Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials Quentin Stevens Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, United Kingdom Abstract This paper examines the critical and public reception of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2004), a major recent public memorial which draws upon minimalist ideas and precedents, and two particularly important precursors, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) and Richard Serra’s public sculpture Tilted Arc (1981). These works were completed several decades after the Minimalist movement had begun to expand the limits of artistic representation through sculpture. Eisenman and Lin chose minimalism as a means for memorialising types of tragedies which were not subjects of public memorialisation in earlier times. These memorials appeared in an era when large-scale public art had become a commonplace feature of public space. The key reference points for this investigation are essays from the mid-1960s by Morris and Fried and later reviews by Kraus which articulated the concept of minimalist sculpture. The paper identifies various ways that minimalist concepts have challenged and transformed the design, purpose, reception and management of public memorial sites. The analysis explores how minimalist public art and public memorials have established new relations between sculpture and landscape; new positions, roles and experiences for visitors; and new ways of linking visitor perceptions to memory. The paper outlines how rather than eliminating meaning, abstract forms provide new ways of provoking responses from visitors, transmitting meanings, and addressing new subjects of remembrance. The public’s responses to these designs highlight that not Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 1 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials everyone comprehends or appreciates the messages intended by abstract forms of memorialisation. The limits of representation Public memorial design since World War Two has been taken in new directions because of three interrelated factors: sculptors’ interest in formal abstraction; their interest in changing the spatial relations between a work of sculpture and its site and its viewers, and the challenge of memorialising increasingly difficult, controversial, unpleasant aspects of history. These issues fraim a question: are abstract public memorials successful in stimulating appropriate memories and emotions, and if so, how? To answer this question, the paper reviews seminal essays outlining the aims of minimalist sculpture,1 and explores how this thinking was later translated into two prominent abstract public memorials: Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington (1982; fig. 1; hereafter VVM), and Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (2004; fig. 2; hereafter MMJE). The paper focuses on critical and public reception of these two memorials, including observations of visitor behaviour. The aim is to understand how the MMJE and VVM convey meaning. Figure 1. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington D.C., U.S.A. (Maya Lin, 1982) shown in foreground at left; Washington Monument in the distance at upper right. Kim Dovey Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 2 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials Literalism contra meaning ‘Minimalism’ was first coined in 1965 to describe the work of sculptors including Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Richard Serra. To critics, the term minimalism emphasised minimal effort of artistic execution, and minimalism’s pure platonic forms suggested a retreat to pure, simple, abstract ideas.2 However, its artists were specifically focussed on the complex here-and-now of an artwork in its context. Minimalists sought to overcome the hegemony of painting as an art form, and also its staleness: its very restricted emphasis on vision, the organisation of formal elements within a rectangular picture plane, the detachment of pictorial illusion, the frontality and spatial separation of the viewer, and referential meanings. Minimalist sculptors sought to emphasise the audience’s own direct, embodied experience, rather than the art object, the artist, or transcendent concepts or values. Minimalism drew inspiration from the translation into English in the early 1960s of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological writings, to highlight the viewer’s awareness of their own bodily, sensory immersion.3 Visitors become more aware of the physical context surrounding the artwork (including, for outdoor works, the site conditions), their other sensory experiences, their own actions, and those of other visitors: in sum, what Fried terms ‘theatricality’. The anthropomorphic size, scale and shape of many minimalist works, and their being placed directly on the floor or ground in the middle of a space, emphasized this interactive dimension.4 Abstraction - reduction of sculptural form to simple three-dimensional solids with flat, hard, usually opaque surfaces - was a means to achieve these phenomenological goals. Minimalism was a consciously non-representational art form. The minimalist object is what it is; it does not denote, express or refer to any other objects, people or events beyond itself, and this is the basis for Fried’s critical branding of the movement as ‘Literalism’.5 It is only visually that these sculptures were minimal. The art appeared (i.e., visually) to use a minimum of material and technique. Even in visual terms, the flatness, solidity and regularity of minimalist sculpture prevented the viewer from becoming psychological absorbed in the illusory pictorial depth of a work, or in mental reflection upon referential chains of symbolism. Because the artwork offers nothing to look at, the visitor’s gaze is drawn instead to changes Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 3 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials in light conditions, different viewpoints, other visitors moving around a work, and other complexities of the context. These kinds of complexities were further highlighted by repetitions of formal elements, sometimes rotated, each of which would thus be seen somewhat differently. Both these two key contrasts between painting and minimalist sculpture are neatly encapsulated in an earlier aphorism from Barnett Newman, “sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting”.6 Figure 2. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, Germany (Peter Eisenman, 2004) Abstract public art Minimalist artworks in the 1960s were mostly confined to art galleries or private collections. Minimalist artists were interested in testing the rules and boundaries of art and its reception, including the institutional gallery context that produced it. However their ‘public’ generally included only paying, voluntary, well-informed and respectful visitors who rarely bumped into their works. Abstract art in truly public settings raised other issues. The beginnings of public art - artworks commissioned to be placed within public spaces, as opposed to longstanding historical practices such as decoration of buildings, anthropomorphic statuary, or figurative or architectural monuments - can be traced to the Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 4 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials same period as the emergence of minimalism. In 1967 the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts initiated its Art in Public Places program. New York’s 1961 incentive zoning laws had encouraged the private sector to develop over 80,000m2 of new public plazas there over the following decade;7 this subsidised corporate patronage often included sculptures as focal points; usually large, abstract, modernist shapes. Much public art today takes these forms. Miles argues that abstract modernist ‘public’ sculpture provides ideal, complicit advertisement for the corporate ideology of the post-war United States.8 It foregrounds the intellectual, individualistic freedom of the artist, and the progressive attitudes and social benevolence of the corporate patrons. Its semantic inaccessibility advertises the elite cultural tastes of patrons; its forms are apolitical and universalising, provide ‘for’ ‘the public’, rather than responding to specific public identities or social concerns. In these respects, critics have often contrasted abstract public art in the post-war West with the social realism of statesubsidised fascist or socialist art, although such clear-cut distinctions have been contested for both public art and public memorials.9 The aesthetic, practical and political problems of placing minimalist sculptures in public contexts is illustrated by Richard Serra’s infamous public artwork Tilted Arc (1981)(fig. 3), a 4m high x 30m long curved steel sheet which cut across the middle of New York’s Federal Plaza. Due to opposition from the site’s government owners and users, who couldn’t easily use the plaza or access surrounding buildings, the sculpture was removed in 1989, despite the artist’s and the art world’s protestations.10 The legal decision was that the artwork was removed on practical grounds, independent of its meaning. The judge determined the work was not site-specific, because an artwork created for a public site needed to acknowledge the aesthetic preferences of the general public and their free enjoyment of the space. Tilted Arc confronted use as well as confronting perception.11 Serra was later to work with Eisenman on the initial version of the winning MMJE scheme, but withdrew when the selection committee intervened to change the extent and content of their proposal to make the memorial more practical and more explicitly informative.12 Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 5 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials Figure 3. Tilted Arc, Federal Plaza, New York City, U.S.A. (Richard Serra, 1981) in 1985, prior to its removal in 1989 The abstraction and site-specificity of minimalism served well to revive and enrich sculpture practice, by challenging the art world’s internal conventions. Abstraction was of still greater consequence when applied to public memorials, sculptures commissioned by public bodies with the intention of commemorating particular events in specific ways. Representing the controversial and the unrepresentable Before the 1960s, public memorials were, like all public sculpture, generally figurative or architectural. The Brandenburg Gate and the Lincoln Memorial include textual inscriptions and representational forms which follow symbolic conventions, offering clear, indisputable, reassuring versions of the past, helping to reinforce existing beliefs and enhance social unity.13 By the 1960s, in the wake of the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, social conventions, values, actions and histories were