Bunker 599: A Photographic Monument

Bunker 599: A Photographic Monument Alicia Chester Architecture/Photography Modern/Postmodern Professor Douglas Crimp Fall 2013 2 Bunker 599 is one of seven hundred surviving military pillboxes built in 1940 on the New Dutch Waterline, a defense system composed of artificial and natural bodies of water created in the Netherlands in 1815, completed in 1870, in use through 1945, and disabled in 1960.1 The Netherlands is a country largely below sea level with centuries of experience creating dams and controlling waterways, as well as a history of using hydro-geological defense systems as early as the sixteenth century, known as the Old Hollandic Waterline. The New Dutch Waterline was constructed in an eighty-five kilometer ring to surround cities vital to the Dutch economy––Muiden, Utrecht, Vreeswijk, and Gorinchem––through intentional flooding, thus isolating and turning the Netherlands’ economic heartland virtually into an island in times of war. The water was just under half a meter deep: too shallow to sail through but too deep for troops or horses to traverse on foot. Hazards for any who would attempt to cross lay under the water, including barbed wire, ditches, and mines, and areas of particular weakness were fortified. The New Dutch Waterline was mobilized in only three wars: the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, World War I, and World War II. The concrete pillboxes––despite being named Bunker 599, the structure is technically a pillbox––were constructed in 1940, even though the New Dutch Waterline was used only as a secondary defense line in World War II, and aerial bombing weakened the efficacy of a defense system based on ground invasion. In the post-World War II era of a peaceful Europe, the New Dutch Waterline is a relatively forgotten relic of the past. The remaining forts are now for public use, including as parks, camp sites, and wine cellars. 2 1 There is discrepancy in some sources whether there are six or seven hundred surviving pillboxes. The name would seem to suggest there are six hundred, as listed in the promotional video. However, the majority of architectural blogs cite seven hundred pillboxes. I am relying on dates and figures from an article by architect Ronald Rietveld, head of the design firm that created Bunker 599, Rietveld Landscape. See Ronald Rietveld, “Bunker 599: The Netherlands: military landscape made publically accessible,” Building with Landscape, Topos 74 (2011): 29–31. 2 “About the New Dutch Waterline,” Hollandse Waterlineie Laat Je Verrassen. http://www.hollandsewaterlinie.nl/ pages/english-information.aspx. 3 In 2010, the Dutch Service for Land and Water Management commissioned the design firm Rietveld Landscape (now Rietveld Architecture–Art–Affordances) in collaboration with Atelier de Lyon to remake one of the surviving pillboxes into a publicly accessible attraction. Although not originally intended as a monument, Bunker 599 serves as a reminder of war–– specifically, World War II––and a symbol of the New Dutch Waterline itself.3 It is one of several interventions in a demilitarized zone now considered a cultural heritage site, recreational area, and ecological haven, designated as one of twenty official national landscapes to be preserved and developed between 1999 and 2020.4 In other words, Bunker 599 forms part of a landscape transformed from a defense system into a site of domestic tourism and national remembrance. When it was unveiled in October 2010, Bunker 599 was featured on numerous architectural blogs and websites. Far from contextualizing the monument, however, most articles recycled the language available in Rietveld Landscape’s statement about the work and republished the carefully composed press photos (or incredibly similar shots). Little variation in representation of the project is available, and my only experience of the monument comes through these media. Bunker 599 appears to have been constructed with specific photographic vantage points in mind. It is located near a major highway and is intended both to be clearly visible while driving by and to lure drivers to stop and visit. A wooden boardwalk cuts a straight axis directly through the center of the bunker, directing visitors to walk down a hillside staircase, through the bunker, and out to a pier extending into a flooded portion of the New Dutch 3 “Bunker 599,” RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances]. http://www.raaaf.nl/en/projects/7_bunker_599. Rietveld Landscape was renamed Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances in October 2013. In this essay I refer to the design firm as Rietveld Landscape, its name at the time of creating Bunker 599 and, hence, the name cited in articles on the project. 4 “About the New Dutch Waterline,” Hollandse Waterlineie Laat Je Verrassen. http://www.hollandsewaterlinie.nl/ pages/english-information.aspx. On the development of the New Dutch Waterline, see also Martin Knuijt,“Sharp as a Knife: A concept for the Dutch Waterline,” Small Scale Interventions, Topos 79 (2012): 36–41. 