Yet more on "ideas" "Like many architects he would be more impressive if silent."

Someone else notices that Muschamp Too likes "ideas:"

The new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenman, is the apotheosis of this soul-searching. A vast grid of 2,711 concrete pillars whose jostling forms seem to be sinking into the earth, it is able to convey the scope of the Holocaust's horrors without stooping to sentimentality - showing how abstraction can be the most powerful tool for conveying the complexities of human emotion.

Here is the work:

click

Certainly is oppressive, gives me the creeps, elicits grim feelings, makes me think. Might well be a very impressive work.  Judging from the photo, it is indeed an impressive work and I don't for a moment suggest otherwise.

But I think this is where some critics go wrong and bring in what I believe are irrelevant notions such as "abstraction." They want to puff up their review so that it sounds like something fancy and academic: "...abstraction can be the most powerful tool for conveying the complexities of human emotion." In this case "abstraction" is compared -- favorably, of course -- with "sentimentality," (which I take to be the human form? If so that is a pretty weirdly-telling value judgment. If not, then what does it mean?) Whether his overall point is true, whether the two -- "abstraction" and "sentimentality," -- are truly at opposite ends of some continuum, whether the clause makes sense in the context of the Holocaust where there are very few complexities, well I do not reach those issues. Nor, more importantly, does the author, who tosses off the concept as a cook in a greasy spoon tosses off an omelet -- without preparation or follow-through.

A sidenote: Ourossoff writes:

The memorial's power lies in its willingness to grapple with the moral ambiguities arising in the Holocaust's shadow. Its focus is on the delicate, almost imperceptible line that separates good and evil, life and death, guilt and innocence. (italics added - DS)

What "moral ambiguities" can he possible see? The Nazis were evil. They did evil things. And what is this stuff about "the delicate, almost imperceptible line that separates good and evil, life and death, guilt and innocence." Life and death are pretty clear, if you have ever been with someone as they die; there is a whole lot of mystery but not much ambiguity. As to good and evil and guilt and innocence, you can make all sorts of arguments about individual responsibility in the context of many tragic events -- say a hurricane where deaths could have been avoided by better warning systems -- but it seems preposterous to offer the Holocaust as such a context. Weird, in fact. Ourossoff either thinks too much or not enough.

UPDATE: Yet one more person thinks that there was something odd about Ourossoff's piece. Please do read this excellent link as it -- pretty devastatingly -- makes Ourossoff look both dense and pretentious at the same time.

UPDATE 2: 

ambiguous

ambiguous adj
1: open to two or more interpretations; or of uncertain nature or significance; or (often) intended to mislead; "an equivocal statement"; "the polling had a complex and equivocal (or ambiguous) message for potential female candidates"; "the officer's equivocal behavior increased the victim's uneasiness"; "popularity is an equivocal crown"; "an equivocal response to an embarrassing question" [syn: equivocal] [ant: unequivocal]
2: having more than one possible meaning; "ambiguous words"; "frustrated by ambiguous instructions, the parents were unable to assemble the toy" [ant: unambiguous]
3: having no intrinsic or objective meaning; not organized in conventional patterns; "an ambiguous situation with no frame of reference"; "ambiguous inkblots"

If one wants to call the Holocaust "ambiguous" then life too must be  "ambiguous" in which case everything is "ambiguous" etc-etc-etc, blah-blah-blah, and you are reading the wrong blog as this one is zoned for certainties not "fashionable nonsense."

Life may be a mystery but as the author of BERLIN MEMORIAL REVEALS ABYSS, NOT AMBIGUITIES wrote "...that does not mean we do not know evil when we see it."

 

Comments

[Michael Blowhard]

Abstraction is a very specialized taste: always has been, always will be. Nothing wrong with it, of course, particularly where private pleasures are concerned. But imposing a minority taste on public works, public behavior, and on people who'd really rather not, thank you very much, strikes me as a bit ...

Well, why wouldn't such scolds expect to be disliked by the general public?

[David Sucher]

MB,
Uh...was this comment meant for this post? Completely passes me by.

