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We all saw the young men gather round the memorial to Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville in August They came to psych themselves up for a fight, so much so that one of their fascist ilk mowed down counter-protesters with his car, killing one and injuring nineteen others.
Yes, the monuments must go. Whoever says the monuments should remain for whatever reason should celebrate them according- ly, and be seen doing so. Otherwise, such advocates disrespect the monuments, which only until recently were abandoned to the task of remembering—as in dis- torting—history.
Above all, siting Confederate monuments is how we value them. People spoke out over a hundred years ago when sponsors were scouting for locations to install monuments, insisting that they be placed in very prominent places in town and objecting to potential locations like sleepy graveyards.
Now people are vocal in saying that these monuments should be removed from our public spaces—because they are no longer at the center of our civic consciousness—and instead retired to cemeteries as artifacts of a dead culture. This sculpture reflects on the history of capital punishment in the United States by layering and structurally con- densing six different historical forms of gallows, representing seven different exe- cutions.
One of these wooden, abstracted replicas refers to the hanging of thirty- eight Dakota Indian men on December 26, The mass execution, presumably the largest in American history, took place in Mankato, Minnesota, and is still a deeply mourned event in the memory of the Dakota Indians.
With reference to this horrific episode deeply rooted in their historical consciousness, representa- tives of the Dakotas and other Native Americans protested vehemently against the sculpture both on site and online. They did not see a work of art but rather a taunting monument. How could one erect such sculpture in a place close to the historical execution site without making an explicit reference to the massacre? How could this work not then be a memorial?
How could the artist and the muse- um deal with their history in this way? Why did they not ask the referenced com- munities what they thought about it in advance? The fact that Scaffold had already been shown at Documenta 13 in Kassel in and at other European venues, where it did not invite political misunderstanding or cause a stir, did not influence the protesters. Neither did the question about the status of art as a medium of rep- resentation, which should not be confused with reality, come up.
Nor was the orig- inal intention of the artist considered. Durant—as I know from several conversa- tions with him—had prepared Scaffold with serious historical and archival research and wanted to make a critical contribution to this often-overlooked aspect of American history: execution by hanging. In my opinion, the outcome of the conflict is both significant and frightening in its implications for the current debate on identity politics and cultural appropria- tion.
Durant soon realized that there was no way out of the deplorable situation and ultimately donated his work of art to the representatives of the Dakota Indians so that they could proceed with it according to their own wishes. One of the original plans was to burn it; another was to bury it. According to the press, the latter hap- pened in mid-September , but no one knows for sure, not even the artist, as Durant told me.
Olga Viso, executive director of the Walker Art Center, who had come under intense political pressure because of the purchase of the sculp- ture, stepped down a few months later. It is not clear whether there is a direct link to the Scaffold case, but it may well have played an important role. For myself as an art historian very interested in political iconography, the fundamental question is, What is artistic freedom today?
And what is its future? Sam Durant. Photograph by Rosa Maria Ruehling. And what about the art critic? Why not defend the space of liberty, including for art and historical monuments now in danger of being dismantled in Charlottesville Confederate monuments or New York the Columbus and Theodore Roosevelt statues? In which century do we live? Is it possible to correct history and art histo- ry by making contested works invisible, removing them from view or otherwise dis- posing of them?
And why must art serve as a demonstration-object for what histo- ry, politics, and education have failed to address, explain, and clarify? To whom does history belong, and is it divisible into identitarian fragments? It is without question right to have discussions about repressed themes of history, the inequitable treatment of parts of society, and the domination of certain ideologies.
But art is exactly the place where this can happen. Indeed, in the Scaffold case this is what happened. However, it should not be at the cost of destroying the artwork.
To abandon art as a medium of critical representation and reflection means to arrest its history. And the fact that history might be overcome by being forgotten or simply dismissed in the form of monuments is certainly not the appropriate way forward for an enlightened, democratically formed society that is sovereign and critically aware of its history in all its facets.
With this remark the philosopher made reference to the domi- nance of money as a force shaping social life in his time. Today it is the politics of so-called political censorship that threatens freedom. The freedom of the arts is at stake, or, at least, the freedom to talk about art, or, in the worst case, both. Look at the prototypes for the border wall that President Trump ordered to be erected near San Diego. These could be ironically or seriously regarded as a national landmark that could be dialectically understood as a compensation for the virulent iconoclasm of the present day when other monuments have to be taken down in order to erase their history.
