ALL CULTURE begins with commemoration of the past and honor
rendered to the dead. The oldest literary monuments in the Western
tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey, seemed to their original
audience to be historical accounts, in suitably decorative form, of
events they believed should not be forgotten by those who would be
born long after all who fought at Troy were dead. Probably, the
cave paintings at Lascaux, six times older than the Trojan War,
were meant to commemorate a particularly memorable hunt, a kind of
memory of whose victims has outlived by 17 millennia anyone’s
memory of the hunters. Such irony—by which I mean the tendency of
meaning to change with context—is routine. Shelley’s Ozymandias,
whose “shatter’d visage” and “vast and trunkless legs of stone”
were all that remained of those works upon which that hero had once
invited the mighty to look and despair, is rather the rule than the
exception for those in the commemorative trade, given a long-enough
perspective.
All such commemorations are not only of events and the people
who were involved in them but also of
the meaning of those events in the eyes of the commemorators. They
build their monuments not only in order that great deeds should not
be forgotten but, ipso facto, to defend the greatness of the deeds
and the men who performed them against the insolence and
irreverence of time. Ultimately, of course, time
proves to be pretty unbeatable, even by marble and the gilded
monuments of princes—even by the rhymes that Shakespeare said
would outlast them. But long before “the unswept stone” in his
Sonnet 55 is “besmear’d with sluttish time,” the context of such
perdurable goods changes and, with it, their meaning. Thus the
Roman-style monuments to conquest and victory still to be seen in
London or Paris have become only a century or so later rather an
embarrassment for many of the British and French grandchildren of
those who built them, along with the national honor and the empires
they were meant to commemorate.
Indeed, as the newly unveiled monument to Martin Luther King on
the Mall in our nation’s capital shows, the context can change its
meaning before the monument is even built. Ostensibly there among
the Founders and preservers of the Union for as long as the Union
itself endures, the colossal image of Dr. King in granite was
presumably placed there to memorialize the new birth of civil
rights for all races that he did so much to bring about less than
half a century ago. Yet already it conveys quite a different
meaning—and deliberately so. Done in socialist-realist style by a
Chinese sculptor whose more usual subject has been the late
communist dictator and mass murderer Mao Zedong, this image of
America’s nonviolent civil rights hero appears to have been
designed to stand less for his genuine accomplishments than for his
later “progressive” opinions, once thought to be un-American—for
example, those related to the twin progressive fantasies of a
superstate to guarantee the good things of life to all and a
(rather contradictory?) world government to take the place of
national sovereignty.
Although this incongruous portrayal of King as Dear Leader
explicitly commemorates his genuine accomplishments, its style
together with its placing of them in the context of his
aspirational utopianism has the effect of making it into a monument
to unreality—perhaps because so many of today’s heirs of the civil
rights movement, like Rep. André Carson, have decided that their
political interests lie in upholding the fantasy that King really
changed nothing and that the Tea Party, for instance, represents a
concerted attempt to return America to the days of lynchings and
Jim Crow segregation. Indeed, to a certain kind of post-honor
sensibility, the colossal King transforms the context of the
much-commemorated achievements of the Founders nearby, rather than
being transformed by it. Thus Philip Kennicott of the
Washington Post, reviewing what he affects to regard as
the “mostly harmless and neighborly” Chinese King statue, argues
that “this newest addition to the national clutter will eventually
fade into Washington’s marble background of benches, bollards and
inspirational blather.”
So much for honor! I particularly savor the irony in the fact
that one of the stone-masons imported along with the statue from
the Middle Kingdom told Courtland Milloy of the Post that he and
his colleagues were working on it not for pay (the King family, by
the way, demanded and got some $800,000 for the use of their
ancestor’s words and not very like likeness) but for the “national
honor”—meaning China’s national honor. Here, by contrast, the
massive slabs of granite at their very unveiling are rhetorically
reduced with little fuss to “clutter” and “inspirational blather.”
It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that what the statue was first
intended to make us remember has already been forgotten—along with
so much else that we used to think was an important, even an
essential part of our national identity. The historical irony thus
built into the statue is that, in honoring a great man, we now mean
not to affirm but to deny the concept of greatness itself. King as
the martyred visionary is presented to us not only as a monument to
a distinctive kind of 20th century failure, like the many toppled
and untoppled communist Big Men he so much resembles, but also as a
rebuke to King the man of action and doer of great and
unblatheringly inspirational deeds for believing in the goodness of
America.
Irony of quite a different kind was present in many of the
commemorations of the tenth anniversary of 9/11. I was particularly
taken with the exhibition at the International Center of
Photography in New York, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de
Barcelona, and the Imperial War Museum in London called Memory
Remains by the Catalan photographer Francesc Torres. Without any
context, Mr. Torres’s series of photographs portray mere junk,
albeit junk removed from those normal junky contexts of casualty,
decay, failure, abandonment, or random destruction, and placed as
incongruously and ironically as Martin Luther King’s image on the
mall in a JFK airport hangar. You could entertain yourself by
regarding the images of these broken buildings and machines
belonging to everyday life as abstract forms but only by
deliberately forgetting that they were removed from the site of the
ruined World Trade Center 10 years ago and brought here so that
people could remind themselves of that ruin.
In the book that accompanies the exhibition, Mr. Torres writes
that over the last century we have developed in the retinal and
conceptual arts a visual vocabulary that didn’t exist before
modernism. We have grown accustomed to perceiving bent steel
(Richard Serra) and crushed cars as sculpture (John Chamberlain),
and charred and eroded surfaces as painting (Jasper Johns, Antoni
Tapies, Anselm Kiefer). All these and more—discarded clothes,
personal belongings, papers and documents— are now fully
assimilated into the history and tradition of modern Western art,
making very difficult a strict distinction between documentary and
aesthetic qualities.
In other words, the context in this case does not just change
the meaning, it is the meaning—as, indeed, it is for modernist and
conceptual art. The power of time to diminish that meaning as the
shock of September 11, 2001 gradually wears off is as great as
ever, but at least it is not so easy to transform it into something
quite different by political chicanery. I think that this power to
transcend politics—which, as Hurricane Irene so recently reminded
us, is vouchsafed to fewer and fewer people and events in our
national life—is a big part of what makes these images so
evocative.
At any rate, it’s clear that national honor and pride, which
once had that power, have it no more— which may be one reason why
national catastrophe and defeat still does. It’s true that some may
repair to Mr. Torres’s photographs or the bizarre waterfall
memorial at Ground Zero or other images or reminders of disaster in
order to keep their hatred of the enemy burning bright while
others, like the so-called “truthers,” will do so in order to keep
their hatred of someone other than the enemy (are you listening
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney?) burning bright.
But most people who look at them, like most people taking part
in the other tenth anniversary events and remembrances, do so in a
pure spirit of the response to tragedy as identified by Aristotle,
that is in a spirit of pity and terror. More even than an
aesthetically correct response, this is a Christian response, it
seems to me, since the image at the heart of the Christian faith is
of a man dying on a cross— which also commemorates a defeat and a
tragedy.
Don’t tell the ascendant forces of militant secularism, however.
They really won’t like that.