[A.C. Douglas]

Even given that what Ouroussoff wrote in that single sentence is carelessly and imprecisely expressed, the meaning intended is clear enough within the context of the rest of the beautifully written and perceptive piece if only one can control one's jerking knee long enough to keep it from getting in the way of one's cognitive faculties.

ACD

[A.C. Douglas]

My above refers, of course, to this sentence in the NYT piece:

"The memorial's power lies in its willingness to grapple with the moral ambiguities arising in the Holocaust's shadow."

ACD

[David Sucher]

Not knee jerk at all. I noticed the sentence one day and went back to reread the next. Surely there might be a way to explain it away -- I even started to -- but it is too important a site and a sentence to merely say it was "carelessly and imprecisely expressed" without carefuly and precisely explaining what was actually meant.

Don't these paid journalists have editors? If I were writing for a million people in a Paper of Record rather than ten I would damn well get one.

[A.C. Douglas]

"...but it is too important a site and a sentence to merely say it was 'carelessly and imprecisely expressed' without carefuly and precisely explaining what was actually meant.
---------

Sure. Be happy to.

That offending sentence, more precisely expressed, would have read:

"The memorial's power lies in its willingness to grapple with the moral ambiguities OF GOOD AND EVIL IN ORDINARY, EVERYDAY LIFE arising in the Holocaust's shadow."

ACD

[David Sucher]

Nope, ACD. That doesn't work. The memorial is about the Holocaust, not about "ORDINARY, EVERYDAY LIFE." In fact if you don't mind, I'll say you are talking nonsense. Everyday life doesn't have events like the Holocaust. And if it does have a murder in it, such an event is rarely morally ambiguous. Yes there are the rare cases of self-defense which might be at the margin of what the law allows as defensive. But you can't compare such cases to the Holocaust. The next step is to suggest that the Holocaust was a matter of German self-defense. That would be hideous, preposterous; even black humor wouldn't go so far.

No, I think that Ourossoff was attempting to get fancy and cute and "intellectual" and got in over his abilities.

No, my friend. you'll have to try again; your sentence digs a deeper hole for Ourossoff.

And anyway, I quoted TWO sentences; the second one is also fatuous.

[A.C. Douglas]

Y'know, it's really trying dealing with you SSB types.

Read the bloody article, not just the one sentence! Ourossoff himself refers to what I wrote as the memorial's central theme:

-----
"But the memorial's central theme is the process that allows human beings to accept such evil as part of the normal world - the incremental decisions that collectively lead to the most murderous acts.

"There is no way to glean this from photographs; it can be understood only by experiencing the memorial as a physical space. No clear line, for example, divides the site from the city around it. The pillars along its periphery are roughly the height of park benches. A few scattered linden trees sprout between the pillars along the memorial's western edge; at other points, outlines of pillars are etched onto the sidewalk, so that pedestrians can actually step on them as they walk by.

"The sense of ambiguity - the concerns of everyday life, a world of unspeakable evil - will only be amplified once the memorial opens to the public. It is not hard to imagine Berliners sitting on the pillars at the memorial's edges, reading books or sunning themselves on a spring afternoon. The day I visited the site, a 2-year-old boy was playing atop the pillars - trying to climb from one to the next as his mother calmly gripped his hand."
-----

Get it now?

ACD

[A.C. Douglas]

Which of course includes that second sentence of Ourossoff's to which you objected.

ACD

[David Sucher]

Oh I read that and there is one use of the word "ambiguity." And I believe he misuses it and it really has nothing to do with what either the Holocaust or what he himself is taling about.

His Memorial may be brilliant but his words strike me as drivel, confused, all over the place. "Ambiguous" is the wrong summation for the phrase you cite -- " the concerns of everyday life, a world of unspeakable evil."

"The concerns of everyday life, a world of unspeakable evil" do not equal "ambiguous." He is not using the language correctly and no appeal to Derrida will save him.

Like many architects he would be more impressive if silent.