They are often used to glorify the conquerors, to forget the conquered, to postpone recognition of genocide, slav- ery, segregation, sexism, and other atrocities. The question today is whether these iconoclasms signal the beginnings of systemic change or if they will act as a safety valve releasing stress while leaving the status quo in place. We will have to do more than destroy sym- bols.
We need to begin a truth-and-reconciliation process with our past, and that will involve a national reckoning with the foundational catastrophes of our histo- ry—genocide and slavery. South Africa, Rwanda, and Germany have attempted to make their histories visible and unavoidable. The past is woven into these societies through ubiquitous memorials, markers, and museums dedicated to remembering genocide through the education system as well as through anti-racist laws and public policy.
These examples inspired a civil-rights attorney from Montgomery, Alabama, named Bryan Stevenson to launch two remarkable projects that could be the beginnings of our own truth-and-reconciliation process, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which remembers every single lynching in the US, and the Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, which shows how slavery is still with us today.
We face unprecedented challenges as a nation, indeed as a species—cli- mate change, wealth inequality, institutional racism, mass incarceration, endless war, nuclear annihilation—and our history continues to divide us, frustrating the joining-together we so desperately need to deal with these existential issues. The National Memorial and the Legacy Museum have the potential to begin healing within the African-American community and within society as a whole.
As public consciousness grows around the true nature of our history and its effects, as the process of reconciliation and remedy develops, this sort of material may become more acceptable as subject matter in artwork. At the same time, the identity of artists may become less important than the meaning of their work. Durham, NC Photographed by Joshua White. Tehran The next day, Van Turner, Jr. And this is only the beginning. There are other parks that need to be liberated from mediocrity and returned to the people as a unifying asset.
It suggests that public space must both be free d and configured as property, unrestricted and yet binding. These are words forged under duress, one name for which might be monumentality. What remains tacit in the press conference is a set of positive terms for communities of color and systems of racial oppression.
The parks must not just be open to the community but claimed as its property, provided the goal is to undo the spatial and psychic domination of the statues.
Memphis Greenspace filed its incorporation papers in October. Van Turner, Jr. When we mean—or perhaps need—to dis- cuss race in America, we end up discussing monuments instead. The slippage seems understandable. There has been something exhilarating about the sudden prominence of monuments in national headlines over the past year.
With it came a sense that disciplinary expertise might prove clarifying, and even politically powerful. In a number of instances, it has been both. Scholars and art historians firmly related the origins of Confederate monuments in historical waves of white supremacism, and they parsed the rhetoric of the debates from the ideological operations of the statues themselves.
Against the arresting images of statues dragged down, by force or by legal loophole, anxieties over the abstract loss of a leaf in the historical record look feeble and misplaced. And it is callous to privilege the preservation of these statues or the traces-of-there-having-been-statues, even as object lessons, over the security and sanity of black Americans. But if the public arena demands reparative actions—among which I would include a broad spectrum of performances and counter-monuments, from William Pope.
Between and , as Fascism plunged France and Switzerland into a different crisis of national self-representation, Alberto Giacometti toiled over countless miniature figures, most no taller than a centimeter. He anchored each in its own comparatively oversized pedestal, so 2. I am grateful to Kris Cohen for his clarifying discussion of these concepts with me. A Questionnaire on Monuments 45 that it resembled a monument viewed at some long distance. The project was melancholy and compulsive, as well as historically and monographically unassimil- able.
Despite this, it also engaged upheavals of national representation by yielding up the monument as a function of unstable and asymmetrical relations. That engagement passed largely unnoticed, however, and illuminating its insights today requires a similar involu- tion of the contemporary stakes around monumentality.
Such work, by the artist as well as the art historian, may well appear like a pale and politically unsatisfactory echo of action in the public arena. The counter-monument, like the monument, derives its potency from recognition. What it does, it does in private, and often incon- clusively.
