Bunker 599: A Photographic Monument

Alicia ChesterArchitecture/Photography

Modern/PostmodernProfessor Douglas Crimp

Fall 2013

Bunker 599 is one of seven hundred surviving military pillboxes built in 1940 on the

New Dutch Waterline, a defense system composed of artificial and natural bodies of water

created in the Netherlands in 1815, completed in 1870, in use through 1945, and disabled in

1960.1 The Netherlands is a country largely below sea level with centuries of experience creating

dams and controlling waterways, as well as a history of using hydro-geological defense systems

as early as the sixteenth century, known as the Old Hollandic Waterline. The New Dutch

Waterline was constructed in an eighty-five kilometer ring to surround cities vital to the Dutch

economy––Muiden, Utrecht, Vreeswijk, and Gorinchem––through intentional flooding, thus

isolating and turning the Netherlands’ economic heartland virtually into an island in times of war.

The water was just under half a meter deep: too shallow to sail through but too deep for troops or

horses to traverse on foot. Hazards for any who would attempt to cross lay under the water,

including barbed wire, ditches, and mines, and areas of particular weakness were fortified.

The New Dutch Waterline was mobilized in only three wars: the Franco-Prussian War in

1870, World War I, and World War II. The concrete pillboxes––despite being named Bunker 599,

the structure is technically a pillbox––were constructed in 1940, even though the New Dutch

Waterline was used only as a secondary defense line in World War II, and aerial bombing

weakened the efficacy of a defense system based on ground invasion. In the post-World War II

era of a peaceful Europe, the New Dutch Waterline is a relatively forgotten relic of the past. The

remaining forts are now for public use, including as parks, camp sites, and wine cellars.2

2

1 There is discrepancy in some sources whether there are six or seven hundred surviving pillboxes. The name would seem to suggest there are six hundred, as listed in the promotional video. However, the majority of architectural blogs cite seven hundred pillboxes. I am relying on dates and figures from an article by architect Ronald Rietveld, head of the design firm that created Bunker 599, Rietveld Landscape. See Ronald Rietveld, “Bunker 599: The Netherlands: military landscape made publically accessible,” Building with Landscape, Topos 74 (2011): 29–31.

2 “About the New Dutch Waterline,” Hollandse Waterlineie Laat Je Verrassen. http://www.hollandsewaterlinie.nl/pages/english-information.aspx.

In 2010, the Dutch Service for Land and Water Management commissioned the design

firm Rietveld Landscape (now Rietveld Architecture–Art–Affordances) in collaboration with

Atelier de Lyon to remake one of the surviving pillboxes into a publicly accessible attraction.

Although not originally intended as a monument, Bunker 599 serves as a reminder of war––

specifically, World War II––and a symbol of the New Dutch Waterline itself.3 It is one of several

interventions in a demilitarized zone now considered a cultural heritage site, recreational area,

and ecological haven, designated as one of twenty official national landscapes to be preserved

and developed between 1999 and 2020.4 In other words, Bunker 599 forms part of a landscape

transformed from a defense system into a site of domestic tourism and national remembrance.

When it was unveiled in October 2010, Bunker 599 was featured on numerous

architectural blogs and websites. Far from contextualizing the monument, however, most articles

recycled the language available in Rietveld Landscape’s statement about the work and

republished the carefully composed press photos (or incredibly similar shots). Little variation in

representation of the project is available, and my only experience of the monument comes

through these media. Bunker 599 appears to have been constructed with specific photographic

vantage points in mind. It is located near a major highway and is intended both to be clearly

visible while driving by and to lure drivers to stop and visit. A wooden boardwalk cuts a straight

axis directly through the center of the bunker, directing visitors to walk down a hillside staircase,

through the bunker, and out to a pier extending into a flooded portion of the New Dutch

3

3 “Bunker 599,” RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances]. http://www.raaaf.nl/en/projects/7_bunker_599. Rietveld Landscape was renamed Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances in October 2013. In this essay I refer to the design firm as Rietveld Landscape, its name at the time of creating Bunker 599 and, hence, the name cited in articles on the project.

4 “About the New Dutch Waterline,” Hollandse Waterlineie Laat Je Verrassen. http://www.hollandsewaterlinie.nl/pages/english-information.aspx. On the development of the New Dutch Waterline, see also Martin Knuijt,“Sharp as a Knife: A concept for the Dutch Waterline,” Small Scale Interventions, Topos 79 (2012): 36–41.

