Hunger for Memorials: New York's Monument to the Irish FamineBy Jane Holtz Kay It looms, you might say, an imposing artifact in the midst of the construction sites and banal structures on the edge of Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan. But hulks would be the better word to describe its massive presence on my first encounter with the Irish Hunger Memorial. "You can't miss it," my guide had offered. And miss it I couldn't as I stood under an appropriately atmospheric rain before the massive composite of stone cottage, walls, and grassy landscape on four sides. Settled on a barren, construction-studded site, the memorial swallows a complete city block, spreading its landscape and structures to the outward and upward edges of its quarter-acre site.
Multi-level, inside and out, up and down, it stands in sharp contrast to its banal right-angle modern neighbors. Stone-hard and green growing, it forms a place, as much as a commemorative gesture or sculpted object. Rising from the monumental walls of the plinth clad in Kilkenny limestone on the west side, the memorial recalls the bygone architecture of the New Brutalist era. Sloping into a pastoral view of a cottage and green hill on the east, it summons musings and memories of the landscape of County Mayo. Thematically, a split personality - urban and rural--its aesthetics partake of historic ruin and country landscape alike. The 5 million-dollar monument, sponsored by the Battery Park City Authority, seems a surreal but intriguing intruder in Manhattan, as we survey the structure from its concrete side by the Hudson River, mere blocks from the twin towers' site. Its interior passageway has as much to offer as we duck under the façade's cantilevered "awning" through the ground-level tunnel and pace some 8,000 linear feet of text on the terror and misery of famines worldwide, written in thin bands radiating from its backlit walls. Emerging, finally, on the memorial's eastern side, we mount the grassy hillside to its stone Irish cottage, then, walk to its summit to view the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island on the distant Jersey shore.
The gloom of the soggy surroundings this day, akin to the climate of County Mayo that held the cottage and the famine victims, stokes further thoughts of Ireland as we make our way in the late fall downpour, then dive inside to settle into the story of the monument. The island nation's bitter famine of 1845, the Great Hunger lasting seven years and leaving one million victims, lacked neither bards nor poets to make the world mourn its traumas. And the designer uses many means to convey them. If ever there was a mixed-medium, this is it. For openers, there is Tolle himself, the structure's artist-sculptor who shuns formal definitions of his art and work. "I've just spent a lot of time tinkering the line between," he says. Then, there is Wittwer-Laird, ASLA, director of the New York City Parks Greenstreets program which plants trees and other greenery on neglected sites. "This is a sculpture that uses history," she says about the memorial. But this commanding presence turns this bleak site into something less definable and more ?impressive? awe-inspiring.
Still, it is not hard to understand the vehement reactions this presence has provoked. For all the appeal of the ferocious aesthetics of the 1960s in today's era of post-modern and kitschy concoctions, the craggy, concrete form-making represented by the concrete base and cantilevered cover is out of favor.. "Unfriendly," another landscape architect describes the neighborhood reaction. Perhaps she is right. Certainly, as an urban arrangement or neighborhood park --a place for community carriages, ball playing, sidling over to see the river and the view - the structure-cum-site near the Hudson and Battery Park City could be off-putting to some. The other parks nearby created by the Battery Park City Authority, which also sponsored this memorial, are easier - perhaps, too easy - on the eyes and mind. Ranging from gentle to coy, and certainly more subdued, they may seem more congenial neighbors. But the Irish Hunger Memorial is a structure that makes demands - the ragged concrete "roof" of the building, crested by that rough, abandoned cottage--and a symbolism designed to instruct, not just some saccharine story.
Ugly? Beautiful? Somehow the words seem irrelevant. Surreal seems closer to reality. One thing is certain though: New York's literati, critics, and visitors do relate to the project and strongly. In fact, the response to the memorial has been nothing if not controversial --from the opening ceremonies featuring actor Malachy McCourt's offering that "this day goes to show that death in Ireland is not always fatal;" to Roy Foster, professor of Irish History at Hertford College, offering criticism on the sentimentalizing of that event as the "Angela's Ashes" school of tale-telling.
In New York, controversy reigns between those who adulate and those who denounce the new famine memorial. Feelings are exacerbated by its site near Ground Zero. While luminaries like McAleese and New York mayor and governor applauded the event, the work ignited a mixed critical reaction. The argument was extended by professional critics. "Kitsch," wrote Philip Nobel in a November 2002 article Metropolis article titled "Going Hungry". If the off notes had an air of intention--or if it were more fun--the memorial might rise to camp. But it is no fun at all ... no fun precisely because it is so botched. So lets call it what it is: cautionary kitsch." Deploring the memorial as exemplifying the pitfalls of a kitchen-sink approach... loaded with abstracted monumentality and in-your-face pedantry, symbolism and simulation, mimicry and sham." Roberta Smith looked more favorably upon the memorial in the July 6, 2002 issue of The New York Times. "The work, which was created by a 38-year-old New York sculptor, exemplifies contemporary art's ability to meet the public's need for meaningful monuments with an appropriateness that may surprise both advocates and opponents of the new."
