It scarcely demands note that there’s been a move away from what might be called a “legacy” style of representational public art in DC. Maya Lin’s 1982 Vietnam War memorial, which is now widely embraced despite traditionalist misgivings, is perhaps the most notable example. But a raft of other designs, from the classicizing abstraction of the WW2 Memorial, to Lei Yixin’s strangely pharaonic MLK stele, to various “gumball” Einsteins and Kennedys around the capital, also suggest an unease with how history is traditionally portrayed in the nation’s literally most official spaces.
Howard’s high-relief frieze, unfolding over fifty-eight dramatic feet of naturalistic figures, looks like it was parachuted into Pershing Park from a different era. Unapologetically rooted in ancient and Renaissance canons of figural art, it not only looks backward for inspiration, but presents a clear, linear story from one end to the other. Entitled A Soldier’s Journey, it depicts an archetypal American doughboy leaving his family, marching out, facing the ordeal of battle, and emerging on the other side simultaneously damaged and enduring. As he presents his upturned helmet to his daughter at the end, she regards it like an ancient Greek acolyte gazing into the bowl of prophecy to see—what? The horror she, like us, can only experience by reflection? Or the immediate future of still more sacrifice to come in the coming decades?
The work is not much different in form from any number of classical monuments, from armored Athenas contemplating fallen soldiers in Athenian tomb markers to Roman legions marching into battle on Trajan’s Column. Though it would not have been physically out of place on the Acropolis in Athens, its utter lack of triumphalism would arguably have placed it farther down its slopes, where Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides presented scenes very much like it in the Theater of Dionysus. But the point remains: the story and the treatment would not have been lost on an actual ancient Greek.
The most elementary modernism objects to the empty stylistic conventions of warmed-over classicism. Conventions almost demand to be broken, and there is impact in doing just that. But at this late date, is there any doubt that Howard’s approach is not reflexively “conventional” at all, but fully mindful, both of what he’s evoking and how he does it? Paradoxically, it is the fall of any kind of official style that brings renewed authenticity to the old forms, an almost insurgent power. Indeed, is it a bad thing to represent profound national sacrifice in terms that the viewer and the people honored in the memorial would both recognize, and share? It’s a question that arguably goes to the heart of what a war memorial is and what it should accomplish, ideally.
In museums and galleries, the stakes of breaking with artistic tradition rise only to a certain level. If Van Gogh opts to represent his local postman in a way that says more about Van Gogh’s state of mind than the postman’s, that’s not only not a problem, it’s positively interesting. When we speak of memorials, however, the question of subject never fully disappears, because it’s as much about them as about us. Or at least it should be, if we aspire to public art that is anything more than a kind of socialized solipsism.
The act of memorialization both honors the dead and reaffirms the conviction that what they fought for is worth defending. This double function—and I mean the word function both in the sense of “use” and of “event”—is something that connects us with every society with a degree of self-awareness. If we have any rituals left to honor our casualties of war, they are more associated with photo ops than commemoration. The days we set aside for it, Memorial Day and Veterans Day, have become more about shopping, barbecuing and sports. The act of reflection, which was so important to ancient societies, has been relegated to art. That puts a weight on those bronze and marble sculptures that not even their ancient counterparts had to sustain.
The action in Howard’s frieze is not only specific in detail, it is archetypal enough to connect it to others across the millennia. Pericles could have declaimed his Funeral speech in front of it. Lincoln could have read something like his remarks at Gettysburg there too, with no loss in power. In a time of profound disjunction, of division from other people of our own time, and of anxiety for the future, there’s something deeply reassuring about that potential. This is still us. We can still do these deeply human things. We are still here.
Nicholas Nicastro’s next book, Fulcrum: The Life and Science of Archimedes, is out this fall from Reaktion Press.
© 2024 Nicholas Nicastro
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