A Brilliant Tribute

Tonight at sundown in New York, if all goes as planned, twin columns of light will rise high into the sky above lower Manhattan. The six-month anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center will be marked by a side-by-side pair of light beams, each composed of 44 searchlights arranged in a square configuration. Located at Battery Park City, just west of ground zero--a location built on landfill produced in the 1960s by construction of the mammoth trade center towers--the columns of light will shine every night until 11 p.m. through April 13.

A huge sense of anticipation greets their debut. Partly it’s a result of anxiety. “Tribute of Light,” as the temporary memorial to the tragedy of Sept. 11 is called, offers the first real inkling of what an official, permanent remembrance of the awful event might be. The complex question of a permanent memorial looms large. “Tribute of Light” is an avatar of the long, stressful road that lies ahead in determining what shape that memorial might take.

Yet the anticipation also seems born of optimism. “Tribute of Light” is that rare public art project that, when announced, immediately captured the popular imagination. It just seemed--right. Its cause was taken up at once, in press accounts and magazine stories. Dozens, even scores of other proposals for memorial projects have been floated in the aftermath of the towers’ collapse. “Tribute of Light” is the one that always seemed inevitable.

The twin columns obviously are intended to be a ghost version of the Trade Center towers. The behemoths are recalled as a kind of fragile memory--not in the cold, tangible stuff of steel and glass, but in the spiritually inflected substance of ethereal light. The work elaborates--on a monumental scale that befits the enormity of what happened--at least two familiar metaphors. Electrified, it is an industrial-strength votive candle or eternal flame, which burns in remembrance of the past and as a wish for peaceful rest. Composed from searchlights pointed skyward, it also shines as a beacon of hope for the future.

“Tribute of Light” was designed by a team of six architects and artists: John Bennett and Gustavo Bonevardi of PROUN Space Studio; artists Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda; architect Richard Gould, and lighting designer Paul Marantz. With the assistance of the Battery Park City Authority, it is supported by two of New York’s most venerable nonprofit cultural organizations: the Municipal Art Society and Creative Time.

Remarkably, the design was conceived Sept. 12, just a day after the terrorist assault. It has evolved and been refined since then, but the general idea has remained unchanged. Conceived under conditions of unspeakable chaos, horror and alarm, the light sculpture also emerged as a monument to the power of focused artistic thought.

That’s why tonight’s “Tribute of Light” may hold an important clue about how to proceed with the terribly fraught task of creating a permanent monument. For if the idea of a light projection immediately captured the public imagination, a fitting permanent memorial still seems almost impossible to imagine.

As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal wrote not long ago, years from now, when a memorial to the tragedy of Sept. 11 does rise from the rubble, one thing is almost certain: Someone will be unhappy. Memorials, because they touch deeply personal emotional chords, are extraordinarily difficult to design.

The worst-case scenario is a fiasco like the design for the World War II Memorial on the National Mall. Although that world-changing event ended a half-century ago, and a certain degree of unanimity might be said to prevail over its outcome, the memorial currently being built in Washington has proved to be sharply divisive. On one side stand those who applaud its vocabulary of triumphal forms, as well as its insertion between powerful memorials to presidents Lincoln and Washington. Lined up on the other side are those who believe the turgid bombast of the design is ill-suited to the ordinary citizen-soldiers and civilians at home who secured the victory, and they lament an imperial monument arising on ground where generations of disenfranchised Americans petitioned their government in the cause of civil rights.

The memorial to the victims of domestic terrorism in Oklahoma City also gives pause, although of a different kind. I have not seen the memorial in person, only in photographs of the lawn dotted with 168 empty chairs, the entry arch with the time of the explosion inscribed, the children’s garden and the other elements. But I have been struck by the reticence with which the memorial has been greeted. The embrace has been polite rather than warm.

Truly successful memorials elicit a vivid response, despite the pain and anguish represented by their subject. It’s as true of Daniel Chester French’s classic sculpture of an assassinated hero, Abraham Lincoln (where individual fragility mingles with steely resolve, slumped exhaustion and rangy eloquence to create a powerful portrait of human ambivalence) as it is of Maya Lin’s stark, earthbound wall listing the names of Vietnam War dead or Daniel Libeskind’s pierced, twisted, hard-edged design for Berlin’s Holocaust Museum.

Complexity and contradiction are the stuff of truth, but the political posturing around civic remembrance often resists them. Powerful simplicity is challenged by the merely simplistic, life’s rough edges are polished smooth and shades of gray are erased by a black-and-white yearning for definitive certainty.

*

Deciding for Whom

the Tribute Is Intended

“Tribute of Light” was initially titled “Towers of Light.” The name was changed when some survivors expressed concern that it would memorialize buildings, not people. The shift seems appropriate. But it also signals how enormously difficult the process will be to arrive at a permanent memorial.

When a work of art is being commissioned, we tend to focus almost exclusively on the excellence and capacity of the chosen artist. In practice, though, the quality of the patron or client who does the choosing is often as important.

Who is the client for a Sept. 11 memorial? The answer includes groups formed to represent the bereaved families of victims, which will inevitably favor those nearby in New York City over those from Boston to California who also lost loved ones. And it includes the American people at large, who were the psychological target of the terrorist attack. The design will be reviewed by bureaucrats in the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the government agency that owns the site; developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease on the land; the governor of New York, the mayor of New York City and federal authorities who hold various purse strings and issue permits; and others.

Perhaps part of the reason a permanent memorial is impossible to imagine is that it’s also impossible to wrap one’s mind around this shape-shifting hydra. Conceived as a gift, “Tribute of Light” is unhampered by the issue.

One of its chief virtues is its temporal nature. If “Tribute of Light” disappoints, there will have been no harm in trying. The opposite of a permanent memorial, it shifts the focus of remembering away from the eternity of a material object and toward an activity or endeavor. Remembering, it says, is something you do. It unfolds through time. It changes coloration. It includes mortality.

Inevitably, something permanent will be built at ground zero to memorialize the disaster. Perhaps, though, whatever that “something” turns out to be can take a cue from “Tribute of Light” and be accompanied by something temporal and transient.

A Sept. 11 Memorial could be joined by a Sept. 11 Memorial Foundation, with the sole purpose of commissioning temporal works of art in perpetuity. An orchestral work. A book of poems. A performance. A museum exhibition. A teleplay. Another temporal sculpture like “Tribute of Light,” or even a relighting of that tribute on an anniversary in the future. In a pluralistic nation, especially one where the pressure to forget the past is also strong, creating diverse works of art can keep a multiplicity of memories alive.