Leave to one side for a moment the debate over whether Confederate memorials, many of them more than a century old, should be pulled down as an act of civic and moral hygiene. Nearly everyone can agree that the memorials themselves are artistically accomplished. Some of them are overwrought, some of them are mawkish, some of them could rightly be considered beautiful. But in the eyes of the audience they were addressing, at least, the artists and designers did what they set out to do, calling out feelings of gratitude and reverence for the men who fought for a cause. Indeed, it is this very competence that enables the memorials to provoke outrage rather than indifference in a modern audience.
After 18 years of hesitation, congressional dithering, bureaucratic ennui, and aesthetic controversy, ground was broken this week near the National Mall for a memorial to Dwight Eisenhower. It was designed, as readers likely know, by the famous architect Frank Gehry, and it is done up with every ounce of eccentricity and pointless elaboration that he could muster. Its elements—large stone blocks, a few statues, a frieze, bare platforms, and a giant mesh screen hung like a scrim from flanking pillars—are scattered over a four-acre urban square. None of the elements bears much relation to the others. Even now, as the earthmovers do their work, it’s unclear how the statues will be posed or what image will be shown from the scrim.
Which is perfectly appropriate, for the informational content of Gehry’s design was always secondary to its primary purpose: to showcase Frank Gehry and his artistic caprice, along with the supposed aesthetic sophistication of the arts bureaucrats who approved it. The design says much less about Dwight Eisenhower, whose distaste for modernism was well-known, than it says about us. We can only wonder what future generations will think when they come upon the ugly and meaningless memorial that this generation chose to build to honor a great man. By “great man,” we mean Ike, not Gehry, although decades from now no one will be sure.