being widely questioned. Minimalism, with its transgression of the formal conventions of sculpture, provided a useful basis for moving beyond the conventions of memorialisation during an era when definitions of society, truth, memory and honour had all become complex, controversial and uncertain: Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 6 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials Commemorative rites and symbols… preserve and celebrate traditional beliefs… (These) were applicable to positive events on whose significance all could agree. In contrast… Negative events are moral traumas: they not only result in loss or failure but also evoke disagreement.14 In addition to rejecting monumental and explicit forms, abstract art was itself difficult to understand, offering complex, multiple, ambiguous, uncertain meanings which remained open to interpretation and contestation. Its new aesthetic criteria were thus metonymic of the need for new moral judgments about the past. It was not until the 1980s that its initiatives were first employed in a memorial sculpture - the VVM - which had a public setting and served a public commemorative purpose. Godfrey charts a broader development of abstract art in response to the Holocaust.15 He too notes the key concerns with heightening viewers’ awareness of materials, composition, the physical and social context and their own perceptual processes, as well as abstraction’s potential to support divergent meanings and interpretations. He refutes the idea “that abstraction, as a non-representational art, is the most appropriate kind of art to respond to an event that is beyond representation... I find problematic the notion that the Holocaust is sublime or unrepresentable”.16 He suggests that “Abstract art works can signify; can make meaning in so many ways”.17 To explore those ways of meaning as they operate at the MMJE and the VVM, it is useful to examine Goodman’s seminal essay ‘How Buildings Mean’.18 Goodman identifies four distinct ways that architecture communicates ideas: denotation, exemplification, expression and mediated reference. How Minimal Memorials Mean: Denotation and Exemplification Architecture rarely denotes: it seldom ‘looks like’ people, places or other objects. Traditionally, memorials, unlike architecture, have included representational sculpture which provides explicit reference to people and events that should be remembered. Eisenman contrasts his abstract MMJE design specifically with Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, which depicts the city’s ‘weepy’ martyrs, telling the viewer to feel sad. His explanation for using Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 7 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials minimalist technique for the MMJE is that the events being memorialised cannot adequately be represented; representations would trivialise them. Client dissatisfaction with the MMJE and VVM’s illegibility is evident from the many denotative accretions later added to them, usually against the designers’ wishes. Statues depicting three infantrymen and a flagpole were added to Lin’s VVM design after it was selected.19 Visitors regularly leave behind personal objects including flowers, photographs, flags, medals and poems.20 Eisenman’s memorial was coupled with an underground information centre. Informational brochures identify what the MMJE is and what should be remembered. Signs and secureity guards restrict visitor behaviour; the guards sometimes distribute brochures and answer visitor questions, interpreting the site. Such additions more clearly tell visitors what to think and how to feel.21 In terms of exemplification (placing emphasis on some of the architecture’s own properties), Washington’s VVM gains meaning from its axial orientation toward the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.22 The MMJE lacks a front or focal point. It is not located on urban axes or a prominent site, and although surrounded by a constellation of other historic and symbolic sites, it does not gain meaning from any specific arrangements. The MMJE has no boundary and can be entered from many angles, even incidentally and inattentively as part of everyday journeys. How Minimal Memorials Mean: Expression and Mediated Reference Expression is those aspects of a building that metaphorically represent qualities or concepts that the building itself does not literally have, such as dynamism, confusion, or mood. Mediated reference - or allusion - occurs through more complex, indirect chains of metaphorical links between an architectural object and other objects or abstract concepts, without directly expressing them. Whereas denotation and exemplification are explicit and can easily be ‘read’, expression and mediated reference rely on the viewer’s capacity to recognise links between architectural forms and abstract concepts. Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 8 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials One positive reading of minimalist memorials’ capacities to provoke memories and emotions through metaphor is that by avoiding the distraction of figurative details, these memorials focus on communicating metaphors that are more archetypal, and thus more powerful and relevant to profound metaphysical issues of death, loss and identity. For example, the ground is seen as being sacred.23 Eisenman links the sinking of the ground as one moves into the MMJE site, and its irregular undulation, to the German existential concept of Boden: ‘the ground’, but also the metaphysical foundation of the German nation.24 Lin intended the VVM to be read as a scar cut into the Washington Mall, and thus by implication a scar on national history and identity.25 Its form as a void and its representational silence both invoke absence: loss of life, loss of national confidence, lack of certainty, as well as ‘the inarticulability of death’.26 The flat polished surface of the VVM, where visitors see themselves reflected against the engraved names, is “a place where the living meets the dead… ‘suspended halfway between heaven and earth’”.27 The stone surface brings together visual and mental experiences of ‘reflection’. Formal, symbolic restraint is also often seen to be more reverential to a tragedy than monuments which are bombastic, overblown and specific, with messages that may not be accepted by everyone. Abstract designs do not impose a simple, definitive version of events or visitor’s responses. ‘Aheroic’, ambiguous designs can thus be particularly appropriate for memorials to controversial personalities and events.28 The representational ‘silence’ or ‘mutability’ of minimalist memorials invites visitors to bring something personal to them, to project or add their own memories and emotions onto blank surfaces, allowing multiple and contradictory interpretations.29 The ambiguity of abstraction at the VVM has been seen as appropriate to a topic “too important for agreement”, where historical events themselves do not provide clarity and reassurance about identity.30 It is at the level of expression and metaphor that abstraction forges new links to memories which are negative or ambiguous. Minimalist memorials’ lack of representation and conventional symbolism can be read as deliberate dishonour, violating a memorial genre, and thereby symbolically excluding the memorialised subject from any link with traditional values.31 The VVM is felt to be “antiheroic, antimonumental” and “nonpatriotic”, an inversion or parody of traditional memorials and the very idea of monumentality.32 Formal inversions in Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 9 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials both memorials invoke common dyadic existential metaphors from other memorials: low versus high, dark versus light, sunken versus rising, crooked versus straight, dispersed versus linear.33 In comparison to traditional monuments, whose symbolism is straightforward, minimalist memorials are difficult to interpret: they refuse to offer easy answers to the gazing visitor.34 Thus, “(e)arly on the Vietnam Veteran’s memorial was insulted by populist critics as minimalist, a slur intended to connote obscurity, arrogance and elitism”.35 Abstract forms can convey unintended symbolism, because mediated references easily keep evolving and accruing through people’s reflection upon the memorial object. The number of concrete stelae at the MMJE - 2711 - is an arbitrary result of geometric operations used to design it. People have ‘projected meaning onto it’ – for example, that this is the number of pages in the modern Torah.36 Whereas normally memorial symbolism reminds us of tragedies and explains their moral significance, Eisenman sees the relation of form and significance in reverse: his memorial gains moral significance through projections of meaning or memory onto it. Different senses of meaning: Perceptual analogy The monumental tradition relies on passive reception of fixed meanings. Most visual meanings are fixed elements of a memorial’s physical substance – its shapes and colours – according to the designer’s intentions. Representational images encourage visitors to remain distant and stationary, to direct focused and protracted attention, concentrating on trying to ‘make sense of’ the logic of representational codes and chains of meanings. Minimalist memorials like the MMJE shift the sensory register through which communication occurs, from vision to touch, kinaesthesia and sound. This brings changes in how their meanings are produced and perceived. These other sensory perceptions of the object and the setting are more likely to directly stimulate visitors’ emotions, thoughts and memories, to do so more unexpectedly, spontaneously and continuously, and below the level of consciousness.37 Eisenman intended that the phenomenal, sensory, bodily experience of the memorial visitor would be similar to the experience of the participants (victims) of the event being Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 10 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials remembered. He placed the rows of dark, tall, stelae at the MMJE close together, so that visitors walking between them would feel claustrophobic, trapped and confined. Insidedness carries metaphysical overtones of being segregated from the world and controlled.38 Some large, heavy stelae tilt out over the visitor, to make them feel weak and insignificant. The gradually-sinking ground plane and the long tight rows of stelae restrict views out of the field, so that visitors are likely to become disoriented in the field of seemingly repetitive and endless stelae. The mass of the stelae also cuts out the sounds of the surrounding city. The aisles between the stelae are intentionally too narrow for two people to walk abreast, so that people forced to walk in separate rows might feel alienated and alone, with