Architecture, Media, and Memory

Facing Complexity in Post-9/11 New York

Joel McKim

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350037649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Architecture, Media and Memory examines the wide range of urban sites impacted by September 11 and its aftermath – from the spontaneous memorials that emerged in Union Square in the hours after the attacks, to the reconstruction at Ground Zero, to vast ongoing landscape urbanism projects beyond. Yet this is not simply a book about post-9/11 architecture. It instead presents 9/11 as a multifaceted case study to explore a discourse on memory and its representation in the built environment. It argues that the reconstruction of New York must be considered in relation to larger issues of urban development, ongoing global conflicts, the rise of digital media, and the culture, philosophy and aesthetics of memory. It shows how understanding architecture in New York post-9/11 requires bringing memory into contact with a complex array of political, economic and social forces. Demonstrating an ability to explain complex philosophical ideas in language that will be accessible to students and researchers alike in architecture, urban studies, cultural studies and memory studies, this book serves as a thought-provoking account of the intertwining of contemporary architecture, media and memory.

1

Mourning and protest:

Spontaneous memorials at Union Square

With their modest scale, the temporary memorials that materialized throughout New York in the weeks that followed September 11 offered a visual counterpoint to the massive destruction at Ground Zero. Appearing almost immediately after the attacks, these fragile memorials were the first additions to New York’s changed topography¹ and, as media playback of the collapsing towers waned, the next iconic images to circulate on television screens and in the pages of newspapers. In Washington Square and Tompkins Square, at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade overlooking Lower Manhattan, at the multiple fire stations around the city, gatherings of votive candles, poems, banners, flowers, and keepsakes formed in similarly chaotic arrangements. Battered placards reading “We Will Never Forget,” baseball hats, family snapshots of the missing, and wilting bouquets clinging to metal railings and wired fences became a frequent, yet powerful, sight around the city.

Perhaps the most prominent of the temporary memorial sites was also one of the shortest lived. Located just north of the Fourteenth Street police cordon and the closest accessible public space to the World Trade Center (WTC) site, Union Square became a natural gathering point for those attempting to locate lost family members, for people in search of information regarding the still developing state of emergency, and for many who simply wished to be in the presence of others in the days following the attacks (Kimmelman 2001). Documentation of this brief, but important occurrence is now distributed across hundreds of amateur photography websites and Flickr photostreams. In this dispersed digital archive we can still see crowds of people gathered day and night around the aggregation of candles, flowers, and American flags that spread out to surround the park’s statuary and lamp poles. Specific objects stand out from the colorful background of melted wax: a child’s painting of two towers embracing, a rescue worker’s knee pad, a cardboard sign that reads “Killing More Will Not Honor,” and a pair of shoes still in their box. These and thousands of other individual contributions combined to transform Union Square into something unplanned and unrehearsed—a place for grieving, but also a place for discussion and deliberation over what had just happened and what was likely to occur in response (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Union Square Memorial. Donald Lokuta.

The distinctive aesthetics of the memorials that appeared throughout New York in the days following September 11 make them participants in the larger cultural phenomenon of the spontaneous memorial. Often emerging in the direct aftermath of a tragedy, long before official memory responses are established, spontaneous memorials mark a need to remember that is immediate, improvised, and perhaps instinctual. Although increasingly common occurrences at sites of tragedy, whether small-scale traffic accidents or large-scale disasters, the social and political significance of these impromptu memorials is a source of some debate among memory scholars, folklorists, and social historians. From one vantage point, the rituals of mourning are interpreted as forms of popular political expression and seen as exemplary cases of mass mobilization, a developing vernacular aesthetic and the unsolicited occupation of public space. From another perspective they represent a suspicious fusion of media-intensified emotions channeled through the kitsch materialism of consumer product goods. What then are we to make of these popular sites of memory and the complex intersection of affect, political communication, and materiality they embody?

