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Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, War memorials. London: Leo Cooper, Eternal light , in the form of flames, lamps, and torches, is another familiar feature of war memorials. Light, signifying remembrance and purification, has been an important feature of commemorative architecture since ancient times. Forms of light, including the rising sun , came to have new significance in Australia at the time of the First World War.
Though the rising sun had been adopted at Federation as the badge of the Australian military forces, after the dawn landing at Gallipoli on 25 April , it became a symbol of national birth, an essential part of the Anzac tradition. The lotus flower, another symbol of renewed life, ornaments the Lands Department honour board.
Some memorials have obvious patriotic or national symbols, often indicating the dual nature of Australian patriotism. A few memorials bear Australian flora or fauna, or verse written by local people. Even the soldier statues found on many war memorials have symbolic significance. Mostly they represent ordinary infantrymen and lack any markings of rank hence they conform to Australian egalitarian ideals.
According to the Brisbane monumental masons A. That captured moment is further enlivened by the adjacent images of individuals who served. The architectural momentum of the site draws visitors to a tranquil, sheltered sitting area. This comprehensive approach to site design offers the remembrance, honor, and consolation that families need and veterans deserve. The Air Force Memorial is unique in its intention to be seen from a distance. Drivers on I see the three simple arcs, of slightly different lengths, reaching skyward.
It is an ambiguous, graceful, monumental abstract sculpture. The image is pleasing, but viewers may not recognize that it is also a powerful symbol. They may not see the forms as vapor trails of jets accelerating upward symbolically, toward heaven. A visit to the memorial offers a very different experience than the distant view. The three immense arcs emerge from a plaza that includes a variety of elements to honor and remember Air Force veterans.
At one end of the plaza, four bronze sculptures represent airmen carrying flags. At the other end are plaques and inscriptions commemorating various aspects of Air Force History. The plaza includes benches and shade trees. The view of Washington, DC, is pleasing and serves as a reminder that the Air Force serves the nation. The contrast in scale between various parts of this memorial is notable. The upright forms are obviously intended to be seen from a distance. They make a powerful, simple, thematic statement.
The plaza is almost like a different memorial from the arcs. The benches and trees within the plaza create a more intimate environment, but it does not quite have the comfort of the Korean War Memorial or the invitation for personal connection of the Vietnam Memorial.
It feels more like an educational garden. Oddly, the most recent of these five monuments, for me, shares the cold, hard formality of the oldest Grant. If I were directly connected to people in the Air Force, perhaps it would strike me differently. So, returning to the opening question: What do we want from war memorials? We probably all share some basic expectations. We want war memorials to: honor the effort and sacrifice of those who have served; comfort those who have lost loved ones; and provide a site where people can remember and grieve as a community.
Memorials can also serve other tangential purposes, including to: remind us of underlying principles and ideals; commemorate significant wartime events; celebrate the leadership or accomplishments of particular individuals; and remind us of the costs of war. We want many different qualities, and some conflict with others. Those qualities can be expressed through contemporary or traditional approaches. In either case, the effectiveness depends on the depth of the design concept.
One thing that we surely do not want is divisiveness. Memorials honoring and emphasizing the common person who has served in the military fulfill a straightforward human need for acknowledgment.
For me, memorials that romanticize war are troubling. Memorials that elevate national ideals can be inspiring, but also complicated, as in the case of the Civil War. Since war memorials typically remain in place for decades or even centuries, it is important to note that their social and aesthetic functions change over time. While the impetus to create monuments is often rooted in a desire to honor veterans while they are still living, or to help in the healing process of those who have lost loved ones to a war, the monuments can only serve those functions for a limited period of time—about years, at most.
Once the people directly impacted by the war are gone, the purpose of a monument shifts from performing personal healing to more symbolic functions. Those functions may be educational or cultural, as with historical markers, or they may be patriotic, political, or ideological.
Ideological functions range from benign to corrosive. The most well conceived memorials are built around enduring, inclusive concepts that will continue to be of value to the community. As I have reflected on the social and aesthetic functions of war memorials, the controversies surrounding Confederate monuments have remained in the back of my mind.
Passions are strong on both sides of these debates. Most objections to Confederate monuments have revolved around the effort by Southern states to maintain the institution of slavery. There is disagreement as to whether or not that was the primary cause of the Civil War, but, undoubtedly, the issue of slavery was intertwined with the war, and, undoubtedly, slavery was an evil institution.
A monument that suggests otherwise poses serious moral questions. A monument that honors and elevates the secession effort, which would have extended slavery, is bound to be offensive. Still, assessing the meaning of a particular monument, and determining its fate, can get into murky territory. In the Civil War, Americans fought Americans; there was no foreign enemy. The attributions of motivations for the war have been simplified over the years, but an array of economic and political considerations propelled each side.
Beliefs regarding slavery were more complex on both sides than we typically acknowledge. For some with deep family roots in the South, the removal of monuments may feel like an erasure of part of their personal history. Most Confederate monuments offer some combination of honoring the dead and resurrecting ideology. Weighing the balance can be difficult. In reflecting on the Civil War, it is impossible to separate Confederate leaders from the ideology they espoused.
They spoke and wrote at length about their motivations and intentions. It is not as hard to separate common soldiers from that ideology. Surely, many of them were committed to the cause, but it is safe to assume that many of them were simply dragged into the war by the sad, hungry undertow that drags most soldiers into most wars. Monuments remembering the common Civil War soldier, without glorifying ideology, fulfill the same functions as any other war memorials.
Memorials, at their best, have the power to heal; they also have the power to divide. When they aim to acknowledge and honor individual losses, they can help people to move forward. When they glorify the issues and principles that led to the conflict, they invite people to look backwards and re-litigate those issues. In the American Civil War, both sides suffered immense losses. For Civil War memorials to have acceptance, they need to serve the aspirations of the nation as a whole.
We may pass by them daily without much notice. Unless we make an intentional effort to explore them, read plaques, and ponder their significance, we gather only a vague feeling of historical significance. Confederate monuments, however, are hard to ignore for many people. They can be an imposing reminder of an ideology intertwined with white supremacy.
In fact, many of these monuments were intended to be imposing, as demonstrated by their proliferation during the Jim Crow era and the years of the Civil Rights movement. They have been used as a tool in an effort to maintain a set of values and a social hierarchy that historically put light-skinned people above dark-skinned people. If we view Confederate monuments with similar considerations given to other war memorials, how do they stand up?
The Jefferson Davis Memorial is composed of a large central column supporting a female figure, with a statue of Jefferson Davis at its base, surrounded by a classical colonnade supporting an entablature capped with sculptures of flags, shields, and armaments. Inscriptions and plaques are distributed throughout the monument. The interior space is closed off by an iron fence. The first thing that struck me about the Davis Monument was the odd proportional relationship between the parts.
The column is huge, making the sculpture of Davis seem diminutive. If the column stood alone, the proportions would seem fine.
If the rest of the monument stood without the column, it would also work. This may just be an issue of personal taste, or reflect the aesthetics of the turn of the 20th century, but it may also be tied to the intent of the monument.
The overall feeling is somewhat solemn, cold, and imposing, like the Grant Memorial. The predominance of architectural elements over the sculptural elements suggests that the primary intent is to honor an institution, rather than a person. The tall central column and elevated inscriptions require visitors to look upward. The colonnade stirs feelings of authority and established power, like a government building or, perhaps, the ruins of that authority. Architecturally, the memorial invites viewers into its interior, where there is a semi-circular bench, but an iron fence which looks like an afterthought divides the space and presents a fortress-like atmosphere.
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