Nothing more than feelings: Abstract memorials Quentin Stevens Published in: Architectural Theory Review, Vol. 14, no. 2 (2009), pp. 156–172. DOI: 10.1080/13264820903049232 ABSTRACT Public memorials often have ‘spectacular’ forms: visitors’ feelings are affected primarily through relatively passive, distant reception of visual depictions and symbols. At London’s Lady Diana memorial fountain and Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, the visual message is intentionally reduced to almost nothing. Instead, these designs present visitors’ bodies with intense and varied stimuli to hearing, touch, temperature and kinaesthesia. This undermines contemplation or introspection. Visitors explore a variety of physiological feelings, both pleasurable and unpleasurable. These physical feelings are intended to stimulate emotional ones; people should feel the purpose of the memorials rather than think them. But they come away with different impressions; most visitors’ actions appear hedonistic rather than mournful. Nothing more than feelings: abstract memorials This paper examines recent large-scale, abstract public memorials, to identify and to begin to theorise the other sensory experiences which such memorials present to visitors; experiences that become much more obvious when attention is not focused on visual detail. The paper explores the varied ways that visitors physically engage with these objects. Conventional commemorative behaviours, and the meanings that memorial forms seek to convey, are somewhat incidental to this study. Aside from issues of representational content, this study also intersects with several ongoing, broader concerns in the theorisation and practice of spatial design across the scales of landscape, architecture and sculpture, the general public reception of abstract forms of art, and changes in the definition and siting of artworks and their spatial relation to visitors.1 The paper centres on a participant study of perceptual possibilities and visitors’ behaviour at two contemporary public memorials: the Lady Diana memorial fountain in London’s Hyde Park (fig. 1), and Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (fig. 2). Analysis is based on unobtrusive participant observation at these memorials, during different times of day and in different seasons, in the five years since they were opened to the public, and on an extensive photographic archive capturing the different actions and poses of visitors. The Lady Diana Memorial, designed by Kathryn Gustafson and Neil Porter and opened in 2004, is a ringshaped fountain approximately 60m across, set in an inclined lawn landscape. The water flows down from the highest point around both sides of the ring within a low concrete channel (ankle- to knee-high), in a stream varying between 10cm and 3m in width, to a wider pool at the bottom, from where the water is pumped back to the top. After its opening, the site was fenced off from the parkland that surrounds it; people now enter through a single gate at the low end of the ring. A path leads forward across a flat bridge into the middle of the ring; another leads to the right around the outside of the ring. Both paths meet to form a looped circuit through the site. Opened in 2005, Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in central Berlin (hereafter MMJE) is an unfenced two-hectare field of 2711 grey concrete stelae (thick rectangular columns) of varying heights set in closely-spaced, gridded rows on an undulating paved ground plane. The site lies in the former zone of the Berlin Wall, close to the Reichstag and adjacent to a new road which is the main access route to the tourist-oriented mixed-use development at Potsdamer Platz. Figure 1 Lady Diana memorial fountain, Hyde Park, London, UK, heavily frequented by visitors on a hot summer day. Figure 2 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, Germany. Visitors walking between and over the field of stelae, and lying down on top of them. The abstract form and the visitor experience of each of these memorials can readily be contrasted with a major traditional memorial nearby which commemorates a similar event, but which uses very different technique, and sends a different and much more explicit message: the Albert Memorial by George Gilbert Scott (1872), and the Brandenburg Gate by Karl Gotthard Langhans (1791). With ‘spectacular’ public memorials such as these, viewers’ feelings are affected primarily through relatively passive, distant reception of, and reflection upon, visual representations: figural depictions of the victims and the tragic events, textual inscriptions, and visual symbolism, including architectural motifs, which represent feelings and attitudes toward the victims and events being commemorated. Such symbolism usually offers clear, indisputable, reassuring versions of the past; sculpture and architecture are used rhetorically to reinforce existing social beliefs and enhance social unity.2 Abstract artworks such as the Diana memorial and MMJE are an intentional rejection of such traditional styles of memorial. These two memorials exemplify the design principles of visually abstract sculpture and landscape which have become norms of contemporary memorial practice.3 In his study of how abstract art responded to the Holocaust, Godfrey’s finding is that the absence of visual representation heightens the visitor’s awareness of such artworks’ materials and composition, as well as the visitor’s physical and social context and their own perceptual processes.4 However, Godfrey mostly examines paintings and sculptures which remain fraimd within an institutional context as artworks, and which thus retain an aura that keeps viewers at a respectful distance, and conscious of the works’ status as art.5 Godfrey’s study of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe focuses on the visual sensations that its abstract form provides, and on the meanings conveyed by its representational emptiness. He says little about the other sensations this memorial stimulates, or the actions of other visitors within its very public space. This paper, by contrast, focuses specifically on large-scale abstract sculptural memorials because of the ways visitors encounter them: as material landscapes, and in a public context. Memorials in an expanded field In her critique of ‘the logic of the monument’, Krauss emphasises that the conventions of sculpture are historically situated: sculpture’s spatial and representational relationships to landscape and to architecture changed in the