Tadashi Kawamata’s outdoor installation at Documenta 8, with its stylized wooden scaffolding built in and around the bombed-out ruins of a Kassel church, made an impressive and poignant war monument. Its splintered boards and unsteady, ramshackle appearance recaptured a sense of one single, terrible moment of collapse under Allied bombing. The piece became a pathway back to that 45-year-old experience, underscoring the lingering impress of the war and its physical and emotional devastation. It took advantage of its own access to 20th-century history and to one of the sites of that history’s