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Performativity of sites of commemoration and performativity at sites of commemoration

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Performativity of sites of commemoration and performativity at sites of commemoration

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Content Performativity of Sites of Commemoration
and
Performativity at Sites of Commemoration
By Rachel Zaretsky
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
(FINE ARTS)
May 2021
Copyright 2021 Rachel Zaretsky
Acknowledgements
Jennifer West
Suzanne Lacy
Amelia Jones
Ofri Cnaani
Louis Zaretsky
Nancy Zaretsky
Troy Curtis Kreiner
Thank you
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………ii
List of Figures ………………………………………………………………….…..iv
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………..…v
Introduction ………………………………………………………………………1
Chapter 1: Sites of Commemoration and Collective Memory…………………..…2
Chapter 2: The Counter Monument……………………………………………..….6
Chapter 3: Counter Monuments as Sites of Production…………………………….9
Chapter 4: On Memory Work……………………………………………………...17
Chapter 5: Overdetermined Counter Monument Design………………………..…20
Chapter 7: Multi Sensory Design in Counter Monuments…………………………25
Chapter 8: Horst Hoheisel and A Memorial to a Memorial ………………..……31
Chapter 9: lauren woods and A Dallas Drinking Fountain Project………………….33
Chapter 10: Conclusion……………………………………………………………………36
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….44
iii
List of Figures
Figure 1. Rachel Zaretsky. Photograph taken at the Memorial to the 38
Murdered Jews of Europe, 2016. Berlin, Germany
Figure 2. Rachel Zaretsky, I set out to photograph every crack at the 38
memorial, 2018, video.
Figure 3. Shahak Shapira, Yolocaust Project, 2017 39
Figure 4. Rachel Zaretsky, Visiting the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach 39
by proxy, 2019. video installation
Figure 5. 9/11 Museum Tissue Box Pedestal, New York, NY 40
Figure 6. Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum, 2001. Berlin Germany. 40
Figure 7. Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Proposal, 1981. 41
Figure 8. Rachel Zaretsky, A walk along the Vietnam Veteran’ s Memorial 41
Wall, 2020, video.
Figure 9. Felix Gonzelz-Torres, Untitled (Death by Gun), 1990 42
Figure 10. Jochen Herz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, A Monument 42
Against Facism, 1986. Harburg, Germany.
Figure 11. Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz, A Memorial to a Memorial, 1995. 43
Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Germany.
Figure 12. lauren woods, A Dallas Drinking Fountain Project, 43
2013-present. Dallas, TX.
iv
Abstract
In this paper I analyze the role of performativity within the design of sites of commemoration in
the United States and Germany and how performativity determines the level of engagement
visitors have with the act of remembering. As an artist, I also contextualize my work and
interests in the social space of memory.
v
I. Introduction
How do Americans as a culture represent historical moments and people? How do we
engage with these representations of remembrance? The purpose of this paper is to understand
the role of memory that is enacted at sites of commemoration and what those sites encourage in
those who visit. Here, I argue that commemorative sites are performative by design and what
occurs at these sites of commemoration is also performative. Some memorials encourage a
visitor’s experience to expand by going beyond the traditional expectations utilizing symbolism
to represent and educate. Interactive memorial construction encourages memory to live on in an
enduring manner through approaches such as the combined activation of sight and touch.
The productivity of commemorative sites is measured by the level of engagement with
performativity and how explicitly these sites communicate information. I focus on the counter
monument movement and how its relationship to multi sensory characteristics instigate a deeper
engagement with visitors. I will provide a critical inquiry into the work of American and German
monument makers and artists on this spectrum who strive to construct transformative
experiences including my own art work. This paper focuses on the relationship of
commemorative practices that the United States and Germany have adopted as their memorials
share a relational and cumulative dialogue.
1
II. Sites of Commemoration and Collective Memory
As art historian Erika Doss has argued, in the United States we have an obsession with
memory and history and an urgent desire to express and claim our issues in public space through
symbolic expression. Doss has labeled this impulse as our Memorial Mania. These anxieties are
1
propelled by self identification, national historicity and the politics of representation. Memorials
are “repositories of public feelings and emotions.” Our obsession with memorials is swelling to
2
keep up with the pace of our expanding and diversifying public that expects recognition and a
sense of entitlement from our national symbols. Prior to this moment, public opinion on
3
memorialization was obscured by institutions of power. The boundary between past and present
is less stable today due to the proliferation of media and an erosion of the boundary between the
identities of the individual and the public.
4
We all participate in individual memory and collective memory. As Maurice Halbwachs
5
has articulated, collective memory is shaped by the needs of the present. In order to explain the
current moment, those in a position of power reconstruct the past to define what is remembered
Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 2.
1
Ibid, 13.
2
Ibid, 34.
3
Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts : Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, Calif: Stanford
4
University Press, 2003),8-9.
Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 50.
5
2
and how the public remembers it. Reliant on spaces, Halbwachs writes, “[e]very collective
memory unfolds within a spatial framework.”
6
French Historian Pierre Nora expands on collective memory’s reliance on space through
the term lieux de mémoire, places of memory, as spaces where geography, history, identity and
memory are activated through these designated sites on a national scale. V oid of the actual site
7
of a memory, these places become sacred spaces where the politics of identity and nationhood
are legitimized and become a pseudo-religious canon. Collective memory is shared by the public,
an elusive and unstable group independent from institutions. Memorials serve as our memory
8
aids, or “materialist modes of privileging particular histories and values.” In the aftermath of
9
World War II, our commemorative focus became more frequent and changed tune from exalting
heroes to memorializing victims.
When designing memorials for the future, I believe our relationship to accessing the past
through visual records is an influential mechanism that links generations. Such framing could
offer a bridge to what subsequent generations deem incomprehensible. Marianne Hirsch outlines
“postmemory” as “the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic,
experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as
to seem to constitute memories in their own right.” She writes on the topic of the Holocaust as
10
a child of Jewish parents who survived World War II, though the term and its understanding has
Ibid, 6.
6
Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire" Representations, no. 26 (1989): Accessed
7
November 10, 2020. doi:10.2307/2928520 ,7-9.
Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics” Public culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 49–52.
8
Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 38.
9
Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 1 March 2008; 29 (1). doi: https://doi.org/
10
10.1215/03335372-2007-019, 103.
3
grown beyond the original reference of being strictly “the generation after”. Postmemory doesn’t
form a coherent identity, it refers to a generational structure of transmission embedded in
mediation.
11
Hirsch’s perspective on postmemory’s transmission through media posits a viewer in the
present’s ability to see and touch the past through visual representation. The potent bond we
share in accessing the memories of others through the photograph is understood through the
relationship to sight and affective memory. Photographs have indexical and iconic attributes that
offer a bridge to see, to embody and to touch a viewer by functioning as postmemory projection
screens. In Susan Sontag’s book Regarding the Pain Of Others she notes how something
12
unknown to us becomes “real” and coded as news once it’s been photographed. The photograph
13
has the ability to allow us to engage through it with others’ pain despite the separation from the
viewer in their time and place.
German filmmaker Harun Farocki’s essay film Images of the World and the Inscription of
War explores how a dated record can be reconstructed in the present when the power over the
interpretation is held by a new beholder. Composed of found footage, the film surgically
deconstructs an aerial photograph taken by allied forces during World War II of a potential bomb
target. The image captures the concentration camp Auschwitz in the frame, only noticed decades
later. The photograph can now be viewed as a rare document of evidence, though it doesn’t
communicate the horrors that we know took place.
Ibid, 35.
11
Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 1 March 2008; 29 (1). doi: https://doi.org/