Waterline. Once a visitor reaches the end of the pier, she turns around for a view back through

the bunker to where she started on the hillside. The vertical cut through the pillbox creates a line

bisecting both the structure and the horizon, which, from certain vantage points, is visually

extended by the horizontal boardwalk. The strict symmetry of the bunker cleanly sliced by a

pathway encourages visitors to move back and forth along a straight line. The beginning and

endpoint of the pathway reward visitors with a dramatic one-point perspective from each side of

the site, paralleling the one-point perspective of the visitor’s camera itself and rendering explicit

the connection of tourism and photography.

Slicing the small, dark structure connects interior and exterior and inverts relationships

of light and dark, forming the aesthetic basis for Bunker 599.5 It took over four months to cut

through the two-meter thick walls6 with diamond-tipped saws so that visitors could view into and

through the pillbox.7 The rough, moss-grown exterior showing signs of decay––threatening to

meld into the dirt and grass of the landscape––opposes the brighter and newly polished concrete

walls of the interior, reflecting the water beyond. Differences in texture and value connote

contrasts of the old and the new, history and the present. That is, they connote that the decaying

pillbox has been resurrected from the once war-torn landscape and historical oblivion in a

peaceful present. The uncanniness emanating from these photos is rooted in the sense that an

airless space was opened to air, that what once was opaquely hidden is now transparently visible.

4

5 “You go inside, and you can no longer connect the inside to the outside. You don’t know anymore what the inside and the outside have to do with each other.” Living Picture Film, Bunker 599, 2010. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/50229102.

6 Kimberly Li, “Bunker 599 by Rietveld Landscape + Atelier de Lyon,” GBlog, July 26, 2012. http://blog.gessato.com/2012/07/26/bunker-599-by-rietveld-landscape-atelier-de-lyon/.

7 Mara Corradi, “Bunker 599: from architecture to monument,” Floornature, October 3, 2011. http://www.floornature.com/projects-learning/project-bunker-599-from-architecture-to-monument-6586/.

I was initially drawn to make comparisons between Bunker 599 and Gordon Matta-

Clark’s Splitting of 1973 for some compelling similarities, including: the act of creation through

destroying an existing architectural structure, the industrially laborious process itself of cutting

out and removing the center of a building, the resulting aesthetic of a strong vertical line of light

bisecting a heavier and darker structure, and the fact that both processes were documented

closely with film or video.8 In fact, several shots in the documentation of the making of Bunker

599 seem quite directly influenced by the documentation of Splitting. Although both structures

were shelters, they were built and used for very different purposes in their first lives––one

domestic and one military––and were appropriated with very different intentions, including, most

obviously, each structure’s relationship to time. Matta-Clark’s Splitting was to be ephemeral from

the outset, as he was granted permission to cut the one-family New Jersey home before its

demolition, and it existed for three months. Bunker 599 was commissioned by a government

agency and is intended to be permanent, being literally set in stone––or concrete, anyway. With

its vertical cut causing the house to split lopsidedly, Splitting may be characterized as referencing

destruction and allegorizing the impermanence and imperfection of domestic life, while the

perfectly symmetrical cut in Bunker 599 is better characterized as a redemptive gesture

memorializing the site’s history in perpetuity. For these reasons, this tempting aesthetic

comparison is a bit of a red herring.

In some ways, Bunker 599 is closer in form and intention to Rachel Whiteread’s

Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, also known as the Nameless Library, in Vienna, Austria. Having

won the 1996 contest for a site-specific design to memorialize the more than 65,000 Austrian

5

8 Several architectural blogs made the comparison to Splitting and, more generally, Gordon Matta-Clark’s anarchitecture as well. See Kimberly Li, “Bunker 599 by Rietveld Landscape + Atelier de Lyon.”

Jews killed by the Nazis, Whiteread’s idea was to construct a bunker-like structure whose walls

resembled casts of a library turned inside out. In casting the spaces between and around books,

she employed “materiality [as] an index of absence” to commemorate the lost “people of the

book” and the corresponding loss of history.9 In other words, Whiteread used history’s most

familiar and tangible means of construction and transmission as a form to remember loss.

Notably, these books are all the same size, creating a repetitive, gridded structure that maintains a

conversation with minimalist sculpture and conceptual photographic practices. The doors to

Whiteread’s monument, which are also negative casts, do not open but are permanently sealed.

In this respect, the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial seeks to enclose space to show the opacity of

historical loss in direct contradiction to Bunker 599, which seeks to open its space to the

landscape and the public.

