From Monuments to Public Art: Peeling Back the Social Architecture of Power

Much has been written about the status of the monument.

The themes of timelessness and universality produced by monuments are self-serving ones that seek to wash the blood from the hands of those who have profited from the violent exploitation of others. Monuments express a narrowly defined identity while suppressing the many unreconciled strivings and wounds of the past. They are riven by a fundamental contradiction between institutionalized memory and the lived and embodied memories of everyday life. They are tools for the restriction of speech and mobility with their semiotics defined in highly enforceable terms. Monuments speak of the political power of sign systems.

Traditional monuments present themselves as symbolic centers from which meaning radiates outwardly from their cores. They insist on their symbology as the authoritative embodiment of collective memory, identity, and history.

Movements such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Time’s Up have demonstrated how untenable this insistence is. They called into question the operation of monuments and their symbolic projection of racism, sexism, colonialism, and countless historical oppressions. A reckoning with monuments in our midst signifies the continuing struggle for full political democracy and social justice. The toppling of monuments attests to this struggle of challenging hegemonic norms.

But removing a monument only separates the outer peel of the social architecture of power. Has the removal of Confederate statues, for example, resulted in less systemic racism in American society? In his essay Monumentality (1944), architect Louis Kahn described monumentality as a disposition of a monument. He defined this disposition as “enigmatic” and possessed of a “spiritual quality inherent in a structure which conveys the feeling of its eternity, that it cannot be added to or changed.” By enigmatic, Kahn was referring to ideology (although he did not recognize the term as such). By spiritual quality, he was referring to the social and political paradigms that delimits the person to critically respond to power (again, he did not recognize this delimitation as such).

Despite that monuments are no longer tenable, the sense of need for them continues. Why is this? Perhaps because the monument continues to be useful in the consolidation of communities, especially in relating to commemorations of an extensive and profound event, such as for 9/11. How then to grapple with the quandary of the continuing need to commemorate in monumental form, despite a monument’s discreditation? Some public monuments have tried to address the dilemma by means of innovative aesthetic strategies.

The celebrated Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial (1993) in Washington, D.C., produces a polysemous field that displaces the hegemonic narrative of wars as heroic and noble. It does so through ideas of embodiment and the displacement of the conventions of war memorials. For example, the work is horizontal, even subterranean, and not vertical. The monument is haptic and not aloof.

The short-lived Teeter Totter Wall (2019) physically linked the cities of El Paso, Texas, to Ciudad Suárez, Mexico, by means of hot pink teeter totters perforating the border wall that separates the two communities. The work plays off ideas of split communities both imagined and real. The power of the wall itself was punctured for all of forty minutes. However, both its existence and removal by authorities spoke truth to power about the wall.

For several decades, an untitled commemorative to Chief Tecumseh consisting of bound-up twigs, twine, and ribbons has been anonymously placed, removed and replaced repeatedly at the foot of the monolithic Brock’s Monument (1856) in Queenstown Heights near Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. Major General Sir Isaac Brock stands atop a mighty limestone column while his ally Chief Tecumseh is omitted from any official acknowledgement. The makeshift character and modest scale of the colloquially titled monument to Chief Tecumseh emotionally swamps Brock’s Monument, speaking truth to power about Canada’s concerning relationship to its First Nations and Indigenous peoples in ways that most Canadians fail to recognize.

Other monuments have involved the idea of transitional or counter-monumental discourses that are self-negating in form, such as the Ashrott Fountain (1985) of Kassel, Germany. Named after its original sponsor, Sigmund Aschrott, a German Jew, the fountain erected in the center of Kassel in 1908 was destroyed by the Nazis in 1939 for its association with Jewishness. An inverted version of the Aschrott Fountain was sunken into the ground near where it once stood. It is all but invisible to the view. All of these examples also point to the indeterminacy of monuments to be fully claimed without contest for all time.

Enter Public Art, a ubiquitous term that includes everything from murals to monuments. It is an umbrella term that carries the cadence of an assumed public good for all. The open-ended definition of Public Art allows it to operate as an instrument for both public policy and private interests. The multitudinous forms that Public Art may take allows it to speak to a pluralized public with its competing and contradictory demands. Unlike a monument, Public Art is presented as a program of variation that epitomizes the freedom of expression. The idea is that Public Art speaks for everyone, regardless of our differences. Occluded is the fact that public space continues to be increasingly policed and diminished. Under such circumstances, programs of Public Art have become de rigueur for civic spatial branding. They operate as a contradiction between an openness in terms of aesthetic forms and closure in terms of its oversight by administrative systems that often coincide with private interests.

Auxiliary terms that extend creative practices in all directions has greatly complicated Public Art as a discourse. Public manifestations involving creative dissent is not common as witnessed in Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and the Umbrella Democracy Movement in Hong Kong. While creative interventions within political movements seldom makes claims to art, they do de-territorialize the boundaries of public art expression as much as public art can take lessons from the creative strategies that such manifestations offer. Today, Public Art also must compete with myriad visually capturing manifestations of architectural, advertising, publicity, and other entertainment forms. All these manifestations not only challenge conventional ideas of the monument but reduce the possibilities for a broader conception of democratic public space by means of the politics of distraction. The society of the spectacle has intensified expanding into the domains of social media platforms. The issue of “spectatorship” has changed according to the increased power of the spectacle.

Recent decades have seen both real and symbolic monuments and walls topple. A globalized world propelled by digital technology has resulted in a horizontalization of the relationship between those who are and are not represented publicly. But this horizontalization is incomplete, leaving out large numbers, of people without basic rights or legal means to respond to power, all their human potential absorbed and erased by the capitalist machine. As expressions of power, monuments have historically functioned to discipline bodies as part of the management of societies for the sake of a few. The question today is whether the demand for a democratization of public systems of representation can accommodate the participation of increasingly audible othered voices. The answer must be yes, for no is to unacceptably continue with the status quo. This should be the aspiration for Public Art, as a spur for the application of the imagination as a progenitor of a greater democrateic space for public speech and dialogue.

Perhaps Public Art is where the shadows cast by Monuments can start to be demarcated as merely shadows. Shadows themselves signify something but they are not “real.” They are not “alive.” It is life itself that possesses the power that the Monument so desperately clings to. It was never alive in the first place. As long as we know this then the Monument really has no power in the end. It is merely a compilation of bronze particles melted to resemble to life. It is an illusion of life, not life itself.