People build monuments not so much to individual human beings as to ideas and ideals. Though a monument or memorial may look like a man or a woman, it usually represents much more than that, to viewers and to builders. Often built long after the death of the nominal subject, a memorial indicates how its designers wish its subject to be remembered by viewers, how the designers themselves perceive and remember the subject, and the greater context within which the designers place the subject and the context within which the designers live and work – that is, the vantage point from which they remember the subject. In the end, a memorial represents not a whole person and a whole life honored and remembered but a life reconstructed, to present a message created by the designers and accepted by the viewers – a kind of shared cultural memory of someone and sometime that neither designers nor viewers perhaps ever knew personally.
Every detail of a memorial presents designers with an opportunity to control this message through the reconstruction and distortion of the subject’s life – to guide what viewers will see, feel, and remember as they view the final memorial “collage.” Size represents one of the most obvious ways for a monument to manipulate perception of its subject. In everyday life, the greater an object is in scale, the more it may impress its audience; the smaller in scale, the more it may invite approach and contact. Reduce something’s scale enough, and it can even go all the way from intimidating to cute – a tiny plastic Tyrannosaurus or a palm-sized plush Cthulhu the Elder God, for instance, might evoke more “aw” than awe. Though the designers of D.C. monuments have never altered the scale of human subjects so far as to produce either fear or protective affection from their viewers, they have used it to encourage certain audience relationships with the monuments and certain audience perceptions of their subjects. The three presidential memorials containing human figures provide examples of how differences in scale can result in very different visitor interaction with monuments and perception of their subjects.
(Click here to continue to the accompanying photo essay.)