4 Waterline. Once a visitor reaches the end of the pier, she turns around for a view back through the bunker to where she started on the hillside. The vertical cut through the pillbox creates a line bisecting both the structure and the horizon, which, from certain vantage points, is visually extended by the horizontal boardwalk. The strict symmetry of the bunker cleanly sliced by a pathway encourages visitors to move back and forth along a straight line. The beginning and endpoint of the pathway reward visitors with a dramatic one-point perspective from each side of the site, paralleling the one-point perspective of the visitor’s camera itself and rendering explicit the connection of tourism and photography. Slicing the small, dark structure connects interior and exterior and inverts relationships of light and dark, forming the aesthetic basis for Bunker 599.5 It took over four months to cut through the two-meter thick walls6 with diamond-tipped saws so that visitors could view into and through the pillbox.7 The rough, moss-grown exterior showing signs of decay––threatening to meld into the dirt and grass of the landscape––opposes the brighter and newly polished concrete walls of the interior, reflecting the water beyond. Differences in texture and value connote contrasts of the old and the new, history and the present. That is, they connote that the decaying pillbox has been resurrected from the once war-torn landscape and historical oblivion in a peaceful present. The uncanniness emanating from these photos is rooted in the sense that an airless space was opened to air, that what once was opaquely hidden is now transparently visible. 5 “You go inside, and you can no longer connect the inside to the outside. You don’t know anymore what the inside and the outside have to do with each other.” Living Picture Film, Bunker 599, 2010. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/ 50229102. 6 Kimberly Li, “Bunker 599 by Rietveld Landscape + Atelier de Lyon,” GBlog, July 26, 2012. http:// blog.gessato.com/2012/07/26/bunker-599-by-rietveld-landscape-atelier-de-lyon/. 7 Mara Corradi, “Bunker 599: from architecture to monument,” Floornature, October 3, 2011. http:// www.floornature.com/projects-learning/project-bunker-599-from-architecture-to-monument-6586/. 5 I was initially drawn to make comparisons between Bunker 599 and Gordon MattaClark’s Splitting of 1973 for some compelling similarities, including: the act of creation through destroying an existing architectural structure, the industrially laborious process itself of cutting out and removing the center of a building, the resulting aesthetic of a strong vertical line of light bisecting a heavier and darker structure, and the fact that both processes were documented closely with film or video.8 In fact, several shots in the documentation of the making of Bunker 599 seem quite directly influenced by the documentation of Splitting. Although both structures were shelters, they were built and used for very different purposes in their first lives––one domestic and one military––and were appropriated with very different intentions, including, most obviously, each structure’s relationship to time. Matta-Clark’s Splitting was to be ephemeral from the outset, as he was granted permission to cut the one-family New Jersey home before its demolition, and it existed for three months. Bunker 599 was commissioned by a government agency and is intended to be permanent, being literally set in stone––or concrete, anyway. With its vertical cut causing the house to split lopsidedly, Splitting may be characterized as referencing destruction and allegorizing the impermanence and imperfection of domestic life, while the perfectly symmetrical cut in Bunker 599 is better characterized as a redemptive gesture memorializing the site’s history in perpetuity. For these reasons, this tempting aesthetic comparison is a bit of a red herring. In some ways, Bunker 599 is closer in form and intention to Rachel Whiteread’s Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, also known as the Nameless Library, in Vienna, Austria. Having won the 1996 contest for a site-specific design to memorialize the more than 65,000 Austrian 8 Several architectural blogs made the comparison to Splitting and, more generally, Gordon Matta-Clark’s anarchitecture as well. See Kimberly Li, “Bunker 599 by Rietveld Landscape + Atelier de Lyon.” 6 Jews killed by the Nazis, Whiteread’s idea was to construct a bunker-like structure whose walls resembled casts of a library turned inside out. In casting the spaces between and around books, she employed “materiality [as] an index of absence” to commemorate the lost “people of the book” and the corresponding loss of history.9 In other words, Whiteread used history’s most familiar and tangible means of construction and transmission as a form to remember loss. Notably, these books are all the same size, creating a repetitive, gridded structure that maintains a conversation with minimalist sculpture and conceptual photographic practices. The doors to Whiteread’s monument, which are also negative casts, do not open but are permanently sealed. In this respect, the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial seeks to enclose space to show the opacity of historical loss in direct contradiction to Bunker 599, which seeks to open its space to the landscape and the public. Here an important distinction arises between a memorial and a monument. The borders between these categories shift and overlap, yet they are not quite synonymous. The purpose and meaning of a memorial is rooted in the word itself: memory. Although a memorial might be a physical monument, as in the case of gravestones, it may also take such diverse forms as a Facebook profile, a tattoo, or a tee shirt, so long as the form serves to externalize memory. The Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial is exemplary of Holocaust memorials in that it is also a countermonument. The formal language of traditional monuments––that is, late-nineteenth-century figurative monuments––is that of the permanent preservation of heroic and authoritative historical narratives.10 In the wake of the World Wars and especially the Holocaust, however, 9 James E. Young, “Memory, Countermemory, and the End of the Monument: Horst Hoheisel, Micha Ullman, Rachel Whiteread, and Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock,” in At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 107. 