Yet long-range problems may demand slow insights as much as swift solu- tions—both Memphis Greenspace and Giacometti, both the action that far out- strips our art-historical questions about statues and the art whose relevance may become clear only when we learn to ask those questions differently. Lydia G. Though they might represent an outdated and even offen- sive worldview, they are difficult to remove from public space—even in progressive cities.
All of these are forms of voting. Embedded in this constant-voting culture is the assumption that all things, people, and phenomena must eventually conform to the law of public opinion with binary options, in this case: Preserve monuments! Tear them down! What about a healing process that moves beyond the binary? That many of the monuments are problematic is beyond debate: They com- monly place racialized colonial triumph at the center of public space. They can embody power and often dominance, through both represented personages and symbols and their spatial manspreading.
But when we oversimplify these intricately crafted lumps of bronze as if they were no different from an offensive logo flash- ing onto a screen whose pixels could simply be turned off, we miss the chance to repurpose their specific histories as artworks. We could be speaking the language of figurative sculpture and molten metal. Roosevelt looks virile, his barrel chest puffed out as he leans back atop his horse. The grouping lays out a perfectly clear message.
Fraser created two other works that will provide inspiration for our purposes: the slumped form of a defeated Indian riding a sorry- looking horse called End of the Trail , which is one of the most iconic and frequently reproduced artworks of the American West, and the Indian-head nickel also called the Buffalo nickel , which bears a composite portrait of Oglala Lakota chief and celebrity-circus performer Iron Tail and Cheyenne chief Two Moons who fought at Little Bighorn.
There are two important clues for us in the Buffalo nickel. And the Indian-head nickel 1. A Questionnaire on Monuments 47 was often hacked to create the famous Hobo nickel, the hand-carved numismatic folk-art form whereby self-trained artists turned Buffalo nickels into drunken Irishmen, skulls, and other designs.
It was an anarchistic collision of art and money, messing with authority by way of laborious craft. The most impor- tant element in both coin and monument is the presence of official US authority. Both coin and monument stand for the full weight of American military force, which is the same force that hunted down and defeated Native Americans.
Coin and monument monumentalize the defeated status of a peo- ple, literally putting it into common circulation and transporting a power dynamic through time into the present day. The present moment is marked by an overt racism reaching into the Oval Office, yet the decade prior saw a quietly progressive shift in the US canon of African American and Native American relations.
Even though the apology contains dis- claimers against legal damage claims unlike the Reagan-era apologies to the Japanese interned during World War II , official apologies are more than mere formalities; they are contractual rituals that announce new behaviors from the top down.
The official apologies would create a logic whereby eventually reparations could be paid. That is why, the more I look at the equestrian statue of Roosevelt, the more I believe that an Apology and Reparations Monument is trapped inside it. How would it look? Figurative public sculpture tends to communicate through gesture. This is true of Roosevelt leaning back in a tense twist on the horse. This is not the pos- ture of humility that would be appropriate if the statue were to be reconfigured to stand for the official US apologies.
Roosevelt could be placed in a furnace and slumped over into a forward bend with head limp as if enacting a humble bow. The warped and stretched heat-induced intervention would also give the sculpture a contemporary flair.
The Indian and African figures to the side could be detached and placed on a separate pedestal directly facing Roosevelt as they symbolically receive the apolo- gy.
The regrouping intervention should be left in a rough state, the recycling process visible. When the reparations begin, the figures could be given new life entirely, melted down into commemorative coins in a ceremony to mark the first round of distribution. I imagine the ceremony as a public bronze pour. A furnace would be set up outside the museum. Monument chunks would go in and liquid bronze would melt into a red-hot crucible before being poured into special tree-diagram molds using the same method as ancient Chinese coins.
This proposal cannot be realized at the present moment, but one day soon it could. Public space requires vision beyond the binary. Many bronzes embody toxic messages from the past, but they should be reshaped rather than removed so that the lessons of the past—and the artistic possibilities of the future—remain intact. Baltimore, Charlottesville, Cape Town, Oxford, Melbourne now mark stages in a rapidly unfolding global phenomenon, conta- gious moments of reckoning with colonial and racialist pasts materialized in bronze and stone.
As has often been noted, in the US many of the offending statues constituted the memory of a mem- ory, erected not at the end of the Civil War but decades later in the era of Jim Crow. This mimetic dimension has been central to historical contestations over public commemorative monuments.
