A bold proposal in Norway for a memorial to the seventy-seven people, most of them teen-agers, who were murdered by Anders Breivik on July 22, 2011, has come to naught. In 2014, the Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg won a government competition with a design that called for cutting a channel across the Sørbråten peninsula, near the island of Utøya, where Breivik fatally shot sixty-nine at a summer camp, and moving the excavated stone to the site in Oslo where, on the same day, a bomb that he had planted killed eight. The gap was to be faced with stone on either side. A tunnel would lead visitors to an aperture in one wall to see the victims’ names engraved on the other. “Memory Wound,” Dahlberg titled it.
Controversy beset the proposal, which struck some as, for one thing, an offense to blameless nature. What had the land done to deserve being fissured? Local residents protested that they were traumatized enough by the killer’s passage among them not to suffer a daily reminder of it, thronged by tourists. Some families of victims refused the use of their loved ones’ names, which are already enshrined on a modest monument—a suspended silver ring, in the woods—on Utøya. Last month, Norway officially cancelled the project.
“Memory Wound” seemed to me, in truth, a bad idea, more lacerating than consoling, though only by a degree when compared with more successful precedents. The oblique-angled, black-marble walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in Washington, and the deep, cascading pools on the site of the destroyed World Trade towers, in New York, also are excavations and also address the feelings of helplessness that attend irremediable loss. They, too, assume and may even amplify pain, but with instructive differences.
Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Memorial, which was completed in 1982, took on the steep task of uniting Americans after a war that tore the nation apart. The message is distilled, sheer grief, shareable by all who see ourselves reflected in the glossy walls amid the touchable names of the dead. The work moots political divisions regarding the war without presuming to resolve them.
The effectiveness of the Ground Zero pools, and of the park in which they are set, gains force from a peculiarly New York sublime: the spectacular, permanent sacrifice of some of the world’s most valuable real estate. The size counts. So does a feature of the pools that I didn’t register until an artist pointed it out to me: the outside corners of the fountains’ minimalist squares are rounded, making continuous lines of the beholders at the peripheries. Raising your eyes from the plunging water, you find yourself in a circle of individuals: one among many.
All public memorials are vulnerable to disrespect—by pigeons on statues, wherever there’s a statue, and by selfie-snapping yahoos, everywhere. But that’s a reality of living in a teeming world. Monuments aren’t churches. The most affecting ones enable, but don’t seek to impose, fitting emotional responses. Dahlberg’s proposal, by contrast, risked being coercive; its conceptual complexity had an effect of exalting the artist as a maestro of mourning. Its cancellation leaves an object lesson. By crossing lines of propriety, “Memory Wound” scouted where and what the lines may be.