Remembering the Holocaust: Strength in Silence
Rachel Whiteread’s memorial for victims of the Holocaust in Vienna is very responsive to the site. It’s a cast of the inside part of a library, so it’s all about silence and muteness, which is what happened. It’s just an intensely powerful negation. That memorial, the Irish Hunger Memorial [by Brian Tolle in New York City] and the proposed memorial in Hyde Park for Princess Diana [by American landscape artist Kathryn Gustafson and London architect Neil Porter]-all three are very different, and each is original. You don’t want to accept what you’ve seen before; you want something unique. My belief has always been to bring people to a place, give them the facts of history, but then you have to give over the piece–it is each visitor who must internalize it and make it personal."
Memorial as Journey
Some memorials are journeys or passages. At Edwin Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in France, you walk across a serene grassy plain. You’re almost trespassing. You go toward a huge gaping arch, like a scream, and as you walk into it, you’re surrounded by names of the missing, thousands of names. You pass through, and look out at another grassy plain–but this one is filled with crosses. It’s a journey to an awareness of immense loss. Then you turn and go back–so there’s that separation between the living and the dead."
The Magic of the Makeshift
The spontaneity after 9-11 was incredibly moving, the shrines around the firehouses and Union Square in Manhattan [above], or anywhere people left tributes. One of the hardest things to see were the missing posters that just sprang up all over the city. Every time you saw them, you were in tears. But if someone tried to re-create those places, it would become a totally different experience. They would lose their power, because what they had was the spontaneity of raw, pure emotion."