Writing in , Rida derided the idea that stat- 1. As is also the case recently in the US, these solutions have been pursued both by civic or state authorities and by non-state actors. Although the coincidence went unnoticed, just a few weeks after the Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously to remove the infamously contest- ed statue of Robert E.
Nevertheless, despite its centrality to the life of the city, as a remnant of imperial British rule that remained intact long after the foundation of the Irish Free State in , the monument was also the focus of considerable ambivalence. Hence, the response to its destruction in was generally muted.
That the bal- ance of equivocation should shift in spring was not fortuitous. The pillar was dynamited just one month before the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising of , when a band of Republican revolutionaries had challenged the British impe- rial machine, establishing their headquarters in a building directly opposite the ill- fated monument. In this way, both temporality and topography played their roles in what was to be canonized as an iconic spectacle of anti-colonial iconoclasm.
More germane to the contemporary situation in the United States is the fact that this was the moment when, thanks to heightened public consciousness about both history and memory, a long-enduring ambivalence about a highly visible remnant of colonialism could most easily be tipped in favor of removal, even if by unortho- dox and unauthorized means.
When it comes to the fate of monuments, timing is everything, as the cur- rent debates in the US also suggest. But so is the appropriate gesture. If the fate 4. It was set in a particularly sensitive location: fac- ing the royal balcony of the palace of the exiled emperor Haile Selassie, trans- formed by the colonial administration into the headquarters of the Italian gover- nor.
The monument originally consisted of a spiral swirl of fourteen concrete steps, each commemorating another year of Fascist power, from the March on Transformed monument to Fascist victory, , at the former imperial palace, now Addis Ababa University. Rome in onward. This was, in other words, a monument to Italian victory that evoked in quite literal terms the ascendancy of Fascism and its march toward the future, situated opposite the window of appearances in the palace of the vanquished emperor.
Instead, a statue repre- senting the Lion of Judah, symbol of the Ethiopian royal house, was placed on the top- most step. In this way, an ani- conic memorial to Fascist power was transformed into a prop or support, its original function subordinated to the elevation of the imperial insignia. The deceptively simple and elegant gesture resonated deeply with the visual rhetoric of occupation and resistance.
Not only had the palace lions been shot when the Fascists occupied the palace in , but one of the most iconic Transformed monument to Fascist victory. On May 8, , the first anniversary of the founding of the Italian empire, the looted Lion of Judah was installed in Rome next to the Obelisk of Dogali, a monument com- memorating the defeat of an Italian expeditionary force of five hundred by the Ethiopian army in erected in the Piazza dei Cinquecento, named after the five hundred fallen Italians.
One year later, the Lion of Judah became the focus of an anti-colonial protest in Rome, when a young Ethiopian, Zerai Deress, attacked 5. Others included a statue of the emperor Menelik II, whose army had inflicted a major defeat on an Italian colonial expedition at Adwa in northern Ethiopia in A Questionnaire on Monuments 53 Italian officials who attempted to prevent him from praying at the monument.
The gesture also epitomized the colo- nial violence reified in the original monument and its chosen location, underlined by the addition of the small-scale imperial lion in place of the more famous and monumental freestanding Lion of Judah sculpture, which remained in Italian captivity until it was returned to Addis Ababa in However, the addition of the lion also indexed the absorption of these histories into a greater whole: A memorial of colonial oppression was now subordi- nated to the restoration of the royal house of Transformed monument to Fascist victory.
Ethiopia and the final defeat of an Italian enemy that had menaced Ethiopia persistently since the nineteenth century. On the other hand, it is a racist film and therefore absolute- 6. See Robert S. Robert S. But its total prohibi- tion could be seen as regrettable from the point of view of the sec- ondary, but potentially worthier, domain of the cinema. Both approaches are worth recalling at a moment when debates about the fates of contentious memorials are consistently polarized between the desire to remove the offending artifact on the one hand and, on the other, accusations that such occlusions attempt to erase, obscure, rewrite, or sanitize uncomfortable historical truths.
