THe ConTeMPorarY CounTer-MonuMenT
Young’s study of counter-monuments focused on those created in the early
1990s and particularly on memorials that disappeared, changed form or
remained partially hidden when installed. Some recent memorial designers
have continued to employ this strategy of absence or disappearance in their
work, creating what might be termed contemporary counter-monuments.
Others have explored different elements of the counter-monument, notably
the changed expectations for viewer interaction and the sense that viewers
must in some way work to complete the meaning of the memorial. Included
in this group would be memorials that, as Young framed it, seek to provoke
rather than console.
Young provided a definition and a framework for the visual analysis of
counter-monuments; however, about a decade before he advanced his argument a memorial was built that changed the aesthetics and experience of
memorial design in ways that have reverberated for the past 35 years. Maya
Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated and opened to the public in
November 1982 in Washington, DC, embodies several characteristics of the
counter-monument. Its below-grade placement, the expanse of black granite, the physical experience of descent to the centre of the memorial – these
were new and challenging design elements that some visitors and critics saw
as provocative and, indeed, disrespectful of the veterans the memorial was
meant to honour. There is no doubt that ‘the Wall’ has changed our experience and expectations for memorials; notably, in the way that it expects, even
forces, viewers to engage with the space and surface of the memorial in order
to fully experience its power. The work of remembering has been partially
accomplished by the designer and the built structure but must be completed
by the visitor. As such, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as counter-monument,
provokes and makes demands on its viewers despite simultaneously fostering an atmosphere of quiet reflection and contemplation. Indeed, despite the
aggressive language of Young’s original description, counter-monuments do
not themselves have to be viewed as antagonistic but rather as challenging
and unsettling the viewer while still allowing for, as Maya Lin wrote in her
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design proposal, ‘personal reflection and private reckoning’ (Vietnam Veterans
Memorial Fund 2016a: n.pag.).
Among the design elements introduced in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
and subsequently incorporated into more recent memorials are the use of a
highly polished and dark material, such as granite; the incorporation of names
of the victims arranged not alphabetically but in a way that seeks to highlight
those victims as individuals; a site that activates the memorial in some way,
rather than serving as a simple backdrop and a means to direct visitors into
engagement with the memorial, for example a path through the memorial. It
is through these and related elements that contemporary counter-monuments
define themselves and deliver their message.
HoLoCauST CounTer-MonuMenTS
In Europe, the best-known example of a recently constructed counter-monument may be Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, opened
in Berlin in 2005.
The 2711 stelae that comprise the memorial, spread over a 10-acre site,
challenge expectations of a memorial space. The scale of loss and destruction
wrought by the Holocaust, in addition to the impossibility of identifying many
of the dead, shapes both literally and figuratively the memorial’s design. The
stelae, of varying heights, appear to unfold like a field of tombstones across the
site. Like the black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the grey concrete
of these forms is unyielding and imposing, particularly when a visitor begins
to walk through the columns at their highest points. Although interaction with
these elements is expected it does not seem so much invited as thrust upon
the visitor. Here there are no names – indeed, can be none – the individual
Figure 1: Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005).
Photo: Chaosdna 2007. CC BY 3.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via
Wikimedia Commons.
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losses are so vast, so incalculable that it is the impossibility of naming that
seems to take precedence in Eisenman’s design. The absence of an identifiable
locus of interaction – an engraved name, a chair – complicates the expected
engagement with the memorial. The visitor does not know precisely how to
behave: should all the forms be treated as sacred spaces, not to be touched
except perhaps in reverence and respect? Or is this an active memory space,
one in which daily activities have a role to play alongside more sombre reflections? While the weightiness of the events commemorated here might suggest
that the former is true, the memorial’s integration with the surrounding city
encourages a different, more casual, interaction as children play around the
space and visitors rest on the concrete pillars. As a counter-monument, the
memorial demands engagement, both physical and psychological, from
the visitor but also opens the possibility of that interaction to take a negative
form, to desecrate rather than to preserve. This possibility is unnerving, even
offensive, to many. However, it suggests that the contemporary memorial, as
counter-monument, must not remain isolated and untouchable but rather to
forge connections with the lived reality of public space in ways both sacred
and profane.
