In Memoriam with Aaron Betsky The age that claims to have turbo-boosted reality with everything from the internet to the mapping of genes has developed a strange new taste for the past. At its most benign, this means a penchant for the styles and forms with which many of us grew up, whether it is the music of the seventies or the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames. On a more profound level, this looking backward leads to the erection of countless memorials. From the proliferation of sites that remind us of those Americans who died in Vietnam and Korea, as well as more and more memorials to ethnic groups such as Japanese-Americans interned during World War II, to the grandest scheme of them all, the proposed Second World War Memorial on Washington's Mall, the solemn reminders of the dead are cropping up all across a landscape increasingly blurred by the speed of our movement through it. Both nostalgia and memorials seem to be symptoms of a sense of loss. What has been lost is not so much something specific, since most of the memorials are not dedicated to recently deceased loved ones, as a sense of time itself. The recovery of history is an important part of an era that some believe has ended it. It might be the only thing that holds together an increasingly diverse and cynical society. And memory the only thing that vouchsafes our reality in a world that is becoming more and more artificial and easy to reproduce. Memorials can, at their best, remind us of the reality of who we are, both as a people and, through empathy (we imagine ourselves in the place of the family and friends of those who died) and their quality as mementi mori (we remember that we, too, will die) of ourselves. The new era in memorials began with the most eloquent of them all, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial dedicated in 1978 in Washington, D.C. Designer Maya Lin used the strategy of abstracing the forms of mastabas, pyramids, pantheons and valhallas. Those grand and ancient structures usually stand on top of the earth as white and unassailable reminders of what is seen to be a heroic and blameless life that in death personifies timeless values. In the Vietnam Memorial, there is only a simple black line etched in the ground. Its presence is that of absence--a gash in the earth--and its power comes from the "mere" listing of the names. History--as in European classical form--is no longer a construct into which we have to be educated. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a fact of loss, an index of deeds done, and a place we could occupy collectively through the recovery of those facts and names. Unfortunately, most memorials do not provide this kind of immediacy and immersion. Many are small markings, statues and/or listings of names that try to update well-worn gestures that have become clichés. The worst of all of them, the current Second World War project, is a travesty of the genre. Its colonnades and axes are reminiscent of nothing so much as the grandiose schemes of Nazi architect Albert Speer. It is a refusal to make a traditional, enclosed and forbidding monument, but also a running away from Lin's dramatic cut into the fabric of civic agreement. It is profoundly banal in a way that makes it possible for both evil and good to come from it, as the associations it evokes already make clear: While it reminds some of us of Nazi Germany, others see associations with Jefferson's designs for the University of Virginia. The best recent memorials have been made by those commemorating AIDS losses. They are frequently simple and small, and often very personal. The best of them is the NAMES Project Quilt. Like my favorite current art, it has the quality of performance. It also draws on what we might call vernacular traditions that remind us of what it takes to truly make a community, while transforming collaborative production into a kind of spontaneous collage. It has the scale of a vast monument and the immediacy of an intimate gesture like a letter or a stitch. Soft and vast, grand and enveloping, its contradictions make the notion of memorial once again a living part of our lives. The writer Richard Rodriguez has argued that the AIDS catastrophe reminded us of that there are limits to how far we can leave our bodies behind as we go searching for the always new. He pointed out that modern science has limits, just as our bodies and our lives do. It took this terrible scourge, inserting itself into our daily lives, to remind us of that fact. Now death, at least for many in the American gay community, has receded back to a more proper horizon. We also mourn the loss of family members who pass closer to their appointed time, of friends cut down by accidents or the cruelty of unpredictable cancers. Death is now more normal again. We watch death occur elsewhere, in other times and places, at the edge. Memorials, as a result, can more readily slip back into their status as boxes of memory that have nothing directly to do with us. Those directly affected by AIDS no longer have a particular prerogative when it comes to memorials. We can only partake in our general need for memory, for models, for a sense of the reality of a world with limits that bring pain and, perhaps, release. What we can offer is the particular contributions we have made to the nature of memorials. If we can make the Quilt and the small, gentle memorials respond to the shrill calls for grandiose tombs with a reminder of how we can each together remember and honor our losses, we will have made a signal contribution to an otherwise amnesiac American culture. Aaron Betsky is Curator of Architecture, Design and Digital Projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His latest books are Architecture Must Burn (Gingko Press, 2000), and Queer Space (William Morrow, 1997). The symposium "panelists'" - Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, Aaron Betsky, Norman Kleeblatt and Dui Seid.