In “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” Friedrich Nietzche asked, “What is the use to the modern man of this ‘monumental’ contemplation of the past, this preoccupation with the rare and classic?” That was 1874. Today, as monuments across the world are toppled, disgraced, vandalized, and defaced, his question pulses with renewed urgence. Re:monument departs from Nietzsche’s dilemma: What are we to do with our monuments to racism, white supremacy, colonialism, war, patriarchy, and oppressions manifold? How might we interrogate, interrupt, supplement, and refunctionalize the memorials that adorn our public spaces?
Together we will study tactics that empty monuments of their signification; reveal their artifice and incompleteness; animate, dislodge, and estrange them; and contest the disgraced memories they commemorate. And, through the development of monumental interventions over the course of the seven weeks, we will test new approaches of our own.
○ Required◌ Supplemental ● Assignment
1: WarnMonuments are contradictions incarnate. They at once remember a past as the past and warn, as the Latin root monēre suggests, about the future. They both remember and forget—and release us from the burden of remembering. As Pierre Nora writes, “the more memory comes to rest in its exteriorized forms, the less it is experienced internally.” And, in all of their spectacle, they recede into common sense. What strikes one most about monuments,” observes Robert Musil, “is that one doesn’t notice them. There is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments.” How are monuments so sensational and shy? What do they commemorate, and who do they disappear? Which tense do they occupy? What exactly is a monument anyway?
- James E. Young, “The Texture of Memory” (1994), 1–15
- Alexander Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman” (1833), 3–18
- Robert Musil, “Monuments” (1927), 320–323
- Alexander Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman” (1833), 3–18
- Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious” (1942), 107–115
- Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History” (1989), 7–24
- Ted Hyunhak Yoon, Decoding Dictatorial Statues (2019), 8–95
- Site Selection: Identify two monumental sites at which you’d like to intervene: these may be places popular or seldom noticed; they may be in the city’s grand piazza or at the end of the country road; they may be new or decrepit, or altogether forgotten. Conduct preliminary research: what do they enshrine?; when were they constructed?; by whom?; how were they commissioned and funded?; of what are they made?; how are they maintained, if at all?; who are their publics?; what are their social, spatial, political, and historical contexts?
2: VoidIn response to the post-Buchenwald injunction to “never forget” emerged a new way of remembering: the counter-monument. Unlike the statues of old that, according to historian James E. Young, “provide[d] a naturalizing locus for memory, in which a state’s triumphs and martyrs, its ideals and founding myths are cast as naturally true as the landscape in which they stand,” the counter-monument demanded that monumentality itself be interrogated. How can monuments disclose their artifice and incompleteness? How, in other words, can memory be set “against itself”?
- Quentin Stevens et al., “Counter-monuments: the Anti-Monumental and the Dialogic” (2018), 718–736
- Horst Hoheisel, Aschrott Fountain (1985)
- Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, Monument Against Fascism (1986)
- Sol Lewitt, Black Form (1987)
- Christian Boltanski, Missing House (1990)
- Mel Chin, Two Me (2017)
- Theaster Gates, Monument in Waiting (2020)
- Sketch: Introduce three sketches of your intervention. Following the term’s nineteenth-century definition—“an outline or general delineation of anything”—these sketches may be drawings, photographs, maquettes, poems, songs, or any other medium with which you would like to communicate your initial ideas.
3: ContestIn 1982, Gegendenkmal was added to the German tryptic—Mahnmal, monument as warning; Denkmal, monument as reminder; and Ehrenmal, monument as honorific—to identify an emergent species of monument as confrontation. Rather than negating monumentality altogether, these monuments puncture historical amnesia to, as writes Zadie Smith on Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby and Fons Americanus, “show all of it, the unholy mix, the conscious knowledge and the subconscious reaction, the traumatic history and the trauma it has created, the unprocessed and the unprocessable.” How can monuments question other monuments? How might they lay bare memories ruinous and repressed?
- Zadie Smith, “What Do We Want History to Do to Us?” (2020) 1–16
- Agnes Denes, Wheat Field: A Confrontation (1982)
- Chris Burden, The Other Vietnam Memorial (1991)
- Andrea Fraiser, Little Frank and His Carp (2001)
- Fred Wilson and K. Anthony Appiah, “Fragments of a Conversation” (2011), 4–9
4: Prototype
- Develop one sketch into a prototype and present it to the class. Consider its material, social, and theoretical components: what is it made of?; what histories does this material carry with it?; who are your publics?; why is it important?; how will you know it “worked”?; what theoretical ideas does it cite?; by what precedents has it been informed?
5: ReappropriateThe mayor pulls back the canvas on the city’s newest monument, Peace and Prosperity, to an improper sight: a tramp sleeping precariously in the lap of its central figure. The crowd is aghast. The sculptor is aggrieved. The police are summoned. The peace has been disturbed. In Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, Kenneth Gross glimpses “the dream of the moving statue.” How can monuments be made to “move or speak, respond to a gesture, call out, look back at the person looking at it”? Is it possible to bring them to life “as oracle[s], enem[ies], guest[s], lover[s], mocker[s], or monster[s]”?
- Kenneth Gross, “Signs of Life” (1992), pp. 3–14
- Krzysztof Wodiczko, “The Inner Public” (2015), pp. 287–299
- Cildo Miereles, Insertions into Ideological Circuits (1970–75), 181–186
- Robert Filliou, Commemor (1970)
- Dread Scott, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? (1988)
- Michael Rakowitz, paraSite (1998)
- Sean Townley, Gassing the Imperial Throne (2020)
6: Dismantle“Rhodes Must Fall.” Since the bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes was covered with excrement at the University of Cape Town in 2015, “fallists” have toppled, redecorated, and disfigured monuments the world over. This iconoclasm isn’t new; as long monuments have been erected, they have been fell. The Romans even had a ritual for it: damnatio memoriae, which dishonored the “condemned memory” of the emperor by removing or altering his statue after death. What are we to do with our commemorations of the criminal? How do we reckon with “difficult heritages” and “places of pain and shame”?
- Kristina Borhes, “Iconoclasm in the Age of the Anthropocene” (2021), 94–102
- Hans Haacke, And You Were Victorious After All (1988)
- Hiwa K, The Bell Project (2007–2015)
- Jorge Otero-Pailos, Ethics of Dust (2009)
- Pieter De Vos, Sikitiko (2010)
- Danh Võ, We the People (2010–2014)
- Iván Argote, Wild Flowers (2021)
7: Present
- Present your intervention to a panel of artists, critics, and curators.