Here an important distinction arises between a memorial and a monument. The borders

between these categories shift and overlap, yet they are not quite synonymous. The purpose and

meaning of a memorial is rooted in the word itself: memory. Although a memorial might be a

physical monument, as in the case of gravestones, it may also take such diverse forms as a

Facebook profile, a tattoo, or a tee shirt, so long as the form serves to externalize memory. The

Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial is exemplary of Holocaust memorials in that it is also a counter-

monument. The formal language of traditional monuments––that is, late-nineteenth-century

figurative monuments––is that of the permanent preservation of heroic and authoritative

historical narratives.10 In the wake of the World Wars and especially the Holocaust, however,

6

9 James E. Young, “Memory, Countermemory, and the End of the Monument: Horst Hoheisel, Micha Ullman, Rachel Whiteread, and Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock,” in At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 107.

10 Young, “Memory, Countermemory, and the End of the Monument,” 93.

memory and memorials became problematic.11 Traditional forms were inadequate to the

magnitude of trauma suffered and the impossibility of redemption.12 Counter-monuments, like

Whiteread’s Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, work to opposite effect, marking ambivalence and

historical uncertainty through antiheroic self-effacement.13 They are meant to mourn rather than

celebrate, to mark tragedy rather than victory, and to serve as deterrence against historical

repetition.

The formal language employed by counter-monuments privileges abstraction over

figuration as a means “to ameliorate a work’s sense of mimetic witness.”14 Instead of

crystallizing memory into a singular and centralized figure, counter-monuments invoke absence

using antimimetic strategies learned from conceptualism, minimalism, and International Style

architecture. Employing geometric forms, industrial and architectural materials, and contrasting

light and shadow, a counter-monument does not possess a single or ideal perspective but

encourages visitors to move through the site to view the work from different vantage points and

to experience the work durationally. It does not aim to be beautiful but to be an unavoidable

presence indicating absence. It is as though the sheer number of those killed in the Holocaust

represents an unfathomable conceptual abstraction necessitating an equally abstract visual

representation––the only adequate means of referencing the unspeakable. In the case of

7

11 The vast literature on Holocaust memorials, monuments, counter-monuments, remembrance, and mourning is beyond the scope of this paper. See especially James E. Young’s The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning and At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, both cited here; and Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (eds.), Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).

12 Young, “Memory, Countermemory, and the End of the Monument,” 96.

13 Ibid., 93, 96.

14 Ibid., “The Countermonument: Memory against Itself in Germany,” in The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 10.

Whiteread’s memorial, there is an abundance of textured detail, but it is monochromatic,

repetitious, and nonspecific, invoking the idea of a library rather than a specific location. The

books offer neither titles nor any other indication of their contents, but only their multiplicity and

formal repetition in a self-conscious recognition of the impossibility of containing historical

trauma in a single image.

The excess of trauma spurs the proliferation of documentary and fictionalized filmic

narratives centering on the Holocaust, on the one hand, and the proliferation of abstract,

monochromatic, antimimetic memorials, on the other: indexicality and abstraction

metonymically become photograph and counter-monument.15 However, these binaries are not so

oppositional as they initially appear. The antimimetic and symbolic abstraction of architectural

form in counter-monuments posits a counterbalance to the surplus of indexical detail offered by

photography, forming two complementary poles of representation that serve to externalize and

displace memory. Only through excessive media representations––from historical documentation

and photographs to Hollywood narratives––and the continued construction of counter-

monuments can the Holocaust be adequately memorialized in efforts to mend historical wounds

and prevent future atrocities.16

Not all postmodern monuments are counter-monuments or memorials, but this discursive

detour through Holocaust counter-monuments is unavoidable in accounting for the majority of

contemporary literature on postmodern monuments and, relatedly, what aesthetics are available

and deemed appropriate for postmodern monuments more generally. Bunker 599 inherits many

8

15 See Andreas Huyssen on Holocaust historiography and media representations, “Monuments and Holocaust Memory,” in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), especially 256–259.

16 “No single monument will ever be able to convey the Holocaust in its entirety.” Huyssen, 258.

aesthetic qualities from counter-monuments, including formal abstraction and architectural

materials. Additionally, as the original pillbox structure was constructed during World War II,

Bunker 599 shares referential and historical contiguity with Holocaust counter-monuments.

However, Bunker 599 functions differently from counter-monuments in that it is not truly a

memorial: it does not reference a specific trauma, event, or person. Its purpose is not to

commemorate a single event or cluster of events, but to transform a preexisting architectural

structure into a symbol of a now-defunct military landscape. Rather than displacing memory,

Bunker 599 may be viewed as a distillation and synthesis of memory in symbolizing the greater

history and national significance of the New Dutch Waterline. It composes part of the longterm

project to transform and repurpose the entire New Dutch Waterline into a recreational area and

ecological haven, thus embodying more of a concern with the present as well as displaying an

optimism lacking in counter-monuments like Whiteread’s. Indeed, destroying the functionality of

a military structure acknowledges the obsolescence of this pillbox in the wake of modern warfare

while also confidently positing lasting peace in Europe in the post-World War II era.

