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Monumental FollyA look at telling absences in art history tells us why not to build a monument at the WTC.

By Christopher BenfeyPosted Monday, June 16, 2003, at 4:11 PM ET

A void may be the most powerful memorial to these imposing towersThe Lower Manhattan Development Corp. has announced an open competition, with submissions accepted until June 30, to design a memorial for the victims of Sept. 11 and the attack on the World Trade Center in February of 1993. The memorial site takes up some 4.7 acres within Daniel Libeskind's planned building complex and includes the "footprints" of the two original towers, bounded on one side by an exposed slurry wall, the only part of the original structure of the World Trade Center to have survived the attacks. According to the New York Times, the victims' families, New York firefighters, and downtown residents have already launched an "intense lobbying effort" to influence the 13-member jury. There have been calls for separate recognition of rescue workers and for filling in the sunken pit so that the memorial will be at street level. In the end, we're likely to get a celebrity sculptor who burnishes his or her reputation with an idiosyncratically designed—and inevitably "controversial"—monument. Or a sentimental and crowd-pleasing idea like the "soaring" memorial envisaged by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. So, I have a simple proposal. My proposal is that we put nothing at all in that space—that it be left as a hollowed-out void.

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There are powerful precedents for such a thing. Libeskind himself built empty spaces—or "voids"—into the design of his Jewish Museum in Berlin, which opened in 2001. When I visited the museum with my father, a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Berlin, both he and I found these to be the most moving parts of the museum. Elsewhere in Berlin, on the cobblestone expanse called the Bebelplatz, Micha Ullman, an Israeli-born artist, has commemorated the Nazi book-burning there of May 10, 1933, with a window at ground level that looks down into an empty subterranean white room lined with empty bookshelves. And then there's van Gogh's haunting "portrait" of Gauguin's Chair, empty since Gauguin abandoned him in Arles—an idea repeated in the one empty chair per victim of the monument for the Oklahoma City bombing victims.

An empty chair was also a mourning motif in early Buddhist art, and lately I've found myself thinking about how the Japanese, as the first wave of American visitors discovered during the Gilded Age, have always known the power of understatement. When Henry Adams, himself a literary master of absence, traveled to Japan in 1886, he particularly admired the Great Buddha at Kamakura, where a 15^th-century tidal wave had swept away the huge temple housing the 40-foot statue. Did the Japanese rebuild the temple? No. Its very absence, with its "footprint" marked by broken pillars, was a powerful presence. Adams' guide in Japan, the connoisseur and author of The Book of Tea, Kakuzo Okakura, deplored the way Westerners filled their houses with pictures, statuary, and bric-a-brac. He proposed that the tearoom be an "abode of vacancy," a description that directly inspired Frank Lloyd Wright's absence-creating "architecture from within."

In the heart of Adams' autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, there is a gap or void of 20 years, a period during which he got married; his wife, Clover, committed suicide; and he went to Japan on a journey of mourning in the company of painter and designer John La Farge. Recently I was on a panel at Yale to discuss it, along with Peter Gay, a distinguished historian of psychoanalytic bent. "What kind of man leaves his marriage out of his autobiography?" he asked, expecting—I suppose—the answer: an immature man in need of therapy. (Gay isn't the first to complain. In a long piece on Gertrude Stein in a recent New Yorker, Janet Malcolm quotes a 1933 letter from Thornton Wilder in which he remarks on Adams' silence about his wife: "It's possible to make books of a certain fascination if you scrupulously leave out the essential.")

I myself find Adams' decision perfectly justified and deeply moving. Clover Adams, a gifted photographer devastated by her father's death, hated monuments anyway. During her honeymoon on the Nile, she complained that Egyptian mortuary art was oppressive; and during a stopover in Rome she chastised the sculptor William Wetmore Story for spoiling "nice blocks of white marble." Adams' 20-year gap is the perfect "countermonument," to borrow a term—for a monument that refuses to be a traditional monument—from James E. Young, a scholar of memorials who serves on the selection committee for the World Trade Center memorial competition.