10 Young, “Memory, Countermemory, and the End of the Monument,” 93. 7 memory and memorials became problematic.11 Traditional forms were inadequate to the magnitude of trauma suffered and the impossibility of redemption.12 Counter-monuments, like Whiteread’s Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, work to opposite effect, marking ambivalence and historical uncertainty through antiheroic self-effacement.13 They are meant to mourn rather than celebrate, to mark tragedy rather than victory, and to serve as deterrence against historical repetition. The formal language employed by counter-monuments privileges abstraction over figuration as a means “to ameliorate a work’s sense of mimetic witness.”14 Instead of crystallizing memory into a singular and centralized figure, counter-monuments invoke absence using antimimetic strategies learned from conceptualism, minimalism, and International Style architecture. Employing geometric forms, industrial and architectural materials, and contrasting light and shadow, a counter-monument does not possess a single or ideal perspective but encourages visitors to move through the site to view the work from different vantage points and to experience the work durationally. It does not aim to be beautiful but to be an unavoidable presence indicating absence. It is as though the sheer number of those killed in the Holocaust represents an unfathomable conceptual abstraction necessitating an equally abstract visual representation––the only adequate means of referencing the unspeakable. In the case of 11 The vast literature on Holocaust memorials, monuments, counter-monuments, remembrance, and mourning is beyond the scope of this paper. See especially James E. Young’s The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning and At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, both cited here; and Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (eds.), Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). 12 Young, “Memory, Countermemory, and the End of the Monument,” 96. 13 Ibid., 93, 96. 14 Ibid., “The Countermonument: Memory against Itself in Germany,” in The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 10. 8 Whiteread’s memorial, there is an abundance of textured detail, but it is monochromatic, repetitious, and nonspecific, invoking the idea of a library rather than a specific location. The books offer neither titles nor any other indication of their contents, but only their multiplicity and formal repetition in a self-conscious recognition of the impossibility of containing historical trauma in a single image. The excess of trauma spurs the proliferation of documentary and fictionalized filmic narratives centering on the Holocaust, on the one hand, and the proliferation of abstract, monochromatic, antimimetic memorials, on the other: indexicality and abstraction metonymically become photograph and counter-monument.15 However, these binaries are not so oppositional as they initially appear. The antimimetic and symbolic abstraction of architectural form in counter-monuments posits a counterbalance to the surplus of indexical detail offered by photography, forming two complementary poles of representation that serve to externalize and displace memory. Only through excessive media representations––from historical documentation and photographs to Hollywood narratives––and the continued construction of countermonuments can the Holocaust be adequately memorialized in efforts to mend historical wounds and prevent future atrocities.16 Not all postmodern monuments are counter-monuments or memorials, but this discursive detour through Holocaust counter-monuments is unavoidable in accounting for the majority of contemporary literature on postmodern monuments and, relatedly, what aesthetics are available and deemed appropriate for postmodern monuments more generally. Bunker 599 inherits many 15 See Andreas Huyssen on Holocaust historiography and media representations, “Monuments and Holocaust Memory,” in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), especially 256–259. 16 “No single monument will ever be able to convey the Holocaust in its entirety.” Huyssen, 258. 9 aesthetic qualities from counter-monuments, including formal abstraction and architectural materials. Additionally, as the original pillbox structure was constructed during World War II, Bunker 599 shares referential and historical contiguity with Holocaust counter-monuments. However, Bunker 599 functions differently from counter-monuments in that it is not truly a memorial: it does not reference a specific trauma, event, or person. Its purpose is not to commemorate a single event or cluster of events, but to transform a preexisting architectural structure into a symbol of a now-defunct military landscape. Rather than displacing memory, Bunker 599 may be viewed as a distillation and synthesis of memory in symbolizing the greater history and national significance of the New Dutch Waterline. It composes part of the longterm project to transform and repurpose the entire New Dutch Waterline into a recreational area and ecological haven, thus embodying more of a concern with the present as well as displaying an optimism lacking in counter-monuments like Whiteread’s. Indeed, destroying the functionality of a military structure acknowledges the obsolescence of this pillbox in the wake of modern warfare while also confidently positing lasting peace in Europe in the post-World War II era. –– Bunker 599 is a monument in the senses accorded the term by turn-of-the-century art historian Alois Riegl, who became the journal editor for Austria’s Central Commission for the Research and Preservation of Artistic and Historical Monuments in 1902. The following year, when he also became the first Conservator General of Austrian Monuments, Riegl wrote “The Modern Cult of Monuments” to provide a theoretical basis for the draft of a law concerning historical preservation.17 In his essay Riegl presents “a case for preserving monuments as 17 Margaret Olin, “The Historian’s Performance,” in Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 175–176. 