NOTED

Following is an augmented excerpt of the chapter "Memorials and Monuments" from our latest book, Central Park NYC, published this past September by Rizzoli.
Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s widow, conceived Strawberry Fields as a living memorial to her slain husband and dedicated the site on what would have been the singer’s forty-fifth birthday, October 9, 1985. The two-and-a-half-acre informal garden occupies a sloping triangle of land at Central Park West and 72nd Street near the Dakota Apartments, the family’s residence and the site where Lennon was murdered on the evening of December 8, 1980. Ono worked with landscape architect Bruce Kelly and the Central Park Conservancy to transform the parcel into a Garden of Peace with plants donated by over 120 nations.


The garden, of course, is named after one of Lennon's most famous Beatles songs, Strawberry Fields Forever, a haunting psychedelic reminiscence of his childhood secret garden, the grounds of the Strawberry Field orphanage in Woolton, Liverpool. The iconic Imagine mosaic, a simple round set in the pavement at the heart of the garden, has become a shrine to Lennon’s memory, collecting notes, flowers and votive candles from his myriad fans, and it is the site of annual vigils to celebrate his birth and mourn his death.

Though often described as interpreting traditional Roman patterns, the design is actually far more expressive than this reading allows and alludes to Lennon's uniquely provocative pacifism and strongly Buddhist leanings and worldview. (Above, Lennon and Ono staging their famous bed-in for peace in Amsterdam in 1969.) IMAGINE, the title of Lennon’s famous 1971 peace anthem, holds the center of an abstracted lotus flower made of thirty-two radiating segments, the number of Buddha’s virtues. (Below, Buddha on the lotus throne.)
In Buddhist traditions, the fully opened lotus, rising above muddied waters, symbolizes enlightenment, and a white lotus connotes purity of mind and spirit. The duality of black and white represents matter and spirit, the mud from which the lotus blooms and the blossom of understanding. And finally, the flower signifies rebirth in a figural and literal sense, entirely appropriate to honor a musician who integrated Buddhist mantras into his music and Buddhist philosophy and a Buddhist worldview into his life.
Disarmingly simple, a single word centering an abstracted flower, Lennon’s memorial owes an enormous conceptual debt to Maya Lin’s revolutionary 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., which overturned traditional notions of a monument’s form and conceptual underpinnings.

However, the Imagine mosaic takes Lin’s abstraction a step further by renouncing three-dimensionality entirely and setting its single-word message into the earth, where it can be trod upon or reverenced—a wry and profoundly insightful evocation of Lennon’s humanity and spirit.
And finally, and as Buddha himself would have observed, there is nothing new under the sun and we find a remarkable conceptual precursor in the 18th-century French garden of Ermenonville, the Altar of Reverie—a simple cylindrical socle, artfully aged, inscribed with the invocation, "To Dream."

The Maine's wreck was coffer-dammed in 1911 and a Naval inquiry held, and a second forensic inquiry was conducted by Admiral Hyman Rickover in 1974. Both definitively documented that the cause of the Maine's destruction was not a Spanish mine or bomb but the detonation of the forward gun magazines. 

Rickover's enquiry attributed the detonation to the spontaneous ignition of highly volatile bituminous coal (which the US Navy had recently adopted as fuel as opposed to slower, cleaner burning and far less volatile but more expensive anthracite coal) in the bunker abutting the forward gunpowder magazine. A spark or heating from the coal fire traversed the bulkhead and ignited the gunpowder in the adjacent magazine, dooming the ship. However, the actual cause of the explosion is still a subject of debate and may never be satisfactorily resolved for history.



Yellow Journalism

Of course this forensic science was carried out far too late to satisfy William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, who were in a frenzied war for domination of New York's lucrative daily newspaper market. The infamous era of corrupt, manipulated, exaggerated and patently false reporting known as "yellow journalism" reached its sordid apex with their jingoistic, frenzied dispatches, detailing non-existent cannibalism, torture and war atrocities committed by Spain against Cuba—all in an effort to drag the United States into war against Spain in a bout of newfound American expansionist brinkmanship.

Hearst was true to his word. In the weeks following the Maine disaster, his New York Journal often devoted eight or more pages a day to the tragedy and speculated wildly about Spanish duplicity. Pulitzer rivaled Hearst in war mongering (though privately he said that "nobody outside a lunatic asylum" believed the Maine had been sabotaged by Spain). Nor were the country's lesser editors to be underestimated in their jingoism, and together the "yellow press" stoked a groundswell of war fervor with editorials demanding vengeance for the sinking of the Maine and the defense of American honor.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Though sorely tempted, we initially let pass the dedication this past August of the lumpen, Social Realist debacle that is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, DC. But now, with the unveiling of Frank Gehry's proposed Eisenhower Memorial, we can no longer resist, as it seems the perfect time to review what's been brewing, monument-wise, inside the Beltway. Unfortunately, nothing good.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial

Pompous and banal in its conception, stiff and ponderous in its execution, and reeking of an "Our Glorious Leader Makes Great Strides for the People" æsthetic that would doubtless have pleased Chairman Mao or Comrade Stalin, the MLK memorial has nothing discernable to do with the persona, eloquence or legacy of the civil-rights leader.


Beyond the embarrassing obviousness of the symbolism (MLK could move mountains! It's in the Bible and his speeches and stuff!), the memorial is constructed of white granite, the pale shade of which could only be found in China—though this begs the question of why a black man's portrait must be sculpted with the whitest granite to be found on earth.