12
10.1215/03335372-2007-019, 36-7
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 1st ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 21.
13
4
The use of “post” in Hirsch’s term postmemory is not declaring we are beyond memory.
It refers to the position of having critical distance while still being inextricably entwined with the
memory. Commemorative sites are linked with postmemory throughout their life cycle.
Memorials are tasked with communicating and acknowledging through a durational
methodology. Even though survivors of a tragedy or the relatives of victims may be advocating
for a memorial, their needs are only a fraction in the decision of a monumental form. These sites
are charged as instigators of remembrance, where they will be encountered by generations
beyond those with direct correlation. Commemorative sites accelerate our constantly shifting
dialogue with the present and past.
5
III. The Counter Monument
Kirk Savage writes of the federal government’s staging of a national narrative through
monuments at the mall in Washington DC as the modern "spatial turn.” The ideology seeks for
the work “to guide visitors’ movement and experience in space.” This shift moved away from the
nineteenth and early twentieth century obsession that Erika Doss termed Statue mania towards
the fixation with public monuments. With this shift in monuments as spatial through larger
14
footprints they create public space within the monumental frame. This new public space within
15
monuments has led the field towards undefined forms.
The traditional pre-World War II public monument followed a model of a classically
constructed figurative representation permanently fixed in a landscape. Its purpose was to
valorize a cultural history and build a collective identity. During the totalitarian Nazi regime this
structure was weaponized as propaganda. Monuments were erected to embody the ideals of the
Nazi party as part of the singular function that art held in the public sphere. After the fall of the
Nazi regime, skepticism shrouded the relationships of German artists to monumental forms. To
erect a monument was to reckon with this fascist context.
Decades after World War II, German governing bodies heeded the public desire for a
monument to carry the recognition of the tragedy and loss of war. How Germans would
approach this appeared to be an impossible undertaking. Born from a rejection of modernism,
where totalitarian ideologies reigned, postmodernism shrunk away from any universal truths and
Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, (University of Chicago Press, 2010,) 20.
14
Kirk Savage, Monument Wars : Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial
15
Landscape. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). http://search.ebscohost.com.libproxy2.usc.edu/
login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=306128. 152, 200.
6
singular resolutions. This path towards the designation of a memorial or monument appears
incompatible. This moment of German monumental history brought the collapse of the singular
interpretation and birthed a movement that recognizes a myriad of experiences termed the
counter monument.
16
Counter monuments are memorial spaces originating in Germany created to challenge the
legacy of the Fascist relationship to the monument. Public memorial spaces can be criticized for
displacing memory away from public consciousness and responsibility. James E. Young probes
the public’s yearnings for monuments that memorialize unfathomable tragedies such the
Holocaust as a possible desire for closure with challenging and burdensome pasts. To displace
memory is the allowance for the public conscious to become more forgetful while the monument
holds the burden. Counter monuments work to create a new relationship that allows for
17
heightened somatic relationships with these public sites within varying degrees of control over a
given experience.
Minimalist monuments starve the viewer of legible symbolism through abstraction, with
little imagery to latch on to. Memorials are primarily driven by sight and depend on gestalt,
perceiving the whole image before processing individual sums. Counter monument designs
divert the visitor’s attention to the phenomenological, other non-visual sensory experiences, their
embodied experience and the performances of other visitors on site. The Vietnam Veterans
18
Memorial Wall in Washington D.C and The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin
James E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today." Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2
16
(1992): Accessed November 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343784. 271.
Ibid, 274.
17
Quentin Stevens, Karen Franck, Memorials as Spaces of Engagement, (New York: Routledge 2016), https://
18
doi.org/10.4324/9781315747002 41.
7
are two minimalist counter monument designs that provoke reactions from their visitors in
productive ways. My artwork responds to the public’s relationship to these sites and will be
contextualized in the following sections. I refer to these memorials as paradigms throughout this
paper.
8
IV . Counter Monuments as Sites of Production
Abstract memorial designs seek to invoke new language that is distinguished from the
limitations of figurative and representational memorials. They refrain from asserting a singular
interpretation of what is being commemorated. But as a result abstraction can also be lost in
translation and create situations without explicit memorializing meaning. Memorials are
19
ultimately tasked to serve a function for the public. They can be understood through Michel
Foucault’s concept of heterotopias. These are places of difference embedded within everyday
space. Memorials situate a particular symbolic narrative of the past set apart from the everyday.
20
Counter monuments are performative in two distinct manners: certain spaces have
expectations for visitors and those visitors mirror these expectations from the design. These
relationships hinge on anticipations that are constantly fluctuating and unreliable. The architects
of counter monuments devise opportunities for multiple experiences. This often creates designs
that live on a spectrum ranging from highly orchestrated to obscured. These designs dictate what
social behaviors occur. Within the design, the level of contextual language offered to a visitor is
crucial: is there a sign naming the site or a list of rules expressing what is allowed? Is there
guards monitoring behaviors on site? If the designs are not explicit, then the behaviors are not
21
either. Social codes are also largely dependent on where these spaces are situated. Often,
Ibid, 154.
19
Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec. "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 24-27. Accessed February 1,
20
2021. doi:10.2307/464648.
Ibid, 167.
21
9
memorials are located in large urban settings that might pull in tourists from adjacent public
spaces.
Cultures impose an immense range of expected behaviors that then become typical of
their public commemorative sites. US and German war memorials are associated with Western
bereavement practices, which tend to appeal to patriotic overtones. When families are not in
possession of the remains of a deceased loved one they seek ritualized objects to serve as
touchstones. These representatives provide a corporeal experience to mediate this absence and
play a factor in the initial call for memorialization in instances of tragedy.
22
At a given moment there could be multiple audiences with varying intentions and
individual needs in relation to a counter monument. These audiences might include: those with
familial connections, tourists or the local citizens commuting through the city. Each of these
audiences respond to one another and imitate behaviors performed that they witness on location
and through photographic documents circulating online.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a significant memorial to analyze in this
conversation about counter monuments and performativity. The motivation to commemorate the
Jews of Europe who perished during the Holocaust had begun to surface through calls from
German citizens in the 1980s. Such a design required the honoring of an incomprehensible loss
of six million people in the country that also held the responsibility for their deaths. This spurred
arguments over political, physical and philosophical concerns for years.
After debates, which became part of the process of Erinnerungsarbeit (memory-work),
the German federal parliament voted to create a memorial. In 1999 the American architect Peter
Marita Sturken, "The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero." American Ethnologist 31, no. 3 (2004):
22
Accessed November 19, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805360. 312-13
10
Eisenmann was selected to execute his proposal. The design eventually consisted of 2,711
concrete stelae varying in height in a large plot of the city near the Brandenburg Gate. An
Information Center with exhibitions detailing the German persecution of Jews is housed below
ground level.
Visiting this sight on a given day, you might see tourists coming in on a bus, commuters
cutting through the vast field of stelae or teenagers drinking beer and sitting on top of the stelae.
As a Jewish person visiting the site, I was shocked when I stumbled upon two Spanish teenagers
kissing in the narrow pathway of the memorial. (Fig. 1) Then it occurred to me that regardless of
the intention of the designers and the city, this field does not function solely as a site of