In this chapter I wish to explore the wider ambivalent or mixed reaction to spontaneous memorials by considering the specific events that unfolded in Union Square after 9/11. The Union Square memorial was remarkable both in terms of its size—the sight of the square overflowing with memory objects was a visually arresting one—and in terms of the unusual diversity of messages and sentiments communicated at the site. It is my contention that the existing interpretations of temporary memorials, both celebratory and skeptical, fall short of fully explaining the type of community that took form in the park in the short ten-day period of the memorial’s existence—one that attended to the immediate and personal need to grieve and gather, but also to the desire to connect to and acknowledge a wider political context for the events that had just occurred. As this book will frequently demonstrate, in post–9/11 New York, the imperatives of personal memory and collective politics are often kept apart or even placed in deliberate conflict. The spontaneous memorial at Union Square was, I argue, one early example of resistance to this false opposition between memory and responsible politics.

Before turning to this specific example in New York, the chapter will provide a brief cultural history of the emerging spontaneous memorial phenomenon in America and Europe and an outline of the contrasting academic perspectives concerning its social and political implications. With this context established, the particular history of the Union Square gathering and the manner in which it complicates some of the critical assumptions about improvised memorials will be considered. I wish to suggest that voices remaining outside current academic discussions of memorial culture might offer a different interpretation of this terrain and it is with this hope that the chapter will bring forward a number of alternative philosophical, political, and aesthetic perspectives. The first is the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, a contemporary Swiss artist who frequently draws from the popular aesthetics of public altars and other mass rituals in his sprawling sculptural practice. Hirschhorn’s art explores the political possibilities that exist at the intersection of material excess and popular forms of communication. Next I’ll look to two philosophers, Paolo Virno and Bernard Stiegler, who attempt to contend with the inherently ambivalent emotional and communicative situation of the contemporary mass populace. Both thinkers highlight the current economic conditions that pattern and restrict the political forms available to the contemporary multitude, while placing emphasis on the role of collective memory as a possible site of resistance. Together these examples help establish another framework for evaluating the underlying affective and political potential of spontaneous memorials in general and the Union Square memorial in particular.

Cultural history of spontaneous memorials

Like most cultural phenomena, unauthorized public memorials and their particular aesthetics of impermanence do not spring from a single point of origin. In order to roughly trace the emergence of the practice, we’re faced with the task of assembling a number of possible sources of influence. In the United States, the grieving rituals that have developed around Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., are one commonly cited visual precedent. Lin’s memorial features two black granite walls, gradually sinking into the ground and engraved with the names of the American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War. Immediately following the completion of the memorial in 1982, visitors began depositing objects beneath the names of specific individuals: flowers, messages, cards, flags, and possessions belonging to the deceased (Kristin Ann Hass’ Carried to the Wall provides a detailed account of the custom). The minimalist surface of Lin’s memorial seems to invite the addition of these eclectic and personal contributions. The items left behind, objects ranging from “bubble gum wrappers [to] wedding rings” (Hass 1998: 22), are collected by the National Parks Service staff and added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection (VVMC). These memory objects, common items now made sacred, are preserved in the Museum and Archaeological Storage facility (MARS) in Lanham, Maryland, where over 250,000 objects (excluding flowers and flags) had been collected by 1993 (Hass 1998: 23).

Similar unplanned collections of mementos and flowers emerged at numerous sites of trauma in the United States in the 1990s. The security fence surrounding the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, site of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, became an impromptu memorial wall, adorned with bouquets of flowers, teddy bears, flags, and posters. Large spontaneous memorials also emerged at the sites of such violent incidents as the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado, in April of 1999 and the bonfire collapse at a Texas A&M University student rally in November of the same year (Girder 2006: 254).

In the UK, comparable rituals of public grieving have followed the tragedies of the Hillsborough soccer stadium disaster in Sheffield in 1989 (Walter 1991) and the Dunblane school massacre (Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti 1998). The death of Princess Diana in the summer of 1997 brought the phenomenon of the spontaneous memorial to a heightened scale and level of media exposure (Kear and Steinberg 1999). Within hours of the first reports of the accident, the gates of Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace were blanketed in floral tributes, photographs, and trinkets. By the end of the public outpouring, 10,000–15,000 tons of flowers had been removed from the various royal sites (Greenhalgh 42). The Liberty Torch monument at the Place de l’Alma, nearby the accident site in Paris, was also refashioned into a surrogate Diana memorial and yet another place for the depositing of flowers and keepsakes.