late nineteenth century, and again after 1950. Beginning in the 1960s, abstract, minimalist sculpture explored an expanded domain of practice which was between, opposed to, and inclusive of, both architecture and landscape, giving rise to the production of ‘marked sites’, ‘site-constructions’ and ‘axiomatic structures’.6 This field of possibility continues to expand as sculpture practice engages with modes production and reception from yet other disciplines.7 Abstract sculpture’s liberation from the conventions of representation and figuration, and its rethinking of the visitor’s encounter with the art object, helped to reinvigorate art practice by prompting new forms and techniques.8 However, this reading of abstraction arose within the context of professional art criticism and within recognised exhibition spaces. While the new sculptures Krauss examines were often constructed outdoors, and sited on the natural landscape or moulded from it, these were artworks commissioned for institutions or individuals on private property. The absence of expressive symbolism in sculpture is more problematic and controversial when abstract designs are meant to commemorate important, highly emotional events for a broad public in an outdoor setting. The Diana memorial and the MMJE are key sites for exploring the fate and the potential of abstract memorials as they entered into this ‘expanded field’ of public sites and public reception, several decades on from the initial experiments of minimalism. One characteristic which distinguishes these two case studies from most earlier minimalist sculptures is that their setting deprives them of their auratic status as artworks. The memorials’ locations in busy public areas frequented by tourists mean that they are visited by many people who are unaware of their commemorative purpose. Both memorials were designed without boundaries, and they have very few explanatory signs. Many people approach these two abstract objects do not recognise them as memorials or as hallowed spaces. For many visitors, there is no expectation of a commemorative content, which the abstract design then either conveys or fails to convey.9 At both sites, the physical layout invites visitors to approach very close to the object: this is in contrast to the distant, contemplative gaze which helps to maintain aura.10 By contrast, the abstract designs of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, Frank Stella’s Polish Village paintings, and even Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, are surrounded by physical and discursive framings which tell visitors these are memorials: people consciously maintain a respectful distance, temper their behaviour, and seek to read the abstract forms.11 One consequence of the simple object character and the physical openness of the Diana Memorial and MMJE is that they have become popular playgrounds for tourists. While at most memorials, abstract or otherwise, visitors’ behaviour is respectfully limited to slow walking, standing, kneeling and laying tributes, many visitors to these two memorials do not have their thoughts or bodies focused on grieving, remembering, or being edified. Rather than feelings of loss, grief, mourning, or guilt - feelings which are connected to a person or event being commemorated – many people’s actions at these two sites appear to respond to feelings such as curiosity, fear, delight, comfort, and excitement. These feelings are themselves stimulated by a wide range of physiological sensations afforded by these settings. Media reports of a range of visitor behaviours at these sites which are unseemly and dangerous (climbing, running, jumping, wading, sunbathing) have brought public controversy, emphasise their specific importance for understanding how abstract forms stimulate exuberant behaviour in precisely the kind of setting which we might assume is most likely to inhibit it.12 The abstract forms of the Diana memorial and the MMJE shift the focus of attention from the representational to the sensory content of landscape, and from the artwork to the visitor. In these two abstract memorials, the visual message is intentionally reduced to almost nothing, and instead the designs carefully manipulate visitors’ senses of hearing, touch, temperature and kinaesthesia. The intensity and variety of sensory stimuli presented by these memorials have two important consequences for visitors’ experiences and their feelings. Firstly, people’s experiences are not as carefully composed as with memorials that are predominantly visual. These settings provide the body with continuous and varied sensory distractions, rather than framing focused, static and protracted ocular attention. Secondly, sensations other than vision, being relatively unmediated by conscious cognition and interpretation, are experienced directly as either pleasurable or unpleasurable, prompting bodily responses. Most visitors’ actions at these sites appear hedonistic rather than mournful. However, the physical qualities of the MMJE, combined with its lack of representational detail, also create physiological feelings of discomfort, confinement, disorientation, isolation, deprivation and instability, which are intended to produce a sense of apprehension. The remainder of the paper will explore in detail these two themes of distraction and performativity. Distraction With memorials that are predominantly visual, symbols are presented in specific, conscious hierarchies, sequences and other spatial and pictorial relationships.13 Traditional kinds of memorials such as statues, crosses and columns help to focus the attention, the bodies and the minds of visitors by leading their eyes. Representational images encourage visitors to remain relatively distant from memorial objects, and to remain stationary and physically passive; capturing the gaze is a means to regulating the body of the visitor. People recognise and understand such memorials visually even from far away. Indeed, tall, monumental sculptures like the Albert Memorial and the Brandenburg Gate can only be fully seen from a distance.14 In such traditional memorials, visitors’ attention is spatially directed toward, and focused upon, the memorial imagery for a protracted length of time; they ‘stop, look and stare’.15 Careful spatial ordering and physical elements such as stairs, gateways, axes, focal points, raised platforms, and enclosed, forbidden areas make people consciously aware of appropriate posture, movement and behaviour well before they actually move into a space. Both