10 historical documents that register the passage of time,” creating a typology of monuments grounded in their relationship to temporality.18 His definition of what constitutes a monument ignores distinctions between art and non-art on historical grounds, simply and loosely defining monuments as works created by humans at least sixty years ago––placing Bunker 599’s original pillbox structure from 1940 well within his limits.19 Riegl describes his categories of intentional and unintentional monuments in which each possesses artistic value, historical value, age-value, or a combination thereof. Intentional monuments are deliberate constructions intended to memorialize, freeze, and preserve “a specific moment or complex of moments.”20 Their artistic value corresponds to the tastes of the era in which they were completed, as they are created with only contemporary uses, needs, and desires in mind––that is, to externalize and crystallize memory for that era, not necessarily for the future. The intention is to keep a past moment alive in the present in perpetuity.21 Accordingly, intentional Holocaust counter-monuments serve present needs to mourn and forewarn, but they may cease to hold the same commemorative value in the future. Unintentional monuments, on the other hand, are historical objects or sites that accrue age-value simply through the passage of time and are “nothing more than indispensable catalysts which trigger in the beholder a sense of the life cycle.”22 This emotional and sensory response does not require particular knowledge or education on the viewer’s part, being a spontaneous and immediate recognition of her own fate, 18 Michael Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-deSiècle Vienna (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 141. 19 Gubser, 145; Olin, 177. 20 Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 24. 21 Riegl, 38. 22 Ibid., 24. 11 much like a memento mori. An unintentional monument may or may not possess artistic value, depending on contemporary tastes, and both intentional and unintentional monuments may have historical value. However, unlike the emotional basis of age-value, historical value is dependent upon the viewer’s knowledge about the object or site. Intentional monuments may gain historical and age-value over time, taking on characteristics of unintentional monuments. Much like his loose definition of a monument, the boundaries among Riegl’s typologies and values are imprecise: To the class of intentional monuments belong only those works which recall a specific moment or complex of moments from the past. The class of historical monuments is enlarged to include those which still refer to a particular moment, but the choice of that moment is left to our subjective preference. Finally, the category of monuments of agevalue embraces every artifact without regard to its original significance and purpose, as long as it reveals the passage of a considerable period of time. These classes form three consecutive phases of the generalization of what a monument means.23 Notably in this passage Riegl highlights the role of the viewer’s subjectivity in determining meaning. Whereas the commemorative value of an intentional monument is determined by its makers to memorialize specific historical moments, the commemorative value of an unintentional monument is simply rooted in the passage of time and hence determined by the temporal standpoint of its viewers rather than a referenced point in the past. 24 As the defining characteristic of an unintentional monument, age-value always references the viewer’s own emotional response instead of a specific, historical moment. But age-value accretes to intentional monuments as well, and, along with historical value, it slowly surpasses the monument’s artistic value, which belongs to the time of the monument’s creation. A monument’s intended historical referent thus lessens in importance as time passes and age-value grows, and the present viewer’s 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 23. 12 subjective preferences and associations eventually usurp the original referent. In other words, over time the intentional monument shifts to become an unintentional monument referencing the viewer’s associations rather than a historical moment. Undergirding Riegl’s notions of value and temporal depth is his concept of Kunstwollen, translatable as the artistic will or desire of an age that changes over time, and “the inner formal and temporal imperatives of an artwork.”25 Hence, the Kunstwollen of the nineteenth century exemplified by figurative monuments differs from our contemporary Kunstwollen embodied by counter-monuments. As Michael Gubser writes: “The concept of Kunstwollen presumed a kind of evidence that took into account the subjective vision of the observer as well as the visual ‘data’ of the observed object. It also offered an inherently temporal and historical account of cultural perception.”26 Viewing monuments possessing historical or age-value is a diachronic experience: the viewer experiences a temporal juxtaposition in which a monument’s contemporary Kunstwollen––its artistic will and desire––cannot be apprehended objectively but is perceived subjectively from the perspective of the viewer’s present Kunstwollen, so that “viewing and interpreting art [are] temporally and historically charged activities.”27 The lens of the present unavoidably brackets aspects of past Kunstwollen, and only those fragments which resonate with the current Kunstwollen––whether through correspondence or contrast––remain meaningful for the present.28 25 Gubser, 154, quote on 209. 