In fact, such a solution was reportedly proposed by Charlottesville mayor Mark Signer when he was first petitioned to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee in spring Guy Debord and Gil W. Rather, they represent markers—per- haps one should say combatants—in ongoing culture wars over how history should be remembered and what historical figures are worthy of veneration. Mostly, they reflect who has had the power to shape public memory. There is nothing unusual about recent debates in the United States over the fate of such artifacts.
Since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the dismantling of public monuments has happened with increas- ing frequency. Many Americans applauded when Muscovites toppled the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, a founder of the Soviet secret police, Ukrainians took down statues of Lenin and Stalin, and Hungary removed communist-era statues to an open-air museum outside of Budapest. Other examples have nothing to do with the end of the Cold War.
Who can forget the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein by American troops in ? Throughout the world, as regimes change, so do monuments.
The powerful resistance to removing Confederate statues might make us wonder how far change in our own racial regime has progressed since the civil-rights era—or the Civil War. But one can demand basic accuracy, and many of our own pub- lic monuments fail this test. In , W. Public monuments tell us more about the moment of their creation than about the history they commemorate. Most of those honoring the Confederacy were erected between the s and the s.
It is not a coincidence that these were the years when a new system of white supremacy, grounded in segregation, the disfranchisement of black voters, and widespread lynching, took hold in the South. The erasure of slavery from the story of the Civil War and a portrait of Reconstruction as an era of misgovernment caused by granting black men the right to vote were part of the intellectual legitimation of this system.
Nostalgia for the Confederacy has always served the needs of the present. The flying of the Confederate flag over public buildings in the South only became widespread in the s, not because of a sudden wave of historical consciousness but as a direct message to the developing civil-rights movement about where power resided in the segregated South.
The neo-Nazis and white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville last year to protest the possible removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee had no doubt as to what it symbolized. It was not simply competent generalship. In my view, there is a line, no doubt difficult to define with precision, that separates monuments so offensive that there should be no place for them in the public square and those that might remain as reminders of history.
The Battle of Liberty Place monument taken down not long ago and the numerous statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest a major slave trader, a commander of Confederate troops who massacred black soldiers after they surrendered, and a founder of the Ku Klux Klan are on the wrong side of the line. But more important is diversifying the public presentation of history.
Some progress has been made of late. A statue admittedly not easy to locate of Denmark Vesey, who plotted a slave insurrection, was erected in Charleston. The National Park Service has inserted discussions of slavery into its Civil War sites, including Gettysburg, where, for years, visitors could learn the details of the battle but not what the sol- ders were fighting about.
A memorial to the thousands of Southern lynching vic- tims has recently been unveiled in Alabama. But where are the statues of the black leaders of Reconstruction, the white Southerners who remained loyal to the Union, or anti-lynching crusaders? The problem today is not simply the exis- tence of monuments to slaveholders and Confederate generals, but that the pub- lic presentation of history in the South is entirely one-dimensional. Ironically, the American public seems more comfortable commemorating the civil-rights movement than the struggle to abolish slavery.
Civil-rights tourism is big business. Some of these museums and monuments offer a sanitized account of the movement and the white response; others are remarkably candid. Birmingham, Alabama, commissioned a series of sculptures commemorating events in the city in , including a dramatic depiction of snarling dogs, giving the visitor a vivid sense of what the demonstrators faced.
Here is a model of sober commemo- ration, coupled with a sense of how deep was the resistance to change, that might well be emulated elsewhere. I would like to recast these questions in relation to American imperialism and the Cold War, focusing on US-Cuba relations. Inaccurate taxonomic studies of the Cuban population were incorporated into US- government records, and racist caricatures of Cubans festooned American maga- zines during this period, suggesting that the US cast itself as the great white savior of the darker, less competent people to justify its assertion of control over Cuba.
Monuments from that time also played an important role in enforcing paternalis- tic views of Cuba. In the postrevolutionary era, the lines of power have been redrawn in the service of anti-imperialist polemics that manifest themselves in skir- mishes involving defacement, adaptation, and additive counterpoints.
By , Cuba had been subjected to three US-military occupations. In the- ory, the US presence guaranteed Cuban independence from foreign control by others, but in practice it protected US interests on the island. Although the cause of the explosion was unclear, American journalists of the era argued that the Spaniards had planted a mine, whipping up public support for sending American troops to the island.
