The monumentality of Washington, D.C. dominates the city but never quite convinces. The neo-classical wedding cake of the Capitol rises above the low skyline of the city and is flanked by congressional office buildings that are essentially neo-neo-classical knock offs: twentieth century allusions, built in the 1920s and 30s, to the values of the past.
Moving westward, the National Mall stretches toward the Potomac with the familiar obelisk of the Washington Monument, which is quirky and rather wonderful, and then to the reassertion of white-marble grandiosity with the Lincoln Memorial. Off to the south, across the Tidal Basin, is the rather more manageable Jefferson Memorial, an open-sided dome with a large bronze statue of the third president. Back on the main axis, interrupting the sweep from Washington to Lincoln, is the recent World War II Monument , placed in a low-lying area at the top of the Reflecting Pool.
The product of many years of committee work and planning, the Monument is simply awful: swelling to meet the demands that we honour “the greatest generation”, it is a white plaza with a hodgepodge of stylistic elements accompanied by execrable prose; during the War, “Women stepped up. . .” reads one graven wall panel. There is a sense of trying too hard; perhaps because the design process didn’t allow for a single, clarifying vision.
Other recently constructed monuments similarly suffer from visual and symbolic excess. Despite Franklin Roosevelt’s desire for only a simple marble bench as his memorial (you can find it in a copse of trees on Pennsylvania Avenue), better minds than he decided to build a sprawling, biographically-themed testament to FDR. A similar sprawl is devoted to Martin Luther King, complete with an extremely large bust portrait which makes him look somewhat like Chairman Mao; it came complete with inaccurate quotations that have now had to be excised and reinscribed. These recent additions raise concerns that there is simply too many badly planned and poorly executed memorials in and around the Mall. A planned monument to General and President Eisenhower is under fire for both its design elements and its lack of fidelity to the virtues of ‘Ike’. Politics, special interests, bureaucratic inertia, all seemed to conspire to undercut what is intended, burying civic values and history itself beneath the weight of their installations.
This month, though, something new appeared on the National Mall: in a six acre plot between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials, the National Portrait Gallery working with Cuban-American sculptor, Jorge Rodriquez-Gerade, constructed a giant “FaceScape” out of different types and colours of earth and sand. Rodriguez-Gerade created a composite portrait of a young man out of a series of snapshots he took of Washingtonians and then transposed the image on the earth by using a sophisticated satellite geopositioning system.
The artist has created these kinds of landscape portraits in European and South American cities – he did one of newly-elected President Obama in Barcelona as well as one of a young girl near the Titanic Memorial in Belfast – but this was his first such project in America. Allying modern technology with ancient art, the modeling of the sand and dirt references Asian and American Indian sand paintings but on a much larger scale. The effect at ground level is of a Zen garden but at altitude, as in these pictures from the Washington Monument, the mysterious and unreadable layers of sand resolve themselves into a portrait graven into the earth.
The effect is quite stunning visually both in its own right and because the appearance of the “face in the earth” is so surprisingly human amidst the monuments and cluster of roads that surround the site. Entitled “Out of Many, One” from the national credo, “E Pluribus Unum” the FaceScape reminds of us the citizenry, past and present, who are the real presence upholding the monumental structures of the Mall. The FaceScape is also counterpoint to the Capitol’s monuments in whose midst it is nestled because it is designed to be ephemeral: exposed to the elements, it will exist for October 2014, eroding, and will then be plowed under, converting the area back to lawn.
The transitory nature of the FaceScape references the work of other environmental sculptors, such as Robert Smithson, whose work was designed to entropy and disappear over time. Biographical and historical time is indicated by the FaceScape’s erosion and disappearance, a commentary on our vain attempt to stop time through over-building and monumentalism. For the National Portrait Gallery, which is no longer – if it ever was – simply a stuffy and dull installation of “Great White Men”, the project was a way of showing how portraiture is infinitely variable and creatively vital in our continual search for identity, both personal and national.
Aerial Photo Credits:
Department of the Interior Photo by Tami Heilemann
David C. Ward is a Senior Historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, where he has curated exhibitions on Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, among others. With graduate degrees from Warwick University and Yale, he is the author of Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (2004) and Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (2010). His poetry collection Call Waiting was published by Carcanet in August this year.
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