** A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR ** - This essay was originally published in my thesis book, Between Icon & Emotion. For the sake of simplicity in formatting this for my website I have removed the citational notes, which were extensive, as well as the accompanying images of existing works, which were also extensive. To see this essay in its entirety, as published, please send me a message through the contact tab, and I would be happy to send you a copy of my thesis.
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History and Myth
The methodology used in designing monuments must be carefully considered by artists and architects. Monuments are physical manifestations of people and events deemed by a consensus in the contemporary culture to be significant to their history. Many works of classical literature impart historical and moral lessons to the audience. When one develops a monument, in whatever medium, that person is acting as a historiographer. History, in and of itself as a presentation of facts, is not a monument. The monument is developed when a message is being conveyed by the work. History is filtered and distilled. The historiographer makes decisions of emphasis to provoke thought or emotion in their audience. With the advent of new generations, history quickly gives way to myth and the conflation of facts in coordination with the zeitgeist. Influential figures fall out of reverence and icons crumble, then are replaced with new, more “respectable” icons. The natural consequence of this is a distortion of facts in favor of a focused narrative, a historical drift. Artistry is used to create a monument which is engaging to the senses and invokes the spirit of both history and the audience. In a monument, as it is with any work of art, there is always a story, a theme, an intention, a protagonist, an antagonist, etc., all the apparatuses of narrative storytelling.
There is a distinction to make: there is no difference between history and legend relative to monuments. This is not to say the facts of history as real events and legends as a real event may be conflated, but the cultural memory with which each are embodied is the same, and their presence in culture carries the same implications of identity. Each individual embodies his or her own culture and subsequently, creates their own world. Each world is different as each individual is different and constantly being shaped by experience and broader worlds. These worlds are not unreal, as they are true and have real consequences, but many have no bearing on the broader reality. Instead, they are irreal, a manifestation of the individual. The passion and drive with which people internalize stories is what determines their reality in culture and in their worlds.
“Consider, to begin with, the statements ‘The sun always moves’ and ‘The sun never moves’ which, though equally true, are at odds with each other. Shall we say, then, that they describe different worlds, and indeed that there are as many different worlds as there are such mutually exclusive truths? Rather, we are inclined to regard the two strings of words not as complete statements with truth-values of their own but as elliptical for some such statement as ‘Under frame of reference A, the sun always moves’ and ‘Under frame of reference B, the sun never moves’ –statements that may both be true of the same world.”
Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 2
Goodman demonstrates that what is true, while not irrelevant, is subject to the “frame of reference” of the individual. Thus, though one’s frame of reference, history and legend intertwine to form cultural myth, and in many cases making distinctions between them is impossible. Often, this manifests in the development of a religion, cult, or fetish. There are many mythic figures, many of them having been based on people who were real – who lived and talked and ate – and their mythic status in culture is informed by their actions. Over time a historical drift takes effect though historiography and creates the irreal myth.
It is important to distinguish what a monument is and what it means to a society’s culture. A monument is any designed artifact that can represent a physical manifestation of culture. Structures, books, films, music, and paintings are some modes of elaboration, not of the real, but of the irreal history that acts as a representation in the zeitgeist.
Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid is an excellent example of an irreal national myth. The work, circa 25 BCE, was commissioned by Emperor Augustus of Rome as a justification of his dynasty. The Roman Republic had ended with a loud thud as Julius Caesar was assassinated and the Empire was forged in the broken aftermath. With Rome suffering heavily under the series of civil wars fought between the Caesarians and the Pompeiians and between Augustus and Mark Antony, consistency of leadership was craved by many Romans. Augustus provided this consistency, but Romans were extremely superstitious and required a tremendous amount of religious justification with regards to their civic governments. The Aeneid served to justify the Julio-Claudian dynasty, even the Punic Wars against Carthage are justified retroactively. The Aeneid is a monument to the glory of Rome and to its new protector, Emperor Augustus.