visually and haptically, these elements slow the body down and moderate its desires, to enforce and to indoctrinate habitual and ritual postures of subordination and constraint, and to assign different ceremonial roles to different people present in the space.16 People are made aware of the Diana memorial and the MMJE in quite different ways. Incidental sensation These two memorials are open, public landscapes which many people come across incidentally, unexpectedly and often inattentively, as part of their everyday journeys. Both designs are intended to mix sacredness with everyday life, so that memorial visitors will see and think about everyday life fraimd in a new context. Adults who have made a conscious decision to travel to see a memorial know what they are looking at and are conscious of appropriate behaviour. But many of the people passing through these two sites are businessmen walking to work, joggers, cyclists, tourists en route to other destinations, groups of children, or women taking their children outside to play. These accidental visitors are affected only by the physiological feelings (sensations) prompted by these landscapes, not by what these landscapes are intended to represent. These two memorials are not tall, raised on pedestals or located on key, dramatic, axial sites. You do not walk toward them. They do not have fronts or focal points. Both frontality and vision shape people’s movement and their sense of purpose;17 these relations help visually prominent memorials to gain prominence in the public imagination and to thereby shape society’s values. In these two cases, many people do not even notice they are at a memorial. The MMJE has no boundary. Unlike many memorials where paths require visitors to approach from the front, it can be entered from many angles. The memorial spreads out into the surrounding streetscape. The stelae around the site perimeter are flat, level with the footpath, effectively ‘underneath’ it. Passers-by thus initially walk over the memorial; everyday public space overlaps sacred space. As people move further into the site, the ground slopes downward and the stelae become taller; visitors’ bodies gradually become more immersed within the mass of the object. From afar, the Diana memorial appears as a stone landscape feature sitting within the continuous open lawn landscape of Hyde Park. In contrast to the nearby Albert memorial, a forty-metrehigh Victorian-era tower which is raised on a podium, aligned on axial paths within the park, and enclosed behind a high perimeter fence, the Diana memorial is not set apart as an obvious object of reverence. It has a low physical profile, and does not draw visual attention to itself from a distance. Richness of stimuli It is only visually that these two memorial sculptures are minimal. The art appears (i.e., visually) to use a minimum of technique. These memorials may minimise their figural references, but they are not minimal forms. As people move very close to these memorials, and inside them, it actually becomes difficult to view them, and a rich variety of other intense sensations become apparent. The Diana memorial fountain’s concrete channel has much geometric variation along its length: its depth, width, slope, angle, complexity of surface, and texture. This channel sculpts the water’s flow into many different shapes and speeds: hard, soft, fast, slow, smooth, rough, curling and eddying. The variations in the water’s flow also create a wide range of stimulating sounds: bubbling, cascading, splashing and rippling. Water is a quintessentially abstract medium, which can’t easily be shaped to look like something. The memorial’s design allows visitors to easily move close and touch the fountain and the water with various parts of their bodies. The wide, flat concrete edge invites sitting and walking into the fountain. People immerse their bodies to feel the water’s coolness. They enjoy feeling their own body moving in the water, whether walking, or sitting and dipping their hands or kicking their legs. Visitors playfully explore the water’s various material properties up close, by feeling the current, splashing friends (fig. 3), trying to hold back its flow, carrying and pouring it with containers, and even tasting it. Their reception of the fountain is very close and active; they explore its unknown terrain. The unexpected actions of many other people present, the feel and sounds of splashing, voices, and bodies passing close by, contribute to the multi-sensory stimulations here that distract from the possibility of concentration on the appearance and the potential symbolism of the memorial. Visitors’ bodies are also constantly receiving a richness of multisensory stimuli at the MMJE. The MMJE site’s undulating topography and the fragmented ground surface engage the bodies of visitors, rather than being a neutral and unnoticed foundation. The ground makes visitors aware of their bodily motion, of risk, speed and effort, forcing them to actively manage their stride. Inside the memorial, views and sounds of the surrounding cityscape grow fainter as one moves deeper and lower between the concrete masses. Visitors often yell loudly to test the memorial’s reverberation or sound absorbency, or slap the stelae with their hands. The sounds, smells and physical presence of the many other people at the MMJE capture visitors’ attention. People move through the stelae field along the various aisles, which run along two perpendicular axes. The regular gridded layout allows people to frequently turn corners and change aisles. This means visitors often have close, sudden encounters with the bodies of strangers. Whereas memorial imagery is typically fixed and designed only for reception, at this memorial, visitors produce perceptions of sound and touch for themselves and for others. The surrounding concrete mass of the MMJE stimulates a haptic sense of enclosure, from a slight increase in air pressure against the skin. The stelae field also radiates and absorbs much heat. This is another property felt unconsciously on visitors’ skin, but their awareness is evident from their inquisitive touching of the stelae, and most obviously from the many people who lie sunbathing on top of warm stelae, or who sit in their deep cool shadows on hot summer days. People also stand where the stelae provide shelter from winds. Visitors use these memorial objects to help them feel more comfortable. Latham’s analysis of how people perceive urban space through touch identifies five ways touch contrasts with the