We all know that memory is primarily an inner, not an outer, process. No monument can do justice to the horror of the Civil War, which is why Lincoln's simple words at Gettysburg (often invoked after Sept. 11) remain its most compelling monument. The movingly minimalist wall designed by Maya Lin (a member of the WTC jury) came more than a decade after the American pullout from Vietnam, at a time when many Americans wanted to consign the war to oblivion. During the months after Sept. 11, thousands of people came to view the site of the devastation, contemplating what Wallace Stevens called "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." We need to heed the message in Emily Dickinson's stanza about "a certain slant of light":

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

There may be a time during the coming decades when memory will require some more specific physical reminder of what happened on Sept. 11. That time is not now. We should be looking instead for ways to honor the "internal difference," starting with the void at the heart of Ground Zero.

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Christopher Benfey is Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His latest book, A Summer of Hummingbirds, about writers and artists in Gilded Age America, has just been published by the Penguin Press.

Photograph of World Trade Center by James Rudnick/Corbis.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

The black wall [of the Vietnam War Memorial] is an example of how some things can take on a life of their own. When this memorial was first unveiled I thought that many Vietnam veterans would be offended by its simplicity. But that turned out not to be the case. Instead (and I wish I knew who started this) veterans and family embraced it and made it their own, touching the name of a fallen comrade or father, and leaving messages and presents in tribute. I don't know if all of this was in the designer's mind, but I suspect not. For the World Trade Center, I suspect something similar will happen, as long as people are able to approach and touch whatever memorial is placed there. I think that a large and sterile hole in the ground won't quite fit the bill, but I do agree that simplicity will be the key to allowing people to find their own meaning for the entire, senseless tragedy.

--Schadenfreude

(To reply, click here)

…The problem here is what constitutes 'absence.' In this case, Manhattan is characterized by density. A gap, like Central Park, is huge. Huge by its distinction. By its commerce. It is as if there were 20 blank pages interjected into the autobiography; the absence of words would make a very unsubtle statement. Instead, the scene of the world trade centers should be restored to the purpose of ... well ... trade. Lots of buildings, full of people, not terribly unique (though not strikingly bland, either). This would be a true 'absence' of a monument. Rather than a ghost town, a necropolis, or a stark vacuum calling out to nature, we would let the life that surrounds it in downtown fill in the gap and rise up to retake the ground lost to terrorism. This would be an understated memorial. Some plaques. A museum down at the PATH station. Nothing to interrupt the ebb and flow of commerce at ground zero and above. NYC back to business, even as it is all day, everyday, just a few blocks away.

--BenK

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There is something to be said for the idea of substantivizing public grief with physical nothingness, and Benfey's points about the use of void in art are well taken. However, there's a reason why Libeskind didn't build his Jewish Museum as merely an empty lot (and I doubt Benfey would have been as moved by such). Instead, he used both positive and negative spaces, each to suggest their own values. His WTC site design does the same. Minimalism has a very deservedly prominent place in modern memorials (Maya Lin's immortal work says it all). But there's a very clear line between doing that, and descending into the Warholist gimmickry that would be represented by the nothing-monument Benfey desires. If anything, the lack of SOMETHING there probably would be even more offensive to more people than whatever design, however provocative, was inevitably selected. He allows that a physical memorial could possibly be built "during the coming decades", but should we have waited decades for Lin's masterpiece? The purpose in rushing things is not to hurry up and start the memorializing, it is to repair the wound in New York City's skyline. And I'd be interested to learn if Henry Adams really did omit 20 years from his autobiography as a deliberate statement, or if he just didn't think it was worth including.

--MikeMillennium

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As one who lost a close friend in the World Trade Center, I would like to see a list of the names of the victims (whether or not fire and police personnel are listed separately is immaterial to me; my friend was a "civilian") somewhere on the site. Apart from that, I agree with the author that there should be no "monument" other than the empty space. This seems to me the most eloquent expression of the tragedy. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln said (I trust my quotation from memory is roughly correct), "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." That the first part of that sentence has proved untrue does not negate the second part.

--ClaudeScales

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