Public Art Conference Archive—2004
Key Panel Presentation: The Future of Our National Mall
presented by Chrisopher Knight, Art Critic, Los Angeles Times
July 17, 2004
Good morning.
I wish I could say that I'm happy to be here today, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that I'm not. I would be happy to be here if I believed that the future of our National Mall was rosy, but I don't. I would be happy to be here if I thought there was a sure-fire method for protecting it from degradation, but I doubt that such a safeguard exists. I guess you could say that when it comes to the Mall's future I am a Cassandra. I think the danger is real, and there is evidence that it is getting worse.
Why does this matter? Partly it matters because I believe that the National Mall is the most powerful example of 20th century landscape design in the United States. It is easily the greatest work of public art that our culture has produced. The Mall is not a landscape that has works of public art displayed on and around it. Rather, the Mall itself is a work of public art. It does not merely represent the ideals of our society-it actually embodies them in time and space. And since those ideals speak to the core identity of the United States as a democratic republic, the stakes for the Mall's future are very high indeed.
So far today we have heard that the National Mall is a "substantially completed work of civic art." I agree. I also think that this designation has been rendered absurd and meaningless. The National Mall was also a "substantially completed work of civic art" in the 1990s. But that did not stop the shoddy backroom deals and private power plays that turned over seven and a half acres on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial to the construction of a third-rate design for a much-needed, and long overdue World War II Memorial, which was dedicated last spring. Whatever problems there might be among the agencies charged with oversight of this incomparable work of art, there is also an inherent flaw in the system.
Before I tell you what I think that flaw is, let me make a few comments about the meaning of this work of public art. We have had helpful presentations on the history of the design, so I won't go over most of that terrain again. Suffice it to say that in 1791 Pierre L'Enfant provided a template based on principles of Enlightenment thought. And a century later, by 1902, the artists of the McMillan plan had extended that Enlightenment scheme into something distinctly modern.
That brilliant team of artists included architects Charles F. McKim and Daniel H. Burnham, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens. Their inventive ground plan envisioned the Mall as a continuous green park framed by rows of elms. Shaped roughly like a kite, its long axis is anchored at the eastern end by the Capitol, seat of the people's representative government and at the western end by the Lincoln Memorial, a shrine to the unbreakable union of the states. A shorter axis goes from North to South-from the White House, home of the nation's civilian leader, to the Jefferson Memorial, which personifies the founding document, the Declaration of Independence. Next to the point where the long and short axes cross, the great obelisk of the Washington Monument anchors the design. A memorial to a man who refused all offers to become a king, it's the spindle around which the symbolic landscape turns.
Taken together, these individual components form a clear network of structures that outline the late-18th century principles on which our social contract as a nation was written. The Mall is a physical emblem of a modern idea of republican democracy, constructed from buildings, memorials and sculptures.
And-not least of all-it is an idea constructed from open landscape. Open, empty space is a central symbolic feature of L'Enfant's famous plan for the Mall, and open, empty space is a central feature of the McMillan Plan that followed it. Think of the unencumbered park as the glue that holds together the Mall's five distinct structures. The very word "mall" derives from pall-mall, an alley for a 17th-century game in which a small wooden ball was driven with a mallet. One of those alleys became the Mall in London, a public promenade that leads to Buckingham Palace. There, the citizenry is invited to gather.
Make no mistake: The emptiness of the Mall is a radical artistic invention-as radical for 1902 when its design was complete as any Earthwork or installation art by any American artist of the 1960s and after. Space has profound meaning on the Mall, and its message goes to the core of American identity.
Now, I know it can be tough to wrap your head around the idea that empty space has deep meaning. But here it does. Space is pivotal to the national psyche-for our collective sense of who we are. From the colonists' faith in the clean slate offered by a New World through the enduring myth of the Great Plains as America's "heartland," emptiness resonates throughout our cultural fabric.
The meaning of empty space for the American psyche was first described by the famous "Turner thesis." The 19th century writer Frederick Jackson Turner most cogently articulated this idea in a paper titled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," which he first delivered to a gathering of historians in 1893 at Chicago' Columbian Exposition, which marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus' voyage. There's a lot to argue with in Turner's writing, but one thing seems incontrovertible. The promise of space is what made American freedom and equality possible.
