April
18 , 2003 Memorials
and Memory: Visual Studies Series Continues April 24
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James
Young
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The site of New York
City’s 9/11 attacks has become a hotly debated piece of
real estate, as various groups propose ways of using the land
and remembering those who died there. The site’s appointed
guardian, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC),
hopes to satisfy these groups with the site’s future buildings,
which will include a complex of towers and memorial plaza designed
by architect Daniel Libeskind, as well as a monument to 9/11’s
victims.
James Young, a consultant to the LMDC and professor of English
and chair of Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst, will discuss the complexity of monuments
like the one at ground zero in the next lecture in the series
The Culture and Nature of the Visual. Young will make
his presentation, titled “Crushed History: The Politics
of Memory at Ground Zero and Beyond,” with German artist
of public memorials and counter-memorials Horst Hoheisel, on Thursday,
April 24, at 4:30 pm in Gamble Auditorium. A reception will follow.
The lecture and a related faculty seminar are cosponsored by the
Office of the Dean of Faculty and the Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman
Center for Leadership.
“The Weissman Center is pleased to support a public conversation
between one of the most innovative memorial artists in Germany
today and one of the most eloquent and thoughtful thinkers on
memorial culture in the world,” says codirector Karen Remmler,
who studies the relationship between private and public forms
of memory in contemporary Germany. “Young’s writing
about and active participation in the dialogue about the function,
aesthetics, and meaning of memorials in Europe, and, more recently,
at ground zero in New York, is nothing less than stunning. A joint
presentation by Young and Hoheisel promises to be an event both
timely and historic as we all consider the concrete forms that
cultural memory and remembrance take in times of crisis.”
“What have monuments and memory to do with each other?”
asks Young, who challenges the idea that a monument can easily
resolve a shared experience or represent a collective memory.
When a 1995 design competition in Germany failed to find a suitable
memorial to Europe’s Holocaust victims, for example, Young
said, “Better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions
in Germany than a final solution to your Holocaust memory question.”
Of the hundreds of designs submitted to that competition, Young
found only one that seemed just. It was Horst Hoheisel’s
proposal to blow up the Brandenburg Gate, grind its stone into
dust, sprinkle the remains over its former site, then cover the
entire memorial area with granite plates. Young called the design
a “provocative anti-solution to the memorial competition.”
He writes, “How better to remember a destroyed people than
by a destroyed monument? At least part of its polemic is directed
against actually building any winning design, against ever finishing
the monument at all. Here Hoheisel seems to suggest that surest
engagement with Holocaust memory in Germany may actually lie in
its perpetual irresolution, that only an unfinished memorial process
can guarantee the life of memory.”
In his lecture on memorializing memory, Young will discuss “what
the monument can and can’t do and how to see a memorial
as a process, using examples of counter-monuments, illustrated
by several of Horst’s own works.” Such countermonuments
include Hoheisel’s famous Denk-Stein-Sammlung in
Kassel’s City Hall Square, which marks the site of a fountain
destroyed by the Nazis.
“Our speakers offer a rare view of the inside negotiations,
artistic issues, and feelings that produce some of our most affecting
public memorials,” says Debbora Battaglia, professor of
anthropology and coorganizer with Associate Professor of Art Anthony
Lee of The Culture and Nature of the Visual. “Drawing
on their own experiences of major projects, including ground zero
and Holocaust memorials in Berlin, Young and Hoheisel take us
beyond the level of formal presentation, into nonpublic realms
of social memory and forgetting. Together, they challenge us to
consider the messages we are sending to ourselves about ourselves
in our public acts of memory, and how these acts concretely shape
a future that is mindful of the past, while moving us to the possibility
of hope. We anticipate a powerful event, with far-reaching significance
for anyone seeking a vision of humanitarian commitment—especially
in these times of social trauma.”
Young is the author of At Memory’s Edge: Afterimages
of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (Yale
University Press, 2000), The Texture of Memory (Yale
University Press, 1993), and Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust
(Indiana University Press, 1988). He was also the guest curator
of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City titled
The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, and
was the editor of that exhibition’s catalogue, The Art
of Memory (Prestel Verlag, 1994). Shortly thereafter, Young
was appointed by the Berlin Senate to the five-member commission
for Germany’s national “Memorial to Europe’s
Murdered Jews,” now under construction in Berlin.
The College’s yearlong lecture series on visual studies
concludes May 8, with the lecture “Living Color: The Animation
of Racial Stereotypes in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled,”
by M. J. T. Mitchell, professor of art history and English at
the University of Chicago’s Cochrane-Woods Art Center.
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