For class last week, we went out to explore the landscape of memory surrounding the Independence Seaport Museum and the general Penn’s Landing area. What we found were a lot of lifeless monuments.
I think one of the biggest themes with a lot of the monuments we saw was death. To be fair, as a historian focused on the 18th century, all the people I study are long dead. However, that fact is never in the forefront of my writing about them or a point I constantly bring up, whereas these monuments—the war monuments in particular—seemed very preoccupied with death. Museums often try to make their subjects alive and relatable to their audiences, and fill their exhibit space with lifelike replicas, period music, videos, and/or many other mediums conveying life and animation. These monuments, on the other hand, often conveyed stillness and quiet. The Korean War memorial, for example, was made of very still granite, in rectangular, not-at-all flowing shapes, with solemn black text. It felt very similar to a modern cemetery, almost as if they hired a headstone designer to create the monument. Like a cemetery, the names of the dead are inscribed in the stone. I also noticed, while walking around, that there were no monuments to older wars. There was no monument to the American Revolution, the 1812 War, the Mexican-American War, WWI—only monuments to fairly recent wars which still have survivors and surviving relatives of the dead. Philadelphia has other monuments, but this area seems devoted to more recent events only. These monuments are also completely out of the way, in a fairly desolate area for foot and vehicle traffic. I initially thought this might just be poor city planning or coincidence related to the construction of I-95, but now I think it might have been intentional to promote the feeling of stillness and somberness reminiscent of a cemetery. The monument to Revolutionary War soldiers in Washington Square is surrounded by people using the park, but no one alive uses the monument as a cemetery. Why would they? No one alive knew any of those soldiers. The Korean War monument, however, can be used as a cemetery—veterans who lost a friend in combat and relatives who lost family members can go there to remember their lost ones and try to move on. The monument also attempts to provide meaning for their deaths, with various phrases about the price of freedom and even a short history of the Korean War. We visited just after Veteran’s Day, so there was evidence of recent activity at the monuments in the form of flags and wreaths often left by veterans groups, suggesting these places are also used as gathering areas for communal remembrance of the dead. Anyway, to bring some of these rambling thoughts together, it seems to me that many monuments are constructed to help survivors and relatives deal with early deaths, which often result from tragedies such as wars, terrorism (for example, the flight 93 and various 9/11 memorials), shootings, etc. In the case of the Korean War memorial, and probably many other war memorials, the monument tries to explain the deaths and give them meaning. It is designed similarly to a cemetery and serves similar purposes, sometimes even as a stand in.
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One of our readings for this week was “The Architecture of Racial Segregation: The Challenges of Preserving the Problematical Past” by Robert Weyeneth. In it, Weyeneth examines various methods used by architects, designers, planners, businessmen and others to segregate and minimize contact between black and white Americans during the Jim Crow era. He categorizes each method and describes them in detail, drawing on extant buildings, their remains, oral histories, building plans, and other sources for his research. He also looks at how people negotiated and also subverted this landscape, and how they sometimes defied the scripts the architecture had written for them. He finishes by pondering if and how the few remaining sites of this architecture should be preserved. While I did not write about it in my last blog post, last week’s readings also discussed landscapes, both natural and cultural, and how they shaped interactions, as well as how different people interacted with them differently. One in particular focused on how slaves and masters interacted with plantation landscapes. While my wall gun has nothing to do with American landscapes or American slavery, it did fit into a very particular landscape of war. Its primary purpose was to rest on the walls of a fortification and provide superior, versatile long-range firepower to its user, filling the gap between infantry muskets and small cannon. That use was specifically mediated by the architecture of fortification, and better understanding how the Mughal Empire constructed forts is crucial to better understanding the gun. Comparing the gun to European wall guns already shows significant cultural differences, as does comparing the Red Fort or Agra Fort to Fort Ticonderoga or any other star fort. Like all other architecture, forts were designed to control people’s actions and movements—although in their case, it was to move them into channel them into kill zones so a small force could stand up to a much larger force. Star forts attempt to apply the science of geometry to do this most effectively, while the Red Fort, like this wall gun, sacrifices geometrical perfection for aesthetics and display, and, militarily speaking, simplicity in design and construction. Whether that is an intentional choice by Mughal leadership or simply the result of a different military tradition I don’t yet know. However, I will have to understand Mughal fortification—from permanent to temporary—in order to really understand the wall gun. Another reading was “Examining the Social Responsibility of Museums in a Changing World” by Ken Yellis. He returns to a theme he has covered before—controversy in museums. In this iteration he continues to explore how the unique medium of museum exhibits is still not fully understood by museum professionals, how museums are still extremely cautious about creating potentially controversial exhibits, and how museums should embrace controversy instead of running from fights with the public. He is concerned with revisiting the themes of his previous article, the Fred Wilson “Mining the Museum” exhibit and cliff swallows “Mixed Blessings” exhibit, but he also discusses a recent exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery called “Hide/Seek” which explores portrayal of gender in portraiture. While the gallery was prepared to create controversy about gender and defend its exhibit from that, it was not prepared to engage in a fight over use of religious symbols in art. When it got one, it then backed down in order to avoid the distraction from its main message. Making this more relevant to my object was the editor’s note at the beginning, which mentioned a recent protest of a UAV (aka drone) exhibit at the Air and Space Museum. Like UAVs, my wall gun is a weapon which was particularly effective at killing people. Unlike UAVs, it hasn’t been used in war for a very long time, and even when it was, it was used by an empire far from here that most Americans don’t know or care about. That makes it less controversial and easier to display, but also very hard to make relevant and useful to an American audience. Maybe in India it could be used to create the kind of risky, potentially controversial exhibit Yellis yearns for. But in America I’ll have to rely on guns used by Americans—and I think I have several ways to use them that might intrigue Yellis. See my thesis when it’s finished. |
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