Immediate Memorials: The Implicit Celebration of Communal Mourning

At first glance they resemble a celebration: large crowds bringing an array of objects, clustering together and exchanging words, thoughts, ­feelings. Widespread and regularly reported, this familiar gathering is a contemporary mourning ritual at sites of sudden death that is expressed in aggregates of flowers, candles, crosses, stuffed animals, photographs of the deceased and personal notes and cards. Variously described as spontaneous or makeshift memorials1 1  - I discuss a different aspect of immediate memorials in Harriet F. Senie, “Mourning in Protest: Spontaneous Memorials and the Sacralization of Public Space,” in Jack Santino, ed., Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 41–49. or shrines, these assemblages reflect a social need to find solace in a shared experience of shock, grief and perhaps anger. As close to the site of sudden death as possible, implicitly they celebrate community in the midst of the chaos of loss—of local victims of roadside accidents or drive-by shootings; of celebrities suddenly gone; or of the larger numbers lost in more public deaths
like 9/11.

Since this practice is predictable, it can no longer be called spontaneous. Rather, its salient characteristic is immediacy. Sudden public deaths rend the social fabric in shocking, tragic ways. They shatter the illusion of safety, destroying expectations of continuity and prompting a pervasive impulse to do something. Describing the array of objects that people leave to mark the place of death as makeshift belittles the poignancy of ­individual contributions as well as the visual and emotional power of the whole. Rarely, if ever, discussed in the context of art, immediate ­memorials reflect inspirations shared by many artists and offer a visual vocabulary appropriated by some in their installations.