There Goes American Tradition

America is facing a crisis.

It's called post-modern art, maybe. Or deconstruction of myth.

It seems former President Eisenhowers granddaughters issued a statement expressing concern about the concept for the memorial to be built in Washington as well as the scope and scale of it.

As the story goes:-

It seems the designer Frank Gehry’s concept for a memorial to the 34th president has been focused on what he calls “the barefoot boy” from Kansas.

Taken from a speech given by Eisenhower after he returned from the Second World War to his home town of Abilene, the barefoot boy image stresses Eisenhower’s simple roots and prevailing modesty.

To realize that visually, Gehry designed the memorial as a set of woven metal tapestries hung from large stone pillars that includes a wintry scene of the Kansas landscape. As Gehry has worked in collaboration with avant-garde theater artist Robert Wilson and focused on the theme of humility, the design for the memorial has emerged as more radical, innovative and unsettling than it seemed when preliminary models and renderings were first shown in March 2010.

...Gehry and Wilson are trying to break with centuries of tradition in the aesthetics of memorialization. The new memorial is conceived as a theatrical space in a parklike setting. The tapestry, which some have compared to a theater scrim, stands in stark contrast to the classical tradition of marble arches, pillars and other Greek and Roman derivatives. It is meant to be diaphanous and poetic, rather than solid and substantial.

The designers are also mulling plans for a statue representing the former president, but not in his role as chief executive or supreme commander of the Allied Forces, which liberated Europe from Nazi domination in World War II.

There goes tradition.

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