these outlets and their costs are today. Indeed, the monument itself so much as it is to our new age, and heterogeneous societies become, it seems, the Part of our contemporary culture’s hunger for
the forms this demand for the monumental now “which has not merely abandoned a great many stronger their need to unify wholly disparate expe- the monumental, I believe, is its nostalgia for the
takes, and to what self-abnegating ends, throw the historic symbols, but has likewise made an effort to riences and memories with the common meaning universal values and ethos by which it once knew
presumptive link between monuments and memory deflate the symbol itself by denying the values which seemingly created in common spaces. But rather itself as a unified culture. But this reminds us of
into fascinating relief. it represents . . .” (Mumford, 179). In an age that than presuming that a common set of ideals under- that quality of monuments that strikes the modern
denies universal values, he found, there can also be pins its form, the contemporary monument attempts sensibility as so archaic, even somewhat quaint:
no universal symbols, the kind that monuments once to assign a singular architectonic form to unify dis- the imposition of a single cultural icon or symbol
represented. Or as put even more succinctly by Sert, parate and competing memories. In the absence of onto a host of disparate and competing experiences,
Leger, and Giedion in their revelatory 1943 essay, shared beliefs or common interests, memorial-art in as a way to impose common meaning and value
“Nine Points on Monumentality,” “Monuments public spaces asks an otherwise fragmented populace on disparate memories–all for the good of a
are, therefore, only possible in periods in which a to frame diverse pasts and experiences in common commonwealth. When it was done high-handedly
unifying consciousness and unifying culture exist” spaces. By creating common spaces for memory, by government regimes, and gigantic monuments
(Sert, Giedion, 48). monuments propagate the illusion of common mem- were commissioned to represent gigantic self-
ory. Public monuments, national days of commem- idealizations, there was often little protest. The
Where the ancients used monumentality to express oration, and shared calendars thus all work to create masses had, in fact, grown accustomed to being
the absolute faith they had in the common ideals common loci around which seemingly common subjugated by governmental monumentality,
and values that bound them together, however, the national identity is forged. dwarfed and defeated by a regime’s over-weaning
By creating common
spaces for memory,
monuments propagate
the illusion of common
memory. Public
monuments, national
days of commemoration,
and shared calendars
thus all work to create
common loci around
which seemingly
common national
identity is forged.
moderns (from the early 19th century onward) have
replicated only the rhetoric of monumentality, in
the words of Giedion, “to compensate for their own
lack of expressive force.” “In this way,” according
to Giedion, “the great monumental heritages of
mankind became poisonous to everybody who
touched them” (Giedion, 25). For those in the
modern age who insist on such forms, the result
can only be a “psuedomonumentality,” what
Giedion called the use of “routine shapes from
Here I would like to explore the ways both the bygone periods . . . [But] because they had lost their
monument and our approach to it have evolved over inner significance they had become devaluated;
the last 80 years or so, the ways the monument mere cliches without emotional justification”
itself has been reformulated in its function as (25). To some extent, we might even see such
memorial, forced to confront its own limitations as psuedomonumentality as a sign of modern longing
a contemporary aesthetic response to recent past for common values and ideals.
events such as the September 11th attacks and more
distant past events such as the Holocaust. In this Ironically, in fact, these same good reasons for
somew hat contrary approach to the monument, I try the modern skepticism of the monument may also
to show what monuments do by what they cannot begin to explain the monument’s surprising revival
do. Here I examine how the need for a unified vision in late modern, or so-called postmodern societies.
of the past as found in the traditional monument Because these societies often perceive themselves
necessarily collides with the modern conviction that as no longer bound together by universally shared
neither the past nor its meanings are ever just one myths or ideals, monuments extolling such universal
thing. values are derided as anachronistic at best, reductive
mythifications of history, at worst. How to explain,
The real problem with monumentality, Lewis then, the monument and museums boom of the late
Mumford once suggested, may not be intrinsic to 20th and early 21st centuries? The more fragmented
Observing Memories
ISSUE 1
14
sense of itself and its importance, made to feel
In an increasingly
democratic age, in which
the stories of nations
are being told in the
multiple voices of its
everyday historians–i.e.,
its individual citizens–
monolithic meaning and
national narratives are as
difficult to pin down as
they may be nostalgically
longed for. The result
has been a shift away
from the notion of a
national “collective
memory” to what I
would call a nation’s
“collected memory.”
Observing Memories
ISSUE 1
insignificant by an entire nation’s reason for
being. But in an increasingly democratic age, in
which the stories of nations are being told in the
multiple voices of its everyday historians–i.e.,
its individual citizens–monolithic meaning and
national narratives are as difficult to pin down as
they may be nostalgically longed for. The result
has been a shift away from the notion of a national
“collective memory” to what I would call a nation’s
“collected memory.” Here we recognize that we
never really shared each other’s actual memory
of past or even recent events, but that in sharing
common spaces in which we collect our disparate
and competing memories, we find common (perhaps
even a national) understanding of widely disparate
experiences and our very reasons for recalling them.
This relatively newfound sense of public ownership
of national memory, that this memory may actually
be ours somehow and not on vicarious loan to us for
the sake of common identity, has been embraced
by a new generation of memorial-makers who
also harbor a deep distrust for traditionally static
forms of the monument, which in their eyes have
been wholly discredited by their consort with the
last century’s most egregiously dictatorial regimes.
Seventy years after the defeat of the Nazi regime,
15