The tagger of the vietnam war memorial3/10/2023 ![]() ![]() Since the American and French Revolutions, these sorts of memorials have proliferated in step with the geometric population growth of the modern world, in part because modernity ruthlessly mechanized the means of destruction. The memorial provided a focus for attention for official ceremonies, as well as a site for the laying of wreaths or flowers, the inscription of names, and an allegorical representation of the event, such as peace, victory, or noble death in the case of a war memorial. ![]() Days of remembrance necessitated a place to gather. Until World War I, the dominance of the classical tradition in architecture and the figure in sculpture provided a set of conventions for memorials and their spaces with almost limitless possibilities for composition within a limited framework of commemoration. In short, American attempts to memorialize are encountering new kinds of issues in a rapidly changing political atmosphere, amid shifting conventions of art and architecture. Recent events, moreover, have strained memorial traditions in new ways, from the AIDS/HIV epidemic to the bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City, the events of September 11, 2001, and the succession of anniversaries of 20 th-century events, including the Holocaust and World War II. Second, memorials have succumbed to the forces of multiculturalism and political correctness, and like the pluralistic, some would say balkanized, society they represent, they have become cauliflowers, each one reflecting the messy aggregation of interests of democracy trafficking in official remembrance. They have become the morbid cigarette we consume after tragedy, as if every loss remains somehow incomplete without its permanent place in the public sphere, in spite of the fact that the nature of the public becomes increasingly ambiguous. First, memorials culminate every conflict, act, notable death, or historical moment. The United States is in the throes of memorial mania that manifests itself in two ways. Memorial Mania Since Maya Lin Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C., 1983 Putting the New Wave of Memorials into Context I.
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