––

Bunker 599 is a monument in the senses accorded the term by turn-of-the-century art

historian Alois Riegl, who became the journal editor for Austria’s Central Commission for the

Research and Preservation of Artistic and Historical Monuments in 1902. The following year,

when he also became the first Conservator General of Austrian Monuments, Riegl wrote “The

Modern Cult of Monuments” to provide a theoretical basis for the draft of a law concerning

historical preservation.17 In his essay Riegl presents “a case for preserving monuments as

9

17 Margaret Olin, “The Historian’s Performance,” in Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 175–176.

historical documents that register the passage of time,” creating a typology of monuments

grounded in their relationship to temporality.18 His definition of what constitutes a monument

ignores distinctions between art and non-art on historical grounds, simply and loosely defining

monuments as works created by humans at least sixty years ago––placing Bunker 599’s original

pillbox structure from 1940 well within his limits.19

Riegl describes his categories of intentional and unintentional monuments in which each

possesses artistic value, historical value, age-value, or a combination thereof. Intentional

monuments are deliberate constructions intended to memorialize, freeze, and preserve “a specific

moment or complex of moments.”20 Their artistic value corresponds to the tastes of the era in

which they were completed, as they are created with only contemporary uses, needs, and desires

in mind––that is, to externalize and crystallize memory for that era, not necessarily for the future.

The intention is to keep a past moment alive in the present in perpetuity.21 Accordingly,

intentional Holocaust counter-monuments serve present needs to mourn and forewarn, but they

may cease to hold the same commemorative value in the future. Unintentional monuments, on

the other hand, are historical objects or sites that accrue age-value simply through the passage of

time and are “nothing more than indispensable catalysts which trigger in the beholder a sense of

the life cycle.”22 This emotional and sensory response does not require particular knowledge or

education on the viewer’s part, being a spontaneous and immediate recognition of her own fate,

10

18 Michael Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 141.

19 Gubser, 145; Olin, 177.

20 Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 24.

21 Riegl, 38.

22 Ibid., 24.

much like a memento mori. An unintentional monument may or may not possess artistic value,

depending on contemporary tastes, and both intentional and unintentional monuments may have

historical value. However, unlike the emotional basis of age-value, historical value is dependent

upon the viewer’s knowledge about the object or site. Intentional monuments may gain historical

and age-value over time, taking on characteristics of unintentional monuments. Much like his

loose definition of a monument, the boundaries among Riegl’s typologies and values are

imprecise:

To the class of intentional monuments belong only those works which recall a specific moment or complex of moments from the past. The class of historical monuments is enlarged to include those which still refer to a particular moment, but the choice of that moment is left to our subjective preference. Finally, the category of monuments of age-value embraces every artifact without regard to its original significance and purpose, as long as it reveals the passage of a considerable period of time. These classes form three consecutive phases of the generalization of what a monument means.23

Notably in this passage Riegl highlights the role of the viewer’s subjectivity in

determining meaning. Whereas the commemorative value of an intentional monument is

determined by its makers to memorialize specific historical moments, the commemorative value

of an unintentional monument is simply rooted in the passage of time and hence determined by

the temporal standpoint of its viewers rather than a referenced point in the past.24 As the defining

characteristic of an unintentional monument, age-value always references the viewer’s own

emotional response instead of a specific, historical moment. But age-value accretes to intentional

monuments as well, and, along with historical value, it slowly surpasses the monument’s artistic

value, which belongs to the time of the monument’s creation. A monument’s intended historical

referent thus lessens in importance as time passes and age-value grows, and the present viewer’s

11

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., 23.

subjective preferences and associations eventually usurp the original referent. In other words,

over time the intentional monument shifts to become an unintentional monument referencing the

viewer’s associations rather than a historical moment.

Undergirding Riegl’s notions of value and temporal depth is his concept of Kunstwollen,

translatable as the artistic will or desire of an age that changes over time, and “the inner formal

and temporal imperatives of an artwork.”25 Hence, the Kunstwollen of the nineteenth century

exemplified by figurative monuments differs from our contemporary Kunstwollen embodied by

counter-monuments. As Michael Gubser writes: “The concept of Kunstwollen presumed a kind

of evidence that took into account the subjective vision of the observer as well as the visual

‘data’ of the observed object. It also offered an inherently temporal and historical account of

cultural perception.”26 Viewing monuments possessing historical or age-value is a diachronic

experience: the viewer experiences a temporal juxtaposition in which a monument’s

contemporary Kunstwollen––its artistic will and desire––cannot be apprehended objectively but

is perceived subjectively from the perspective of the viewer’s present Kunstwollen, so that

“viewing and interpreting art [are] temporally and historically charged activities.”27 The lens of

the present unavoidably brackets aspects of past Kunstwollen, and only those fragments which

resonate with the current Kunstwollen––whether through correspondence or contrast––remain

meaningful for the present.28

12

25 Gubser, 154, quote on 209.

26 Ibid., 157.

27 Ibid., 163.

28 Riegl, 26.

The decision to appropriate an existing structure to commemorate the New Dutch

Waterline rather than to construct a monument using new materials reverses Riegl’s formulation

of intentional monuments becoming unintentional ones through the accumulation of age-value.

