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A Memorial Remembers The Hungry
— By ROBERTA SMITH
The Irish Hunger Memorial opening today on the edge of the Hudson River near
Manhattan's southern tip could be New York City's equivalent of the Vietnam
War Memorial in Washington, an unconventional work of public art that strikes
a deep emotional chord, sums up its artistic moment for a broad audience and
expands the understanding of what a public memorial can be.
The work commemorates a 150-year-old tragedy, the great Irish famine of
1845-52. Although the subject lacks the national scope and immediacy of the
war in Vietnam, the Hunger Memorial, which is in Battery Park City,
illuminates Ireland's tragedy in undeniable human, even universal, terms; it
can grip the viewer with its combination of information and spatial
experience.
The new memorial is a startlingly realistic quarter-acre replication of an
Irish hillside, complete with fallow potato furrows, stone walls, indigenous
grasses and wildflowers and a real abandoned Irish fieldstone cottage. The
96-by-170-foot field rests on a giant concrete slab that is raised up and
tilted on a huge wedge-shape base. It slopes upward from street level to a
height of 25 feet. A packed dirt path winds up the slope, culminating in a
hilltop with sweeping views of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.
The field is a walk-in relic of a distant time and place tenderly inserted
into the modern world almost as if it were an offering. From the riverside,
the towering end wall of the plinth is shadowed by the broad overhang of the
concrete slab, and cut by a ramped entrance that leads into the back of the
cottage. Intended to resemble an Irish burial mound, or tumulus, it also
suggests that the landscape has been flown in on a large spaceship --
especially at night, when it is lighted from inside, creating an eerie glow.
From its inception, the memorial was also intended to be a reminder of world
hunger. The plinth is lined with glass-covered bands of text that mingle
terse facts about the Irish famine with similarly disturbing statistics about
world hunger today, along with quotations from Irish poetry and songs.
But the work's potential for contemporary resonance may be unusually great:
today's dedication ceremony occurs in a city that saw history change course a
short distance away less than six months after the groundbreaking for the
memorial on March 15, 2001.
Located two blocks from ground zero, the Irish Hunger Memorial is likely to
be embraced by many as a symbol of the hundreds of firefighters, police
officers, rescue personnel and office workers of Irish descent who died in
the World Trade Center attack. It was half completed when the attack came,
and its earth-moving equipment and raw materials were commandeered during the
rescue effort. But local police officers and firefighters familiar with the
project protectively guarded the half-finished memorial from inadvertent
damage or dismantling.
The Hunger Memorial will almost certainly add to the growing debate about the
future use of the land on which the World Trade Center once stood. By
coincidence, six proposals for the redevelopment of ground zero, each
including plans for a 9/11 memorial, are about to go on view at Federal Hall
National Monument.
Perhaps most important, the memorial has arrived at a time when Americans,
especially young Americans, have a deeper understanding of tragedy and grief,
of fate's capriciousness and of the complexities of power.
The work, which was created by Brian Tolle, 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. While the low-lying black marble wedges of the
Vietnam Memorial, designed by Maya Lin, might be called populist Minimal Art,
Mr. Tolle's memorial is a form of populist postmodernism, a combination of
reality and simulacra, of high and low, a layering of different historical
periods and contrasting points of view. It is also a typically postmodern
blend of existing art styles -- Realism, Conceptual Art and Earth Art --
bound together by historical fact and physical accuracy.
The work may cause a rolling of eyes among the original Earthwork artists.
Their works tend to be hewn from the vast expanses of Nevada and New Mexico,
miles from anywhere or anyone. In contrast, the memorial has a slight
theme-park preciousness and detail. It is earthwork as Pop Art, a miniature
at full scale.
But it also belongs to the tradition of the war memorial in the form of a
deserted battlefield. Like those at Verdun and Gettysburg, it is a
figure-less terrain in which the viewer stands in for the heroic statue. It
commemorates human failure, human loss and human perseverance in a war fought
with land, food and political might at the cost of at least one million
lives.
The piece brings to fruition efforts dating back several decades to build a
memorial to the famine in New York, where so many Irish immigrated to escape
its reach. It began to take shape when Timothy S. Carey, president and chief
executive of the Battery Park City Authority accompanied Governor George E.
