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The new Irish Hunger Memorial provides a cautionary tale for designers and
planners downtown.
By Philip Nobel
November 2002
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The Irish Hunger Memorial is composed of a chunk of Irish hillside that
has been transplanted to a Manhattan site (above). It rests on a massive
limestone-clad concrete base (below).
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Top, Battery Park City Authority; bottom, Peter Aaron © Esto
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Sometime in college, probably sophomore year, I listened in as some friends
picked through the distinction between camp and kitsch. Recourse to Susan
Sontag's definitive parsing was either beyond them or would have spoiled
the moment. But I think in the end it came to this partial, unwitting Sontag
plagiarism: camp is intentional, kitsch an accident of talent. Camp is a
latent artistic extravaganza, waiting for an elect to snicker and adore
it; kitsch is just bad kunst.
Behold New York's new Irish Hunger Memorial, completed last summer on a
riverside traffic island that was once in the shadow of the World Trade
Center. If the off notes had an air of intention--or if it were more fun--the
memorial might rise to camp. But it is no fun at all, and not only because
the whole neighborhood is haunted or because the purpose of the thing is
to honor the million or more Irish who died in the years between 1846 and
1850 when their potato crop was blighted. The memorial is no fun precisely
because it is so botched. So lets call it what it is: cautionary kitsch.
The memorial is the work of artist Brian Tolle (with mitigating input from
his codesigners, New York's 1100 Architect, who have for some reason been
written out of the official script and given no credit). His basic
move was sentimental, literal, and pat: the idea was to transfer a chunk
of sloping Irish turf--a blighted potato field, see?--complete with
a real famine-era farmhouse, taken stone by stone from County Mayo and reconstituted
in Manhattan. The little field is crossed by furrows and planted with
62 species of Irish bog weeds and nettles. A path winds up from the sidewalk
to a second-story view of New York Harbor and its symbol-rich island attractions.
There's a standing stone with a carved cross at the top of the wee hill.
The sylvan plane is slapped onto a monumental limestone-clad concrete base
with an audacious cantilever extending the highest point. That tray, aspiring
to affective novelty in the monumental modern mode, is as good as it gets
(thank you, 1100). The sides are inlaid with quotations and factoids about
human deprivation and famines in Ireland and elsewhere; there's a quote
from Governor Pataki and a recipe for soup. A back-door passage cuts through
to the ruined house. Interpretive audio runs continuously in that slot,
like the sound track for a Disney film about death.
Just before the memorial was dedicated, I got a call from a friend, usually
articulate, who had been reduced in its presence to a string of breathless
oh-my-gods. "This thing is just too fucked up," he said.
Recovering, he found a useful image: "It's Chandigarh meets ye ole
putt-putt mini golf." Others have invoked Pringles.
Taste-making officialdom greeted it quite differently. In Artforum
it was compared favorably to a lost graveyard in Tipperary. Roberta Smith
celebrated it in a lengthy review in the New York Times that stopped
just short of calling it the best American memorial since Maya Lin carved
her black chevron into the sacred greensward of the Washington Mall. But
Smith seemed to be collapsing the Irish Hunger Memorial with her hunger
for World Trade Center closure: "The memorial has arrived at a time
when Americans ...have a deeper understanding of tragedy and grief, of fate's
capriciousness and the complexities of power."
Smith's Americans, that reductive, societywide "we," may want
that grassy wedge to be a model--practically on-site, easy to consult--for
whatever physical monument or suite of them will soon rise at Ground Zero.
The bar is very high, and not only because the stakes are. Any attempt to
salute the events of September 11, 2001, in steel or stone (or, it seems
inevitable, in light) will be measured against the instant and disarmingly
authentic candle and fence memorials that sprang up everywhere last year.
If they sometimes traded in a kitsch of their own (self-help books are now
being left at one impromptu site downtown), at least they are not arrogant
or cute. And any designed memorial will have to make a case for succeeding
the uncorrected skyline logos, the purple firehouse buntings, and the
hours of video shot by a thousand latter-day Zapruders. Years of public-process
tsouris and private artistic suffering might be avoided if these
things were recognized as the perfect memorials they are, obviating the
need to trundle out some earnest, deliberate, compromised tour de force.
My credit card from a local bank has a predisaster view of Lower Manhattan
shot from the harbor--Statue of Liberty up front, Twins in back--and I imagine
it is not the only one in circulation. Cashiers' double takes prove it to
be a very effective mnemonic. But too few will be satisfied with the
countless atomized memorials we all carry around, and as the development
trajectory stands, the paining icon of the site itself will not survive
to serve a memorial role forever. People who come on a healing pilgrimage
will expect some fixed, synthetic cure--an object, bigger than a bread
box, smaller than the Empire State--that does it all. If there must be that
kind of memorial (which of course there must be), let this new one be a
model--but of the negative sort: frustrating mediocrity.
The Irish Hunger Memorial exemplifies the pitfalls of a kitchen-sink
approach, a keen danger of any design drawn in the shadow of bureaucracy.
It is loaded with abstracted monumentality and in-your-face pedantry, symbolism
and simulation, mimicry and sham. Like Philip Johnson used to say, it's
galloping off in all directions. Though she's never even come close again
(a band has all its life to write that first album), Maya Lin got a
lot very right in her debut. And what she got most right was to do a lot
with very little. The Vietnam Memorial is beautifully viral; with three
moves--the accusing walls, the sloping ground, and that little curb in back
that gathers the lawn into a crypt--she turned all of the Mall against itself.
The World Trade Center site offers an equally rich matrix of associations,
with the added benefit and complication of being the battlefield
evoked. When the time comes, it should be possible for some inspired loner
or functional team to do something equally spare and resonant.
But I don't think that time will come soon. And certainly not by the close
of the competition tentatively planned to begin early next year. (Guess
on what date they're planning to unveil the winner?) Lin's obvious advantage
was a decade of historical distance from the war. No matter how much the
cultural production of the last year has tried to define that moment--nearly
400 books have already been published--it will not always be about decorated
fences and federal screeners, "Let's Roll" and "Rise Up,"
heroes and revenge, and "United We Stand." And it certainly has
nothing to do with flags. We should punt--even if that means delaying
the whole shopping-heavy posturban horror aborning downtown. That's not
to say it's time for amnesia; just humility, restraint, patience. Time alone
is of course no guarantee; after 150 years of cultural digestion the Irish
Hunger Memorial is still thin gruel. But it's thick with omen: quick kitsch
at Ground Zero would be a second tragedy.
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