The Stolpersteine project by the German artist Gunter Demnig began in
1997 and is still ongoing. The Stolpersteine are commemorative brass stones
laid in the pavement outside the last known address of a victim of Nazi
violence and engraved with that person’s name and the date of their deportation and death. Stolperstein can be translated as ‘stumbling stone or stumbling
block’ and while the smooth surfaces of the memorial plates do not literally
cause one to trip, they may be seen as psychological stumbling stones, meant
to disrupt the path of the viewer and to force them to confront the lived reality
of a single victim of the Holocaust.
Kirsten Harjes rightly identifies Stolperstein memorials such as those placed
by Demnig as counter-monuments (2005: 143). She categorizes these projects
(of which there have been others in addition to Demnig’s highly publicized
work) as claiming a more ‘authentic’ and ‘democratic’ form of memory that is
guided by an individual’s unexpected encounter with an object that was placed
by ordinary citizens, rather than the state. I would expand Harjes’ observation
to link the Stolpersteine to the concept of memory work, which can frequently
require coming to terms with individual rather than collective history and also
often has a moral or ethical component. The idea that memory should not
be a passive act but rather requires individual engagement with a person or
event – often through the mediating form of an object inscribed with individual names – is in keeping with the notion of the counter-monument as a space
of sustained engagement and interaction on the part of the general public.
The Stolpersteine, particularly those created and placed by Demnig, have
permitted a significant number of people to confront the individual toll of the
Holocaust within a particular civic and personal space. That many of those
who have participated in the commissioning, researching and installation of
the Stolpersteine are of a generation far too young to have a personal tie to the
Holocaust means that the stones serve a didactic purpose, a function in keeping with the characteristics of counter-monuments, particularly recent memorials and associated memorial museums.
While lauded and embraced by many, the Stolpersteine have not had an
entirely positive reception. Perhaps the best-known criticism of the stones is
Munich’s 2004 ban on the placement of Stolpersteine, a ruling that was upheld
in 2015 despite substantial public protest. The sponsor of the ban, Charlotte
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Figure 2: Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Łatak, Jewish Ghetto Memorial (2005).
Photo: Sabrina DeTurk 2015.
Knobloch, has argued that it is inappropriate to have commemorative stones
placed in ‘dust and street dirt’ (Ziv 2015: n.pag.). This response, with its focus
on their placement in the ground, suggests that the Stolpersteine are, in fact,
functioning as effective counter-monuments that quite literally ‘[…] throw it
[the burden of memory] back at the town’s feet’ (Young 1992: 277).
Kraków’s Jewish Ghetto Memorial was installed in 2005 in Plac Bohaterów
Getta, or Ghetto Heroes Square. Designed by Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz
Łatak, the memorial does not at first glance appear to follow the visual conventions of a counter-monument as discussed by Young. It does not disappear, it
is not a negative-form nor does it invite people to mark or deface it. However,
as with the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Stolpersteine, it is
primarily through viewer or visitor interaction that the Jewish Ghetto Memorial
can be understood as a counter-monument.
The architects of the Kraków memorial wrote that its design was inspired
by films and photographs of Jewish victims of the Holocaust carrying their
possessions through town squares, as they were moved from house, to
ghetto and eventually to camps (Biuro Projecktów Lewicki Łatak 2016).
After the 1943 liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto by the Nazis, Zgody Square
(renamed Plac Bohaterów Getta) was described as left full of useless, dilapidated objects, abandoned when their owners were killed or taken to the
camps. Lewicki and Łatak reduced that image of a square filled with abandoned goods to a simple symbol: the empty chair, standing for loss and
absence.
