The Lives of Monuments

Monuments are public artworks of shared feeling.

National groups, in particular, express their emotions in and through their monuments.

Often such manmade structures mark historical injury (a defeat in battle, a surprise attack, the loss of loved ones, land, or prestige) -- their primary purpose being to help people mourn such injuries.

Some monuments are better at it than others.

According to Vamik Volkan, a psychoanalyst renowned for his work in international relations, monuments indicate the emotional temperature of a people.

They are either "hot," invested with intense group feelings of shame and humiliation, or "cool," promoting individual contemplation and the development of perspective.

A "hot" example is The Crying Father erected during the 1990's in Tskhinvali, South Ossetia, where Volkan led diplomatic efforts at reconciliation in the wake of the Georgia-South Ossetia conflict of 1991-92.

This-larger-than-life figure with head bowed, robed in a traditional burka and sheepskin hat, conveys extreme sorrow. The stone statue commands the attention of a school yard, an active educational institution that also serves as a burial ground for young South Ossetian combatants who died at a time when Georgians had seized the town cemetery.

The figure's submissive pose, and the inaugural ceremonies of poetry staged around it, stood as a reminder of South Ossetia's suffering before Georgian nationalists. As a new monument, it reactivated grief and trauma precipitated by inter-ethnic violence in the region.

Hot monuments, Volkan claims, represent a group's complicated or prolonged mourning. They perpetuate feelings of victimization and often re-inflame historic wounds, leading people down retroactive pathways of intolerance.

Consider the Confederate Memorial at Stone Mountain, ten miles beyond Atlanta, in our own Georgia. Carved on the steep northface of this isolated mountain are the massive granite figures of three Confederate heroes. This tableau inspired a revival of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915, when, in a nocturnal ceremony, fifteen men ascended the mountain, formed a semi-circle around a makeshift altar, lit a cross soaked in kerosene, and re-awakened the "Invisible Empire" from its slumber.

Monuments often mirror collective regressions and also people's steps towards adaptive change. In 1970, Stone Mountain opened as a theme park whose popular laser show imposes the face of fellow Southerner Martin Luther King Jr. over the Confederate icons.

Finally, when monuments they do their job properly, they help groups complete their mourning and eventually cool off.

One such is the USS Arizona Memorial, in Honolulu, which spans the sunken hull of a battleship and marks the resting place of sailors killed during the Pearl Harbor attack.

Accessible only by boat, the 184-foot-long edifice omits "overtones of sadness," according to Austrian designer Alfred Preis, in order "to permit the individual to contemplate his own personal responses ... his innermost feelings."

Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall of polished black granite is another cool monument, Volkan claims.

The act of "facing the Wall" helped lift our nation's collective denial of the American lives lost on Vietnamese soil. The effect of onlookers' reflections superimposed over the 58,000 engraved names attempts to symbolically integrate past and present.

This curative legacy continues in half-scale replica through a traveling museum called "Bringing The Wall Home," which has visited more than 300 cities nationwide.

Cool monuments possess inward-looking qualities and often use reflective surfaces -- as if to ask, "what's your part in this?" They solicit the subjective contributions of the spectator and engage the body in simple but meaningful actions: inviting one to toss flowers into the harbor, to touch a loved one's inscribed name, to make a pencil rubbing.

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Due to their prominence in the public sphere, monuments are central to memory making. Commemorative artworks organize bodily practices of ceremony (poetry, dance, spectatorship) that transmit social recollection across time and space. The manner in which an individual engages in or rejects these rituals may indicate the extent to which he or she is ready to grieve.

Monuments, described by historian Cynthia Mills as "messengers from the past," also play a special role in weaving stories of national identity.

They help us come to know ourselves as a national community, in relationship to others. Cool ones help us grasp the implacability of historic losses rather than fomenting vengeance upon an enemy. As containers of group feeling, they circumscribe collective pain and assist the work of mourning.

"Reflecting Absence," winning design for the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero, presented by architects Michael Arad & Peter Walker.

Everyone needs a good monument to lean on, for those gone but forever with us -- for all the dead beloved who people the space of mind.

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