26 Ibid., 157. 27 Ibid., 163. 28 Riegl, 26. 13 The decision to appropriate an existing structure to commemorate the New Dutch Waterline rather than to construct a monument using new materials reverses Riegl’s formulation of intentional monuments becoming unintentional ones through the accumulation of age-value. Before Rietveld Landscape transformed the original pillbox structure into Bunker 599––that is, an intentional monument commemorating and symbolizing the history of the New Dutch Waterline––the aged and decaying pillbox was a ruin, an unintentional monument with historical and age-value capable of evoking an emotional response. This deliberate intervention runs counter to another important aspect of Riegl’s essay. “The Modern Cult of Monuments” set forth proposals for the preservation of monuments that privilege the natural and steady progression of age-value over any attempts to restore decaying monuments to their original appearance. Riegl valued the symbolic reflection of life-cycles within the monument, recognizing that the Kunstwollen of each generation is different, with artistic values giving way to historical and agevalues.29 He embraced temporal depth, but, by the same logic, he opposed human intervention in the aging process, whether for restoration or destruction: [P]reservation should not aim at stasis but ought to permit the monuments to submit to incessant transformation and steady decay, outside of sudden and violent destruction. Only one thing must be avoided: arbitrary interference by man in the way the monument has developed. There must be no additions or subtractions, no substitutions for what nature has undone, no removal of anything that nature has added to the original discrete form.30 29 Although the development of historical and age-values coincide and are often inseparable, Riegl also places them in opposition. Historical values are better served by the conservation of the monument in its present state, while agevalue moves inexorably toward the eventual ruin of the monument. Riegl considers the merits of each but privileges natural (not deliberately destructive) age-value. Riegl assesses each value as having a different relationship to temporality as well: historical value is concerned with singling out moments from a historical continuum, while agevalue embraces the historical continuum itself. In the case of Bunker 599, however, historical and age-values coincide in the geographic location and obsolescence of the pillbox as a military structure. They may thus be conflated for my considerations here, in which I am concentrating on the deliberate intervention and transformation of the pillbox into an intentional monument corresponding to contemporary artistic values. See Riegl on the tension between historical and age-values (34) and their respective temporalities (38). 30 Ibid., 32. 14 The construction of Bunker 599––which is simultaneously the partial destruction of the pillbox––clearly violates Riegl’s principle against intervention. However, it is precisely through interfering with the pillbox’s “original discrete form” that Bunker 599 adheres to our postmodern Kunstwollen. It is a strategy to appropriate and assimilate historical and age-values into a newly aesthetic object corresponding to contemporary artistic values. This intervention takes the form of simply but violently slicing into the structure to reveal its interior, opening it to the surrounding landscape and the view of visitors. The contrast of newly cut and polished concrete with the rough and aging exterior walls succinctly embodies the juxtaposition of contemporary artistic values––including those consonant with minimalism, International Style architecture, and counter-monuments––with the historical and age-values of the original structure. Bunker 599 was thus transformed into a public artwork and monument through interfering with the pillbox’s age-value, and in so doing, the structure gained aesthetic value corresponding to our contemporary Kunstwollen. There is no guarantee that Bunker 599 will continue to hold artistic value for future generations. It will likely continue to hold historical and age-values, both appropriated from the pillbox itself and in its altered form as an intentional monument, creating a temporal depth referencing the moments of the pillbox’s construction, Bunker 599’s construction, and the viewer’s present. Bunker 599’s dual status as both a historical object in its own right and a deliberately constructed monument means its commemorative value and, hence, its meaning, may slip between its makers’ intentions and its viewers’ perceptions and associations. An intentional monument’s meaning in the present is anchored by the historical moment it references, but, as Riegl points out in his discussion of historical value, this meaning is dependent upon individual 15 viewers’ knowledge of the events the monument intends to reference. If historical context is lacking, a monument may possess age-value and artistic value––depending on the current Kunstwollen––but it will not have a clear historical value for the viewer. 