For all 9/11’s iconoclasm and upheaval and upset, it has produced surprising little innovation in memorials.  A remarkable number and variety of memorials have been made in the ten years that have since passed.  They demonstrate the deep importance of memorials as part of our everyday landscape, and a renewed interest in the process of memorializing.  We have all been engaged by the thousands of popular memorials, and also by the emergence of the official memorials at the WTC site, in Shanksville, at the Pentagon.  This proliferation, instead of fueling innovative approaches, though, has reinforced the already divergent, pre-2001 memorial culture.

Sometime late in the 20th century, memorial strategies diverged.  The ephemeral, popular memorial, a radically contingent foil to old bronze-and-stone memorials, took on new prominence.  “Ephemeral memorial” seems like an oxymoron at first—memorials should be designed to endure, not fade away, right?  The are not only legitimate but stand as radical challenges to traditional memorial culture of bronze and stone.  Examples included the many self-made memorials created in the aftermath of 9/11, in parks, on walls, along sidewalks, pretty much anywhere in public space.

Add to these roadside memorials, ghost bikes, and other “leavings” at disaster sites or conventional memorials.  One of the labels applied to them—makeshift—captures their provisional, temporary nature as well as the urgency and hand-made qualities that leave them both admired and reviled.  The point of ephemeral memorials is immediacy and imageability, not materiality, formal excellence, and permanence.  They expand the notion of what counts as a legitimate memorial and suggest a broadening in the kinds of memorials accepted today as part of a larger landscape—a memorial infrastructure. They make the process of memorialization more immediate for more people.  People want to see their own hand; however fleeting, they want evidence of their own remembering and forgetting.

On the other hand is the official memorial—figurative statues, pedestals, columns or obelisks. Read more…