However, it is the functional, rather than symbolic, aspect of the chairs
in the Jewish Ghetto Memorial that marks it as a counter-monument. Since
the memorial’s inauguration the regular use of the chairs, particularly those
arrayed in proximity to public transportation, has been an accepted part of the
memorial, at least on the part of the public. It is difficult to know with certainty
whether the memorial’s architects intended this practical usage; they wrote in
their description of the memorial project that, ‘[t]he remembrance of those
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who are no longer with us has been expressed by an accumulation of ordinary
objects [… that] stripped of their everyday practical functions, have acquired a
symbolical aspect’, suggesting that it is that symbolic function which may form
the focus of the memorial (Biuro Projecktów Lewicki Łatak 2016). The designers do, however, appear to have given consideration to the effects of time and
wear on the memorial’s surfaces, stating that for materials, ‘[w]e have chosen
patinated bronze, corroded cast iron, galvanization that becomes dull, paving
blocks of grey syenite and ordinary concrete’ (Biuro Projecktów Lewicki Łatak
2016: n.pag.). This suggests an expectation and acceptance of the memorial’s changing character over time, at least in terms of its physical characteristics. Nonetheless, whether the designers intended the chairs to function as
chairs, or only as symbols of loss and absence, the citizens of Kraków seem to
have no problem in accepting a dual role for them: as practical and symbolic.
That the chairs work as useful seating in addition to serving as prompts for
memory and reflection allows for their categorization as counter-monument.
To return to Young’s definition of the term, the Jewish Ghetto Memorial fits
several of the criteria of a counter-monument: ‘[…] not to remain fixed but
to change; not to be ignored by its passersby but to demand interaction; not
to accept graciously the burden of memory but to throw it back at the town’s
feet’ (1992: 277). Through its integration with the public, lived space of the city
the memorial will wear and change as time passes, people will interact with
and use it and thus, wittingly or unwittingly, participate in the memory work
that counter-monuments are intended to provoke. That is not to say that every
time someone sits in one of the memorial’s chairs to wait for a tram they will
reflect on the sins of their city’s past; however, the insistent civic presence
of the memorial does encourage an ongoing and evolving reckoning with
that history. Kraków’s Jewish Ghetto Memorial has neither the self-destructive
nor the negative quality of those counter-monuments designed by the Gerzs,
Hoheisel or Radermacher. Yet in its insistent presence and interaction with
the space of the city it precisely refuses to ‘seal memory off from awareness’
(Young 1992: 272) and instead prompts its viewers to continue the work of
memory in the present and future.
CounTer-MonuMenTS To TerroriST aTTaCkS
Reflecting Absence, a memorial to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,
designed by Michael Arad and dedicated in Lower Manhattan in 2011, focuses
attention on the negative space of the missing World Trade Center towers; a
literal absence acknowledged both in the title of the memorial design as well
as in its physical manifestation.
As such, the 9/11 memorial reflects in some ways the design of Horst
Hoheisel’s Aschrottbrunnen in which an absent edifice is also reflected as a
descent into the earth and which also uses the downward flow of water to
emphasize that descent and absence.
Reflecting Absence is located in the footprint of the original World Trade
Center buildings and despite the surrounding landscaped plaza it is the void of
the destroyed towers that provides the overwhelming focal point for the visitor’s experience of the memorial. Arad has used the space left by each tower
to create a double waterfall that cascades over two levels of black granite: a
30-foot drop around the four edges of each absent tower and then another
into a smaller square centred at the bottom of each void. This second level
of descent seems infinite, an effect compounded by the viewing angle, which
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Figure 3: National September 11 Memorial (2011). Photo: NormanB 2012. CC
BY 3.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
precludes a visitor seeing directly into the centre. The names of the victims
of all three 9/11 attacks as well as of the 1993 terrorist bombing at the World
Trade Center are carved in a bronze railing around the pools, surrounding the
footprints of the towers.
As with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, shortly after the announcement of
the winning entry opponents of the design began to speak out. Again echoing
the response to Lin’s design, a primary concern was the perceived nihilism of
the memorial. Voids, pits, black holes – critics of the design saw the two main
architectural features of the memorial as perpetual reminders of death and
destruction, with no redemptive or healing qualities. This type of public outcry,
often directed at those features of a memorial’s design that make it a counter-monument rather than a monument, has become commonplace, even
expected. While such criticism undoubtedly reflects real emotional distress on
the part of some viewers, often family members of the victims, it can also be
read as a reification of these memorials’ status as counter-monuments. They
have succeeded in challenging conventional expectations of what a memorial
‘should’ look like or accomplish. They mark the emergence of a contemporary
counter-monument.
