Tag: memorial

Jenny Holzer, Black Garden, 1994 

“’I think that when people come into this garden, which is too dark and
too black and too regular, and then read the texts on the benches – it
will be impossible not to understand what it is about. That is what I
hope, in any case.’• Unequivocality of meaning is one of the thematic
concerns of the work of the American artist Jenny Holzer. Since the
early eighties she has been known for using electronic strip advertising
to place very personal, socio-politically committed and harshly lit
messages for debate in public city places. With this project realized in
the early nineties in Nordhorn, a district town in Lower Saxony, on the
German-Dutch border, she chose a garden as her medium for the first
time. Holzer felt that electronics were too insensitive for the project’s
location. For this reason she took the risk, with expert advice from the
American landscape artist Dee Johnson and the local municipal gardener,
of designing a municipal park by the war memorial “Am Langemarckplatz,”
built there in 1929.
As the “Nordhorn Monument,” this memorial was originally erected
for the “gloriously fallen heroes” in the wars of 1870/71 and 1914-18. At
the centre of the slightly raised, simply designed round arrangement
is a circular sandy limestone slab with the names of soldiers who were
killed. On the centre of this was a cylindrical plinth with the sculpture
of a naked, kneeling youth. “It is the fallen who support life,” the
inscription on the plinth still reads today. But the sculpture by
Hermann Scheuernstuhl, stylistically speaking a
work of Neue Sachlichkeit, is missing. The National
Socialists had it removed in 1933 because of its
nakedness and allegedly negroid features. They
made the square, which was renamed Langemarckplatz
in 1938, their preferred heroic memorial in the
town. The new name refers to the battle near
Langemarck in Flanders, where the German army
was reported to have suffered heavy losses in the
First World War. According to a report by the Supreme
Command of the German Army in November
1914, young war volunteers, prepared to fight
and lay down their lives, stormed and took the
enemy positions with the German national anthem
on their lips. This story, deliberately made into myth and used for propaganda
purposes under the Third Reich, in truth contradicted historical
facts and was later revealed by historians to have been deliberate
false reporting for the purpose of glorifying the war.
The town restored the memorial in 1959. The missing sculpture was
replaced by a supposedly neutral bowl of fire. 23 bronze plaques in
memory of the Nordhorn Second World War dead were added by the
long brick retaining wall above the lower section of the park; there
was also a plaque in memory of victims of political and racial persecution. But discussions about the place’s controversial history and the
name of the square did not start in Nordhorn until 1986, and led to
Jenny Holzer’s commission to redesign the memorial in 1989.
Directly adjacent to the old, raised round memorial
she created a second circular garden in the lower
part of the park, placed in the middle of the clearing
between old park trees. This new garden is considerably
larger than the memorial grounds and forms
a kind of echo of the existing arrangement. The layout
of the addition resembles a medieval monastery
garden, but it is also deliberately reminiscent of
a target. Concentric circular beds are separated
from each other by circular paths, and divided into
twelve parts by two paths running on a cross pattern
towards the central round bed. The bed edgings
in red Bentheim sandstone and the path surface
in red brick chippings underline the provocative
character of the garden, but they also correspond with the dark
red brick walls and steps in the old memorial. Five simple sandstone
benches, two in the old and three in the new area, are also shared
design features, reminiscent at first sight of the 1929 originals.
But appearances are deceptive. New inscriptions in German and
English provide drastic descriptions of the horrors of war and make it
essentially impossible to use the benches: “It is the war zoo. It is a
landmark. Pilots name it. Burned all over so only his teeth are good. He
sits fused to the tank. Metal holds the blast heat and sun. The ocean washes the ead. They are face up face down in foam. Bodies roll from swells to the open in the marsh.” 

In stark contrast with the shocking effect of these texts, the small Arkansas Black decorative apple tree with its black fruit in the middle of the new garden seems an almost grotesque cliche, cynical–or is it ironic? The Black Garden makes it clear how difficult it is to create an anti-monument that would not make anyone enthusiastic about war….This garden in the shade of the old park trees gets its name and its strangely melancholy atmosphere from the fact that the whole of the slightly sunken site is filled with plants with dark to black foliage and dark blossoms. Black Mondo grass, dark-leafed geranium and common bugle with dark purple leaves cover most of the beds. Copper berberis, copper beeches, and copper plums with their dark pink blossoms frame the site and create accents at certain points. One of the impressive climaxes in the flowering calendar is the blooming of hundreds of black tulips on the outer edge of the target, The artist planted white tulips only in a small bed in front of the memorial plaque for the victims of National Socialism. Theplanting is adapted and extended in consultation with Jenny Holzer yea  by year.”

—From In Gardens: Profiles of Contemporary European Landscape Architecture by Udo Weilacher