Artist turns bus into a truly moving memorial
During the next nine months, you may see an unusual MBTA bus traveling in and around Boston. It's basically the yellow color of a school bus, but it has neatly printed words and numbers all over it. The words say things about unnamed people such as "She was just a little girl," "He always brought home stray animals," or "She was going to law school." Below each of these descriptions is a pair of dates printed smaller and in white: 1986-1998, 1987-2005, and so on.
At first, you could mistake the writing on the bus for a novel advertising campaign. But it shouldn't take long to figure out that the words and dates refer to people who have died young. In fact, the bus is a rolling memorial to children and teenagers who were victims of violence in Boston between 1980 and 2005.
It's a form of public art, too. Designed by Thomas Starr, an associate professor of graphic design at Northeastern University, in association with the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, it is what's known in the contemporary art world as an "intervention": a work that projects artistic provocations into public situations in order to alter, subvert, or disrupt the normal social fabric. Titled "Remembering Boston's Children 1980-2005," the bus is a wake-up call urging people to become more aware of and perhaps try to do something about a terrible social problem.
In recent years, the creation of memorials has become a big business in America. The Holocaust, World War II, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the AIDS pandemic, and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- these and many other human catastrophes great and small have prompted the construction of all kinds of memorials. The run of memorial building has engendered much thought and debate about what one ought to look like and how it should function.
In our time, the most influential model has been Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Lin's solution to the memorial problem was to avoid visual imagery. Just the names of the dead etched into long, wedge-shaped walls of black stone set into a wide grassy field was enough. Bypassing overt politics and ideology, it gave visitors the physical and mental space to meditate, remember, and grieve, each in his or her own way.
Starr's memorial is similarly abstract and seemingly nonideological. Instead of listing names, it uses words describing victims taken from questionnaires answered by their friends, classmates, and relatives. Each sentence evokes a person who was full of life and potential, and each set of dates connotes the abbreviation of that promising life. So the words in black and the dates in white create a duality of life and death, and the rhythmic repetition of the words and dates has a poetic, elegiac effect.
The big difference between Starr's memorial and Lin's is in its relationship to public space. Lin's structure comes out of relatively recent developments on modern sculpture -- i.e. Minimalism -- but it also belongs to a much older tradition of cemetery sculpture. Built on nationally hallowed ground, it is in a place apart from the madding crowd. Starr's memorial is designed to plunge into the heart of the city's busy civic and commercial life. Its address to the public is active, like advertising and propaganda.
The absence of imagery in Starr's memorial is worth pondering further. Traditionally, symbolic imagery has been central to the memorial. But images are tricky. They can be more vivid than mere words, and partly because of that it's hard to create images that will be universally inoffensive or that won't eventually look silly or tacky.
Words are safer, easier to control. In a world that prejudicially stereotypes people on the basis of what they look like, words may more effectively represent a person's essential humanity . But they can be easy to overlook, too. How the words on Starr's bus will affect people over time in places where all kinds of other signs compete for attention is hard to say. Perhaps by being so low-key, they will seep into Boston's collective consciousness more easily than aggressively angry or mournful imagery would.
The problem with images relates as well to the politicization of the memorial. Once, memorials symbolized values shared by whole communities. As popular as memorials have become, in today's pluralistic world they more often represent different groups with divergent interests, and it has become difficult to build a permanent memorial on public land without a lot of contentious debate about who is to be represented and how. Starr's mobile memorial probably got done because it has no representational imagery to offend anyone, it was not meant to be permanent, and it was relatively inexpensive. (A National Endowment for the Arts grant funded the project.)
The memorial's prevalence as a public art form is fairly recent. In the 1960s, public plazas typically were graced by large-scale geometric sculptures, optimistic monuments to Modernist ingenuity. In the '70s and '80s, artists often designed parks and gardens, using art to try to reconcile nature and culture.
Today's memorial building might be just another contemporary fad -- part of the identity politics movement. But the memorial's current popularity may also signify some deeper sense of collectively felt loss. In our frantically cheerful, materially blessed land there is an awful lot to feel sad about, and the grief just keeps piling up.
With its topical, implicitly liberal politics and elegantly jazzy design, Starr's bus is ideologically and stylistically trendy. It is not a great or very original work of art. Followers of contemporary art will recognize its debt to artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer , who have used billboards, public video screens, and matchbook covers as sites for their socially provocative works. But if you pause to think about the reality that Starr's work represents, it delivers a considerable emotional punch. Here's hoping it makes a difference.
Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com. 
