Irish Hunger Memorial - Coursework Example

Irish Hunger Memorial: New York James Theisen Legean Walker Introduction to Art, Music and Literature March 7, Although designed and planned prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, Brian Tolle’s Irish Hunger Memorial captures the sense of tragedy, despair and loss associated with both the recent New York Tragedy as well as the tragedy suffered by the Irish that fled to this city many decades ago. An examination of the details of the site, its use by visitors and its applicability to a variety of cultures reveals why a site such as this can become so powerful in bridging the distance between peoples. Recognized as public sculpture, monuments to past events serve an important function not only in the community sense of helping others to heal from tragedies, but also in connecting the world of the everyday to the world of art through art’s ability to effectively capture, reflect and legitimize feelings of rage, grief, sorrow and joy that cannot always be expressed otherwise in the everyday world yet have helped to shape and define a culture. “Sculptors have preferred inscrutability to compliance with the values of a world increasingly influenced by marketing and entertainment. The sheer variety of materials and forms that have been presented as sculpture … makes it clear that sculpture has not been regarded as a stable concept with fixed boundaries.”1 With such grand and public works as the land art or earth art movement of the 60s and 70s, sculpture and sculpture parks emerged fully as “an attempt to connect art to the world around them,”2 which the result of exploring and revealing the culture that has produced them. Although designed and planned prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, Brian Tolle’s Irish Hunger Memorial captures the sense of tragedy, despair and loss associated with both the recent New York Tragedy as well as the tragedy suffered by the Irish that fled to this city many decades ago. Created on a half-acre base of limestone transported from Ireland itself, the monument focuses on the fragility of the land and features the roofless cottage of a typical Irish farmer during the famine period, from 1845-1862, in which more than 1.5 million people died of starvation. Everything placed on top of the limestone base was brought to New York from Ireland, including the cottage, carefully reconstructed on site stone by stone. The cottage is surrounded by 62 species of Irish flora grown from native seeds and allowed to grow wild on the site, presenting an authentic landscape that illustrates both the wild beauty and the delicately balanced nature of the bogland ecosystem. To symbolize the empty potato harvests that occurred in 1845, 1846, 1848 and 1849, fallow potato ridges have been pulled into the landscape, planted in between with clover. A wall surrounds this empty quarter-acre crop area to symbolize the Gregory Clause which was added to the Poor Law of 1847. This law stated that “any person occupying more than one-quarter acre was not eligible for any form of governmental relief.”3 This, of course, led to widespread evictions and homelessness, resulting in the great migration to America. It is said the roof remains unthatched as a reminder that many families were forced to pull their roofs down as a symbol of poverty in order to qualify for relief aid while others simply crept into their homes to die, knowing the thatch roof would eventually fall in on them and provide them with the closest thing to a Christian burial they were likely to receive. To further evoke the spirit of Ireland, and recognizing that the famine didn’t occur in one province alone, there are thirty-two stones placed randomly about the site, each from one of the 32 counties of Ireland. “The pilgrim stone is inscribed with a cross of arcs, a motif of great antiquity that is associated with County Kerry’s St. Brendan”4 and is reminiscent of the many cross-decorated stones that can be found throughout the west of Ireland. These are invariably associated with sites that are considered sacred. Visitors to the site have the option of looking out over the cantilevered overlook at the Hudson River, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, or east toward the site of the World Trade Center and St. Paul’s Church, which proved to be a refuge for the thousands of 9/11 rescue workers that arrived to help following the terrorist attacks. “The western entrance to the Irish Hunger Memorial provides a formal, ceremonial passage that leads to the center of the memorial, the Slack Cottage. This entrance recalls the neolithic passage graves of the Boyne Valley: Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth.”5 Tolle’s work required less sculptural effects to portray the ideas, feelings and emotions of his subject, but he is able to do so through the careful reconstruction of a piece of Irish countryside in an obviously contrived and determined place in New York. That this site happened to look upon the site of the World Trade Center tragedy and that it provided a quiet place of remembrance and honor to the fallen was coincidental in its original design, but purposefully incorporated in its execution. The site was dedicated to the memory of those who fell at the World Trade Center and elsewhere upon its opening and reflects the more somber, reflective mood of the country following the attacks. The work of Tolle incorporates images and symbols that would be immediately recognizable to more primitive cultures like the American Indians as well as to the highly sophisticated early cultures of Greece and Rome. Living as close to the land as they did, primitive cultures would immediately recognize the symbolisms of bad harvests, starvation and lack of sufficient shelter as well as the sacred underground of the otherworld. Early cultures like the Greeks and Romans also would have associated the underground passageway with the passage of the dead and the fallow potato rows and marked stones as signs of a great disaster. At the same time that parks such as this one are serving to break down the barriers perceived between the public and the world of art, the Irish Hunger Memorial is serving other purposes within the greater public such as illustrating environmental needs, rebelling against the political or economic status quo or responding to a great community event. This increased sense of wonder at the works opening up before them as well as the applicability of art to the everyday world and sometimes shared cultural concepts has spurred many in the mainstream public to venture to the front doors of the museums with increased confidence even as it has led the way for artists in other mediums to find their way back to a viewing and appreciating public. References Causey, Andrew. (1998). Sculpture Since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frankel, David. (Summer 2002). “Hunger Artist: David Frankel on Brian Tolle – On Site – Artist’s Monument to Commemorate the Irish Potato Famine New York City.” Art Forum. March 5, 2010 “Irish Hunger Memorial at Battery Park City: A Teacher’s Guide, (The).” (2006). State Education Department: University of the State of New York. March 5, 2010 Kaufman, Leslie. (October 1999). “Sculpture Parks and Gardens Conference.” ISC Web Special. International Sculpture Center. March 5, 2010 Read More