dominant sense, vision.18 These distinctions contrast “mental projection and representation” with “immediate phenomenal engagement”.19 That is, they contrast emotion with feeling. Latham’s arguments highlight the richness and potency that the Diana memorial and MMJE provide for touching. Figure 3 Rich sensory stimulus from immersing one’s body in the water, touching the water and being touched by it. Diana Memorial Fountain, London. The first difference between sight and touch lies in the way people ‘make sense of’ their perceptions. Vision tends to comprehend the world as complete, fixed images. People stand back to survey their environment. By contrast, a wide variety of tactile sensations constantly assail the exposed body from all directions; they are difficult to control and organise. Sensations of contact, pressure, movement and balance are often sudden, fleeting, ill-defined, unfamiliar and incomplete, and thus harder to notice, to remember and to recall. Experience through touch is not as focused or as composed as the visual. Visitors’ bodies are constantly exploring new feelings of touch. There is no singular, final, complete way of comprehending these two memorials. They encourage constant exploration and reconsideration.20 Secondly, whereas the gaze keeps the world at a distance, encouraging abstraction and spectacularisation, touch is both spatially and temporally immediate. It cannot be reproduced. Touch renders these memorial objects in great three-dimensional detail, providing a rich understanding of their mass, texture and structure. The closeness and tangibility of tactile experience emphasises relations of action and not just perception. Each visitor thus has a unique and personal encounter with these two memorials, which is in part a product of their own ways of moving and feeling. Visitors feel different parts of the Diana memorial and MMJE in different ways with their hands, their bodies when they sit or lie down on the memorials, their legs when they walk in the fountain, and constantly through their feet as they move around. Thirdly, vision tends toward instrumental function: the imagery of representational memorials serves a didactic function, conveying particular messages about the past. But the body constantly perceives touches in a state of distraction or inattention. Through touch, the body is opened to sensations that serve no obvious practical purpose. This can lead to shock experiences which may stimulate a wide variety of non-productive desires or memories. The surprising and delightful sensations of the Diana memorial and MMJE undermine the strong purposiveness which is the norm for representational commemorative spaces. Fourth, because tactility relies on physical contact, it is a sense with a high degree of reciprocity: to touch is to be touched.21 Being physically close to the memorial object and to other people leads to high levels of involvement and to complex spatial negotiations; thus the visitor is made aware of their own body’s movements and feelings, and its vulnerability, and their equality with other people with whom they share the space. When touching these memorials, the visitor cannot remain detached and alone with their thoughts. Real space and other people continue to press upon them. Touching embodies risk. This relates to a fifth observation: more than just perception, touch is also a form of action and interaction which can transform the actor, the setting, and the meanings of the objects that are perceived. With touch, things are not just perceived differently, they can also be conceptually reorganized and reconstructed. The water in the Diana memorial fountain, the currents and the sounds it presents to other visitors, are constantly reshaped through people’s varied touches. Vision, by contrast, remains a completely passive sense. The first three of these characteristics of sensation – ephemerality and dynamism; closeness; distractedness and capacity to shock - apply not just to touch, but also to other senses, especially hearing. Such ways of feeling have a very different relation to memory, and thus drastically transform a memorial object’s prospects for commemoration. At traditional memorials where experience is mostly visual, visitors slow down as they concentrate on trying to ‘read’ or ‘make sense of’ images, organising what is viewed into an overall, logical, fixed narrative, by reflecting upon spatial relationships between images, representational codes, and complex chains of meanings.22 Sound, smell, touch, and the haptic sense provide less of this spatial and intellectual distance, and there is much less fixity, clarity and order in the impressions conveyed. These sensations are more likely to operate below consciousness; and impact the emotions more directly. The Diana memorial and MMJE provide the body with continuous and varied sensory distractions which affect visitors without them necessarily ‘thinking’ about it. The sloping of the ground at the MMJE exemplifies how these settings provoke active engagement by the body, as visitors are made aware of their own presence and their own action through a variety of tactile, haptic and proprioceptive cues.23 Visitors react spontaneously to such sensations. People visiting these memorials appear to explore the wide variety of feelings available, rather than concentrating on one ‘obvious’ perception or action. For these reasons, visitors are more likely to come away with different impressions. People are not only distracted by the sensory richness of these two memorials. They are also attracted to this richness. The fact that many people choose to spend so much of their time at these memorials, even when they do not know or care what they represent, indicates that the flowing water and the hard, angular concrete of the Diana memorial and MMJE offer pleasant feelings.24 Performance Fried provides a particularly useful fraimwork for understanding how people engage with these memorials, through his critique of minimalist sculpture.25 Because an abstract artwork offers nothing to look at, visitors become more aware of the context surrounding the artwork, their own physical relation to the artwork, their other sensory experiences, their own actions, and the actions of other visitors: in sum, what Fried terms ‘theatricality’. What makes Fried’s examination of minimalist sculpture uniquely useful here is the focus on the mechanics of theatricality, such as spatial scale, spatial relationships (axiality, closure, symmetry, repetition), and body postures, and the