[A.C. Douglas]

"If one wants to call the Holocaust 'ambiguous' then life too must be 'ambiguous' in which case everything is 'ambiguous' etc-etc-etc, blah-blah-blah, and you are reading the wrong blog as this one is zoned for certainties not 'fashionable nonsense.'"
------------------

Jeez!, David. Who "call[ed] the Holocaust ambiguous"? Not Ouroussoff. And if you imagine he did, you really do need to read his piece again.

And, yes, "life too [is] ambiguous." It's one of life's central characteristics. Has been since Day One. Nothing nonsensical -- "fashionable" or otherwise -- about it.

Trust me.

ACD

[A.C. Douglas]

Let me try that penultimate sentence up there again. Less fractured this time

-----
And, yes, "life [is] ambiguous." It's one of life's central characteristics. Has been since Day One. Nothing nonsensical -- "fashionable" or otherwise -- about calling it so.
-----

There. That's better.

ACD

[David Sucher]

"The memorial's power lies in its willingness to grapple with the moral ambiguities arising in the Holocaust's shadow."

I still say he is talking BS and apparently it is both of them - the architect and his fan. (Critic offers too much.)

Life is filled with pleasure and pain but it is not ambiguous.

[David Sucher]

There is yet another point in which the use of "ambiguous" is simply wrong.

The various degrees of complicity, culpability, blame, responsiobility etc etc in the murders (I have never liked the term Holocaust as it is almost a euphemism) which must be ascribed to the whole western world, including, from what I gather my heroes FDR and Churchill, cannot be described as "ambiguous" but simply various lesser degrees of evil/badness/wickedness etc. which are mixed in with lives/actions which were exemplary/heroic/glorious etc.

That there may have been one SS officer who allowed a Jew to pass to safety in Spain does not make his actions as an SS officer "ambiguous" but simply acknowledges that even "bad people can do good things."

That we all do some good and bad in our lives does not lead to some blend known as "ambiguity" but simply to a coexistence of good/bad in one life. It is not complicated though Eisenman/Ourousoff seem to want to make it that way so as to qualify themselves as "intellectuals." (Is how I see it.)

Coexistence of good and bad is not ambiguity.

So, the use of "ambiguity" in relation to the human actions which created the Holocaust is inappropriate.

[A.C. Douglas]

"The memorial's power lies in its willingness to grapple with the moral ambiguities arising in the Holocaust's shadow."

The Holocaust's SHADOW. The Holocaust's SHADOW. The Holocaust's SHADOW.

NOT the Holocaust.

ACD

[David Sucher]

ACD, I suspect that with this topic as with almost everything else except pizza -- you do like pizza? -- we are going to have to "agree to disagree."

I do not believe acknowledging "shadow" adds much at all. For one thing it is contradicted by the text where the real thrust is the various degrees of complicity, which has nothing to do with ambiguity but with degree of culpability. For another, what is meant by shadow? It's just so damned vague -- look at how we can't agree on what it means.

•••

More generally, life is filled with pleasure and pain but it is not ambiguous.

The very fact that we use different words for the various things which happen in life and to which we give person effect demonstrates that we distinguish very clearly between pleasure and pain.

For example, now and then AC Douglas will offer an extremely good post; the majority of the time I am either indifferent to his posts or they are dead wrong. So ACD's blog, "like life itself," could be considered "ambiguous" under the definition used by Ourossoff, Eisenman and approved by ACD i.e. in the sense that "ambiguous" means filled with conflicting sensations and effects.

False.

There is nothing ambiguous about ACD's blog. Sometimes he is correct, sometimes wrong, sometimes beyond my own knowledge so I don't have an opinion (but someone else does.) But that does not make ACD's blog ambiguous but merely ocassionally correct and most often wrong.

[A.C. Douglas]

Ah, David. I've tried to lift you above and beyond the squalid murk and confusion of your SSB thought processes, but, alas, to no avail.

I, with regret, here sadly confess my abject failure.

ACD

[David Sucher]

Yup, sorry ACD, but it is not your fault.
I am affixed like a 20 penny nail to SSB.