31 The loss of historical value shifts the referent from an objective moment embodied by the monument to a subjective moment situated within the viewer. Even so, the monument remains diachronic in that it still references the past from the standpoint of the present. The temporal depth of diachronic viewership not only creates a comparative relation between the present and past through juxtaposing different Kunstwollen, but it also shifts temporal relations from accruing solely within an object to residing within its beholder. The monument mediates history for the viewer so that the past continues to live and resonate within the present. This is the intention of most monuments, but in the temporal referent’s shift from object to viewer, the mediation becomes subjective rather than objective, abstract rather than concrete: “Objectivity and subjectivity, artist and viewer [coexist] in the work.”32 –– Memory and history, like memorials and monuments, are inseparably linked but are not synonymous: “Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.”33 French historian Pierre Nora bases this description of memory and history in their relationship to temporality. He grounds memory “in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects,” while “history binds itself strictly to 31 Ibid., 23. 32 Gubser, 158. 33 Pierre Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 8. 16 temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things.”34 Memory is specific, emotional, magical, embodied, and unintentional. History is universal, analytical, distant, selfconscious, and intentional.35 These characterizations resonate with Riegl’s diachronic formulation of intentional and unintentional monuments. Whereas the historical value of intentional monuments memorializes a historical moment within the present, the age-value of unintentional monuments references the past––or, more accurately, the passage of time––from the standpoint of the present and elicits an emotional response in the viewer, like a memento mori. Similar to the vague boundary separating intentional and unintentional monuments, Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire––sites of memory––accounts for the imbrication and coexistence of history and memory, being broadly defined to include “anything administering the presence of the past within the present.”36 Evident in his choice of phrase––lieux de mémoire rather than lieux d’histoire––at stake for Nora is understanding a historical break with the past in the postmodern era necessitating the crystallization of memory in objects and sites, rather than memory continuing to be carried and transmitted generationally. He poses this as “the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.”37 While a full exposition of Nora’s lieux is beyond the scope of this 34 Ibid., 9. 35 Ibid., 8–9, 13. The archive is also an important feature of Nora’s characterization of modern memory but is beyond the scope of this essay: “Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image . . . The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs” (13). 36 Ibid., 20. 37 Ibid., 7. 17 essay, the category of lieux de mémoire forms a useful response to the question of the loss of collective memory in the postmodern era and our concomitant need to “anchor, condense, and express” memory through attaching it to such external and concrete objects and sites as monuments.38 The proliferation of Holocaust counter-monuments is a case in point, as these memorials are continually constructed to alleviate guilt and to counter forgetting, as one memorial could never adequately represent this historical trauma. 39 Lieux exist in between history and memory; they are “no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.”40 Nora’s analogy of lieux de mémoire as shells recalls photographic indexicality. In discussing Hiroshi Sugimoto’s History of History exhibition (Japan Society, 2005–2006),41 Walter Benn Michaels notes that Sugimoto included artifacts and fossils alongside his photographs: On the one hand, it signifies the impossibility (and the undesirability) of simply denying the indexicality of the photograph. On the other hand, insisting on the photographic fossil as an intentional object (“By photographing these fossils . . . I was making another set of fossils”), it marks the transformation of the natural object into the intentional one, of the trace into the representation, not exactly a representation of the referent but rather of the making of the photograph.42 In Sugimoto’s work, the fossil starts as an unintentional object with age-value, like Riegl’s unintentional monuments, while the act of photographing the fossil transforms it into an intentional object possessing artistic value, like Riegl’s intentional monuments. What Riegl’s typology of monuments and Nora’s lieux de mémoire hold in common with photography, then, is 38 Ibid., 24. 39 Huyssen, 258. 40 Nora, 12. 41 Walter Benn Michaels, “Photography and Fossils,” in Photography Theory (The Art Seminar), ed. James Elkins (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 431. 42 Ibid., 447. 