Peter Chesney: Bauwerk T

The ethnography situated in this staged image, Paul's curation, and my viewing of it has to do with the intentionality gap between figures shaping these acts. No participant in the making of Speer's arch seemed all that aware that their work would have the legacy it has. Sometimes I wonder in memory studies about scholars assuming their subjects to have been aware folks in the distant future would remember them. The Nazis aspired to be remembered for millennia, this I do know, but did their workers? Paul and I being contemporaries, and good friends as well, seem like we would have intentions much more approximate to one another, but I cannot quite tell. That is because Paul's end game with this site and this imagery is unclear. The discourse he has helped to initiate regarding this site seems open-ended, generative of a sense of "futurity." He seems equally invested in this structure being allowed to remain or put through erasure. But either way, he has made Speer's plan and half-fulfilled construction more remembered than ever (for I now know about it). What Paul does not anticipate is the array of thoughts which occur to me as I read this image. I think about a myth from the 20th-century U.S. that mob bosses and corporate leaders used to have inconvenient bodies thrown into wet concrete. Thus Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters organizer, might be inside a piling somewhere. Despite the vividness of that myth, we know it not to be true. The cavity left by a body in a load-bearing concrete structure, like a dam or a bridge, would weaken it to the point of failure. Thus this dumping mythology tends to leave Americans blissfully satisfied with leaving questions about disappeared radicals and their ilk forgotten. For Paul to flip this script and make concrete a site for making meaningful memories, instead of another excuse for oblivion, is rather innovative. Concrete can be more than a cover. It communicates as effectively as critic Ruben Gallo has suggested about stadiums in modernist Mexico City.