Before Rietveld Landscape transformed the original pillbox structure into Bunker 599––that is,

an intentional monument commemorating and symbolizing the history of the New Dutch

Waterline––the aged and decaying pillbox was a ruin, an unintentional monument with historical

and age-value capable of evoking an emotional response. This deliberate intervention runs

counter to another important aspect of Riegl’s essay. “The Modern Cult of Monuments” set forth

proposals for the preservation of monuments that privilege the natural and steady progression of

age-value over any attempts to restore decaying monuments to their original appearance. Riegl

valued the symbolic reflection of life-cycles within the monument, recognizing that the

Kunstwollen of each generation is different, with artistic values giving way to historical and age-

values.29 He embraced temporal depth, but, by the same logic, he opposed human intervention in

the aging process, whether for restoration or destruction:

[P]reservation should not aim at stasis but ought to permit the monuments to submit to incessant transformation and steady decay, outside of sudden and violent destruction. Only one thing must be avoided: arbitrary interference by man in the way the monument has developed. There must be no additions or subtractions, no substitutions for what nature has undone, no removal of anything that nature has added to the original discrete form.30

13

29 Although the development of historical and age-values coincide and are often inseparable, Riegl also places them in opposition. Historical values are better served by the conservation of the monument in its present state, while age-value moves inexorably toward the eventual ruin of the monument. Riegl considers the merits of each but privileges natural (not deliberately destructive) age-value. Riegl assesses each value as having a different relationship to temporality as well: historical value is concerned with singling out moments from a historical continuum, while age-value embraces the historical continuum itself. In the case of Bunker 599, however, historical and age-values coincide in the geographic location and obsolescence of the pillbox as a military structure. They may thus be conflated for my considerations here, in which I am concentrating on the deliberate intervention and transformation of the pillbox into an intentional monument corresponding to contemporary artistic values. See Riegl on the tension between historical and age-values (34) and their respective temporalities (38).

30 Ibid., 32.

The construction of Bunker 599––which is simultaneously the partial destruction of the

pillbox––clearly violates Riegl’s principle against intervention. However, it is precisely through

interfering with the pillbox’s “original discrete form” that Bunker 599 adheres to our postmodern

Kunstwollen. It is a strategy to appropriate and assimilate historical and age-values into a newly

aesthetic object corresponding to contemporary artistic values. This intervention takes the form

of simply but violently slicing into the structure to reveal its interior, opening it to the

surrounding landscape and the view of visitors. The contrast of newly cut and polished concrete

with the rough and aging exterior walls succinctly embodies the juxtaposition of contemporary

artistic values––including those consonant with minimalism, International Style architecture, and

counter-monuments––with the historical and age-values of the original structure. Bunker 599

was thus transformed into a public artwork and monument through interfering with the pillbox’s

age-value, and in so doing, the structure gained aesthetic value corresponding to our

contemporary Kunstwollen. There is no guarantee that Bunker 599 will continue to hold artistic

value for future generations. It will likely continue to hold historical and age-values, both

appropriated from the pillbox itself and in its altered form as an intentional monument, creating a

temporal depth referencing the moments of the pillbox’s construction, Bunker 599’s

construction, and the viewer’s present.

Bunker 599’s dual status as both a historical object in its own right and a deliberately

constructed monument means its commemorative value and, hence, its meaning, may slip

between its makers’ intentions and its viewers’ perceptions and associations. An intentional

monument’s meaning in the present is anchored by the historical moment it references, but, as

Riegl points out in his discussion of historical value, this meaning is dependent upon individual

14

viewers’ knowledge of the events the monument intends to reference. If historical context is

lacking, a monument may possess age-value and artistic value––depending on the current