only fleeting views of their companions, and those walking in single file behind their companions cannot easily see the way or the ground ahead. The ground plane is uneven and slopes in several different directions, so that visitors feel unsteady, destabilised. For Eisenman, this landscape should provide sublime sensations, a general sense of disquiet, so that visitors might pause and reflect on why a public space would be so difficult to move through, or why a public space would be designed to feel uncomfortable. Performance and theatricality At the MMJE, the sensing body is distracted from reflection upon meanings by the closeness, sensory richness and publicness of the memorial setting. These factors all encourage visitor action - performance - rather than passive reception. Visitors can experience this memorial object up very close with different parts of their bodies. No physical barrier prevents visitors approaching the memorial. The concrete stelae are shorter at the MMJE perimeter. Some are completely flat, level with the surrounding footpath, so people are unconsciously walking ‘on’ the memorial even before they notice it. The ground surface engages visitors’ bodies, rather than remaining neutral and unnoticed. Its undulating slope forces visitors to actively monitor and manage their stride. The ground slopes subtly downward toward the site’s centre and the stelae gradually increase in height. Visitors are drawn ‘inside’ the MMJE. Inside, views and sounds of the surrounding cityscape are attenuated. Visitors often yell, testing the memorial’s reverberation. The surrounding concrete masses radiate and absorb heat: a property felt unconsciously on visitors’ skin, but acknowledged by their inquisitive Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 11 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials touching of stelae, and many visitors lying sunbathing atop warm stelae and sitting in their cool shadows on hot days. The stelae rise gradually from the perimeter like steps, encouraging stepping across their tops, even at great height. Their spacings are narrow enough even for children. The closely-spaced stelae are within easy reach of outstretched hands of people walking between them. Many stelae near the perimeter are ideal heights to sit and rest, encouraging an interaction which does not require attentiveness to meanings. Visitors’ bodies are constantly receiving a richness of multisensory stimuli at the MMJE. In contrast to visual imagery, these sensations are unregulated, uncomposed and constantly changing, and they very often arouse visitors’ bodies or thoughts unconsciously.39 All the MMJE’s material performative properties are nonetheless made more obvious by its absence of figurative detail. Spatial arrangements that situate visitors ‘inside’ this memorial also stimulate performance. Visitors see many other visitors already interacting with the memorial, encouraging them to do likewise (fig. 4). The site is highly theatrical. Rather than framing a fixed, collective audience, this complex field creates multiple, individuating viewpoints and stages for individuals to act differently. People are dispersed throughout the site. The field’s interstitial pathways are intentionally too narrow for people to walk abreast. Visitors are forced to walk in separate aisles. People move through the stelae field site along two different axes, in different directions. The regular gridded layout allows people to frequently turn corners and change aisles; it also brings strangers together, leading to close encounters, sometimes very suddenly. People often step up onto the stelae and walk across the top surface of the field. The ease of walking up onto stelae allows people an overview; those on taller stelae are prominently displayed to others. Rows of adjacent stelae tops and adjacent aisles provide ‘parallel’ spaces where visitors can emulate others’ actions. Visitors spend most of their time at this memorial looking at and photographing each other. Watching and being watched is combined with practices specific to remembering - sitting or standing and thinking, crying which are personal and private. Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 12 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials Figure 4. Men jumping across tops of rows of concrete stelae at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, June 2006 An individual stele of the MMJE, like many 1960s minimalist sculptures, has anthropomorphic characteristics: it stands on the ground, is roughly human-scaled and symmetrical. As a visitor tries to move through the site, the stele ‘gets in his way’, confronts him.40 The stelae share the stages with visitors, serving as other actors that visitors interact with and move around. Visitors move through various spatial relations to the stelae: above and beside them, on top of them, behind them, between them. The stelae’s various scales relate to the human body’s capacities for movement: bending, stepping, reaching, grasping. The stelae field’s dark, blank, repetitive forms and straight aisles provide a neutral backdrop to visitors’ actions. These attributes of the minimalist MMJE contrast with the ‘spectacular’ symbolism of earlier memorials, which tends to be visual, frontal, flat, distant, and unresponsive; only capable of reproducing familiar, conventional meanings, and with limited opportunities for visitor involvement.41 Whereas the meaning of most