18 diachronic viewership: a temporal relationship mediated by ordinary objects or sites functioning as traces of the past, in which a historical referent is viewed from the standpoint of the present. Using Sugimoto’s and Nora’s analogy of the fossil’s indexicality, monuments, lieux de mémoire, and photographs crystallize memory and bear witness to the passage of time, operating as indexical traces representing “any visible signs of what has been.”43 –– Riegl’s working definition of what is historical is similar to both Charles Sanders Peirce’s and Roland Barthes’s notions of indexicality in that both depend on contiguity and correspondence. To quote Riegl: “Everything that has been and is no longer we call historical, in accordance with the modern notion that what has been can never be again, and that everything that has been constitutes an irreplaceable and irremovable link in a chain of development.”44 An object is thus historical when it exists in a traceable “chain of development,” that is, when an object is contiguous with a past referent. Riegl’s language––“[e]verything that has been and is no longer”––foreshadows both Nora’s “visible signs of what has been” and Roland Barthes’s famous ontological description of photography as “That-has-been,” stressing the contiguity of a photograph with a real moment in the past.45 Placing Riegl’s notion of what is historical in conversation with Peirce’s and Barthes’s notions of indexicality creates a means to think about the way in which monuments and photography mediate history and memory. 43 Nora, 13. 44 Riegl, 21. 45 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 77. On the temporal relationship of monuments and photography: “Earlier societies managed so that memory, the substitute for life, was eternal and that at least the thing which spoke Death should itself be immortal: this was the Monument. But by making the (mortal) Photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of ‘what has been,’ modern society has renounced the Monument. A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography” (93). 19 For Charles Sanders Peirce, an index is a sign physically connected to its referent, like a footprint, even when this connection is mediated by a material like photography.46 However, Peirce’s index not only points to its referent but also to its beholder: [An index is] a sign, or representation, which refers to its object not so much because of any similarity or analogy with it, nor because it is associated with general characters which that object happens to possess, as because it is in dynamical (including spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with the senses or memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign, on the other hand.47 The photographic index references the past moment when the photograph was taken, but it is also contingent upon the psychological associations of the viewer––as Barthes wrote, “I am the reference of every photograph.”48 In other words, the meaning of a photograph is anchored to the time and place it depicts, but its meaning still shifts according to the varying knowledge and associations of its viewer. In this way “the most significant indexical power of the photograph may . . . lie not in the relation between the photograph and its subject but in the relation between the photograph and its beholder.”49 Shifting the indexical power of a photograph away from relying solely on the “phenomenological guarantee” of a prior reality contiguous with its representation creates room to account for the complexity of relations among present objects, referenced history, and the viewer’s subjective perceptions.50 46 Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs” (c. 1897-1910), in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 106. 47 Ibid., 107. 48 Barthes, 84. 49 Margaret Olin, “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification,” Representations 80 (Autumn 2002): 114-115. 50 Sabine T. Kriebel, “Theories of Photography: A Short History,” in Photography Theory (The Art Seminar), ed. James Elkins (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 30. 20 Photographic indexicality thus mediates temporal relationships between the past and present and between an image and its viewer. Recalling Nora’s lieux de mémoire, indexicality allows “[o]bjectivity and subjectivity, artist and viewer [to coexist] in the work.”51 Here we also return to Riegl’s typology of intentional monuments, embodying the maker’s intention to reference a historical moment, on the one hand, and unintentional monuments, eliciting subjective and emotional responses from the viewer in the present, on the other. As with photographic indexicality, the characteristics and values of monuments mingle within the same object, image, or site, with past moments and intentions perceived through the lens of the present. In the same way that a monument’s meaning can shift with the loss of historical context and changing artistic values––an era’s Kunstwollen––a photograph’s meaning can also become unmoored from its historical referent. In both cases, meaning is dependent upon viewers’ knowledge and associations. Monuments and photographs are always diachronic representations, even when their referents have been abstracted in the loss of historical context and the subjectivity of perception. –– Bunker 599 occupies a place between intentional and unintentional monuments in exemplifying aspects of historical value, age-value, and artistic value. Constructing an intentional monument from a previously unintentional one is an effort to rescue historical knowledge from obscurity and to repurpose an obsolete military landscape for present use through a strategy of intervention rather than preservation. In his vision for Bunker 599, architect 51 Gubser, 158. 