It’s been five years since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, where nearly 3,000 lost their lives. Still there is no tangible marker erected on the spot, debate and controversy strangling efforts at construction. Yet memorials built in dedication to the 2002 Bali Bombings have proceeded with pervasive calm. Why is it that some memorials attract conflict in their creation, while others more easily appease?
Earlier this year, amidst protests from victims relatives, construction began on the World Trade Center memorial. In 2003, Daniel Libeskind’s master plan was selected as the winning design for the sixteen empty acres at Ground Zero. The original plan included a memorial, a set of cultural buildings and several office buildings which would “create a dense and exhilarating affirmation of New York.”
Libeskind’s Freedom Tower – a 1,776-foot glassy spiral – will be the centerpiece of the memorial area. A feature of the building is a beam of sunlight entering the buildings at the moments when the planes struck the Twin Towers.
As beautiful as the creation might sound, its construction has been nothing short of a nightmare. Plans first came unstuck when New York Governor George Pataki unveiled the Freedom Tower’s cornerstones on July 4, 2004. Relatives of the victims objected to incorporating the Drawing Centre – an esteemed arts institution – into the area as it had housed works that were critical of the current US Federal Government. They also objected to the International Freedom Centre and its intention of displaying the struggle of freedoms from other cultures, as this might overshadow the Ground Zero memorial.
Yet another sore point was the additional memorial to sit alongside Libeskind’s tower, designed by relatively unknown architect Michael Arad and chosen from 5,000 entries.
Where the Twin Towers once stood would be the Arad’s memorial, Reflecting Absence, featuring reflecting pools 8 metres below ground (appearing as a void) and the names of the victims inscribed around the pools.
Victims families were unhappy that the memorial would cover the Towers’ footprints, and that the names of their loved ones would be ‘underground’. Sufficiently mobilized, they formed an online protest portal called Take Back the Memorial and were able to generate enough media coverage and public support to spur Governor Pataki into retreat on the International Freedom Centre and the Drawing Centre. Reflecting Absence, for now, lives on, albeit millions over budget and the still bane of many a political existence.
Another memorial to be bogged down in public debate was the £3 million Princess Diana Memorial Fountain. The design, allegedly built to enable inclusivity and accessibility, was a 210-metre oval water concourse where the speed of the water varied according to the carvings in the granite. Designer of the memorial, landscape artist Kathryn Gustafson, told The New York Times: “Death is hard on the living, not the dead. You want to remember the dead not for their mistakes but for what makes you smile.”
First, its christening was stalled by administrative and political bickering. Then, one month after the memorial opened, three people, including a child had slipped and were injured on the fountain’s glossy Cornish granite base. And the structure was dismissed as “a puddle” by a friend of the Princess. The public, and the family of the intended honouree, weren’t impressed.
Philip Dodd, director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, emphasizes the important relationship between architect and engineer. He told The Guardian: “What the fiasco of the fountain suggests is that old-fashioned engineering skills need to be praised because when they don’t work we end up looking foolish. Cool Britannia was all about surface and looking good, but you need to be able to walk over the bridge or in the fountain without falling over.”
Sitting in stark contrast are Bali Bombing memorials in Australia and London. A Bali Memorial Sculpture in the Australian state of New South Wales by sculptor Sasha Reid showed three four-metre high bronze figures leaning on each other. Reid said the pieces signified “hope and a celebration of the lives lost”
Australian David Byron who lost his 15 year old daughter in the attacks found immediate strength in the creation: “”It was us putting our arms around each other every day to get through,” he said. “Giving us the strength and the comfort that we need on a daily basis.” It’s construction proceeded without incident.
The UK Bali Bombing Victims Group also have enjoyed a smooth run with their permanent memorial commemorating the 28 Britons slain in the attacks. A ceremony is scheduled on 12 October this year, the fourth anniversary of the bombing in Kuta, where Prince Charles will unveil the sculpture – a marble globe with 202 carved doves. The public has been receptive, and those affected most by the events of the tragedy have raised no issue.
So what’s at work with the art of memory?
Design and architecture writer Matthew DeBord offers the following observation:”Something has definitely changed. What’s clear is that great artists don’t do monuments anymore. This is a relatively recent development.”
DeBord points to a 2003 exhibit, Augustus Saint-Gaudens: American Sculptor of the Gilded Age. “Saint-Gaudens, a great sculptor as well as a prominent citizen, gave the nation a rousing quartet of Civil War memorials: the Shaw Memorial in Boston, the Sherman Memorial and the Farragut Monument in New York and the statue of a standing Lincoln in Chicago. All four combine the vigor of American realist art during the Gilded Age with a soulful understanding of just how tragically necessary the Civil War had been. A hundred years after Saint-Gaudens’s death, this sort of passionate synthesis of national mood and artistic ambition has vanished from the scene.”
He adds: “Realism is out if the question, as that genre has become the exclusive province of Third World totalitarian dictators. Recent events in Baghdad demonstrate that, these days, a memorial that actually looks likes what it’s supposed to be memorializing stands a better-than-average chance of being torn down and dragged through the streets.”
Writes Margaret Rose Olin in The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, ” Memorials are a means by which societies unceasingly shape their pasts. They provide a focus for public commemoration of individual memories, guiding them into channels that serve changing public purposes. The channels are determined and redetermined through time in often conflicting negotiations between the authority who authorized, designed, and constructed a memorial, the groups who use it for commemorative purposes, and the memorial itself, including changes made to it or to its site.”
These complex forces are at work around Ground Zero, complicated further by the after-effects of the event (the conflict in Iraq, diminishing civil liberties in the name of protection, and so on).
Ultimately, something will be built at Ground Zero, and people will move beyond their concerns. As US history scholar Edward T. Linenthal concludes: “the most profound and mindful memorial would engage the struggle of coming to terms with the event’. “It’s not about resolving it or coming to `closure’,” he said. “It’s about enduring.”