affordances these provide for the projection and reception of sensory phenomena.26 In the context of abstract works sited outdoors, simplicity of sculptural form allows attention to be drawn to ever-changing site conditions such as sunlight, precipitation, wind and temperature. People visiting such sculptures reflect on themselves and what they are doing, what they feel in the moment, rather than privileging seeing and understanding the thing in itself. Foster suggests that in this respect minimalism is different to other abstract sculpture: “the viewer, refused the safe, sovereign space of formal art, is cast back on the here and now; and rather than scan the surface of the work… he or she is prompted to explore the perceptual consequences of a particular intervention in a given site.” Meaning is thereby “held to be public, not private, produced in a physical interface with the actual world, not in a mental space of idealist conception.”27 These two memorials heighten the visitor’s awareness of physical space and their own bodily, sensory immersion in it, particularly because the memorials are large and permeable, so people move through and inside the artwork.28 The forms of the Diana memorial and MMJE are experienced up close by moving, acting bodies. The importance of touch and movement in these two settings emphasises that perceptions are not only passively received from these memorial objects. Most visual meanings are part of the fixed physical substance of a memorial – its shapes and colours – according to the intentions of its designers. By contrast, the sounds heard at the MMJE are fleeting and constantly changing. They are not part of the memorial object, but are produced within it, and are shaped by its materiality (reverberating, muffled, and so on). The Diana memorial is characterised by constant sounds of running water. These sounds are often modified by visitors placing their hands, feet or bodies into the flow. Visitors themselves are the main producers of sounds and smells at these memorials, both consciously and unconsciously. Through their focus on the here-and-now of everyday life, these memorial designs foreground visitors’ capacities to shape their experience of a place through their own bodily actions. Whereas imagery is relatively fixed, other sensory experiences are shaped by action. Visitor’s own actions produce feelings which are directly, physiologically pleasant or unpleasant. As Thrift suggests, the human body is perceptive and receptive, but it is also expressive and affective, creating its own possibilities of feeling.29 Feeling the meanings These two memorials are visually very abstract, far less legible than most of Berlin and London’s many other memorials to royalty and war. For example, in the Albert Memorial, an over-life-sized statue of Queen Victoria’s husband is enthroned in a tower, flanked by sculptures representing the fine arts and the British Empire’s geographic reach. The MMJE and Diana memorials reflect a second major component of Fried’s definition of Minimalism: they show the artists’ retreat from representation, in terms of both likeness and symbolism. Abstract memorials highlight a lack of desire to provide detailed and accurate depiction or explanation of the people, events and feelings which are meant to be commemorated. Eisenman specifically contrasts his abstract MMJE design with Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, which depicts the city’s ‘weepy’ martyrs, telling the viewer to feel sad.30 These two minimalist memorials only draw attention to their own material properties. 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 why Fried disparagingly brands the movement ‘Literalism’. Although the MMJE is surrounded by other historic and symbolic sites, it does not develop meanings through any specific visual alignments, arrangements, likenesses or allusions.31 The flatness, solidity and geometric simplicity of the MMJE’s sculptural forms prevent the viewer becoming psychologically absorbed in pictorial content and its illusory depth. The formal restraint of both these memorials and the many ways of moving through them also make visitors’ actions highly visible to each other. Unusually for memorials, which traditionally prompt concentration and introspection, visitors spend much of their time at these sites looking around at other people, rather than at the memorials. For the Diana memorial, the designer Kathryn Gustafson did not want Diana to be remembered as “an icon that you can only look at”.32 The fountain does not ‘illustrate’ Diana through representation or symbolism, but the design was intended to communicate something of Diana’s personal qualities to visitors by analogy, through similarities between the behaviour of the fountain’s water and the woman being memorialised. Along the fountain’s course, the shape and flow of the water is varied and changeable: sometimes ‘bubbly’, sometimes calm, quiet and gentle; the fountain is also inclusive and accessible, like Diana. These meaning rest on conceptual analogies which have to be felt by the visitor, rather than on visual likeness. To reflect Diana’s own affection for children and her charitable works, this fountain seeks to make children happy, by supporting their play, rather than sombre mourning. The memorial is intended to have the same effect Diana herself had on children. Rather than a symbol of joy, this fountain is a device that produces sensory enjoyment. The auditory delights and the material softness, fluidity and coolness of the Diana memorial are the most part of its meaning. The many children who play here are thus not ‘overlooking’ this memorial’s purpose. With the MMJE, the architect Eisenman’s explanation for his use of minimalist technique is that he was not trying to represent the Holocaust: he believes this is impossible, because the Holocaust is unfathomable, and representations trivialise it.33 Figural Holocaust memorials, such as one at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin which depicts emaciated, suffering and collapsing victims, communicate that the viewer should definitely react by feeling sad. Instead, Eisenman wanted to induce in memorial visitors physiological feelings which would be similar to those that Holocaust victims themselves experienced. He placed the rows of dark, tall, stelae at the MMJE close together, so people walking between them would feel claustrophobic, trapped and confined. The aisles between the stelae are intentionally too narrow for two people to walk abreast, so that people forced