21 Ronald Rietveld describes his deliberate choice to appropriate the most familiar and visible indicator of historical value in the New Dutch Waterline: For the general public, the NDW is an abstract concept. Most people know the fortresses and the concrete works act as indicators of a military past. The exact story and the sense of the ingenious military system is unknown to the layman. The beauty of the more than 700 concrete works is the fact that they are visible from many locations in the contemporary landscape and that they are referring to a military defensive system. Within the “invisible” landscape of the NDW it is precisely the many points in the main resistance strip which depict the military system for the layman. The mysterious qualities of these indestructible bunkers in the rapidly changing landscape is a very important quality. The NDW is still an open and fairly intact landscape and some of the many exciting military objects should adopt a contemporary function. Only then is the future value of the Waterline guaranteed. The cultural heritage is valuable and should continue to be an important part of history but it is no more or less than a starting point for a new future. This calls for intelligent design in strategically chosen locations in the NDW. Bunker 599 is one example.52 In Rietveld’s description, only through intervening in the aging landscape to introduce contemporary artistic value is historical value safeguarded for the future. Historical structures like the pillboxes have the potential to memorialize history, but this function is only valuable if these fragments from the past continue to be functional and resonate in the present and, thus, remain meaningful in looking toward the future. The conceptual intentions behind Bunker 599 center on visibility: it is through cutting opening the pillbox to expose its interior that the original structure, the former military landscape in which it is situated, and the history that both represent are made publicly accessible and visible––hence, knowable. It is an eminently photographable tourist site; the vertical cut and straight boardwalk leading through Bunker 599 form clear vantage points with dramatic perspectives awaiting the tourist’s and architectural photographer’s cameras alike. Photographing 52 Rietveld, 30. 22 Bunker 599 functions as a means to photograph the past in the present, to simultaneously document a personal visit to the site and memorialize its national history and significance. Rietveld Landscape’s choice to appropriate a historical structure and transform it into an intentional monument does more than reference and redeem history symbolically. It reveals faith in the structure’s indexicality. Bunker 599 is intended to place visitors in a direct and tangible relationship to the past through the appropriation of the original structure’s historical and agevalues in a new aesthetic form embodying postmodern artistic values. The structure’s indexicality does not seem to be undermined but reinforced by the repetition of its form. It is like the other seven hundred pillboxes on the New Dutch Waterline, yet this one is made special. It is Bunker 599, chosen to represent all the others like it, to reveal its humble utility yet to be exemplary, to cut through the opacity of history and let it mix transparently with the present. In this diachronic site, visitors may touch and photograph a moment out of time. 23 Bunker 599, Rietveld Landscape/Atelier de Lyon, New Dutch Waterline, Culemborg, The Netherlands, 2010 24 Bunker 599, Rietveld Landscape/ Atelier de Lyon, New Dutch Waterline, Culemborg, The Netherlands, 2010 25 Bunker 599, Rietveld Landscape/Atelier de Lyon, New Dutch Waterline, Culemborg, The Netherlands, 2010 26 Gordon Matta‐Clark, Splitting, 1973 27 Rachel Whiteread, Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, Vienna, Austria, 2000 28 Bibliography Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Corradi, Mara. “Bunker 599: from architecture to monument.” Floornature. October 3, 2011. http://www.floornature.com/projects-learning/project-bunker-599-from-architecture-tomonument-6586/. Gubser, Michael. Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. 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Michaels, Walter Benn. “Photographs and Fossils.” In Photography Theory (The Art Seminar), 431–450. Edited by James Elkins. New York and London: Routledge, 2007. Nelson, Robert S., and Margaret Olin (eds.), Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Nora, Pierre. “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Translated by Marc Roudebush. Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24. Olin, Margaret. “The Historian’s Performance.” In Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, 171–187. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. 29 –––. “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification.” Representations 80 (Autumn 2002): 114-115. Peirce, Charles Sanders. “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs” (c. 1897-1910). In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, 98–119. Edited by Justus Buchler. New York: Dover, 1955. RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances]. “Bunker 599.” http://www.raaaf.nl/en/ projects/7_bunker_599. Riegl, Alois. “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin.” Trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo. Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 21-51. Rietveld, Ronald. “Bunker 599: The Netherlands: military landscape made publically accessible.” Building with Landscape, Topos 74 (2011): 29–31. Young, James E. “Memory, Countermemory, and the End of the Monument: Horst Hoheisel, Micha Ullman, Rachel Whiteread, and Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock.” In At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, 90-119. Yale Univ. Press, 2000. –––. “The Countermonument: Memory against Itself in Germany.” In The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, 27–48. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993.