Monumental Controversy

Who has the moral authority to dictate to an artist what should be the form and content of a monument dedicated to a national hero, constructed with public funds? The design of a monument to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, which should be built in the courtyard of the Mall in Washington D.C., has generated an intense debate over who should have the final say in deciding how to represent the career of a military hero who became president of the United States.

As often happens with publicly financed projects, politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, interest groups, columnists, historians, artists, art critics and family members of the honoree have all intervened in the construction of the Eisenhower monument. And the predictable result has been that a project that began nearly six years ago today continues unfinished; it has been politicized and has become increasingly controversial.

And this is despite the fact that two years ago, a commission appointed by Congress and consisting initially of four senators, four members of the House of Representatives, four presidential representatives and an Eisenhower family member, approved an innovative design presented by three famous figures of contemporary art in America: architect Frank Gehry, theater designer Robert Wilson and sculptor Charles Ray.

To realize the project, Gehry was inspired by a speech that Eisenhower delivered in the town where he grew up, Abilene, Kansas, on his return from World War II: “Because no man is really a man who has lost out of himself all of the boy, I want to speak first of the dreams of a barefoot boy,” he said, adding, “I am not the hero, I am the symbol of the heroic men you people and all the United States have sent to war.”

Gehry takes up the theme of the barefoot child to recreate the life and environment in which Eisenhower grew up. To represent the silos where grain was stored, Gehry constructs a dozen columns that serve to sustain a series of translucent “tapestries” with landscapes that depict life in Kansas at different times of the year.

The project also includes the creation of a series of reliefs based on famous photographs of Eisenhower as general and president, as well as a statue of a barefoot boy watching the reliefs. The final element of the design is a small wooded park that blends into the landscape of the courtyard of the famous Mall in the federal capital.

The Eisenhower family, however, did not hide their dissatisfaction with the design of the monument. One of the grandchildren of the president even resigned from the committee that initially approved the project. The main objection, says one of the granddaughters, is that they do not see in this design the mark of his legacy.

What also bothers them is that the project mainly remembers a man “who believed in traditional values.” Another critic of the project is the influential Washington Post columnist, George Will, who thinks the design minimized the greatness of a president who deserves a better celebration than the one Gehry is willing to give. In a recent article, Will lists the accomplishments of the general and, especially, those of the president.

In his statement of facts, however, he does not include the most controversial actions of Eisenhower’s presidency, such as the coups d’état that Eisenhower authorized to install the Shah in Iran in 1953 and to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala the following year.

Less serious but more irritating has been the intervention of an extreme right wing group who call themselves the National Civic Art Society and who call for the design to be disqualified. They defame the sculptor Charles Ray, who was hired to make the statue of the barefoot child that Ray has not even started to design, and oppose the design of Gehry and Wilson because, according to the them, the monument to Eisenhower should be constructed in adherence to the neoclassical style. Why? Simply because in its infinite ignorance, they believe that this is how all the monuments should be.

I can imagine what this retrograde group thinks of the one side of the Bradenburg Gate in Berlin, where American architect Peter Eisenmann built the Holocaust Monument consisting of 2,711 gray concrete blocks of different sizes, without names or dates, and with its sober majesty moves the soul of those who have been fortunate enough to visit.

The topic of the discussion, however, should not be if we should take seriously the hallucinations of a group of fanatics or if the family likes the monument or if the monument should follow tradition of becoming an altar dedicated to highlighting the virtues of the honoree.

The main subject is the old dispute over who has authority to dictate to an artist in what form and with what content the monument should be built.

I think that even if it is sound to have a debate over how to use money from contributors, since there is no universal manual over how to build a monument, at the end of the day, it is the artists who should decide how to make it. Especially when those who lead this project are a trio as extraordinary as Gehry, Wilson and Ray.