| Like
all memorials, they have been created not for the departed but for
the living. By preserving the memory of the victims in our consciousness,
these memorials help to keep them alive. For it is only with the loss
of memory that someone or something truly dies. The Czech writer Milan
Kundera equates memory with the preservation of life: “Forgetting…
is the great private problem of man; death as a loss of self. But
what of this self? It is the sum of everything we remember. Thus what
terrifies us about death is not the loss of the future but the loss
of past. Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life.1
A second function of the memorial is that of warning. This function
is most apparent in the form of war memorials. Maya Lin’s Washington,
D.C. Vietnam War Memorial is as much an admonition of war as it is
a place of mourning and remembrance. |
| As
Susan Sontag has noted, “disease is regularly described as invading
he society, and efforts to reduce mortality from a given disease are
called a fight, a struggle, a war.”2 And thus, the victims of AIDS
can be seen as the victims of a gruesome international war. Like the
war memorial, Pardo’s still lifes are also a deadly serious warning.
Safe sex is our only alternative, our only defense in the battle against
AIDS. But even more importantly, Pardo warns us against the human
tendency to judge its victims, to equate them with the evil which
has assaulted them. Gerard A. Goodrow 1.Milan Kundera, The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Viking Penguin, 1981) pp. 234-235.
2.Susan Sontag, AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1989) p.10. |
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