The consistency of the human experience is what unites the irreal in myth. Human society relies on the consistency of human emotion to form a cohesive culture. This consistency forms the framework around which the irreal forms. Humans rely on stories and narratives to deepen their understanding of the irreal. It is impossible for a human to understand existence in its totality. Complicit in this is a self-evident disconnection from real history due to temporal immobility. Limitations in scale, intelligence, and imagination necessitate the relationship between stories and existence. In our worlds, these stories form myths, which transform culture, which inform our irreal worlds. The analogues and mechanisms used to describe and relay stories of fiction are the same used to describe history and past. The same internal mechanisms of understanding make these fictions so powerful and, in some ways, these stories are designed to be more powerful than non-fictitious stories. Firsthand accounts of events are irreal personal narratives. Even today this is the case; many irreal histories are being written at any moment. Nevertheless, the myth tends to unite a culture’s definitions of the irreal. It is the cultural determination of truth, or at least what must be true. The story permeates and influences all. History is learned by stories, through narrative. This is not to say the themes of a narrative are consistently read in the author’s intention. Contemporary perceptions change a narrative’s themes with the understanding of competing narratives compiled over time.
Aesthetics
The relationship between icon and emotion must be carefully considered by architects and artists in their designing of monuments. An icon is a form which suggests a meaning and in the case of monuments, a meaningful form which must serve to orient the visitor towards history in a sort of critical temporalism. It is an aesthetic dictation of historical meaning. The icon must not overwhelm or overly aestheticize the monument, though it should be aesthetically attractive, as emotion must be clearly conveyed by aesthetic elements such as tectonics, light, sound, material, spatial orientation, and atmosphere. To understand how utilize an icon effectively, one must understand the sublime.
In Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, he makes the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. Kant supposes that beauty lies in the aesthetic pleasure derived from the form of an object, whereas the sublime is formless and boundless. The sublime is a concept and emotion not attached to any icon or form, but to “an indeterminate concept of reason.” Kant describes this realization in terms of magnitude primarily. Kant describes the sublime as an internal emotional reaction than an external relationship to something aesthetically pleasing.The sublime inspires awe in its boundlessness and greatness. It is so boundless and intense in its magnitude it becomes ineffable to comprehension. It is the aesthetic transcending the power of human understanding.In this transcendence, sublimity becomes something to be feared, but not to be fearful of, as it has no dominion over humans. Kant describes it has having a “negative pleasure.”
A monument must relate to this idea of sublimity through magnitude. One need not make a large monument to convey ideas of magnitude, however there must be a significant icon that orients to the event the monument seeks to narrate. This icon will demonstrate the magnitude necessary for the monument to achieve sublimity. Without this orienting icon, there will be a lack of “negative pleasure” as the necessary referent is absent. The monument balances iconic meaning with the atmosphere of a space. The relationship between an iconic referent and the atmosphere of the monument is the critical point of any monument, especially as they relate to works of architecture.
Atmosphere is non-representational and so, not created by proper understanding of historical iconography and semiotics, but by the thoughtful making of spaces using the aesthetic elements outlined in the first paragraph of this section. These elements form a work of architecture and allow it to be an emotionally resonant work.
Zumthor discusses atmosphere as the totality of combined elements coming together to create an environment. This extends beyond form and includes sound and smells, something architecture rarely considers in schematic design aside form noise reduction and preventing decay due to natural elements penetrating the building. Using spatial elements, architects construct non-spatial elements. This is not as difficult as it might seem, as all sensory perceptions exist within spatial reality. Architects are responsible for focusing these perceptions to creates an atmosphere in the architecture of a monument in line with historiographic intentions. This is becoming more complex than ever as society moves into the post-modern era.
The creation of a monument necessitates the creation of a new irreal world. Great care must be taken to avoid falling into the sand-pit of representation that is Jean Baudrillard’s precession of simulacra. All monuments are simulations of reality; this is unavoidable. It is important not to stumble into the lower degrees of representation as described by Baudrillard:
“Representation stems from the physical equivalence of the sign and the real (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, of the contrary, stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelopes the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.
Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.”
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 6
As Baudrillard makes clear, the simulacrum is the copy without an original; it is the origin of mythic distortion in the post-modern era. This is as true in architecture as it is in any other form of representation. It is tempting to use exact replicas of architectural structures contemporary to the period or event in question. However, this is a trap that will only generate a simulacrum. Louis Kahn stated as much in his essay on monumentality in 1944. It was his belief that the worlds of contemporary architects can never match the worlds of the builders of great historical works of architecture. The icon must be transformed in some way to create an effective atmosphere; it cannot be a one-to-one transition throughout time. The historiographic work must be present in the architecture of the monument.
