Mute Point (Page 2)

Memory is not the same as history. --Peter Eisenman

There are 303 steles more than four meters high, 569 steles from three to four meters high, 491 steles from two to three meters high, 869 steles from one to two meters high, 367 steles from zero to one meter high--and there are 112 flat platforms without steles. None of these figures carries any symbolic meaning, nor does the total number--2,711 steles--have any special significance. There is no code--nothing like the rather grating number of 1,776 that Daniel Libeskind seems proud to have selected as the height, in feet, of the Freedom Tower projected for Ground Zero. The difference in height is due to the unevenness of the ground: It enables the top surfaces of the steles roughly to line up with one another, forming a unified surface. If one follows a pathway that dips to the field's lowest point, the steles on either side are among the highest in the whole complex, so one can feel somewhat lost. But this difference in elevation is not registered in the overall surface of the field of steles, which, because of the variation in slant, creates the sense of a gentle wave, like the surface of a body of water or, to use an example from Eisenman himself, like the surface of a field of grain. (There is also an incongruous stand of forty-one trees on the side facing the Tiergarten park, mandated by the overseer of the commission.) The result is a late Minimalist masterpiece of monoliths with variously slanting tops, together forming an undulating surface.

Viewed as a work of art, the memorial is impressive. Eisenman's work is not beautiful, but it would, I think, have been an artistic defect had it been beautiful in the Kantian sense of yielding a certain disinterested pleasure. A memorial is not intended to be an object of aesthetic gratification but a reminder of something in danger of being forgotten. As Eisenman himself has admitted: "I think it's a little too aesthetic. It's a little too good-looking. It's not that I wanted something bad-looking, but I didn't want it to seem designed. I wanted the ordinary, the banal." One is reminded of what Marcel Duchamp said of his ready-mades: "The choice of these ready-mades was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste." The difference, of course, is that, unlike Duchamp's toilet, Eisenman's banal, concrete slabs are not a subversive commentary on the nature of art but rather an attempt to honor the victims of an immense historical catastrophe. The spirit of the memorial is solemn rather than insouciant.

Because the aims of a memorial are by definition distinct from those of a work of art, the question naturally arises as to whether Eisenman's Minimalist, mute creation succeeds in evoking a historical tragedy as vast in scale as the Holocaust. History tells us how many Jews, from how many places and under what circumstances, were casualties of the Holocaust. But who remembers the Holocaust as a series of names, places and statistics? Holocaust memories are specific, ineradicable images of people being hauled out of houses, forced into inhuman conditions and treated with the terrible, deliberate cruelty of which only human beings are capable. A representation of the Holocaust would arguably have to build into the image not merely the number of lives extinguished or ruined but the evil implied in its conception and execution.

The opacity of Eisenman's memorial is a conscious choice, rooted in his sense of the enormity of the Holocaust, and of his suspicion of, as it were, graven images. As he has said, "The Holocaust is of such magnitude that it cannot be represented without such representation becoming kitsch, sentimental and hollow." It's almost as if he made a work that defies visual representation precisely in order to avoid such pitfalls. And since the memorial embodies nothing that belongs to what is conventionally understood to be the imagery of the Holocaust, it is radically abstract--a regimented complex of Minimalist monoliths that refuse to name what they are intended to commemorate.

The problem with making a work out of laterally uniform monoliths and arranging them in regular rows is that the result is likely to evoke a graveyard--something that obviously troubles Eisenman, who has alternately conceded and denied the resemblance when it has been pointed out to him. "The space isn't a graveyard," he has insisted. "I didn't want names. It should be absent of meaning." It is, of course, true that a field of monoliths cannot embody any specific meaning, and that the meaning is filled, or at least completed, by the viewer. But the title of the memorial clearly designates a set of individuals--the murdered Jews of Europe--and connotes a concept, that of genocide. So there is something troubling about the fact that nothing in the monument informs the visitor of either dimension of its meaning. No wonder it can so easily be mistaken for a graveyard or, as is often the case with young children, for a funhouse or playground.

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