Absence visible: chosen by a jury from 5,201 submitted proposals, the design for the World Trade Center memorial is both the epitome of tact and a consummate expression of bafflement - Issues & Commentary - Critical Essay

Art in America, April, 2004 by Nancy Princenthal

By the end of 2003, the field had been narrowed to three schemes, including Garden of Lights (submitted by Pierre David with Sean Corriel and Jessica Kmetovic), which involved an apple orchard and prairie at street level, and, in chambers beneath each tower footprint, a small column for each victim, illuminated in part by natural light from above. The second finalist entry was Passages of Light: The Memorial Cloud (Gisela Baurmann, Sawad Brooks and Jonas Coersmeier), which proposed covering the south end of the site with a translucent canopy made of 10,000 light conducting elements, flat on top and forming an undulating ceiling below for an underground chamber where there would also be circles of light for each victim. Reflecting Absence, the third contender, was some thing of a dark horse. The jury's, and public's, most frequent objections (no concrete reference to the event, or to the site) were addressed to some extent by Arad and Walker's changes. The winning design, as altered and publicly unveiled, was praised, somewhat hesitantly in most quarters (as by Benjamin Forgey in the Washington Post and on the editorial page of the New York Times), though Herbert Muschamp was fulsome, invoking Narcissus, Persephone and the Eleusinian mysteries to celebrate a design that "puts us in mind of societies where birth and death were understood to be aspects of life." (10) Popular judgment will be harder to monitor, though opponents always speak more loudly than supporters. (An instructive precedent is Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, 1986, which drew more advocates than detractors in local petitions and letter-writing campaigns, though opponents ultimately succeeded in having it removed.)

In any case, the criticism that assails Maya Linstyle memorials is deeply misleading, not least because it misconstrues the minimalism that allegedly underlies them. In sorting out the differences between the vocabulary of Lin's memorials and that of Minimalism, one must ask whether there is a timeless and universal language of abstract visual form, to which public art should--logically, ethically--resort. But if the 20th century taught us anything, it's that the answer is no. There are a thousand such languages and dialects, and they each have very, very small communities of native speakers. What makes them important is precisely their resistance to easy translation, the mysteries they harbor, their difficulties. Particularity, idiosyncrasy, the quiddity of perceptual experience--these are the best things that abstract art can offer, in public as anywhere else. Lin's Vietnam memorial does speak a dialect of high modernist abstraction, which relies not on Minimalism's psychological recalcitrance but rather on a particularly concentrated emotionalism--it is closer to Malevich's world of pure feeling or Ellsworth Kelly's negotiation between nature and geometry than to Donald Judd's transcendently reductive exercises. What voice Reflecting Absence will have, as form, is not yet evident, though it will certainly lack the singularity, and the clarity, of Lifts memorial.