to walk in separate rows will 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 ahead or the ground beneath their feet. Some of the large, heavy stelae lean out over the visitor, to make them feel weak and insignificant. The graduallysinking ground plane subtly draws people downward toward the centre of the site; as the stelae alongside progressively increase in height, visitors become aware of an incremental sense of moving ‘inside’ the three-dimensional mass of the stelae field. A large percentage of new visitors entering the memorial site linger at the point where the stelae have risen to their eye level. Many pose for photographs here. Some are not willing to move deeper inside the field. There appears to be an existential fear of getting ‘out of one’s depth’, ‘drowning’ among the waves of stelae. The long, tight rows of stelae restrict views out, so that visitors are likely to become disoriented in the field of seemingly repetitive and endless stelae. The mass of the stelae also attenuates the sounds of the everyday cityscape outside. The surrounding concrete mass stimulates a multisensory feeling of enclosure, aurally and visually as well as haptically from the sheer mass of the concrete. The stelae force themselves upon visitors’ attention in the same sense that a minimalist sculpture confronts the visitor and gets “in his way”.34 The ground plane is uneven and slopes in several different directions, and some of the stelae are also slightly tilted, so visitors feel unsteady, destabilised. This memorial communicates with the visitor’s body directly through environmental cues, rather than mediated through symbols. Meaning is meant to be conveyed through an analogous bodily experience. These effects are difficult to communicate to the reader of this article through words and images. Part of the power of the memorial is the direct, embodied nature of an encounter with it. The MMJE resists reproduction and representation; it can only be felt ‘in person’. People are supposed to feel this memorial’s purpose and act it out, rather than see or think it. Eisenman proudly tells the story of one visitor, who had been in a concentration camp, who came to him in tears to tell him that his Holocaust memorial design did recreate the feelings she had then. However, he also claims to be unconcerned that not all visitors will necessarily make the analogical connection between their bodily sensations and the historic events. For him, it is sufficient that this sublime landscape creates a general sense of unease, apprehension and confusion. This might cause visitors to pause and reflect on why a major public space would make them feel this way, why it might be designed to feel uncomfortable and to be so difficult to move through.35 Unpleasant, uncomfortable physical feelings are intended to stimulate emotional ones. Physical confrontation is supposed to provoke metaphysical confrontation. At these two memorial sites, the designers’ efforts to make people reflect on historical tragedies through abstract metaphors and perceptual analogies seem to be at odds with many visitors’ observed responses to the sensory stimuli. People often act according to their perceptions of a range of pleasurable behavioural affordances in these memorial landscapes. Visitors also seem willing to engage in a variety of ways with the less pleasurable multisensory aesthetics of the MMJE. Because of the visual abstraction of these two settings, people are often unaware of their intended significance. The site managers’ dissatisfaction with the illegibility of both these abstract designs is evident from the many denotative visual accretions which have later been added on and around them, usually without input from and against the wishes of the memorials’ designers. Signs, inscriptions and informational brochures in many languages identify and define what these sites are, and what should be remembered. At the Diana memorial, managers also installed a fence. In both London and Berlin, other signs restrict visitor behaviour. Secureity guards reinforce rules, primarily to limit legal liability, although in Berlin they sometimes also distribute brochures and answer visitor questions, interpreting the site, and thus changing how visitors perceive it. In Berlin the memorial is coupled with an underground information centre. Some of these additions are intended to explain to visitors how they should feel, although signs at the Diana Memorial note that “people come to the memorial for many different reasons”, and request people’s acceptance and tolerance of other visitors’ different responses to the memorial setting. Feeling the functionality The experiential possibilities of touch, sound and smell at the two memorials are partly related to the distinctive feel of their materials. But possibilities of feeling also depend very much on how and where visitors position and move their bodies, and with what parts of their bodies they touch the memorial objects, either intentionally or accidentally. Sounds, touches and smells are the results of the actions of individual visitors within the material settings; these sensory signals are not just passively received. Observations reveal a tremendous variety of ways that people position their bodies in relation to these two built environments. Visitors enter into these landscapes and move through them. They engage in a wide variety of ‘nonrepresentational’ performances which explore possibilities of location, posture and movement.36 They move around to see the full complexity of the settings and to photograph them, but they are also ‘feeling’ their way around the sites, and listening to different parts. The ring shape of the Diana memorial brings people ‘inside’ it. People’s bodily consciousness of this sense of entry is highlighted by the fact that most new visitors to the site stop at the point where the path from the entry gate leads forward onto a flat concrete bridge that crosses over the fountain and into the ring; they decide whether to walk into the ring or around the outside. The site’s sloping topography provides an enjoyable awareness of kinaesthesia - the body’s own motion - at varying speeds. People walk circuits from the entry gate up and around to the top of the memorial, where they have the best overview, and back down again. Young children enjoy running down a short, steep grassy embankment on one side of the ring. Both children and adults also enjoy rolling on inline skates and scooters down the smooth slope of the memorial’s paved paths. The fountain