Pataki on a trip to Ireland, and the two men began to discuss Vesey Green, a
half-acre square in Battery Park City, as a possible site. Upon their return,
after the authority was formally charged with creating a monument, Mr. Carey
selected a steering committee and hired Joyce Pomerantz Schwartz, an
experienced art consultant, to guide the process of selecting the artist.
Battery Park City's 155 acres already include 13 large-scale public artworks,
the Museum of Jewish Heritage (A Living Memorial to the Holocaust) and the
New York City Police Memorial. Financed by the Battery Park City Authority,
the new piece has only slightly run over its original $5 million budget, Mr.
Carey said.
Mr. Tolle was among 13 artists selected from an initial review of 150
portfolios and one of five awarded a $10,000 stipend to create a model and
proposal for the site. The selection of his scale model -- like the budget
projection, it's surprisingly close to the final outcome -- was all but
unanimous. He chose as collaborators Juergen Riehm and David Piscuskas of
1100 Architects of New York and Gail Wittwer-Laird, a landscape architect.
The only conditions were that the memorial be a contemplative space, retain
the harbor view and incorporate text. The third condition reflected Mr.
Carey's view that too many memorials and monuments become mute because they
contain so little specific information about the events they commemorate.
Both Mr. Carey and Mr. Tolle relish the idea that the memorial can change and
grow. Paths that form through the grass will be kept. Mr. Tolle devised an
ingeniously flexible method of mounting the texts: they are silk-screened
onto strips of clear Plexiglas that are simply leaned against the glass bands
from the inside. When lighted, they appear to be etched, but they can be
easily changed, injecting new facts about world hunger or additional history
about the famine.
Mr. Tolle says that the project is ''a synthesis of my interest in history,
architecture and trying to make a memorial for a particular event that also
lends itself to adaptation.'' He describes the memorial as ''a little
fragment of Ireland built on a heap of language,'' and this is almost
literally true. Excluding the tons of earth that blanket the tilted concrete
shelf and the irrigation system buried in it, nearly every particle of the
monument has an Irish origin and a historical logic.
The 62 plants -- including wild yellow iris, nettle and blackthorn -- are
specific to the Connacht boglands in County Mayo, whose rural landscape
inspired Mr. Tolle. The fieldstone house and walls were imported stone by
stone from a farm in the area belonging to Tom Slack, a cousin of Mr. Tolle's
partner, Brian Clyne. (Built in the 1820's, the house had a dirt floor until
1945 and was occupied until 1960; it was donated to the memorial by the Slack
family.)
The slope of the memorial is dotted with 32 large stones, one from each of
Ireland's counties, and an ancient pilgrim stone, carved with an early Irish
Cross of Arcs. The surrounding plaza and the base are clad with Kilkenny
limestone, a green-gray stone that is studded with small, white, featherlike
coils -- fossils from the ancient Irish seabed.
The quarter-acre size of the monument adheres to the infamous Gregory Clause
passed by the British Parliament in 1847, which decreed that cottiers whose
plots exceeded that size would not be eligible for relief. The cottage is
roofless because many farmers tore the thatches off their homes to prove
destitution and qualify for relief.
The sentences that gird the limestone base from bottom to top have been
gleaned from contemporary reports, newspaper editorials, parliamentary debate
and parish priests and show how many people in the midst of the tragedy
grasped its awful proportions. And also how many did not. In one line, the
recipe for the soup ladled out in British-run soup kitchens (12 1/2 pounds of
beef to 100 gallons of water) is compared with the recipe used in the soup
kitchens established for victims of the famine by American Quakers (75 pounds
of beef to 100 gallons of water).
The question of whether this elaborate artwork will have meaning beyond Irish
history, or even beyond world hunger, is largely moot. It shows one instance
and one cause of the immigration that has shaped and continues to shape New
York City. It shows instances of suffering, prejudice and mismanagement so
specific that they can't help but reverberate into our own time.
Mr. Tolle said he considered the tilt of the work crucial in separating the
memorial from its setting. Without it, he said recently, ''the piece would be
a folly.'' But the slant that isolates the Hunger Memorial from its setting also
establishes a crucial similarity. The Irish farmers tilled their land so
intently that it became close to man-made, just like Manhattan. The
crampedness, oldness and ekedness of the field, so unlike most American terra
firma, itself communicates a sense of human determination and toil. It is a
fragment from a man-made island placed upon another man-made island, one
symbol of endurance atop another.
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