An additional chain of influence connects American spontaneous memorial practices to Roman Catholic, particularly Latin American, traditions and rituals for the public commemoration of death. Holly Everett, for example, traces the custom of placing roadside crosses or altars at the site of traffic deaths in the Southwest to the long-standing Mexican cultural traditions in these states. She points to the Catholic Descansos (resting places for the souls of travelers who died en route) that peppered the region as far back as the 1700s (2002: 27). Regina Marchi considers the contemporary rituals of El Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) in America as a form of recurring spontaneous memorial. And Celeste Olalquiaga, comments on the process of “Latinization” of the United States in the 1980s and charts the influx of Catholic religious trinkets in New York’s Fourteenth Street markets, the interest in Latin American altares (home altars) within the New York City art scene and the prevalence of Latino Catholic iconography in the club culture of the period (1992). Spontaneous memorials, particularly in Latino-influenced cities, such as New York, are perhaps a translation of these aesthetic sensibilities and cultural practices into the modes of expression employed by the general public.

Many of the scholars who have sought to understand this developing phenomenon detect a clear form of social engagement and even political expression within these rituals of public mourning. Jack Santino, whose principle objects of study are the “spontaneous shrines” of Northern Ireland, suggests that the memorials have both a commemorative and a “performative” quality, adapting J. L. Austin’s linguistic theory of “performative utterances” to the materiality of these popular memory practices. While Austin used the designation to refer to statements that cause the effect they declare (the marriage pronouncement “I do” being a prime example), Santino extends the meaning of the term “to events that attempt to cause social change” (2006: 9). He suggests that every memorial, however modest, possesses a degree of this performative quality in that it brings a specific issue into the public realm through the insistence of its very presence. This is certainly true of the shrines marking the sites of sectarian killings in Northern Ireland, but it is also true, Santino claims, of less overtly political memorials. Spontaneous shrines left at the roadside after a car has struck a cyclist or pedestrian, for example, commemorate the death of an individual, while also making a statement on the public issue of road safety. Even the display of mourning following Princess Diana’s death can be viewed through this lens as signaling the people’s changing relationship to the monarchy and presenting the public demand for a state funeral and permanent memorial.² Santino interprets the phenomenon of spontaneous memorials as a method of marking the concerns of a community within public space and therefore as a practice with intrinsic political relevance.

Adopting a similar critical stance, Harriet F. Senie suggests “spontaneous memorials are inherently also expressions of protest” (2007: 27). She points, for example, to a mural and shrine that appeared in Detroit to mark the site where Malice Green, a black unemployed steel worker, was beaten to death by two white police officers. Senie comments on the role the memorial played in bringing public awareness to an occurrence that may otherwise have gone unnoticed (2006: 41). “Frequently commemorating victims of random bullets, police brutality, or hate crimes,” Senie claims that immediate memorials, “serve both as expressions of protest and outlets for communal grief and rage” (2016: 50). Likewise, Marchi, in her aforementioned study of El Dia de Los Meurtos, points to the history of political negotiation incorporated within these popular rituals. She highlights the anti-colonial roots of the custom within Latin America, characterizing it as an indigenous resistance to Roman Catholic power through the continuation of traditional observances of ancestor worship hidden in the guise of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day celebrations. According to Marchi, this element of cultural resistance continues to be manifested in contemporary American versions of El Dia de Los Meurtos where the identification of social problems facing Latino communities, such as farm workers’ safety, is incorporated into the rituals. She comments, “U.S. Day of the Dead rituals create sacred spaces that serve both as sites for cultural affirmation via the enactment of ancestral customs, and sites for political expression, in which the dead become allies of the living in the condemnation of injustice” (2006: 272).