Application in Political Aesthetics
To better understand Baudrillard’s precession of simulacra as it relates to design, one can examine the monuments of the 20th century philosophies: socialism; capitalism; and fascism.
The style of art expressed in Soviet monuments is often called socialist realism. These monuments are the archetypal Soviet era propagandistic sculptures and art that served as monuments to the power of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They typically depict workers, farmers, miners, etc., in heroic and resplendent poses. They demonstrate the glory of the worker in his post and the narrative is clear: the greatest thing you can do is produce, and contribute that production to the group for the glory of the proletariat. One motivation of these monuments was to obfuscate the failures of the ideology they espoused. Bread lines, failing production, low wages, etc. were masked in the art of socialist realism. The art is remarkably anonymous. In almost every example of monumental socialist realism there are two figures, one to represent men and one to represent women. With that anonymity comes a lack of specificity; the figures depicted are meant to be the common worker. They could be anyone in the Union who worked under the ideology of socialism. This is the second degree in Baudrillard’s precession of simulacra: the simulation that masks and denatures a profound reality.
Contrasting the socialist to the capitalist, building an architectural ‘monument’ to capitalism would be counterintuitive, redundant, and pointless. Capital exists as the monument to capitalism. Disneyland6 is the often-used example when discussing signs in capitalistic cultures. Baudrillard considered it to be “a perfect model of all entangled orders of simulacra”. Disneyland is a place which markets itself as being of the imaginary, of the unreal. As a capitalistic institution, it sells a commodity, but remarkably the commodity it sells is imagination. Disneyland is the commodification of the imaginary through the aesthetic. The natural state of affairs in a capitalistic culture is ceaseless commodification. The success of Disneyland’s sale depends on the aestheticization of something which does not exist. What’s more is that it accomplishes this. It makes the imaginary the “real,” and this leaves no place for the real. This is Baudrillard’s third order of simulation, masking the absence of a profound reality. However, the effects of Disneyland go further.
"Disneyland is presented as reality to make us believe everything else is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and the order of simulation."
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 12
This aggregation of worlds creates the atmosphere of Disneyland, the icon that it is focused through is nonexistent. Disneyland is a monument without an icon. It barricades itself in its aesthetics and expands endlessly to stave off the inevitable suffocation of the anaesthetization of imagination that will bring only an atmosphere of boredom and familiarity. Sublimity – which would prevent this – is absent in Disneyland. Because of this, Disneyland becomes a ‘prop’ to the hyperreal order.
With the advent of Nazism in 1930’s Germany came a series of rallies held in Nuremburg at a zeppelin field. Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments and dedicated architect of the Nazi regime, created the Cathedral of Light using flak lights aimed up into the sky to simulate gigantic luminous columns. This ephemeral construct was meant to convey to the German people the triumph of their nation and to glorify order, martial thinking, and war. The icon utilizes sublime monumentality to invoke the sublimity of war. It is the anesthetization of war and the anaesthetization of it effects. It is undoubtedly effective at conveying its message. The Cathedral of Light creates fanaticism through this anaesthetization of politics.
The benefit of living in the future is a scoreboard, and the Nazi’s Reich, which was ‘destined’ to last a thousand years, fell after only twelve. With this historical scoreboard, we are able to look back on the Cathedral of Light as a hollow icon of fascism. The themes shift. We do not lose focus of the original theme, but our understanding is expanded with the awareness of other narratives. For the people of Germany in the 1930’s, Speer’s vision simulated the reality that fascist ideology demanded and German citizens swiftly found it to be their reality. Signs began to dictate reality. The signs of Nazi Germany still carry impact, though that impact has shifted away from declaring the self-evident glory of a “master race” to declaring the self-evident horror of what a group of people did for the twelve years they held fasces over their corner of the world.
The rise of the fascists in Germany demonstrates how images which reflect the absence of a profound reality can lead to the images becoming their own reality. In many ways the emergence of Nazi Germany was the emergence of simulacra, and it took a war to reverse the process and break it. Violence, which was anaesthetized by the simulation of war in the Cathedral of Light, came to destroy the ideology it stood for. Violent delights have violent ends.