remembrance.
The monument is primarily experiential: one steps into the space and chooses a path to
follow through the varying height of stelae, some of which rise above one’s head. The site
immerses and disorients visitors while falling short of holding them to a particular experience.
This diminishes the message and imperative to remember on site. Usually, the behavior that is
performed at memorials is choreographed and imitated.
I consider the commemorative site as a type of stage. Responding to codes embedded in
the design, visitors enact acknowledgement and contemplation of who and what is being
memorialized in their performance. Designs incorporate physical or metaphorical borders as a
means of designating these sites. But even with conventional memorials, often other behaviors
deviating from the primary function of the site seep in. At a site deemed sacred, all behaviors
23
that are performed there are interpreted as meaningful and thus transformed into
Ibid, 315.
23
11
rituals.
24
In my artistic efforts to understand the performative identity of commemorative spaces, I
seek to uncover the variety of responses that might be provoked by a relationship with these sites
at this moment in time. I spent three months living in Berlin in 2016 with the intention of
researching and understanding the public’s relationship to counter monument spaces. I performed
the role of observer at The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and set aside 15
hours a week to be present at this memorial. Setting aside my own experience of the memorial, I
gave myself prompts to understand how others spend time and document our experiences at
these open-ended memorial spaces. I wrote, I drew, I collected, I observed people, I recorded.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin is made up of 2,711 concrete
stelae of the same width but varying in height. I noticed that every time I was there some aspect
of it was under construction. After doing some research I learned that the concrete stelae are
hollow due to the necessity of mitigating cost and weight, as there is the below ground level
information center. The unclear intention of the memorial, linked to the lack of signage and the
risk of crumbling in onto itself motivated my performative action seeking to photograph every
crack I saw combing through the rows of concrete.
I was hunched over and guided by my camera, following a random path through other
bodies to document as many hairline cracks I could until I reached exhaustion. The resulting 10
minute video piece is a record of this gesture, featuring hundreds of images. (Fig. 2) As an artist
making work about the challenges of memorialization, I investigate languages that chip away at
the limits of representation. I view this resulting video work as a record of this search.
Ibid.
24
12
Counter monuments encourage more than a multitude of interpretations; they invite
performative responses. In my view the goal of this memorial is to encourage varying
opportunities to look within to attempt to connect to a horror that is unimaginable. This horror
can not be simply explained. Despite it seeming beyond comprehension, the path that led to the
Holocaust is one we, humanity, are capable of. I believe the creator of this design desired for this
thought process to be one of the outcomes for visitors.
The expansive scale of the memorial and the walking paths within create a sensation of a
labyrinth which mimics the experience of a city park. People exploring the maze-like design
have a tendency to want to get familiar with the space to orient themselves. This results in an
ambling pace of visitors. It is next to historic landmarks in the city such as the Brandenburg Gate
and where the Berlin Wall once stood but today this area is also major metropolitan zone with
restaurants and shops. The memorial borders Tiergarten Park, where one could be picnicking on
the other side of the street and extend their behavior from the park to the memorial. In
acknowledgment of the geographic location and the flexible boundary between commemorative
site to cityscape, an important aspect of the memorial is that it invites a relational dynamic for
performative connections with visitors.
The absence of signage visible on the site is a missed opportunity to invite engaging
participation in memorializing the deceased. Lack of signage creates a lack of context, leading to
no overt demarcation of the space as a commemorative site. Some tourists are aware ahead of
time of the Information Center below ground, but many people who visit do not know of its
existence. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe has no clear focal point and functions
like a backdrop to visitors without representational or textual information.
13
The undertaking to memorialize the Jews murdered by the Nazi party was a lengthy and
arduous process. An ambivalent context contributes little to this dialogue. Those who occupy the
site are stimulated by the spatial experience. Without so much as the title of the memorial visible,
this creates a purely formal encounter tethered to the present and separate from any reference of
who or what historical event is being summoned.
One might draw the conclusion that an absence of signage is a method to prevent the
coercion of an indivisible interpretation, as counter monuments mandate. I see a distinction
between openness and aimlessness in memorialization. The behaviors that occur on site are not
explicitly prohibited by the designer’s objective. Visitors rely on their habitual bodily memory to
inform their responses to this setting. The architect supposed a certain set of codes and
25
behaviors would be performed as a result of the design but might not have anticipated all of the
ways in which the memorial becomes activated in Berlin as time passes.
Of the outcomes that were not anticipated is Yolocaust, a 2017 photo project by Israeli-
German satirist and writer Shahak Shapira. The title is the merging of the slang term “You Only
Live Once” and the Holocaust. Responding to the irony of playful and seemingly unaware selfies
taken by tourists at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and circulated online, Shapira
created a series of twelve shocking images. (Fig. 3) He juxtaposed the poses and behaviors of
visitors with backdrops of archival photographs from the Holocaust. The photographs displayed
disturbing realities of the Holocaust such as emaciated, deceased bodies from concentration
camps. Black and white filters were applied to the composite images in order to merge the
opposing existences to the same plane.
Edward S. Casey, “Body Memory,” In Remembering, Second Edition: A Phenomenological Study, (Indiana
25
University Press, 2000), Accessed November 22, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gzfjf.17. 146-151
14
Shapira’s images were published on the artists website and on social media. News outlets
wrote about the project and it reached an audience of millions who lambasted those who took the
original selfies. They were labeled “dumb ass selfie takers.” Through their dissemination on the
26
internet the project reached all twelve original image makers, who contacted Shapira about the
photographs and issued apologies. Once they asked him, he took down the images and
27
eventually replaced them with a statement on the project. When I encountered an image from the
series on the internet, I felt that the project and what could be extrapolated from it was limited.
Shapira clearly intended to challenge those who take photographs of flippant behavior at
memorials and to discourage future visitors from choosing to take photographs that insufficiently
acknowledge the Holocaust. I believe that this project brought this trend to the attention of the
mainstream media, but it did not endeavor to unpack the motivations of a generation that led to
the phenomenon. Yolocaust is one of several projects that shift the spotlight to what behaviors
are performed at The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe other than remembrance.
Historically, the impulse to take a selfie at a memorial was not invented by social media.
Tourists of commemorative sites have created joyful photographs or mailed postcards from
places haunted by history since the advent of photography. The images we produce today are
28
being created and circulated on the internet to a wide audience at an accelerated rate. Perhaps
29
Joel Gunter, ‘Yolocaust’: How should you behave at a Holocaust memorial?’, BBC News, Published on January
26
20, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38675835
Shahak Shapira, “Yolocaust”, Accessed on November 21, 2020. https://yolocaust.de/
27
Maria Zalewska, Selfies from Auschwitz: Rethinking the Relationship Between Spaces of Memory and Places of
28
Commemoration in The Digital Age : Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media Journal |
Special Issue: Digital Trauma in Eastern and Central Europe, 2018, 102
Marita Sturken, “Icons and Remakes.” Journalism & Communication monographs 20, no. 4 (December 2018):
29
314–317
15
this speed renders impossible any pause for contemplation as is traditionally associated with
commemorative acts. The role of repetition within photographic representations of
memorialization has aided the melding of individual, varied experiences of an event to become a
singular amalgamation. This distorts the site’s meaning in photographs, reconstructed into
personal self-promotion. With each site comes repetitive performances of engagement that
contribute to this singularity.

16
V . On Memory Work
Counter monument designs aim to inspire a more provocative experience in the hopes
that these dynamics may erode complacency. In this section of the paper I look to artists,
architects and efforts by myself that aim to create encounters that activate the role of a visitor
from spectator into participants at memorials. This transfer of responsibility relies on the concept
of memory-work, which is a process of individuals acknowledging what was forgotten and lost
in the process of remembering. These structures refer to memory while relinquishing the
responsibility of reminding.
30
The Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach is a large memorial located at 1933-1945
Meridian Avenue in Miami Beach, Florida. The site itself fills street numbers marking the
duration of the Third Reich in Germany. Miami Beach had one of the highest populations of
Holocaust survivors in the 20th century. This memorial combines both figurative and abstract
designs and is not viewed as a counter monument. Rather, the video work I created about this site
offers a counter monument interpretation of the memorial.
In 1984 a memorial was proposed by the Holocaust Memorial Committee, a local private
nonprofit organization comprised of survivors. I would like to distinguish this cohort as an
anomaly from the other memorial case studies I share as typically the design of a memorial is not
selected by those directly involved. The final design by architect Kenneth Treister includes nude,
starved figures climbing up a 40 foot sculptural arm. The memorial’s website underscores the
conflicting opinions of what memorial designs are tasked with representing. “Critics of Treister’s
Karen E. Till, "Hauntings, Memory, Place." In The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. University of Minnesota
30
Press, 2005. 18-19.
17
design said the Memorial’s focal point, the more than four-story-high outstretched arm, tattooed
with a number from Auschwitz was “grotesque,” and a “brutal intrusion on the cityscape.”
Holocaust survivors and committee members said that was the point.” This is the first
31
memorial l encountered as a child and in considering the site as a subject for my work I sought to
expand my relationship with this site. The names of seventeen of my family members are
inscribed in the granite walls surrounding the arm, which were inspired by Maya Lin’s Vietnam
Veteran’ s Memorial Wall surrounding the arm.
Visiting the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach by Proxy is a three-channel video
installation I conceived of consisting of one projection showing a 10 minute video and two
vertical monitors showing refracted imagery and color in quick flashes, mimicking memory
flashbacks as if one is driving by the memorial. (Fig. 4) The content in the ten minute video is a
performance for the camera. The impulse to create this performance was motivated by my
decision to not visit the memorial in person as an adult and instead visit through Instagram
geotags and hashtags used in relation to the memorial.
This memorial’s objective enlists very overt imagery so that there is little doubt in the
interpretation or alternatives to what it’s communicating. The site’s location is South Beach,
where it is also in close proximity to hotels, night clubs and the beach— all which attract an
international crowd. In my video, I act as a mediator between what the memorial is and how
people frame it through their participation and production for social media. Despite the

31
“About" Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach website. Accessed November 23, 2020. https://
holocaustmemorialmiamibeach.org/about/history/
18
perception that the memorial discourages active engagement, visitors engage with it in
unintended modes through social media.
In this performance, I withhold imagery of both the site and the social media posts
interacting with it. I perform the memorial siphoned through social media renderings using
language and my arm as a prop. When performing the site’s geotagged posts, which I refer to as
a living archive, I avoid expressing emotion in my descriptions, my voice and my gaze to limit
perception of judgement, so that the listener privileges the images they create in their head. The
monotone voice I use rings hollow and opposes the traumatic content the memorial represents.
I share the approach taken in this video installation after detailing the photo project of
Shahak Shapira’s Yolocaust as our works are both engrossed in the photographed behaviors acted
out by visitors of two memorials, yet our approaches diverge. My intention is not to characterize
what I think is right or wrong behavior at memorials; rather I ask related questions about the
intended audiences of these sites. Shapira’s approach underscores the ridiculousness of social
media production and engagement, where we are increasingly somewhere but not present,
engrossed with a secondary audience. I don’t believe that juxtaposition enlists the nuance of
dialogue that must be part of a conversation on the indeterminate interpretations of counter
monuments.
19
VI. Overdetermined Counter Monument Design
Contemporary memorial designers are aware of the power of making memory relevant to
generations that might not have witnessed what they are tasked with commemorating. I refer to
the choices made by those who designed the 9/11 Museum in New York and the Jewish Museum
in Berlin as overdetermined memorial designs that function within counter monument
characteristics but veered off course with assigned and narrow experiences that the designs
enforce on site.
The memorial Reflecting Absence is a counter monument design by architect Michael
Arad to honor the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the site of the former World
Trade Towers that were destroyed in the attacks. The design was completed in 2011 and features
twin reflecting pools whose edges are inscribed with names of the deceased. The design’s
representation of absence through voids created by submerged fountains appears to be influenced
by Horst Hoheisel’s Aschrott Fountain, a counter monument designed in 1987 to honor the
murder of Jews in Kassel, Germany. Adjacent to Arad’s memorial is the affiliated 9/11 Museum.
I visited the site in 2015 where I spent time with both the memorial and the museum. The
memorial’s mission is to create a space that honors the victims of the attacks.
32
The museum serves to educate the public about the tragic events and their impact on the
world following September 11, 2001. It houses exhibitions and a collection of artifacts from the
aftermath of the attacks relating to people and events. When I visited I recall encountering
imagery and records that led up to the moment of the attacks, breaking down the event by
“Home page”, 9/11 Memorial. Accessed on November 21, 2020. https://www.911memorial.org/
32
20
stretching time. The experience was incredibly emotional and the exhibition design felt
manipulative.
While absorbing the information on display I recall the exhibition halls as crowded and
overstimulating. I teared up upon reading individual accounts of victims. In one of the
exhibitions I looked down and noticed an unusual feature I’d never encountered in an exhibition
before: an elongated tissue box holder posing as a pedestal. (Fig. 5) It presented an invitation to
visitors who may be crying. It supposed that the material on display encourages crying. I felt a
sense of mistrust in relation to the construction of the experience I’d been participating in. I was
pulled out of the moment. As an American I feel inextricably linked to the historical events
portrayed in the museum and the rupture caused by 9/11, but I could not fight the sense of
suspicion that bubbled up in reaction to the museum due to its overdetermined orchestration of
an experience. This disenchantment reminded me that as a collective memory device, the
museum’s function is to forge a unified, national construction of the events that occurred on
September 11, 2001. Memory and history are in opposition and museums are part of the
historical process.
Another illustration of the role that creating a museum plays in providing resolve to a
community is the history of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The founding of a Jewish Museum
was a years-long process of disagreement and controversy. Concurrent with efforts of re-
unification and the Berlin Wall, a debate around whether a dedication to Jewish German history
should be viewed as a department within the Berlin Museum or if such an institution should
function as an independent Jewish museum in Berlin. The history of Jews in Berlin is a vibrant
21
part of the city’s fabric prior to the war. Such a history could support itself, though that also
stirred controversy that posited the separation as a form of segregation.
33
In 1988 Berlin city planners initiated a call taking these issues into consideration for a
building design proposal which was termed an “Extension of the Berlin Museum with the Jewish
Museum Department.” From the many proposals submitted, American architect Daniel
Libeskind’s proposal Between the Lines was singled out. He laid out a vision for a building that
was composed as a map that echoed the history of the Jews in Germany. It featured broken
pathways and resisted linear ways of navigating the space. In 2016 I visited the building and was
taken aback by my reaction to it. As a visitor, I wasn’t too familiar with the history of the design
when there, but the choreographed museum experience was most memorable. I hardly remember
what was housed by this museum.
The halls guide the visitor in specific directions with an outcome of disorientation. (Fig.
6) I recall an architectural void, a dark room one enters that contains nothing but a sliver of light
above one’s head, creating a feeling of a prison cell with a “glimmer of hope.” There is also an
art installation by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman in one of the halls. Visitors cannot avoid
it. The installation consists of 10,000 iron plates shaped as human faces with open mouths.
Visitors walk through the path, stepping on the faces while they emit a loud clanging sound in
the wake of one’s path. I found myself having a very unusual “allergic reaction” to the
experience of being guided through this building. The focus and intended experience of the
museum was inescapable. As an artist and a Jewish person identifying with the position of the
James E Young, "Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin: The Uncanny Arts of Memorial
33
Architecture." Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 2, 2000: doi:10.1353/jss.2000.0007. 2-7.
22
persecuted I had very physical resistance to the museum and subsequently considered the space
coercive and excessive.
Peter Eisenmann, the architect of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, taught at
the Cooper Union in New York where Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the Jewish Museum,
was his student. Their counter monument proposals for these two structures in Berlin were faced
with similar challenges of creating commemorative space for Jewish remembrance in Germany.
Both structures are viewed as Deconstructivist architecture, a movement that emerged in the
1980s and was led by Eisenmann. In the catalogue of a 1988 Museum of Modern Art exhibition
in New York which solidified the group of architects as contributing to the Deconstructivist
movement, the curator of the exhibition, architect Philip Johnson defined as follows: an architect
who creates deconstructivist designs “is one who locates the inherent dilemmas within