Not all who study these emerging forms of popular memory share this faith in their political potential, however. An opposing position is vehemently argued in the writing of Patrick West, a researcher for the liberal British think tank Civitas, who criticizes the public outpourings of grief after Dunblane and the death of Diana as displays of inauthentic “conspicuous compassion.” West views spontaneous memorials as manifestations of a fundamental social anomie, a symptom of an atomized consumerist culture devoid of the traditional institutions (family, church, neighborhood) that would direct these energies toward genuine forms of civic involvement (2004: 65). In his dismissal of popular mourning West draws on sociologist Stjepan Mestrovic’s theory that we are witness to a modern “postemotional society,” one in which “mechanization has extended its imperialistic realm from technology and industry to colonize . . . the emotions” (Mestrovic 1997: 146). West maintains that it is this form of simulated and pre-packaged emotional experience that spontaneous memorials provide the public, distracting them from the real work of sustained political commitment (2004: 2).

Recent considerations of memory rituals in post–9/11 New York have tended to adopt a similarly skeptical view of the underlying political intentions of these practices. Marita Sturken’s work Tourists of History charts the interconnection of memory, security, and patriotism in America from the Oklahoma City bombing to current architectural developments in Manhattan. Her study sets the current obsession with the memorialization of sites of trauma against the background of a general atmosphere of fear that dominated the 1980s and 1990s America (a period which saw the proliferation of prisons and a preoccupation with personal security, despite being a time of relatively low threat) (2007: 42). Sturken argues that the diffused sense of fear that was endemic to the 1980s and early 1990s gave way to the full-blown terror generated by the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks, and an already developing culture of comfort and security was pushed to a new level of intensity. The result, Sturken claims, is a “frenzied consumer response to the fear of terrorism” (2007: 5). Among the manifestations of this reaction highlighted by Sturken are the rising sales of sports utility vehicles in post–9/11 America; the civilian adoption of the Hummer military vehicle is seen as the ultimate example of a purchasable sense of security.

Sturken extends her analysis to the spontaneous memorial phenomenon and the increasing number of official memorial sites in America, claiming that they too are reflections of this fear-driven form of consumerism. Both participate in a realm of kitsch, she argues, where the experience of history is mediated through commodities. The flowers and keepsakes left behind at sites of trauma and the souvenir trinkets taken away from the gift shops at official monuments are equally symptomatic of this merging of mourning and consumerism. Even the spontaneous memorials appearing as an initial reaction to the WTC attacks were, according to Sturken, “quickly incorporated into the media spectacle of 9/11 as the media operated to shape the public aspects of mourning” (2007: 174). The kitsch aesthetic of these practices, she argues, made them readily available for repackaging by the media. The photographs of the missing included in the makeshift memorials, for example, return as the “Portraits of Grief” featured daily in The New York Times. These rituals of mourning with their dependence on consumer objects (from the erection of street corner memorial shrines to the circuit of trauma tourism) are, according to Sturken, oriented toward the production of comfort and the reconstitution of a sense of American innocence that delimits any potential political response to these events. The ubiquity of the memorial teddy bear is for Sturken the quintessential symbol of this depoliticized form of reassurance. She ultimately claims that the “culture of comfort” fostered by popular memory practices “functions . . . as a means to confront loss, grief and fear through processes that disavow politics” (2007: 6). What Sturken describes is not the “postemotional” public suggested by West, but rather one that diffuses intense feelings of anxiety through the readily available conduits of commodity objects. The possibility of an engagement with the forces conditioning this experience of anxiety is, she argues, sacrificed in this process of transference.

Considering the proliferation of 9/11 memorabilia available near the Ground Zero site, Karen J. Engle makes an even stronger claim for the disastrous political consequences of a kitsch response to world events. In her view, “Kitsch says: we can all be One, and be united in our common purpose. But this One is totalitarian, and it desires no less than the extermination of its foes” (2007: 77). In Engle’s readin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 Mourning and protest: Spontaneous memorials at Union Square
• 2 Absence and exposure: The National September 11 Memorial & Museum
• 3 Algorithmic memory: The interaction designs of Jake Barton and Local Projects
• 4 Secrets, false targets, and social media: Confronting conspiracy theories
• 5 Creative recall: Digital design, architecture, and the challenge of memory
• 6 Landfills and lifescapes: The transformation of New York’s Fresh Kills
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright