Four Freedoms Park lies at the southernmost tip of Roosevelt Island, atop one of New York’s most spectacular landfills. Though Louis Kahn designed the memorial—to Franklin Delano Roosevelt—in 1972, his plans were shelved after his untimely death two years later, coinciding with the city’s financial crisis. That may have been for the best. When the project was first presented to the public, art critic Thomas B.
Hess ominously intoned that its “brutal, centralized force” evoked “the dark magical omnipresence of the government and the demigods who command it and us.” Time passed, the bureaucratic penumbra receded, and in the 2000s a group of private patrons decided to finish the job.
When Four Freedoms finally opened in 2012, Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman described the park as “monumental triumph for New York” and its “new spiritual heart.” I can’t say I’ve ever seen what Kimmelman saw. While Kahn had a genius for manipulating brick and concrete into austere, yet welcoming spaces, the roofless inner precinct of the memorial (to say nothing of the attenuated landscape by Harriet Pattison that precedes it) exudes none of the magic of his best work. Hess was paranoid, but his reservations were valid. The granite really does feel cold and authoritarian, and the monumental stair that initiates the circulatory path is downright hostile to those who, as Roosevelt himself once did, require the aid of a wheelchair.
The park’s name commemorates FDR’s famous 1941 congressional address, which advocated for the universality of a particularly American conception of freedom: of speech, of religion, from want, and from fear. Roosevelt used this address to justify America’s entry into World War II, but the mass incarceration of 125,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were US citizens, scarcely a year later, evinces how limited those freedoms could be.
Heir to this checkered legacy is the inaugural project from the Art x Freedom program, which pledges $250,000 annually to commission public art that interrogates “issues of social justice and freedom.” This fall, as part of his piece Camouflage, Ai Weiwei draped a tent of military netting over Kahn’s sepulchral space. The shroud sported a remixed camo pattern—pixelated feline silhouettes, in a nod to the island’s history as a cat refuge—but the gesture was too subtle to defuse the pattern of its overwhelmingly militaristic associations. The same could be said about the Ukrainian proverb rendered in pink neon and ribbons, onto which visitors were invited to write their own interpretations of freedom. The overall effect, both close-up and from the considerable distance from which most of the public viewed the work (and from which the park has the greatest, and still unrealized, potential as a site for public art) was less sculpture than haphazard mobile command station.
If Ai intended for Camouflage to remind the General Assembly gathered at the United Nations Headquarters that unjust wars ought not be fought in the name of freedom, the message was garbled from the start. Instead, the installation appeared to underline how remote the dream of international peacekeeping has become, and within weeks of its opening, the unrelenting East River winds had torn Camouflage’s fragile canopy to shreds.