buildings.” Much like Jacques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction in relation to the written
34
text, Deconstructivism questions the universal truths, in this case, of architecture while
preserving the function of a building.
The two designs in Berlin will live beyond the architects and maintain an enduring
relationship with one another. They hold their visitors to varying levels of engagement in their
pursuits of memory work. Tourists who visit the Jewish Museum probably visit The Memorial to
the Murdered Jews of Europe. Although due to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’s
outdoor location and large scale it welcomes passerby that might not visit the Jewish Museum.
Reflecting on the design choices each architect made, one could argue they function on two ends
of the counter monument spectrum. I wonder if my aversion to the Jewish Museum is related to
Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 11.
34
23
the fact that the restrictive paths are housed in a building. Perhaps in this instance, four walls
were overbearing and I was resisting being overly manipulated. The building does not offer an
opportunity to follow one’s own path, or to step away if the experience is too intense.
24
VII. Multi-sensory Design in Counter Monuments
With the turn towards anti-monumentality after World War II, the intended meaning of a
memorial can no longer be easily inferred by simply glancing at it. This frustrates the gaze.
Visitors have to take part in a more concerted effort to interpret the meaning. Remembering
becomes an active and ongoing process. This issue of engagement is key to understanding
whether or not a memorial is performative. When confronted with a counter monument, as James
E. Young argues, there is the space of memory, “the space between the memorial and the viewer,
between the viewer and his or her own memory.” This echo of Young’s is an invitation to look
35
within oneself.
Counter monuments allow for the space of memory and do not rely solely on visual
comprehension. Often, there is a multi-sensory aspect of the design. Buildings and memorials
that stimulate touch encourage an active reception from the visitor. I refer to this interactivity as
36
a means of empathic simulation that opens up performativity.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund proposed a competition for a memorial design in
1981. The task was daunting: What design could represent and prioritize the death of 58,220
American soldiers and the 3 million who served in a war? What design could represent a war
criticized by the American public which did not have a triumphant resolution during a time of
indifference and disdain towards veterans? Maya Lin’s proposal of a “a long, polished, black
James E Young, At Memory's Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. (United
35
Kingdom: Yale University Press, 2000), 118-119.
Michael T. Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), 143-44.
36
25
stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth” was selected. Her memorial proposal
37
details a space within a space and the responsibility of the visitor. (Fig. 7)
While it was lauded by the committee who initiated the call, once announced to the
public it was perceived by some as a political statement critical of the Vietnam War. Politicians
fought to discredit her and alter her work. Her design was condemned by one writer as a “black
gash of shame.” The design rejects forging a national consensus, as previous monuments did in
38
the past. Yet, even as a 21 year old student Lin did not waver and remained truthful to her
proposal and the integrity of her artistic intentions. Compromises were eventually made to the
general site by way of symbolic and figurative additions, but the wall remains the central point.
Lin’s use of abstraction with the specificity of names and dates created a new language of
remembrance that reverberated and influenced future memorial designs in Germany and the
United States.
The scale feels as though Lin considered the height of a human and encourages a close
relationship with the bodies of the visitors. To walk alongside this monument is to articulate ones
body in relationship to it for the duration of the wall. There are no barriers that prohibit a visitor
from touching the memorial. In fact, the design emboldens one to touch. The texture of the
names etched in the granite and the reflective quality of the stone also inspires touch. Visitors
search for the names of family members amidst the thousands. Those who visit that do not have a
familial connection are influenced by the behaviors of others and mimic similar actions by
partaking in the acknowledgment of names as well. Visitors create rubbings of names of the
"These names, seemingly infinite in number..."Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Parks Service Website.
37
Accessed November 23, 2020. https://www.nps.gov/vive/index.htm
Tom Carhart, “Insulting Vietnam Vets”, The New York Times, Published October 24,1981. nytimes.com/
38
1981/10/24/opinion/insulting-vietnam-vets.html
26
deceased on the wall as one might in a cemetery. The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Fund adapted
to this behavior and encourages it by providing paper monogrammed with the logo and pencils
so that anyone may partake.
A Walk along the Vietnam Veteran’ s Memorial Wall, 2020 is a video I composed from
experiences shared online through photography, video and sound as a means of accessing the site
when we are unable to visit physically. (Fig. 8) Born from the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions
on personal movement and travel, I spent time on social media sites such as Youtube, Instagram,
Yelp, Trip Advisor and Google Maps, from where I collected material to stitch together a
repository of experiences that visitors chose to record and upload at the memorial in Washington
D.C.
The video is a haptic representation of a virtual walk along the wall and the ways visitors
engage with it guided by my disembodied arm. The arm simulates scrolling, touching and
rubbing in an emotionally charged yet disconnected sphere. Understanding the power of a
monument that inspires touch and for others to mirror these behaviors of touch is to recognize
the kinesthetic empathy the design instigates. My video amplifies the body’s spectral relationship
to Lin’s memorial at a time when engagement is restricted. I view emphasizing touch and it’s
affective qualities essential to this work during a pandemic when touch is stigmatized and even
dangerous. These embodied gestures forge a relationship between the corporeal, the linguistic,
and the cultural.
39
Artists who work in three dimensional mediums examine the monumental form through
their work and challenge our relationship to monumentality. Sculpture’s characteristics overlap
Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, eds. Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, (Bristol:
39
Intellect Books Ltd, 2012) Accessed November 9, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, 22.
27
with monuments through subject matter and structural choices but diverges from the obligation
for function. The art critic Rosalind Krauss wrote in 1979 about the shifting of categorizing
sculpture from a static medium to an expanding and malleable genre, including minimalism and
land art. These observations came at a time just before the development of architectural counter
40
monument designs. The expanding definition of sculpture is intertwined with postmodernism and
the deconstruction of the monument.
Untitled (Death by Gun), 1990 by the visual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres is a work in the
Museum of Modern Art in New York's collection, which functions as ceaseless monument. This
work is articulated as public sculpture by the artist. The sculpture is an installation that invites
41
participation, though because it is an artwork housed in a museum it has a different audience and
symbolic investments than public monuments. (Fig. 9)
The work, which exists as a set of instructions to produce an ephemeral object, is seen in