These three political orders – communism, capitalism, and fascism – are systems meant to negotiate the rise of the proletariat masses in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. Their monuments and their messages are directed at the lower classes and meant to prescribe their proper relationship with the upper classes. For instance, the fascists say, “you will demonstrate your inherent glory if you fight for us”; the capitalists say, “you will be great if you buy this from us”; and the communists say, “we are made great though your contributions and you should continue to make them”. These are all proclamations aimed at citizens of a culture to manipulate their position within society. These are the simulations of image to be avoided in monuments. Thoughtless aestheticization leads, inevitably, to the anesthetization of history. What is critical in monuments is not the imparting of the tenets of an ideology, but in the understanding of one. This may include the tenets, but care must be takes as to not aestheticize them without the proper temporally orienting iconography and emotionally orienting atmosphere. The cultural benefit of monuments is the facilitation of cultural identity, but the personal benefit is the facilitation of cultural understanding. Through monuments the irreal can be comprehended. Thus, the worlds humans create can be understood or challenged, and this is the ultimate purpose of a monument.
Monuments in the Post-Modern Era
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (designed by Maya Lin in 1982) is, no doubt, the closest we have ever come to achieving a synthesis of icon and emotion in a way that the icon serves to impact emotion without commodifying it. The form of the monument, located in Washington, DC, is deceptively simple. A bent black retaining wall of highly polished granite cuts into a pristine green field. A pathway slopes down, paralleling the wall toward the crease at the deepest point, and slopes up again along the other half of the folded abutment. The black, paneled face of the wall is inscribed with the names of those who died in the war. The icon of a grave marker is invoked by the walls, as well as the idea of burying the dead and the idea of a scar. The living are brought down into the ground to align with the dead, separated only by their names and black granite. The names serve not only as a focal point of the individual casualty, but as a quantifying and orienting image to the Vietnam War. Just by the inclusion of names, visitors can understand the scale and magnitude of the war.
The wall is highly interactive and the whole monument requires tactile interaction. It is a place where people reference both a relationship to the war and to the dead. It is not about understanding what the people involved in the war, both domestically and abroad, did and felt. In such an event, any consistency of experience is a phantasm. Of the soldiers in Vietnam during the war, only one in five saw combat action. The direct experience of the Vietnam War was so wide ranging that any attempt to portray it as a cohesive single image would be disingenuous. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial manages to deepen an understanding of history without aestheticizing war. Aesthetic elements are included, but at no point do they overtake the icon. The Vietnam Memorial is a statement of one simple fact: these are the names of the people that won’t be coming back. It gives us ownership of this fact through the historiographic artistry and we are left to do with it what we will. Decisions made beyond this are decisions that relate directly to how the visitor experiences the monument.
This is what make the addition of the Three Soldiers (or Three Servicemen) by Frederick Hart such an artistic assault. When Maya Lin’s monument won the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, there was a reactionary panic, which led to the commission of Hart’s sculpture. The reactionaries had little faith that Lin’s design to honor the veterans of the war fulfilled the conventional expectations of a memorial. Secretary of the Interior James Watt was prompted to issue an ultimatum to the design which included changing the black walls to white and positioning a statue of a wounded soldier with a flag in a central position of the wall. The US Commission of Fine Arts, which had final approval of the design of the memorial, implemented a compromise. The wall would maintain its original design, but the statue and flag would be added nearby.
Three male figures of different ethnic backgrounds, cast in bronze and larger than life-size, stare toward the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial. This addition is the epitome of an aestheticization of history in a monument. You have three figures of men, “heroic-size”, one being a composite image of three men. Clearly, the icon of the soldiers does not achieve the sublimity required by a monumental icon. In no way does this sculpture deepen any understanding of history or of the Vietnam War, or of the essential human condition.
Peter Zumthor’s Steilneset Memorial is dedicated to the people accused in the Vardø Witch Trials. 91 people were burned at the stake under the accusations of practicing witchcraft in 1621 in Vardø, Norway. The monument has two unequal parts, a large-scale building designed in its entirety by Peter Zumthor, and a sculpture by the late Louise Bourgeois. The building is composed of a long walkway suspended inside a wooden frame similar to a traditional, local fish drying racks or “hjell.” A long ramp leads up into the interior of the form which is dimly lit — the only light coming from 91 small square windows and 91 tiny light bulbs, meant to represent the 91 people executed. The atmosphere of the interior is a heavy presence; the hallway is ribbed in such a way that it seems to stretch on forever. It is dark, and the focus of the viewer becomes the lights, those who stood accused. Information on the victims is displayed through the hall. It is instantly an environment which elicits an emotional response. This is Zumthor’s understanding of atmosphere:
“We perceive atmosphere through our emotional sensibilities – a form of perception that works incredibly quickly, and which we humans evidently need to help us survive. Not every situation grants us time to make up our minds on whether or not we like something or whether indeed we might be better heading in the opposite direction. Something inside us tells us an enormous amount straight away. We are capable of immediate appreciation, of a spontaneous emotional response, of rejecting things in a flash.”
Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres, 13
Juxtaposing Zumthor’s atmospheric building is the memorial designed by Louise Bourgeois.16 A chair with fire coming out of the seat sits in the center of a concrete pit surrounded by circular mirrors which are aimed at the chair. This is an icon which overwhelms the themes to the point of commodification. When creating a literal “hot seat”, the themes of intimidation, paranoia, distrust, and persecution become smothered by the aesthetic symbol. This is the icon supplanting the real.
Similar to the Lin and Zumthor memorials, the Jewish Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind demonstrates a critical awareness of these issues. It steers away from the conventional symbolism of the holocaust and instead, creates architectural icons from the well-known icons of the holocaust in a way which stresses volume and material to drive the body to feel. The sublimity of spaces such as the Holocaust Tower are spaces meant to stress the physical, and the atmosphere can be felt in the bodies of visitors. It emphasizes verticality and is irregular in its plans and dimensions. Darkness is used effectively with the acoustical properties of the space to create an atmosphere of fear. The use of atmosphere drives the historiographic narrative though the zig-zagging form of the building. This is not an escape from the iconic, but an effective use of a deconstructed iconography to orient the visitor temporally and to create an atmosphere which imparts an emotion critical to the understanding of the Holocaust: terror.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, designed by Peter Eisenman, is an extremely aesthetic monument. The monument is composed of 2711 rectangular concrete stelae organized in an imprecise grid along an undulating ground plane. The use of icon is apparent in these repeated concrete masses. They serve as the iconic referent to graves. However, the urban environment and the advent of social media have enticed many young people to use the Memorial to the Murdered Jews as a backdrop to smiling carefree pictures. This dissonance has led to the development of “Yolocaust”, satirical images in which these images of people are cropped from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews and superimposed onto actual images of the Holocaust. What creates this dissonance?
Many monuments are aesthetically beautiful, but it’s rare to see this level of disconnection between the visitors and the monument’s intended emotional response. Likely, the dissonance is injected via the abstractions of the graves. These icons orient towards death, but not towards any specific instance of death, nor do they orient the visitor temporally towards the Holocaust. As previously mentioned, the icon must serve to orient towards history and this is not achieved in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews.
Moreover, the atmosphere of the monument is in contention with the message the historiography intended to present. The urban context and the lack of hierarchy or axial movement in the circulation of the monument means that movement is entirely democratic. There is no intended point of entry, there is no direction of promenade as there is in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is not a graveyard as one typically understands it. Graveyards and cemeteries have pronounced entrances and boundaries, they have information about the people buried there which proves that there are people buried there. The graves are occupied. In Maya Lin’s monument the burial reference succeeds because the connection to the dead is fully established by the inclusion of names. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe does not utilize the iconography of a grave in an effective manner which orients the viewer temporally towards the Holocaust. It does not create an atmosphere in line with the historiographic intentions a monument to the victims of the Holocaust requires. Instead, it is an aesthetic reference to death via the stelae, elements which have many other associations throughout history other than death. It is the anaesthetization of the Holocaust through aestheticization and the beginning of commodification.
Theodor Adorno writes in his essay “Cultural Criticism and Society” that “[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” This is to say that representations of the Holocaust should not “mystify and mythologize” the actual events. Adorno dreaded Baudrillard’s fourth order of image, the simulacrum, in which a constant reproduction of images eventually anesthetizes and cheapens the real. What Adorno does not reference is the natural tendency to mythologize history through historiography. The Holocaust, along with every other moment in history, has been elevated to the cultural power and significance of a revered legend. Part of this is due to the sheer unfathomability of the event, and part due to the fetishization of Holocaust study.
The importance of remembrance cannot be understated. However a remembrance through singularly aesthetic means is the first step to the commodification of history and tragedy. The question hanging like the sword of Damocles over every monument designer’s head is: How does one represent a traumatic image without romanticizing, anaesthetizing, or commodifying the event?