It was not until the s that an investigation determined that the explosion had probably been an accident. Nonetheless, the tale of Spanish aggression and American sacrifice bound Cuba and the US togeth- er by means of a shared enemy, deflecting attention from the opportunistic goals of American intervention. The monument was commissioned by the Cuban president in and erected in At the base of the twin columns are two female statues that repre- sent the US as a maternal figure guiding Cuba, a younger woman, to indepen- dence.
Atop the columns was a large bronze eagle facing north, signifying that the US would fly home once it helped Cuba break away from Spain. Not surprisingly, after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in , when anti- American sentiment ran high, the monument was attacked by a revolutionary mob.
The eagle was confiscated and the new Cuban government added an antago- nistic inscription that revised the history of the explosion: To the victims of the Maine who were sacrificed by imperialist voracity and the desire to gain control of the island of Cuba. For a while, a rumor circulated that Pablo Picasso was going to send a dove to replace it, but the sculpture never arrived. At the platform he stands holding a child in one arm and pointing with the other at the US embassy.
Critics of the government joke that he is showing Cubans where to go if they want to leave the country. In , a group of exiles secretly produced a plaster replica of the bronze statue and tried to install it on the pedestal. It was finally installed in Central Park in Eusebio Leal, historian of the city of Havana and director of the restoration of its historic center, had mentioned on a visit to New York some years before that he would love to see the statue in Havana, and Block took it upon herself to make it happen.
Cuban exiles and Cuban-American artists who had for years complained that Block excluded them from her vision of Cuban art because of her singular focus on work made on the island saw this costly venture as an obsequious embrace of an authoritarian state that looks askance at its diaspora.
Block did not respond publicly to the criticisms of her venture. Yet the sculpture was sent to Cuba this past fall, and is now installed in the 13th of March Plaza in front of the Museum of the Revolution. The location of the sculp- ture is not coincidental. The plaza commemorates an attempted coup in by young revolutionaries, and some years later it became the site where Fidel Castro declared the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution. The Cuban government orchestrated a positioning of the statue that both supports its historical narrative and attracts tourists.
Perhaps unsur- prisingly, both are white women who did NOT live in Philadelphia and were mar- tyred. This paucity of public acknowledgement of the contributions of women endures in a city in which Marion Anderson grew up; Lucretia Mott and Alice Paul cut their political teeth; Harriet Forten Purvis and her two sisters, Margaretta Forten and Sarah Louise Forten, blazed powerful activism inside and outside of the organization they co-founded, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society; and Charlene Arcila founded the Philadelphia Trans Health Conference, which has become the largest transgender-specific conference in the United States.
The anecdotal explanation of why there are so few monuments to women in the United States is that women did not, in the past, have political power.
That asser- tion belies the fact that white women were critically important to the proliferation of monuments in the US, particularly those that celebrated the Confederacy. In fact, many white women exerted a great deal of their political power to erect monuments that excluded white women like themselves, women of color, immigrant women, transwomen, people of color in general, queer people, poor people. What these exclusions demonstrate, it seems to me, is that the public monu- ment does not simply reflect white-settler patriarchal power; the public monument exists in order to assert, sustain, and maintain that power.
They assign a figure, a gen- der, a race and a class as a political tactic to make claims, to usurp control, to dis- possess land, to ward off historical narratives that could, would, and do tell com- plex stories about how a nation is formed, how a city is founded, how technologies 1. Black women have also played an outsized role in preserving and protecting history, though their contributions are rarely recognized in statues, plaques, historical accounts, or named archives.
Here I want to suggest we intentionally widen the distinction between monuments that are purely honorific and monuments that are part of a larger project of historic preservation in which a his- toric site, home, natural formation is designated as a monument in order to preserve and protect it from subsequent ownership, destruction or development. A Questionnaire on Monuments 67 are invented. Monuments operate materially, narratively, and iteratively. They are a mechanism inside an ongoing power grab.
Monuments and the power they are rallied to secure are both unreasonable and insecure. Their aspirations and claims have always been the site of intense conflict. Confederate monuments are under attack because there is great, passion- ate labor being expended to dismantle the material conditions that reproduce white patriarchal heteronormativity. This labor aligns with efforts in the last half- century to remediate the historic exclusions that are constitutive of the genre of monumentality.