a gallery as a low column of papers stacked roughly nine inches in height as directed by the
artist. Each sheet of paper displays the photographs and names of 460 individuals killed by guns
in the United States during the week of May 1–7, 1989. They are identified by name, age,
location, along with a brief description of their deaths. The images were initially published in
Time magazine. The sculpture encourages visitors to take a poster with them, a gesture that
42
disperses and circulates the images and text to a wide audience with the aura of owning an
artwork. Each poster is a fragment linked to the original sculpture, which one typically would not
Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October 8 (April 1, 1979), 30.
40
cite page 284 from FGT book
41
“MoMa Collection”. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ”Untitled" (Death by Gun), 1990. https://www.moma.org/collection/
42
works/61825. Accessed November 21, 2020.
28
be allowed to touch in the context of a gallery. The conditions of purchase for many of Felix
Gonzaelz-Torres’s works insist that their contents be continually replenished, which is apt in this
work as unfortunately gun violence continues to be relevant. The shape itself is read as a form of
a plinth in the context of a gallery, one that is viewed from all angles like an object, but most
importantly from above looking down. These vantage points resemble a headstone. Untitled
(Death by Gun)’s meditation on time is evident and akin to memorialization practices that extend
a sense of liveness from one’s participation.
When walking along Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall the granite structure
appears to start at ones ankles and rise above one’s head throughout the duration. Truthfully, the
path is sinking into the earth, skewing the perception of the journey. Monuments that are
designed to have a direct relationship with land point to imperceptible traumas. For example,
just outside of the German city Hamburg in a suburb called Harburg, a counter monument was
erected in 1986 that fostered a direct engagement between the design, the visitors, and
temporality. The Monument Against Facism, by Esther Shalev-Gerz and Jochen Gerz was chosen
amongst other proposals from an open call initiated by the city. (Fig. 10) Beside the work was a
panel translated in several languages, which stated: “We invite the citizens of Harburg, and
visitors to the city, to add their names here to ours. In doing so we commit ourselves to remain
vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12-metre tall lead column, it will gradually be
lowered into the ground. One day it will have disappeared completely, and the site of the
Harburg Monument against Fascism will be empty. In the end it is only we ourselves who can
stand up against injustice.”
43
‘Monument Against Facism’ Jocchen Gerz’s website. Accessed November 21, 2020. https://jochengerz.eu/works/
43
monument-against-fascism
29
This monument thus began as a towering plinth before proceeding to sink into the earth
completely. Inscriptions marking a monument in a town square is a gesture often understood as a
defacement that is meant to subtract from and alter its meaning. Some accounts were critical of
marks other than signatures as being disrespectful, but I believe these typical occurrences are
what the artists drew from. They intentionally took the seed of people’s interest in contributing,
marking and bearing witness to a place that doesn’t make space for their voices and they
intensified it, creating a dialogue about fascism during an era where tensions were rising in
Germany.
The sinking plinth brought on a transformation that combined the call and the visitor’s
response. Now what remains visible is a plaque stating the chronological history of the erection,
inscription and lowering of the stelae. Part of the stelae can be viewed through a window
underground. The visibility of numerous names in the public square, however temporary their
visibility, reverberates through the city. These names rely on being in view and interpreted as
those who committed themselves against fascism. They were the names of the living requesting
us to witness. On Maya Lin’s memorial wall, the visibility of the endless seeming list of names is
a reckoning making visible Americans who died as a result of their service.
30
VIII. Horst Hoheisel and A Memorial to a Memorial
Horst Hoheisel, born in Poland, is an artist and designer who refers to himself as a
“catalyzer of memory.” His practice has included monuments that aim to understand the
44
relationship of memory to absence. Responding to the same call for a German national
“memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe” for which the government had declared that Peter
Eisenmann was chosen, Hoheisel had submitted a proposal advocating: “To blow up the
Brandenburg Gate, grind its stone into dust, sprinkle the remains over its former site, and then
cover the entire memorial area with granite plates.”
45
In James E. Young’s essay “Memory and Counter-Memory,” he postulates that Hoheisel
believed that “the 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.” Hoheisel remembers an absence by reproducing absence.
46
Counter-monuments force visitors of sites into an active role by shifting the burden to
remember on to the visitors rather than the monument. The Gerz monument retracts performing
the role of “containment.” Hoheisel favors denying public art materiality so that the meaning is
capable of living onward and avoids rigidity. A monument that is fixed in the landscape enforces
the ideals and myths of the landscape on which it stands in.
Juan F. Fernandez, The Praxis of Horst Hoheisel: The Counter Monument in the Expanded Field. (PhD diss.,
44
University of Amherst Scholar Works, 2014). Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/theses/832 , 3.
James E. Young, At Memory's Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture,
45
(United Kingdom: Yale University Press, 2000), 92-93.
James E. Young, ‘Memory and Counter-Memory’, Harvard Design Magazine. Accessed November 21, 2020.
46
http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/9/memory-and-counter-memory
31
Horst Hoheisel collaborated with Andreas Knitz to create A Memorial to a Memorial in
1995 at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimar, Germany. A first memorial, a wooden
obelisk, was built in 1945 by the former prisoners shortly after their liberation. The obelisk was
made from wood ripped from the barracks. Due to the material, its longevity was brief. Decades
later, Hoheisel and Knitz inserted a counter monument on the same location of where it stood.
Hoheisel and Knitz did not experience Buchenwald as prisoners, but their memorial references
and builds upon the original expression by the prisoners. It is a stainless steel plate in the ground,
designed to look like the top of the obelisk, flattened. Inscribed are the names of 51 national
groups that suffered at this camp. The plate is kept at human body temperature, 98.6 degrees, 365
days of the year. (Fig. 11)
47
The heat of the plate suggests a presence of life in the absence of these lives. It provides
an entry point with visitors who activate the memorial. The intention of the memorial is not
understood without effort from the visitor. It requires the visitor to kneel down and touch to
engage with a type of transference of understanding. Our human association with death is cold
bodies and cold materials like metal and stone. The sensation of touching a surface the
temperature of our own body creates a cathartic neutralizing effect. Rather than pointing to the
differences of lived and lost, the experience is like touching oneself.
‘A Memorial to A Memorial’ Andreas Knitz website. Accessed November 21, 2020. http://www.knitz.net/
47
index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=26&Itemid=32&lang=en
32
IX. lauren woods and A Dallas Drinking Fountain Project
lauren woods is a contemporary American artist from Texas. woods’ projects invite the
viewer to ask themselves questions about how power and knowledge is organized in the United