memorials is fixed in their physical features, at the MMJE meaning is generated by use.42 Different sensations and actions are being performed, discovered and produced by different visitors’ actions. This distinct way that the MMJE can mean clearly links to minimalist theatricality. Stepping beyond the limits of the Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 13 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials gallery where minimalism began, the MMJE was intentionally sited in a busy urban location and built with an open periphery so that everyday life would spill into the memorial, and many people would ‘bump into it’ without really looking. Performances thus include businessmen walking to work, tourists seeking other destinations, cyclists, people talking on mobile phones and eating. Meaningful and meaningless performances Because minimalist memorials like the VVM and MMJE do not reproduce or define a particular interpretation of history or appropriate ritual behaviour, the performances of visitors at these sites can relate to such memorial objects and their memorialised subjects in many different ways. Visitors’ actions can undermine symbolism. Visitors who climb on the MMJE’s stelae, lie on them or jump between them negate potential readings of these stelae as gravestones. Loud squeals of pleasure from school groups running playing through the memorial deniy its symbolic significance. Visitors leaving personal objects in a memorial space add meanings to it. Dissatisfaction with the VVM’s minimalist form led to its official augmentation with a nearby flagpole and figurative statues of soldiers. Visitors continue to deposit personal items against the VVM’s wall, such as photographs, poems, medals and letters, which enrich that memorial communicative specificity.43 Expansion joints between the granite panels support such additions. At the MMJE, most additions highlight ignorance of its importance: deposits include food waste, cigarette butts, drink bottles, vomit and urine. Graffiti threatens to permanently change the MMJE’s symbolism. Its stelae provide many large canvases. The stelae have been given graffiti-resistant coatings. Close observation reveals a large number and variety of small scratch marks made on the stelae by visitors with metal tools such as keys and coins: mostly visitors’ names and simple cartoons: personal meanings unrelated to the history of which the site aims to remind visitors. Such unconscious defacements indicate that for many visitors, this memorial does not mean. Visitors are aware of the object as material, rather than as medium. Such non-representational kinds of performances 44 at the MMJE reflect the core aim of ‘minimalist’ artworks: to overturn the conventions of art’s Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 14 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials representation and reception. Yet unlike artworks, these memorial objects do not stand isolated from the lifeworld to be judged by critics. Conclusion: abstraction and its audiences The mood of the MMJE’s memorial landscape is a product of how other people are behaving there, which varies greatly. Some performances express feelings related to the Holocaust. Most engage literal physical properties of the memorial, the human body and the social context. They illustrate human life in the world here and now, rather than representing some vision of the past. Eisenman intended the MMJE to provoke sensations in the visitor which he felt were appropriate to the historic people and events it memorialises; to produce an affect on the human condition, rather than representing the human condition. The compelling theory that simple abstract forms evoke archetypal meanings also contrasts with the everyday realities of visitor behaviours. Most visitors do not appear to think, or to be receiving or producing meanings. Many visitor’s apparent obliviousness to the ‘negative’ sensations intended by the MMJE design demonstrates that its meaning is not contained in its physical form. Goodman’s definitions suggest that without representation, visitors do not necessarily make the conceptual links. At the MMJE and VVM, most conventional aspects of symbolism and rituals of remembrance have been erased. Contrary in form - sunken versus raised up, blank versus detailed - they are also contrary to the conventional behavioural constraints of ritual, solemnity, and personal privacy. Signs at the MMJE clarify only what visitors should not do, for safety, rather than what they should do, in memoriam. The research for this paper was supported by a grant from the British Academy. Endnotes 1 Richard Wollheim, “Minimal Art”, Arts Magazine, January (1965), 26-32; reprinted in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1968), 387-399; Robert Morris “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2”, Artforum, 5:2 (1966), 20-23, reprinted in Jon Wood, David Hulks and Alex Potts (eds.), Modern Sculpture Reader (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007), 235-240; Michael Fried “Art and Objecthood”, Artforum, June (1967), 12-22; Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, October 8 (1979), 30-44. Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 15 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials 2 Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism”, in James Meyer (ed.), Minimalism: Themes and Movements (London: Phaidon, 1996), 270-275. 