Kunstwollen––but it will not have a clear historical value for the viewer.31 The loss of historical

value shifts the referent from an objective moment embodied by the monument to a subjective

moment situated within the viewer. Even so, the monument remains diachronic in that it still

references the past from the standpoint of the present. The temporal depth of diachronic

viewership not only creates a comparative relation between the present and past through

juxtaposing different Kunstwollen, but it also shifts temporal relations from accruing solely

within an object to residing within its beholder. The monument mediates history for the viewer

so that the past continues to live and resonate within the present. This is the intention of most

monuments, but in the temporal referent’s shift from object to viewer, the mediation becomes

subjective rather than objective, abstract rather than concrete: “Objectivity and subjectivity, artist

and viewer [coexist] in the work.”32

––

Memory and history, like memorials and monuments, are inseparably linked but are not

synonymous: “Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal

present; history is a representation of the past.”33 French historian Pierre Nora bases this

description of memory and history in their relationship to temporality. He grounds memory “in

the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects,” while “history binds itself strictly to

15

31 Ibid., 23.

32 Gubser, 158.

33 Pierre Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 8.

temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things.”34 Memory is specific,

emotional, magical, embodied, and unintentional. History is universal, analytical, distant, self-

conscious, and intentional.35 These characterizations resonate with Riegl’s diachronic

formulation of intentional and unintentional monuments. Whereas the historical value of

intentional monuments memorializes a historical moment within the present, the age-value of

unintentional monuments references the past––or, more accurately, the passage of time––from

the standpoint of the present and elicits an emotional response in the viewer, like a memento

mori.

Similar to the vague boundary separating intentional and unintentional monuments,

Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire––sites of memory––accounts for the imbrication and

coexistence of history and memory, being broadly defined to include “anything administering the

presence of the past within the present.”36 Evident in his choice of phrase––lieux de mémoire

rather than lieux d’histoire––at stake for Nora is understanding a historical break with the past in

the postmodern era necessitating the crystallization of memory in objects and sites, rather than

memory continuing to be carried and transmitted generationally. He poses this as “the problem of

the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There

are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real

environments of memory.”37 While a full exposition of Nora’s lieux is beyond the scope of this

16

34 Ibid., 9.

35 Ibid., 8–9, 13. The archive is also an important feature of Nora’s characterization of modern memory but is beyond the scope of this essay: “Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image . . . The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs” (13).

36 Ibid., 20.

37 Ibid., 7.

essay, the category of lieux de mémoire forms a useful response to the question of the loss of

collective memory in the postmodern era and our concomitant need to “anchor, condense, and

express” memory through attaching it to such external and concrete objects and sites as

monuments.38 The proliferation of Holocaust counter-monuments is a case in point, as these

memorials are continually constructed to alleviate guilt and to counter forgetting, as one

memorial could never adequately represent this historical trauma.39

Lieux exist in between history and memory; they are “no longer quite life, not yet death,

like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.”40 Nora’s analogy of lieux de

mémoire as shells recalls photographic indexicality. In discussing Hiroshi Sugimoto’s History of

History exhibition (Japan Society, 2005–2006),41 Walter Benn Michaels notes that Sugimoto

included artifacts and fossils alongside his photographs:

On the one hand, it signifies the impossibility (and the undesirability) of simply denying the indexicality of the photograph. On the other hand, insisting on the photographic fossil as an intentional object (“By photographing these fossils . . . I was making another set of fossils”), it marks the transformation of the natural object into the intentional one, of the trace into the representation, not exactly a representation of the referent but rather of the making of the photograph.42

In Sugimoto’s work, the fossil starts as an unintentional object with age-value, like Riegl’s

unintentional monuments, while the act of photographing the fossil transforms it into an

intentional object possessing artistic value, like Riegl’s intentional monuments. What Riegl’s

typology of monuments and Nora’s lieux de mémoire hold in common with photography, then, is

17

38 Ibid., 24.

39 Huyssen, 258.

40 Nora, 12.

41 Walter Benn Michaels, “Photography and Fossils,” in Photography Theory (The Art Seminar), ed. James Elkins (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 431.

42 Ibid., 447.

diachronic viewership: a temporal relationship mediated by ordinary objects or sites functioning

as traces of the past, in which a historical referent is viewed from the standpoint of the present.

Using Sugimoto’s and Nora’s analogy of the fossil’s indexicality, monuments, lieux de mémoire,

and photographs crystallize memory and bear witness to the passage of time, operating as

indexical traces representing “any visible signs of what has been.”43

––

Riegl’s working definition of what is historical is similar to both Charles Sanders Peirce’s

and Roland Barthes’s notions of indexicality in that both depend on contiguity and

correspondence. To quote Riegl: “Everything that has been and is no longer we call historical, in

accordance with the modern notion that what has been can never be again, and that everything

that has been constitutes an irreplaceable and irremovable link in a chain of development.”44 An

object is thus historical when it exists in a traceable “chain of development,” that is, when an

object is contiguous with a past referent. Riegl’s language––“[e]verything that has been and is no

longer”––foreshadows both Nora’s “visible signs of what has been” and Roland Barthes’s

famous ontological description of photography as “That-has-been,” stressing the contiguity of a

photograph with a real moment in the past.45 Placing Riegl’s notion of what is historical in

conversation with Peirce’s and Barthes’s notions of indexicality creates a means to think about

the way in which monuments and photography mediate history and memory.