On 22 July 2011, Anders Behring Breivik carried out two terrorist attacks
in Norway: detonating a car bomb near the government headquarters in
Oslo and carrying out a shooting rampage at a youth camp on the island of
Utøya, north-west of the city. These attacks, which killed 77 people, were the
deadliest peacetime assaults in the country’s history. Shortly after the attacks
occurred, the Norwegian Ministry of Culture established a committee to
begin discussion about building a memorial, or memorials. Following the
committee’s report to the Ministry in Spring 2012, the task of overseeing the
design selection and memorial construction was assigned to KORO – Public
Art Norway, the government organization responsible for public art projects
(2013). In March 2014, Jonas Dahlberg’s winning design was announced
to the public. Although much of the press surrounding the announcement,
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particularly from the design community, focused on Dahlberg’s design for a
monument in Sørbråten, near Utøya island, the artist in fact unveiled plans
for three memorials, in keeping with the competition brief given by KORO.
These included, in addition to the Sørbråten memorial, both a temporary and
permanent memorial at the location of the bomb blast, Government Quarter
in downtown Oslo (Public Art Norway 2014). While each memorial can be
seen as a counter-monument in its own right, the connection between the
three fosters a deeper interpretation of these spaces and structures as countermonuments.
Memory Wound, the monument designed for the headland at Sørbråten,
overlooking Utøya, cuts the earth of the headland, creating a gap that isolates
the tip of the peninsula across an unbridged channel. On each side of the
gap, the sheer drop of the land and rock gives extends into the water, the
stone surface of each face polished with the names of the victims inscribed
on one side of the cut. A path, culminating in a short tunnel, will lead visitors
along the headland to the site, where they will reach a viewing platform cut
into the face of the earth, from which they can observe, but never access, the
names and isolated land across the wound. The design is striking and jarring;
the memorial does not attempt to ameliorate the feelings of loss triggered by
the event. While the act of walking out on the headland to the memorial site
is intended as part of the memorial experience, it is not intended to lull the
visitor into an untroubled communion with nature. In Dahlberg’s words, ‘[i]t
should be difficult to see the beauty of the natural setting, without also experiencing a sense of loss. It is this sense of loss that will physically activate the
site’ (Public Art Norway 2014: n.pag.). Dahlberg’s choice of the word activate
in this description is telling; it suggests that the memorial does not exist as a
memorial without the physical and emotional presence of its visitors. In this
sense, Memory Wound disappears when not visited.
An important component of Dahlberg’s design concept for all three
memorials is that the materials excavated from the Sørbråten site, including trees and other plants, will be incorporated in both the temporary and
permanent memorials at Government Quarter in Oslo. Indeed, the materials
will migrate twice: first from Sørbråten to the temporary memorial site and
from there to the permanent memorial. As they move they will necessarily
change and over time the living material will grow, die and be renewed. Thus,
Dahlgren’s memorial concept creates one wound in order to build, or even
heal, elsewhere. The mood of the memorial sites in Oslo is presented as more
communal and dialogic than that at Sørbråten, positioning the permanent
memorial (designed as an amphitheatre with no stage) as a space for conversation and education about difficult issues, such as how to foster tolerance
(Public Art Norway 2014). This memorial has moved on from the private reckoning of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to incorporate a conversational and
didactic function seen in other contemporary counter-monuments as well.
THe MeMoriaL MuSeuM aS CounTer-MonuMenT
Several recent and high-profile memorial projects have included what
may become an expected component of memorial design: a museum. One
of the earliest and best publicized of these projects was the Oklahoma City
National Memorial, which commemorates the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995 in an act of domestic
terrorism. Designed by the Butzer Design Partnership and dedicated in 2000,
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the Oklahoma City National Memorial covers a 3.3-acre site and is comprised
of several elements, including a reflecting pool, gates, orchard and a field of
empty chairs. To claim the memorial as a counter-monument is problematic, for, although it does include many spaces for interaction, the prevailing
symbolic message of the memorial is one of comfort, kindness and resilience. It does not provoke the visitor to critically reflect on their intellectual
or emotional responses to the event, nor does its design incorporate elements
that abruptly confront the visitor with the reality and magnitude of loss represented by the memorial. However, this memorial is significant for its inclusion
of a museum on the memorial site – an inclusion that has become integral to
many contemporary counter-monuments.
The Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum presents the events of
the day of the attack and its aftermath through a series of large-scale displays
featuring personal artefacts, news media coverage, video and other visual and
audio components designed to both recall the event for those who experienced it and to tell a story for those who are encountering the information for
the first time. The displays are arranged as ‘chapters’, reinforcing the vision of
an unfolding narrative, albeit an open-ended one, as suggested by the final
two chapters titled ‘Responsibility’ and ‘Hope’. The museum and memorial site
are managed by a non-profit foundation and, in addition to their commemorative and didactic functions, serve as a locus for a variety of community
activities ranging from a memorial marathon to school partnerships. While
the Oklahoma City Memorial and museum offer a particularly diverse range of
displays and activities, perhaps more so than other memorial museums, they
are emblematic of the partnership of museum and memorial that has emerged
as a new paradigm for memorial design.
The National September 11 Memorial Museum opened in May 2014
and claims to serve as ‘the country’s principal institution for examining the
implications of the events of 9/11, documenting the impact of those events
and exploring the continuing significance of September 11, 2001’ (2016). The
Museum further promises that ‘[t]he lives of every victim of the 2001 and 1993
attacks will be commemorated as visitors have the opportunity to learn about
the men, women, and children who died’ (National September 11 Memorial
& Museum 2016: n.pag.). These are weighty tasks, and the scale of the highly
designed, cavernous museum seems to echo the scope and solemnity of its
mission. The majority of the museum’s displays are housed underground, and
the visitor descends past physical manifestations of the destruction caused on
9/11, such as the charred and mangled steel columns that supported the World
Trade Center and the so-called ‘Survivors’ Stairs’ that provided one point of
egress from the burning towers and survived their collapse. Such mute objects
might, in another context, serve themselves as counter-monuments; here,
however, they become enmeshed in a more crowded and complicated narrative of heroism and victimhood, survival and loss.
As in other memorial museums, the September 11 Museum includes
large numbers of personal artefacts as well as photographs of the victims of
the attacks. Because so many first responders were killed at the World Trade
Center site there has been since the earliest phases of the memorial design
process an uneasiness about how to balance commemoration of those individuals with that of ‘random’ victims of the attacks. In the memorial museum,
one of the most striking displays is of a mangled fire truck that, in its placement and size, stands in for the heroism and sacrifice of all first responders.
Across the museum, the gallery devoted to photos of the victims also impacts
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the visitor with its size and the sheer number of photos. Yet, ultimately, these
are positioned as individual portraits of loss rather than a collective remembrance or celebration of life. The museum is not easy terrain to navigate; it
encourages divergent and sometimes conflicting emotional and intellectual
responses from its visitors. As such, it may be seen as a counter-monument –
disquieting, provocative and insistent on its visitor grappling with the burden
of memory.
And yet, the September 11 Memorial Museum has been criticized for
the handling of displays of personal memorabilia from 9/11 victims and of
remnants of the Twin Towers and for its incorporation of audio and images
related to the terrorists themselves. The experience of passing through the
subterranean halls of the museum does feel a bit like walking through a
macabre theme park and in 2015 the Museum was awarded the Themed
Entertainment Association’s Extraordinary Cultural Achievement award in a
ceremony held at Disneyland, an ‘honour’, which has outraged many victims’
families. In the design of the museum one senses that as much attention was
given to what exhibits might attract the attention of indifferent viewers, for
example the mangled fire truck, as to the more subtle touches that seek to
evoke the pathos of 9/11 and its immediate aftermath, such as the photomontage of the flyers with images of the missing which were posted around the
city in the hours and days following the attacks. However, no aspect of the
Memorial Museum seems to have attracted as much criticism as the merchandising of 9/11 that takes centre stage in the Museum gift shop, where one
can purchase everything from 9/11 themed jewellery and clothing to stuffed
search and rescue dogs. As provocative as these aspects of the museum may
be, they serve not to connect the museum to the counter-monument that is
Reflecting Absence but rather to undermine the impact of that memorial space.
Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe incorporates an
Information Center that serves a similar reflective and didactic function as
the museums attached to the National Oklahoma City Memorial and to the
National September 11 Memorial. However, the content of the Information
Center is less sensationalist than that of the US museums and its design
connects more seamlessly with that of the memorial itself. Indeed, the space
of the Information Center uses design elements that provide a clear visual link
to the memorial’s structure, suggesting that the memory work encouraged by
the memorial should continue within the centre. The focus of the exhibitions
is on information more than on artefacts – there are no collections of personal
belongings such as those found in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and
Museum. There are photographs, texts and, importantly, names. Those names
that are absent from Eisenman’s stelae are found in the Information Center,
most dramatically in the Room of Names in which short, recorded biographies
of murdered or missing Jews are played while the person’s name along with
their year of birth and of death is projected on the four walls of the room.
The visitor is confronted fully and exclusively with the text of a name and the
story of a person. There is no image, no photo, no memento. The Center’s
website explains that ‘[a]n attempt is made here to dissolve the incomprehensible abstract number of six million murdered Jews and to release the victims
from their anonymity’ (Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
2016: n.pag.). However, that gesture is rendered at least partially futile when
we learn that ‘[t]he reading of the names and life stories of all the victims in
the form presented here would take approximately six years, seven months
and 27 days’ (Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 2016:
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n.pag.). The burden of memory is once again thrown back at us; you cannot be
consoled by these names, only troubled.
It is through features such as the Room of Names that the Information
Center of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe seems to continue and
perhaps amplify the effect of the counter-monument that is Eisenman’s field of
columns. It is not designed so much as a space apart, but as a continuation of the
memorial experience. In the same way that the memorial both demands interaction and renders that interaction complicated, so too does the Information
Center draw the visitor to engage, only to leave them with more questions. This
museum space may be about remembrance; it is not about resolution.
The plan for the permanent memorial for July 22 in Oslo’s Government
Quarter does not explicitly describe a museum space, but the brief from the
Art Selection Committee places strong emphasis on the desire for a didactic
or informational component to the memorial site. The Art Plan for the memorial sites states that, in reference to the permanent Oslo memorial, ‘[t]he Art
Selection Committee would be especially interested in solutions that combine
artistic expression with knowledge production in new ways’ (Public Art
Norway 2013: n.pag.). As the permanent memorial is unlikely to be completed
until 2020 or later, this desire may be founded in part on the recognition that
many of those encountering the future memorial site will do so at an experiential distance from the events of 2011, making the educational component
more critical to a full understanding of the memorial.
Another planned but as yet unrealized educational addition to an existing
memorial is the proposed Education Center at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
According to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund the goals of the Center
are to:
[p]ut a face to every one of the more than 58,000 names listed on The
Wall; Share some of the hundreds of thousands of objects left at The
Wall by families, military comrades, and others over more than three
decades; Provide a historical account of the events that took place on
the battlefield and the homefront during the Vietnam Era; Tell the story
of The Wall.
(2016b: n.pag.)
The Education Center will thus serve multiple purposes, perhaps directed
to different audiences. It will provide information about the historical and
political context of the war, a function particularly important for younger
visitors to the Center. It will also attempt to put faces to the names on
the Wall through a proposed photo gallery that visually echoes that in the
National September 11 Museum. Its third purpose is unusual and could
only occur in a memorial museum built many years after the memorial it
complements. That purpose is to memorialize the Wall itself through the
display of objects left at the memorial over the decades and through the
inclusion of information specifically describing the development and history
of the memorial. Whether the Education Center at the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial reinforces or undermines the force of the counter-monument that
is the Wall itself remains to be seen. Its proposal does, however, suggest
that memorial museums have now become such regular and expected
components of memorial sites that even one of the most aesthetically and
emotionally powerful of contemporary memorials is seen to be in need of
such an addition.