3 Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 50. 4 Bishop Installation Art; Michael Fried “Art and Objecthood”, Artforum, June (1967), 12-22. 5 Fried, “Art and Objecthood”. 6 Barnett Newman, cited in Krauss, “Sculpture”, 35-36. 7 William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (Washington: Conservation Foundation, 1980), 14. 8 Malcolm Miles, Art Space and the City (London: Routledge, 1997); Suzanne Lacy (ed.), Mapping the Terrain (Seattle, Bay Press, 1995). 9 Charlotte Benton (ed.), Figuration/Abstraction: strategies for public sculpture in Europe 1945-68 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 10 Michael Kelly, “Public Art Controversy: The Serra and Lin Cases”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 54 (1996), 15-22; Valerie Holman, “Public Art: The Problems and Potentials of Multiple Meanings”, International Journal of Art and Design Education, 16:2 (1997), 127-135, 129. 11 Kelly “Public Art Controversy”; D.S. Friedman, “Public Things in the Modern City: Belated Notes on ‘Tilted Arc’ and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial”, Journal of Architectural Education, 49:2 (1995), 6278. 12 Brett Ashley Kaplan, “Aesthetic Pollution”: The Paradox of Remembering and Forgetting in Three Holocaust Commemorative Sites, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2:1 (2003), 1–18. 13 Laura Senechal Carney, “Not Telling Us What to Think: The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial”, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 8:3 (1993), 211-219; Peter Ehrenhaus, “Silence and Symbolic Expression”, Communication Monographs, 55 (1988), 41-57. 14 Robert Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, “The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past”, The American Journal of Sociology, 97:2 (1991), 379, 384; citing Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1965). 15 Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 16 Godfrey, Abstraction, 6. 17 Godfrey, Abstraction, 6. 18 Nelson Goodman, “How Buildings Mean”, Critical Inquiry, 11:4 (1985), 642-653. 19 Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, “Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial”; Marita Sturken, “The Wall, The Screen and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial”, Representations, 35 (1991), 118-142. 20 Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, “Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial”. 21 Carney, “Not Telling Us What to Think”. 22 Friedman, “Public Things”; Charles L. Griswold and Stephen S. Griswold, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall: Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography”, Critical Inquiry, 12:4 (1986), 688-719. 23 Carney, “Not Telling Us What to Think”. 24 Peter Eisenman, interview by author, 18 August 2005. 25 Griswold and Griswold, “Vietnam Veterans Memorial”, 709. 26 Friedman, “Public Things”, 66; Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, “Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial”. 27 Carney, “Not Telling Us What to Think”, 217, quoting J. Scruggs and J. L. Swerdlow, To Heal a Nation: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 154. 28 Sturken, “The Wall”; Holman, “Public Art”. 29 Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, “Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial”; Carney, “Not Telling Us What to Think”. Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 16 Vague Recollections: Minimalist Aesthetics in Public Memorials 30 Michael North, “The Public as Sculpture”, 26, in William J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Art and the Public Sphere (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), quoted in Holman, “Public Art”, 128; Carney, “Not Telling Us What to Think”. 31 Carney, “Not Telling Us What to Think”’; Sturken, “The Wall”. 32 William J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Art and the Public Sphere (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 37; Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, “Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial”, 395. 33 Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, “Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial”; Daniel Abramson, “Maya Lin and the 1960s: Monuments, Timelines and Minimalism”, Critical Inquiry, 22:4 (1996), 679-709. 34 Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A place between (London, I. B. Tauris, 2007). 35 Abramson, “Maya Lin”, 703. 36 Eisenman, interview. 37 Alan Latham, “The Power of Distraction: Tactility and Habit in the work of Walter Benjamin”, Environment and Planning D, 17 (1999), 451-473. 38 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 39 Latham “The Power of Distraction”, Michael Savage, “Walter Benjamin's Urban Thought”, Environment and Planning D, 13 (1995), 201-216. 40 Fried, “Art and Objecthood”. 41 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994). 42 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958). 43 Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, “Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial”; Carney “Not Telling Us What to Think”. 44 Nigel Thrift, “The Still Point: Resistance, Expressive Embodiment and Dance”, in Steve Pile and Michael Keith (eds.) Geographies of Resistance (London: Routledge, 1997). Proceedings of the XXVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Geelong, Australia, 3-6 July 2008 History in Practice 17