The Biography of a Memorial Icon: Nathan Rapoport's Warsaw Ghetto Monument

ion, in addition to the ways it diffuses a work's sense of mimetic witness, may frustrate as well the memorial's capacity as locus for shared self-image and commonly held ideals. In its hermetic and personal vision, abstraction encourages private visions in viewers, which would defeat the communal and collective aims of public memorials. On the one hand, the specificity of realistic figuration would seem to thwart multiple messages, while abstract sculpture could accommodate as many meanings as could be projected onto it. But in fact, it is almost always a figurative monument like the Warsaw Ghetto Monument that serves as point of departure for political performances. It is as if figurative sculpture like this were needed to engage viewers with likenesses of people, to evoke an empathic link between viewer and monument that might then be marshaled into particular meaning. In referring to the general condition of the world, an inner state of mind, broken trust in mankind, or even art's inability to represent the real, abstract forms still offer artists the widest possible variety of expression. Maya Lin's succinctly abstract Vietnam Veterans Memorial, for example, commemorates the nation's ambivalence toward the Vietnam War and its veterans in ways altogether unavailable in figuration.8 Instead of merely condemning the figurative mode as archaic and out-of-touch, however, we might also acknowledge the need in public audiences for figuration, even as we recall the constructed nature of figurative iconography. In this way, we can keep monumental figuration from naturalizing itself, from putting a finish on its significance. By breaking the figurative icon into its performative parts and reinvesting the memorial text with the memory of its own constructedness, we might thus remember the essential abstraction of figurative iconography. Through this attention to the activity of memorialization, we might also remind ourselves that public memory is constructed, and that there are worldly consequences in the kinds of historical understanding generated by monuments. Our questions have not been, Can a monument witness events? or How do monuments distort history? but rather, How have monuments like this organized historical memory? What are the social, political, and aesthetic dimensions comprising the monument's public life? What is our role in it all? and finally, What are the consequences for our current lives in light of the ways our past is memoThe Biography of a Memorial Icon 101 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.78 on Wed, 22 Jun 2016 06:10:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms rialized? In these questions, we find that the performance of the Warsaw Ghetto Monument depends not on some measured distance between history and its monumental representation but in the conflation of private and public memory, in the memorial activity by which minds reflecting on the past inevitably precipitate in the present historical moment.