Why? Well, three years before Turner's lecture, the U.S. Census Bureau had announced the disappearance of a contiguous frontier line. Turner took this so-called "closing of the frontier" as an opportunity to reflect upon the influence it had exercised. He wrote that the Western United States had served as the country's defining fact and safety valve. Most Americans lived in the East, but it was the West that gave their lives meaning. Picking up and moving west had always been an option for citizens restless for adventure, or merely anxious about their circumscribed or unsatisfactory situation in life. In other words, the promise of space liberated us from the inescapable conflicts of class and nation that had infected the Old World. Jackson saw the phenomenon clearly because he was writing just as America's western expansion was more or less complete. The safety valve was being shut off. And I emphasize that he was codifying and promoting these ideas about the fundamental meanings of open space just as the civic landscape of the National Mall was about to take its modern 20th century shape.
In 1901 and 1902 the meaning of open space for the conventional artists of the McMillan Plan was tinged with pathos. They designed their landscape when continental expansion had bumped up against the Pacific Ocean and so-called Manifest Destiny was running out. But these remarkable artists recognized the seeds of something marvelous in L'Enfant's original 1791 scheme, which outlined a mall that originally began at the Capitol but ended at the Washington Monument. So in their new design these artists pushed west and south, into open marshland where memorials to Lincoln and Jefferson now stand.
The five major buildings and memorials that now occupy the compass points of the National Mall vary widely in aesthetic caliber. But the open space between them is an unalloyed marvel-a vital, functioning, poetic public symbol of the authenticity of our open society. The openness is given shape by the contrasting urban tangle of the federal city that surrounds it. Space on the National Mall encapsulates America's soul.
Today that openness is under siege. Where some see a poetic evocation of America's soul, others see a real estate opportunity ripe for development. Scores of proposals are out there for memorials, visitors' centers, museums and security systems and other projects. Some are worthy, some not. Soon, you can expect the chorus to swell for a memorial to the recently deceased former president, Ronald Reagan.
There is no small irony in this. In 1986, it was President Reagan who signed into law the single most important piece of federal legislation meant to prevent the erosion of the National Mall. Called the Commemorative Works Act, it includes numerous provisions to secure this extraordinary work of public art. You can refer to the Commemorative Works Act to say that-hey, wait a minute, there cannot be a rush to build a Reagan memorial on the Mall. The legislation says no such memorial can be authorized until 25 years after the death of an individual. So a Reagan memorial could not possibly be considered until at least the year 2029.
If you believe this, I've got some former swampland down by the Rainbow Pool that I'd like to show you. The Rainbow Pool, which for 70 or 80 years was part of the Lincoln Memorial's grounds, is today the site of the World War II Memorial-even though the Commemorative Works Act expressly forbids it. The law says that "a commemorative work shall be so located as to prevent interference with, or encroachment upon, any existing commemorative work." But the law was just a minor impediment in getting the World War II Memorial built on the Lincoln Memorial's grounds.
It seems to me that the Commemorative Works Act contains an inherent flaw. The Act requires congressional authorization for new monuments within carefully proscribed limits meant to protect the Mall's precious and meaningful open space. But the law was written in the 1980s. That means it also allows private donors to pay for the design, development, construction and long-term maintenance of those schemes. An unintended consequence of this so-called public-private partnership is that Congress will easily approve any proposal that has a vocal or influential constituency. In short, the provision turns the National Mall into a playground for special interest groups. That's no way to run a public art program. When a plan as enormously appealing as a World War II memorial to American triumph over global Fascism comes along, no safeguard is strong enough to deter the power of popular sentiment. Congress, which didn't have to pay the bills, and thus was not accountable, was more than happy to waive the restrictions imposed by the Commemorative Works Act. It had nothing to lose, nothing to debate, and we were treated to a fiesta of chest thumping and grandstanding as a seven-acre hole was carved into the heart of the Mall.
The National World War II Memorial is a case study in good intentions gone hopelessly awry. Bad design and bad oversight together have done irreparable harm to the Mall. Almost every institution that could have protected the nation's most important work of public art from disastrous intrusion failed: the National Capital Planning Commission, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the National Park Service, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and more. Some were even active participants in making the fiasco happen. And I hasten to add here that I include my own institution in responsibility for this mess—the national press almost completely defaulted on its watchdog role during this lengthy and awful episode.
A government of representative democracy succeeds only on a careful system of checks and balances. At present the powerful and unprecedented symbolic landscape of the National Mall stands nearly defenseless, susceptible to the desires of influential special interests. Free and open space might have secular spiritual meaning that goes to the core of the American idea; but that meaning cannot survive once irreplaceable space gets filled in with granite, marble and steel, however well intentioned.
—Chrisopher Knight, Art Critic, Los Angeles Times
July 17, 2004