18

43 Nora, 13.

44 Riegl, 21.

45 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 77. On the temporal relationship of monuments and photography: “Earlier societies managed so that memory, the substitute for life, was eternal and that at least the thing which spoke Death should itself be immortal: this was the Monument. But by making the (mortal) Photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of ‘what has been,’ modern society has renounced the Monument. A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography” (93).

For Charles Sanders Peirce, an index is a sign physically connected to its referent, like a

footprint, even when this connection is mediated by a material like photography.46 However,

Peirce’s index not only points to its referent but also to its beholder:

[An index is] a sign, or representation, which refers to its object not so much because of any similarity or analogy with it, nor because it is associated with general characters which that object happens to possess, as because it is in dynamical (including spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with the senses or memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign, on the other hand.47

The photographic index references the past moment when the photograph was taken, but it is

also contingent upon the psychological associations of the viewer––as Barthes wrote, “I am the

reference of every photograph.”48 In other words, the meaning of a photograph is anchored to the

time and place it depicts, but its meaning still shifts according to the varying knowledge and

associations of its viewer. In this way “the most significant indexical power of the photograph

may . . . lie not in the relation between the photograph and its subject but in the relation between

the photograph and its beholder.”49 Shifting the indexical power of a photograph away from

relying solely on the “phenomenological guarantee” of a prior reality contiguous with its

representation creates room to account for the complexity of relations among present objects,

referenced history, and the viewer’s subjective perceptions.50

19

46 Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs” (c. 1897-1910), in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 106.

47 Ibid., 107.

48 Barthes, 84.

49 Margaret Olin, “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification,” Representations 80 (Autumn 2002): 114-115.

50 Sabine T. Kriebel, “Theories of Photography: A Short History,” in Photography Theory (The Art Seminar), ed. James Elkins (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 30.

Photographic indexicality thus mediates temporal relationships between the past and

present and between an image and its viewer. Recalling Nora’s lieux de mémoire, indexicality

allows “[o]bjectivity and subjectivity, artist and viewer [to coexist] in the work.”51 Here we also

return to Riegl’s typology of intentional monuments, embodying the maker’s intention to

reference a historical moment, on the one hand, and unintentional monuments, eliciting

subjective and emotional responses from the viewer in the present, on the other. As with

photographic indexicality, the characteristics and values of monuments mingle within the same

object, image, or site, with past moments and intentions perceived through the lens of the

present. In the same way that a monument’s meaning can shift with the loss of historical context

and changing artistic values––an era’s Kunstwollen––a photograph’s meaning can also become

unmoored from its historical referent. In both cases, meaning is dependent upon viewers’

knowledge and associations. Monuments and photographs are always diachronic representations,

even when their referents have been abstracted in the loss of historical context and the

subjectivity of perception.

––

Bunker 599 occupies a place between intentional and unintentional monuments in

exemplifying aspects of historical value, age-value, and artistic value. Constructing an

intentional monument from a previously unintentional one is an effort to rescue historical

knowledge from obscurity and to repurpose an obsolete military landscape for present use

through a strategy of intervention rather than preservation. In his vision for Bunker 599, architect

20

51 Gubser, 158.

Ronald Rietveld describes his deliberate choice to appropriate the most familiar and visible

indicator of historical value in the New Dutch Waterline:

For the general public, the NDW is an abstract concept. Most people know the fortresses and the concrete works act as indicators of a military past. The exact story and the sense of the ingenious military system is unknown to the layman. The beauty of the more than 700 concrete works is the fact that they are visible from many locations in the contemporary landscape and that they are referring to a military defensive system. Within the “invisible” landscape of the NDW it is precisely the many points in the main resistance strip which depict the military system for the layman. The mysterious qualities of these indestructible bunkers in the rapidly changing landscape is a very important quality. The NDW is still an open and fairly intact landscape and some of the many exciting military objects should adopt a contemporary function. Only then is the future value of the Waterline guaranteed. The cultural heritage is valuable and should continue to be an important part of history but it is no more or less than a starting point for a new future. This calls for intelligent design in strategically chosen locations in the NDW. Bunker 599 is one example.52

In Rietveld’s description, only through intervening in the aging landscape to introduce

contemporary artistic value is historical value safeguarded for the future. Historical structures

like the pillboxes have the potential to memorialize history, but this function is only valuable if

these fragments from the past continue to be functional and resonate in the present and, thus,

remain meaningful in looking toward the future.

The conceptual intentions behind Bunker 599 center on visibility: it is through cutting

opening the pillbox to expose its interior that the original structure, the former military landscape

in which it is situated, and the history that both represent are made publicly accessible and

visible––hence, knowable. It is an eminently photographable tourist site; the vertical cut and

straight boardwalk leading through Bunker 599 form clear vantage points with dramatic

perspectives awaiting the tourist’s and architectural photographer’s cameras alike. Photographing

21

52 Rietveld, 30.

Bunker 599 functions as a means to photograph the past in the present, to simultaneously

document a personal visit to the site and memorialize its national history and significance.

Rietveld Landscape’s choice to appropriate a historical structure and transform it into an

intentional monument does more than reference and redeem history symbolically. It reveals faith

in the structure’s indexicality. Bunker 599 is intended to place visitors in a direct and tangible

relationship to the past through the appropriation of the original structure’s historical and age-

values in a new aesthetic form embodying postmodern artistic values. The structure’s

indexicality does not seem to be undermined but reinforced by the repetition of its form. It is like

the other seven hundred pillboxes on the New Dutch Waterline, yet this one is made special. It is

Bunker 599, chosen to represent all the others like it, to reveal its humble utility yet to be

exemplary, to cut through the opacity of history and let it mix transparently with the present. In

this diachronic site, visitors may touch and photograph a moment out of time.

22

Bunker  599,  Rietveld  Landscape/Atelier  de  Lyon,  New  Dutch  Waterline,  Culemborg,  The  Netherlands,  2010

23

Bunker  599,  Rietveld  Landscape/Atelier  de  Lyon,  

New  Dutch  Waterline,  Culemborg,  The  Netherlands,  

2010

24

Bunker  599,  Rietveld  Landscape/Atelier  de  Lyon,  New  Dutch  Waterline,  Culemborg,  The  Netherlands,  2010

25

Gordon  Matta-­‐Clark,  Splitting,  1973

26

Rachel  Whiteread,  Judenplatz  Holocaust  Memorial,  Vienna,  Austria,  2000

27

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Corradi, Mara. “Bunker 599: from architecture to monument.” Floornature. October 3, 2011. http://www.floornature.com/projects-learning/project-bunker-599-from-architecture-to-monument-6586/.

Gubser, Michael. Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. Hollandse Waterlineie Laat Je Verrassen. “About the New Dutch Waterline.” http://www.hollandsewaterlinie.nl/pages/english-information.aspx.

Huyssen, Andreas. “Monuments and Holocaust Memory in a Media Age.” In Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, 249-260. New York and London: Routledge, 1995.

Knuijt, Martin. “Sharp as a Knife: A concept for the Dutch Waterline.” Small Scale Interventions, Topos 79 (2012): 36–41.

Kriebel, Sabine T. “Theories of Photography: A Short History.” In Photography Theory (The Art Seminar), 3–49. Edited by James Elkins. New York and London: Routledge, 2007.

Li, Kimberly. “Bunker 599 by Rietveld Landscape + Atelier de Lyon.” GBlog. July 26, 2012. http://blog.gessato.com/2012/07/26/bunker-599-by-rietveld-landscape-atelier-de-lyon/.

Living Picture Film. Bunker 599, 2010. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/50229102.

Michaels, Walter Benn. “Photographs and Fossils.” In Photography Theory (The Art Seminar), 431–450. Edited by James Elkins. New York and London: Routledge, 2007.

Nelson, Robert S., and Margaret Olin (eds.), Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Nora, Pierre. “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Translated by Marc Roudebush. Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24.

Olin, Margaret. “The Historian’s Performance.” In Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, 171–187. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

28

–––. “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification.” Representations 80 (Autumn 2002): 114-115.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs” (c. 1897-1910). In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, 98–119. Edited by Justus Buchler. New York: Dover, 1955.

RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances]. “Bunker 599.” http://www.raaaf.nl/en/projects/7_bunker_599.

Riegl, Alois. “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin.” Trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo. Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 21-51.

Rietveld, Ronald. “Bunker 599: The Netherlands: military landscape made publically accessible.” Building with Landscape, Topos 74 (2011): 29–31.

Young, James E. “Memory, Countermemory, and the End of the Monument: Horst Hoheisel, Micha Ullman, Rachel Whiteread, and Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock.” In At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, 90-119. Yale Univ. Press, 2000.

–––. “The Countermonument: Memory against Itself in Germany.” In The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, 27–48. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993.

29