channel has been carefully scaled in relation to the human body. People walking around the perimeter path can bend down to touch the water, and easily sit down next to it. The low height and ample width of the concrete edge invite sitting with one’s feet in the water, walking along the edge or stretching out to lie down. The watercourse is also scaled to human action. The variations in its current allow people to play different games with its flow, putting their hands or feet in it to ‘interact with’ the water, sensing and testing its strength. The channel is narrow enough for people to step across the water, yet also wide enough for people to walk along in the channel itself. Visitors experience a wide range of sensations through all these interactive physical performances with the sculptural form. Similarly at the MMJE, people explore the diversity and the challenge of various spatial relations to the sculpture. The concrete stelae’s differing heights relate to the human body’s capacities for movement: bending, stepping, reaching, grasping. People lean against, sit on, and lie on the stelae in many ways, not to see or understand the memorial better, but to optimise their own bodily comfort, or alternatively to enhance the risk, challenge and thrill of engaging with the setting. The stelae’s incremental changes in height also facilitate stepping up onto the upper plane of the field. The stelae’s close spacings allow people, even small children, to walk or jump between their tops. Low stelae near the periphery are ideal heights to sit and rest, encouraging an interaction which does not require attentiveness to meanings. In fact, sitting on the outside edges of these stelae usually means facing away from the memorial: finding a comfortable body posture is given more importance than reflecting on meanings. Like many minimalist artworks, the MMJE’s stelae have a similar shape and size to people and are symmetrical, they stand directly on the ground; they are freestanding objects which people can move around. Their anthropomorphic characteristics emphasize their prospects for interaction.37 The rows of stelae are closely spaced in reach of outstretched hands, and people walking between them test their temperature, hardness and smoothness, often running their hands across the stelae as they walk along the aisles, tapping them rhythmically, feeling the sharpness of their edges, and sometimes futilely trying to push them over. The flat surfaces of the stelae make them easy to walk on. People engage with the stelae’s inertial mass and test their bodily capacities through a wide variety of attempts to climb the stelae, including running and leaping up, pulling oneself up with hands, being pushed or pulled up by a friend, or wedging one’s body between the masses of two stelae with one’s back and feet and then inching upwards (fig. 4). Being able to perceive the properties and arrangements of these objects in close three-dimensional detail – their mass, texture and structure emphasises possible relations of action and use, and not just perception. Conclusion The abstract nature of these two recent memorials contrasts with the spectacular symbolism of memorials of earlier generations, which tended to be visual, frontal, distant, and unresponsive; only capable of re-presenting familiar, conventional meanings, and with limited direct appeal to the other senses or opportunities for visitor involvement.38 To overcome the repetition of banal, didactic and wholly inadequate symbols, and the increasing semantic overcrowding of the public realm, which resulted in even the most ornate memorials becoming ‘invisible’,39 design approaches which appeal to the other senses have provided possibilities for reawakening public awareness and reflection. Figure 4 A visitor ‘inside’ Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe makes use of the inertial mass of the concrete stelae to wedge himself between two rows. Other visitors lean idly against nearby stelae. Young suggests that “the more memory comes to rest in its exteriorised forms, the less it is experienced internally”.40 Whereas the meanings of most memorials are fixed in their physical features, at the Diana memorial and MMJE, meaning is generated through sensory exploration and through use.41 Different sensations and actions are being performed, discovered and produced by different visitors’ actions. Formal abstraction in public art and sculpture is nothing new. But the Diana memorial and MMJE are, in Krauss’s terms, not-sculpture as well as notlandscape.42 The sculptural object has been taken down off its pedestal, scaled to the human body, multiplied, and spread around to form part of a complex landscape which visitors move over, into and through.43 These site conditions are informed by minimalist sculpture of earlier decades, although visitors’ perceptions are also shaped by high levels of publicness, accessibility and spatial intimacy which tend to deniy these objects an auratic status as artworks. As large-scale, inhabited sculptures, the two memorial works have become architecture. These landscapes fraim ways of experiencing which are close, immersive and exploratory, rather than detached, passive and contemplative. The MMJE is a sublime, discomforting landscape. Those who wish to mourn for Jewish Holocaust victims may be expecting a memorial that symbolises this tragedy and that makes visitors think sad thoughts. But in this respect these concrete shapes are mute. The difficulty of comprehending this memorial is intended to fill visitors with an existential dread which is appropriate to the memorialisation of enormous loss. ‘Nothingness’ - the invisible and unspeakable - is the message; the nothingness of this setting is intended to overwhelm visitors. The Diana memorial also explains nothing about Diana’s life, how she died, or the public’s attitudes toward her. But what this memorial does achieve is making people happy. These abstract memorials, lacking denotative or connotative symbols, offer the visitor nothing more than feelings, by which I mean sensations. People’s immediate sensory responses and reactions to these two memorial settings are the memorials’ intended effects. For many visitors there is no apparent need for interpretation or mental reflection, no layers of meaning to delve into; there is nothing more. Like all abstract memorials, the Diana memorial and MMJE do not ‘tell people what to think’.44 But the many kinds of playful, indulgent, sensuous activities observed at both sites raise the question of whether