This literal mountain of imported white Chinese granite—appropriately enough in its way—was pneumatic-chiseled by a sculptor imported from China as well. This of course explains why the King memorial looks so preternaturally like the sort of Communist-era monuments that have been vengefully toppled in such great numbers in the past few decades (and seeing as China pretty much owns the US by now anyway, we shouldn't be so surprised by all this, I suppose).



To compound the what-you-can-only-conclude-is-borderline-criminally-willful obtuseness which permeates this project, one of the citations chiseled into the side of the mountain-slice in which the reverend is embedded, à la Han Solo frozen in carbonite from The Empire Strikes Back, is a ham-fisted conflation that King never uttered ("I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness") and which, in Maya Angelou's words, "makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit."

A small recompense: Angelou's crusade has had an impact and the inscription will be re-carved. But don't let them stop there...

In all, pondering the MLK memorial for any length of time generates much the same reaction as pondering Congress for any length of time. Though everything else about it is wrong, it certainly is in the right city.


Frank Gehry's Memorial to President Eisenhower

No, that's not the memorial's official name, though it may as well be. Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao was among the most poetic and innovative structures of its time, but that time was a quarter-century ago now and this tired bit of bombastic starchitecture is an utter disaster that should be roundly rejected.


First of all, Gehry's project is not a memorial, it's a drive-in theatre—though the pictures don't move and you can't park your car for all the trees and hordes of toddlers in strollers or just taking their first adorable little baby steps, if we are to believe the tiny, cardboard cut-out staffage on the presentation model.


The vast and pointlessly over-scaled postcard images of Eisenhower's life that are the basis of the design show a disturbing lack of creativity or serious thought. Millions have already been spent and tens of millions more have been earmarked to erect this vast, oppressive cage, but all that time, energy and money could be saved—and an equal educational impact be had—by printing the half-dozen images on a nice, glossy fold-out and distributing them for free from an on-site kiosk.


In yesterday's public hearings, Ike's grand-daughters excoriated the design for being overblown and reminiscent of Maoist propaganda posters, and certainly there is—yet again—the strong odor of Social Realism hanging about, but what is most unpardonable about the design is that the huge postcards are simply a facile and expedient solution, a tired Postmodernist cliché, and inexplicably Gehry has renounced his signature poetic curves and gone all formalist on us and the screens are sited and designed with clear, rectilinear precision.

None of this has anything to do with Frank Gehry, so what's going on here? Essentially, he took the idea of the blown-up PoMo postcards and fused it with the contemporary-euro-art-museum-perimeter-screen fetish in a desperate attempt to animate the design with a fading trend.


This bit of architectural cool was popularized by the French architect Jean Nouvel, initially at the Fondation Cartier (1994, above), where the building itself becomes a screen, and later at the Musée du quai Branly (2006, below), where a glass screen-wall replaces the classic French iron perimeter grille. The appropriation's traces are obvious because the grid has heretofore been anathema to Gehry, but Nouvel is its recognized maître.


Gehry here reminds one of Madonna: a past-prime-time trend vampire who, all the more painfully, latches onto the meme just as it turns to rancid cliché. Leon Krier has been in high dudgeon over Gehry's design (there's even a website devoted to loathing it, the conspiratorially named The Truth about the Eisenhower Memorial) but his anti-Modernist polemic entirely misses the real motivation and "inspiration" for what truly went into this mess. Frankly, Krier is plumbing the depths of a puddle here and has produced a critique that says more about Leon Krier and his obsessions than it does about the true nature of Frank Gehry's sad excuse for creativity.


A memorial worthy of the name (the best example in decades upon decades being Maya Lin's remarkable and profoundly moving Vietnam memorial) should capture the import of its subject and transmit that with an emotional and artistic charge: with dignity, innovation and elegance. There is none of that here.

We should also point out that Lin's design was the result of an open competition and that at the time she was just out of design school and totally unknown; the directors of the Eisenhower memorial commission have ensured that the selection process precludes any unknown talents by restricting it to established, vetted firms. Their insular cronyism has resulted in a debacle that they roundly deserve, in heaping platefuls.


Gehry's design is claustrophobic in the extreme and literally boxes in the site. One has to wonder, did anyone have the temerity to ask the 83 year-old éminence grise just who is going to clean all those acres of screens, and how? Or how big those quarter-inch dowels holding up the screens in the model might actually be in real life? Seeing as they stand over six stories tall and look to be roughly 20 feet in diameter? And reek of the worst of 70s design, but on steroids?

Imagine all the bird kills. Imagine the disgruntled neighbors. Imagine standing under one of the trees, right next to the screen wall. Forget about what it will look like if built; imagine what it would look like in a hundred years. Apparently no one has.

So many practical questions—concerns about scale, usability, maintenance, preservation of view corridors and the like—seem simply to have been ignored. No wonder there is a movement afoot to institute a moratorium on building any more monuments in the District—a ban we fully support, until some sort of sanity is restored to Washington (i.e., never). And we haven't even begun to touch upon this design's appropriateness in paying homage to Eisenhower himself. We defer here to the family, who are vociferously trying to stop it.


No surprise really, because this memorial has nothing to do with Eisenhower. If the vast pictures of him weren't there, you would never even guess that it was a memorial, let alone one dedicated to Ike. By the way, if you enter "Ike" into Google, this is what you get:


This is Ike from the Smash Bros. Dojo, whatever that is (besides the obvious Osiris symbolism). Actual images of the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, and of the 34th president of the United States do not appear until well into Google images' third page.

Likewise, except for those ridiculously massive pillars, you'd never think Gehry's memorial project was permanent either.

And with any luck, it won't be.