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ConCLuSion
Memorial design in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has
developed in ways that would be unimaginable to the designers of monuments such as the interchangeable doughboy statues erected in so many
American towns and cities to commemorate the soldiers of World War I. Yet
despite their divergence from traditional or conventional memorial forms,
many contemporary memorials adhere to a set of design elements that align
with the characteristics of counter-monuments: they are severe, even austere,
in their shape and material; they demand visitor interaction; they provoke
memory work and they bear witness to absence while creating an insistent
civic presence that may evolve over time. Further, the development of the
memorial museum as an important component of memorial sites offers an
additional layer of meaning for these counter-monuments. At times, these
museums amplify the best of their memorial counterparts, however they also
risk turning an effective space of memory into a vehicle for bathos and kitsch.
As memorial design continues to evolve in the coming decades, Young’s
formulation of the concept of the counter-monument will continue to resonate with designers, critics and the public as they encounter new memorial
architecture and grapple with the legacy of memorialized events.
reFerenCeS
Biuro Projecktów Lewicki Łatak (2016), ‘New Zgody Square – remodelling
of Bohaterów Getta Square’, http://www.lewicki-latak.com.pl/main.php/
realizacje/plac_bohaterow_getta. Accessed 8 May 2016.
Doss, Erika (2010), Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2016), ‘Room of
names’, http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/exhibitions/informationcentre/room-of-names.html#c1727. Accessed 16 August 2016.
Gerz, Jochen (2016), ‘Mahnmal gegen Faschismus’, http://www.jochengerz.
eu/html/main.html?res_ident=5a9df42460494a34beea361e835953d8&art_
ident=76fdb6702e151086198058d4e4b0b8fc. Accessed 8 May 2016.
Harjes, Kirsten (2005), ‘Stumbling stones: Holocaust memorials, national
identity, and democratic inclusion in Berlin’, German Politics and Society,
23:1, pp. 138–51.
National September 11 Memorial & Museum (2016), ‘About the museum’,
https://www.911memorial.org/about-museum. Accessed 23 July 2016.
Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum (2016), ‘Home’, https://oklahomacitynationalmemorial.org/. Accessed 25 July 2016.
Public Art Norway (2013), ‘Art plan for July 22 memorial sites’, http://publicartnorway.org/prosjekter/memorial-sites-after-22-july/. Accessed 13 August
2016.
—— (2014), ‘Winning entry: Jonas Dahlberg’, http://publicartnorway.org/prosjekter/memorial-sites-after-22-july/. Accessed 13 August 2016.
Stolpersteine Project (2016), ‘Home’, http://www.stolpersteine.eu/en/home/.
Accessed 8 May 2016.
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (2016a), ‘Maya Lin’s original proposal’,
http://www.vvmf.org/maya-lin-design-submission. Accessed 30 July
2016.
—— (2016b), ‘Campaign for the education center at the Wall’, http://www.
vvmf.org/education-center. Accessed 30 July 2016.
www.intellectbooks.com
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Young, James (1992), ‘The counter-monument: Memory against itself in
Germany today’, Critical Inquiry, 18:2, pp. 267–96.
—— (2002), At Memory’s Edge: Afterimages of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art
and Architecture, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ziv, Stav (2015), ‘Munich to continue ban of stumbling stone Holocaust
memorials’, Newsweek, 29 July, http://europe.newsweek.com/munichcontinue-ban-stumbling-stone-holocaust-memorials-330985?rm=eu.
Accessed 14 August 2016.
SuGGeSTeD CiTaTion
DeTurk, S. (2017), ‘Memory of absence: Contemporary counter-monuments’,
Art & the Public Sphere, 6:1+2, pp. 81–94, doi: 10.1386/aps.6.1-2.81_1
ConTribuTor DeTaiLS
Sabrina DeTurk (Ph.D.) is assistant professor of art history in the College
of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University, Dubai, UAE. Current
research projects include a comparative study of contemporary memorial
design as well as research on street art and visual culture in the Middle East
and North Africa.
Contact: P.O. Box 19282, Zayed University, Dubai, UAE.
E-mail: sabrina.deturk@zu.ac.ae
Sabrina DeTurk has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
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