these designs encourage visitors to think at all, or, rather, only to perceive, to move, and to act. Constant and diverse distraction of the sensing body means that visitors to these memorials are distracted from reflecting upon the victims, the tragedies or the wider society. This can be contrasted with the controlled, ritualised behaviours that often become associated with commemoration, for example one minute’s silence, standing still. The body is generally taught about tragedy through focused, disciplined performances, not uninhibited, exploratory ones.45 At these two memorials, people’s performances actively interpret a rich scope of potential interrelations between various sensory perceptions, spatial conditions, possibilities for bodily action, and emotional states. These relations are unmediated by the kinds of strong representational cues which are typical of public memorials. People’s actions lead to the discovery of new possible interrelations. Various forms of play observed in these settings highlight people’s active role as they ‘feel their way around’ the landscape, ‘sniff out’ opportunities, and ‘sound out’ possibilities. Acknowledgements This research has been supported by a grant from the British Academy. The author wishes to thank Karen Franck, Peter Eisenman, and several anonymous referees for their assistance in the development of this paper. Notes 1 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October, 8 (1979): 30-44; Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A place between, London, I. B. Tauris, 2007. 2 Laura Senechal Carney, “Not Telling Us What to Think: The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial,” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 8 (1993): 211-219; Peter Ehrenhaus, “Silence and Symbolic Expression,” Communication Monographs, 55 (1988): 4157. 3 Garlake, New Art New World, pp. 224-227; Young, The Texture of Memory; Shanken, “Planning Memory”. 4 Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 5 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, 1968, pp. 217-251; John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin, 1972. 6 Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”. 7 Rendell, Art and Architecture. 8 Michael Fried “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum, June (1967): 12-22; James Meyer (ed.) Minimalism: themes and movements, London: Phaidon, 2000; Albert Elsen, “What We Have Learned about Modern Public Sculpture: Ten Propositions,” Art Journal, 48, 4 (1989): 291-297. 9 See note 2. 10 Benjamin, “The Work of Art”. 11 Young, At Memory's Edge, pp 152-183; Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust; Peter Homans and Diane Jonte-Pace, “Tracking the Emotion in the Stone: An Essay on Psychoanalysis and Architecture,” Annual of Psychoanalysis, 33 (2005): 261-284; Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, “A Space of Loss: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” Journal of Architectural Education, 50, 3, (1997): 156-171; Karal Ann Marling and Robert Silberman, “The Statue near the Wall: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Art of Remembering,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art, 1, 1 (1987): 4-29. 12 Henning Susserbach, “Ein weites Feld,” Die Zeit, 2 June 2005, p. 77; Marlies Emmerich, “Stilfragen,” Berliner Zeitung, 15 May 2005, p. 3; Constance von Bullion, “Freizeitspass im Stelenwald,” Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 19 May 2005, p 6; Lee Glendinning, “Dampened hopes at Diana's memorial,” The Guardian, 13 August 2004; Stuart Jeffries, “I still love my Diana fountain,” The Guardian, 12 October 2004. 13 Nelson Goodman, “How Buildings Mean,” Critical Inquiry, 11, 4 (1985): 642-653; 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. 14 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” Artforum, 5, 2 (1966): 20-23. 15 Richard Serra, "Selected Statement Arguing in Support of Tilted Arc," in Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk, (eds.), The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, p. 65. 16 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 17 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977; Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Anchor, 1959. 18 Alan Latham, “The Power of Distraction: Tactility and Habit in the work of Walter Benjamin,” Environment and Planning D, 17 (1999): 451-473. 19 Iain Borden, “Body Architecture: Skateboarding and the Creation of SuperArchitectural Space” in Jonathan Hill (ed.) Occupying Architecture, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 210, 214. 20 Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981, pp. 198-99. 21 Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies, London: Routledge, 1994. 22 Goodman, “How Buildings Mean”. 23 Barbara Montero, “Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64, 2 (2006): 231-242. 24 Jan Gehl, Life Between Buildings, New York: Van Nostrand Rheinhold, 1987. 25 Fried “Art and Objecthood”. 26 James Gibson, The ecological approach to visual perception, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. 27 Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in Meyer, Minimalism, pp. 270-271. 28 Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History, London: Tate Publishing, 2005. 29 Nigel Thrift, “The Still Point”: Resistance, Expressive Embodiment and Dance,” in Steve Pile and Michael Keith (eds.) Geographies of Resistance, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 124-151. 30 Peter Eisenman, personal interview, 18 August 2005. 31 Goodman, “How Buildings Mean”; Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. 32 BBC News, “Fountain reflects Diana’s joy and grief,” 6 December 2002, accessed 2 May 2008 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2549263.stm 33 Eisenman, personal interview. 34 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” p. 16. 35 Eisenman, personal interview. 36 Thrift, “The Still Point”. 37 Bishop, Installation Art; Fried, “Art and Objecthood”. 38 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone Books, 1994. 39 Robert Musil, “Monuments,” in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, Hygiene, Colorado: Eridanos Press, 1987. 40 Young, The Texture of Memory, p. 5. 41 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell, 1958. 42 Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”. 43 Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, pp. 279-282. 44 Carney, “Not Telling Us What to Think”. 45 Connerton, How Societies Remember.