States. In A Dallas Drinking Fountain Project (2005-present) she does so through the use
subversive tools to point to the injustices so that they generate conversation about the larger
structural implications that brought these systems into place.
The story of A Dallas Drinking Fountain Project begins in 2005, was realized in 2013
and continues on. Local news in Dallas reported that the remnants of a “Whites Only” sign was
re-discovered above a drinking fountain in a Dallas municipal building after a tile fell off the
wall. Texans were in disagreement as to what to do about this revelation. As the debate around
the preservation of Confederate monuments rages in our country, woods’ work illuminates an
alternate approach to destroying offensive monuments.
48
Rather than covering up the sign, woods proposed a privately funded new media
monument that honors the American Civil Rights movement. Her proposal was approved, and
that was the start of the Dallas Drinking Fountain Project journey. When someone approaches
the drinking fountain to take a drink of water, they are temporarily denied while a projection of
video footage appears by the fountain. 1960s era newsreel footage of civil rights protestors being
violently attacked with water hoses materializes. Only once the footage finishes can one drink
from the fountain. (Fig. 12)
Lee Escobedo, “A Dallas Drinking Fountain: Interview with lauren woods”, Temporary Art Review. Published on
48
January 17, 2018. http://temporaryartreview.com/a-dallas-drinking-fountain-interview-with-lauren-woods/
33
The inclusion of the archival footage highlights the shadow of this racist history and
intensifies it through the multi-sensory exchange. The spectator must put in a level of labor to
receive their reward of a sip of water. By temporarily withholding this resource, the memorial
forces the visitor to consider the relationship of water as nourishment and water as a weapon in
our recent history. Presented with the opportunity to drink water at the monument, the drinker is
placed in a position where African Americans were not allowed. A tangled, embodied
relationship is developed between the body and the monument through consumption. This
dynamic evokes the series of candy spills by Felix Gonzalez Torres which encourage scooping
and ingesting candy from piles determined by the height and weight of the artist, his boyfriend
and others. These works were created in the context of the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s and
1990s where bodies painfully wasted away.
Through constructing this monument, woods created a space that reckons with this
history and requires us to spend time with her juxtaposition of records. It also creates a new site
in the municipal building with capacity for thought and reflection. Those who trigger this
monument might have stumbled upon it. They also might have traveled to experience it. A Dallas
Drinking Fountain Project has also been activated by the public as the site of events such as the
Mothers against Police Brutality Press Conference, Notes on Public Process and Public Memory
and Workers Defense Project. At the time of this paper, the building is under renovation but,
interestingly, the monument will be re-installed at the new building. A Dallas Drinking Fountain
Project continues the lineage of counter monuments through its representation, its activation of
the viewer and as a site that hosts contemplation on current day representations of institutional
34
racism. The memorial does not carry a narrative arc that ends with a resolution, rather it is a site
to instigate further dialogue.
35
X. CONCLUSION
In a conversation I had with the artist lauren woods in Fall 2019, she voiced that the
structures of the counter monument influenced the formulation of her monument practices in a
contemporary art context. Thus her work continues the exchange of embodied counter monument
making between US and German contexts, using this language to attempt to further a dialogue
within the limits of representation. Each of these memorials and artworks work to explicate and
encourage lasting, yet mutable, relationships with difficult memories. These works I’ve detailed
in this paper tow a fine line between explicit and unspecific routes toward engaging their
audience in a dialogue of remembrance.
In my art practice I examine how modes of representation can portray absence, how we
process loss and our collective desire to preserve through memorialization. I view photographs as
a material adept providing insight to the social life of sites of commemoration. My videos push
this dynamic and my position as mediator through digital embodiment.
Designers, architects and artists should accept and encourage the multiplicity of
interpretations that inevitably occur in relation to memorial spaces. The age of social media
forces us to consider the role of acceleration and our impulses to be seen and participate with
commemorative sites in this dialogue. The memorials that are successful function as a portal so
that there is the capacity for a transformative experience during a visitor’s encounter. This
encounter should encourage a commitment to memory as the responsibility of remembering must
live within people, not objects. Ultimately visitors cannot be manipulated into a consensus as one
36
person’s transformation might be a forgetful moment to another. It is the degree of performativity
in a design that dictates the potentiality.
37
List of Figures
Figure 1. Rachel Zaretsky. Photograph taken at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 2016. Berlin,
Germany
Figure 2. Rachel Zaretsky, I set out to photograph every crack at the memorial, 2018, video.
38
Figure 3. Shahak Shapira, Yolocaust Project, 2017
Figure 4. Rachel Zaretsky, Visiting the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach by proxy, 2019. video installation
39
Figure 5. 9/11 Museum Tissue Box Pedestal, New York, NY
Figure 6. Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum, 2001. Berlin Germany.
40
Figure 7. Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Proposal, 1981.
Figure 8. Rachel Zaretsky, A walk along the Vietnam Veteran’ s Memorial Wall, 2020, video.
41
Figure 9. Felix Gonzelz-Torres, Untitled (Death by Gun), 1990
Figure 10. Jochen Herz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, A Monument Against Facism, 1986. Harburg, Germany.
42
Figure 11. Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz, A Memorial to a Memorial, 1995. Buchenwald Concentration
Camp, Germany.
Figure 12. lauren woods, A Dallas Drinking Fountain Project, 2013-present. Dallas, TX
43
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract In this paper I analyze the role of performativity within the design of sites of commemoration in the United States and Germany and how performativity determines the level of engagement visitors have with the act of remembering. As an artist, I also contextualize my work and interests in the social space of memory.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Zaretsky, Rachel Dina (author)

Core Title Performativity of sites of commemoration and performativity at sites of commemoration

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Degree Conferral Date 2021-05

Publication Date 05/05/2021

Defense Date 05/05/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag counter monument,design,digital image,holocaust,Memorial,memory,monument,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance art,performativity,social media,Touch,visual art

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor West, Jennifer (committee chair), Jones, Amelia (committee member), Lacy, Suzanne (committee member)

Creator Email rzaretsk@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC112720106

Unique identifier UC112720106

Identifier etd-ZaretskyRa-9603.pdf (filename)

Legacy Identifier etd-ZaretskyRa-9603

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Zaretsky, Rachel Dina

Type texts

Source 20210507-wayne-usctheses-batch-835-shoaf (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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