But these objects, as lauded as they might be individually, barely and rarely make it through the intensely conservative and risk-averse mechanisms through which public works are approved, commissioned, and installed. A counter-monu- ment project, no matter how dynamic, will never match the weight and space assumed by those monuments that promulgate the fictions of the white patriarchal nation-state.
As part of a field of material support for these fictions, Confederate monuments must be dismantled, removed, and taken out of civic spaces. In this moment of active and widespread struggle over the place of monu- ments in our civic lives, the most exuberant praxis for me is that of the active trans- formation of the monuments, statues, and pedestals that populate our cities and towns.
In both practice and site, these vocabularies of transformation are the mater- ial for a critical reimagination of public material culture and the relationships between language, sculpture and history. Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee Monument funded by J. Henry Ferguson, commis- sioned by the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore, artist Laura Gardin Fraser, erected in to criti- cism as well as fanfare, removed August 16, Niehaus, dedicated May 6, , removed by the City of Memphis, December 20, Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation.
Photo: Romain Lopez. With each exhibition, he asserts his commitment toward a non-exclusive public. This view seriously underestimates their mobility. A peculiar case of the seesaw fate of a monument is the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great in Berlin. An early marker of the coming reunification, you might say! Today the Hohenzollern Palace is being rebuilt and Frederick rides eastward again, right in the vicinity of a counter-monument by Israeli artist Micha Ullman to the book burnings of on Bebelplatz, an underground library with empty white shelves covered by a glass plate and visible only from aboveground.
Based on a fundamental critique of Nazi monumentalism and a rejection of the tradition of privileging figures on horseback with erect postures and triumphal gestures, the counter-monument promised to empower memory of the Holocaust and the Third Reich. All that remains is a plaque with an inscription and a book publication documenting many of the graffiti. If self-denial of the monument as monument was one strategy, spatial reversal was another.
But could the counter- monument avoid becoming a monument itself, even if it disappeared from view? Did it really challenge the monumental claim of lasting through the ages by simply negating key features of its predecessors? Or do these counter-monuments ulti- mately share in the fate of all monuments as defined by Robert Musil when he said that there is nothing as invisible in urban space as a monument?
At a time when white supremacists are rallying across the nation to glorify the Confederacy and have more than just the ear of the current US president, monuments to the Confederacy in New Orleans, Memphis, Charlottesville, and elsewhere have become embroiled in attempts to remove or even destroy them.
Some have been successful, some not. Public debate has drawn attention to the fact that they were all erected decades after the Civil War in order to support segregation and political nostalgia. They created a belated, heroic image of a lost cause that was anything but heroic and always an offense to the African-American population in the South and indeed to principles of democracy and human rights.
Memphis monuments to Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan, or Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, must have been painful reminders of slavery to those to whom they had not become simply invisible.
But that such feelings have exploded on a broad scale in the current moment is not at all surprising. Even New York, a city without Confederate monuments, joined the debate when Mayor de Blasio created a commission to make recommendations about monuments in the city, none related to the Civil War, but all offensive to parts of the public.
Central and controversial has been a demand to dismantle the Teddy Roosevelt statue in front of the American Museum of Natural History and the Columbus monument on Columbus Circle. The need for a reckoning with American history embodied in these monuments has been publicly acknowledged, and the commission has presented its findings and recommendations.
I agree with those who doubt that dismantling should be a general solution for monuments of a past considered to be offensive not only to present-day sensi- bilities and politics but to any democratic polity based on Enlightenment princi- ples.
Different histories must be recognized, even if their lingering manifestations in the present are odious. And remember: All sides of the political spectrum will have both the desire and the means to destroy monuments.
The recent case of neo-Nazi destruction of many of the famous Stolpersteine in German cities, small brass plaques marking sidewalks in front of buildings where Jews lived before being deported and killed, is a good example.
Assuming that monuments do have some power to keep historical memory alive, every destroyed or removed monument adds to an erasure of history from pub- lic space. But what is the benefit of expanding the historical amnesia already so wide- spread in current digital culture? I would opt for another strategy. A Questionnaire on Monuments 71 Removing them to a museum or merely adding a plaque or other explanatory markers is not enough.
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