"A landscape in between," Wittwer-Laird calls it. Maybe so. Yet, one wonders. For all the designers' concern with genuineness in the plantings--some included for naturalism, others for their symbolic value in Irish folklore (white heather for good luck, for one)--they look scruffy. Trying to reside between country and wildness, never mind New York City's crueler climate, its pelting rain, heavy snow, and wetter, colder seasons, is not easy for non-native plants Other problems occurred as well, in the transplanting of history, says Stephen Brighton, an archaeologist who has spent summers in Ireland as assistant field director of Center for the Study of Rural Ireland. Despite a struggle in locating the memorial (signage is non-existent), Brighton found it impressive, but ahistorical. The farmhouse replica is, in fact, a double - not single - home. That is, it's twice the typical size of a farm during the famine years, and unrealistically cozy. A family during that time was squeezed into a tight space; their lives their lives centered around a peat fire in the central fireplace that served as heat and cooking source. It lacked hearth and chimney, and its smoke darkened their narrow confines--an image and reality lost in the remake, though salvageable by photographs, he suggests. Still, whatever the criticisms voiced, the hunger memorial achieves originality, substance and weight. A mini-journey to the past, as well as a script to the present, it offers far more than so many of today's lackluster, artistically challenged memorials of all genres, Irish and otherwise. Tolle's Irish Hunger Famine memorial has established a setting in the midst of nowhere---a provocative structure with mental fiber and artistic muscle. In the end, for all the controversy, this surreal, striking, and complicated monument is compelling in its effort to merge the written and the felt - to establish a place in a wasteland once shadowed by the twin towers and now standing awaiting new surroundings on all sides. For all the ambiguity, one hopes that its presence and place in the city has stirred the thoughts and heated the pot of future monumentmakers beyond today's memorial cliches.
This critic-at-large commentary appeared in Landscape Architecture, March 2003.
|
Together, Brian Tolle, the memorial's creator, and its landscape architect, Gail Wittwer-Laird (who collaborated with Juergen Riehm of 1100 Architects of New York), and I survey this hard-wrought Irish scenario: the 19th century cottage, brought to America rock by rock and fitted out with empty nooks and fireplace within. The reconstructed cottage sits nestled in native Irish grasses, some 62 varieties according to the designers' reckoning. "The coolness, the smell, they're palpable," Tolle describes the surroundings created by these native plantings, varieties of weeds, thistles, and wildflowers from the north Connaught wetlands, pointing out the soil around the cottage, corrugated as if abandoned for potato planting. Then, we move to the top of the hill overlooking the New York harbor 25 feet below.
The next day, by myself on a gray but rain-free early morning, the memorial with its concrete base and 35-foot cantilevered cover still looks stranded among the vacant streets, bleak buildings and construction sites. Yet, despite its site and split-personality presence--a tourist's mini-Ireland to the east; a monumental structure to the west - the "sculpture" seems forceful in the sea of banal buildings.
The quarter-acre site stands for the maximum amount of land an Irish family could hold and still secure famine relief under British rule. Equally didactic (and why not?) the commentary on famine worldwide lining the tunnel recalls universal tragedies from the past to the present. The highlighted words are meant to tell of the millions, not just Ireland's million hunger victims. Comprising 110 quotations from everyday bills of produce or notes to friends and family, to profounder, more provocative statements, the content is designed to allow and inspire change, Tolle explains. A literary backdrop in flux, the quotations can change related to the times its viewers are living in, says Tolle. Today, the backlit text, which would measure almost two miles if laid end to end, runs from top to bottom of the tunnel and includes personal reports, poems, and statistics. Its creators plan to record famines or hunger crises destined to occur in the future, and designed to "relate to the living, " the artist explains the silk-screened sentences inscripted on strips of resin that provide a glowing contrast to the harsh exterior.
If New York City can boast the first bit of County Mayo planted in the U.S., it is not the first, or safe to say, the last Irish Hunger Memorial built in the last few decades, courtesy of Irish devotees fuller pockets anxious to memorialize the famine. Indeed, a, well, cottage industry seems to have grown up over the Irish famine. Committees have spawned a family of memorials; most recently, the haggard figures in upscale Westchester County's bronze Great Hunger Memorial and a sculpted half-boat bronze with figurines in Philadelphia. In Boston, the 150th anniversary of the Irish Famine also prompted a million-dollar memorial park in 1998. Settled between the literary edifices of a Border's bookstore and the historic Old Corner Bookstore, its emaciated bronze figures, looking like tortured versions of the renowned artist, Giacometti's already tortured sculptured forms, scarcely improve the plaza site.
Then, there are the everyday observers. The boggy plot lacks genuineness, my daughter, an American who summers in County Mayo, scoffs. The rocks are "off," the grass thirsty, and the mortar of the walls displays shabby workmanship, she adds dismissively. Even the land itself, the species of grasses, plants and wildflowers in the 96-by-170 foot field attract criticism: too compressed, too dreary, too unreliable to last in this climate.
