But artists often hesitate to cede control, not wanting to compromise their visions as a matter of principle; as a result they can at times be highly resistant to consulting with victims. In one sense, the relationship between designer and victim is that of contractor and client – with clients asking the contractor to build them a place to mourn. In many cases, architects are more comfortable with this kind of relationship than artists. One case in point is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by the architect Peter Eisenman and the artist Richard Serra. When German chancellor Helmut Kohl asked for substantial changes to their design, Eisenman obliged, and Serra removed his name from the project.

 

Is it even necessary for memorials to be created by trained artists and architects? Not all memorials are. The AIDS Memorial Quilt, stitched by amateurs, proves that effective memorials don't necessarily need professional artists. There is a wide spectrum of possible approaches. On one end, there are spontaneous and often ephemeral memorials, created by everyday people in the heat of grief, like the messages, drawings, and makeshift shrines that accumulated in New York’s Union Square in the days after the September 11 attacks. The fact that they were unprofessional, chaotic, and sometimes kitschy only seemed to increase their emotional power. On the other end there are conceptual art projects that seem almost like pranks, such as the Bruce Lee statue in Bosnia and much of Horst Hoheisel’s work. At their best, these memorials are cleverly and incisively designed to shatter old patterns of thought, pushing passersby to consider ideas that are inspiring and new. Other concepts lie somewhere in between. To make the Paine Memorial in Chile, which commemorates victims of state terror, professional artists worked closely with families of victims to design the site, teaching the families the art of mosaic-making over a period of months. The families testified to how much this creative process became a part of their healing process.

 

The process is, in some ways, more important than the memorial itself. In many post-conflict situations, “people can’t find anything to agree on except that certain things need to be recalled,” memorial scholar James Young said. “So the memorializing process becomes a place where people work through to reunify otherwise very broken communities.”

 

Today, it’s unlikely that a new memorial will be built in a traditional style – say, a noble soldier on horseback atop a slab of marble with a plaque. How did the modern approach to memorial design develop? One important factor was that, in the first half of the twentieth century, the tremendous destruction and trauma of the two World Wars irrevocably transformed the function of art. As James Young put it, people began to look to art “not as a redeeming, saving grace, but as something now obligated to represent hopelessness, or irredeemable loss.” At the same time, a tendency toward a new aesthetic – what we now might call modernism – was taking hold. These developments had a huge influence on memorial art.

 

In the decades since, as artists have grappled with how to address mass atrocity in their work, certain recurring themes have formed a kind of aesthetic lexicon for memorials. For example, the Krakow Ghetto and Deportation Monument in Poland, Un Lugar para la Memoria in Chile, and the Oklahoma City Monument in the United States all use empty chairs to suggest absence. In fact, absence itself is one of the most regular themes found in modern memorials. The winning design for the forthcoming World Trade Center Memorial, which emphasizes the empty footprints left by the destroyed towers, is titled “Reflecting Absence.” Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin features five cavernous voids, which, in Liebeskind’s words, represent “that which can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history: humanity reduced to ashes.” Sometimes memorials themselves are made to disappear, as with a number of German “countermonuments,” including Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s gradually descending Monument against Fascism, Gerz’s secretly installed and hidden Monument against Racism, and Horst Hoheisel’s inverted Aschrottbrunnen Fountain. (In his design submission for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Hoheisel even proposed blowing up Berlin’s iconic Brandenberg Gate – to remember one destruction with another.)

 

Many other memorials are built around a landscape theme – notably, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the United States, designed by the landscape architect and artist Maya Lin. “She opened a place in the landscape in order to open a place within us for memory,” Young said. “I think no single memorial has had a greater impact on the aesthetics of memorial and monumental architecture. Finally there seemed to be a vernacular for articulating loss and ambivalence about remembering things you might rather forget.” In another use of landscape, to commemorate the destruction of the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, the architect Tadao Undo planted some 50,000 white blooming magnolias, right in the path of destruction. “It’s built on the premise that we need a memorial that we tend and nurture,” Young said. Young, who helped judge the design competition for the World Trade Center Memorial, said that the jury received a number of proposals with this in mind, and ended up choosing a design that included groves of trees. “You have to take care of them, and they provide comforting shade.” Young said. “You remember life with life.”