Monumental Amnesia: Reading the Spatial Narratives Written by Contemporary Urban Landscapes
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) 2008
By
Darien Jane Rozentals, BA (Hons) University of Tasmania
Acknowledgements: I thank Doctor Brigitta Olubas for her supervision, as well as my fellow postgraduate students in the School of English for providing an encouraging academic cohort to work with. I thank Doctor Steven Gartside for presenting me with the opportunity to become an associate research fellow for the centre MIRIAD at the Manchester Metropolitan University. I thank Doctor Anna Johnston and Professor Lucy Frost for their confidence in my work and as my academic role models. I thank Beckett Sara Rozentals, Agnes Vogler, Rebecca Dorgelo, Craig Basil Johnson, and my parents John Rozentals and Beverly Brill, for their amazing support. Finally, I would like to thank Nicholas James Hamilton, my travel companion – this thesis was completed with his wonderful support and friendship.
Rozentals i Contents:
Introduction Monuments, Urban Memory and Memory Installations: A Theoretical Introduction 1 Images
Chapter One Architectural Opacity: The Static Dialogues of Officially Sanctioned Monuments 58 Images
Chapter Three Imagined Spaces: Symbolic Monuments and The Collapse Of Spatial Boundaries 121 Images
Chapter Three Transitory Ruins: Everyday Monuments and the Gentrification of Industrial Sites 178 Images
Conclusion Resilient Monuments: Potential Futures for the Built Environment and Memory Installations 238
List of Works Consulted 243
Rozentals ii One of the most interesting cultural phenomena of our day is the way in which memory and temporality have invaded spaces and media that seemed among the most stable and fixed: cities, monuments, architecture, and sculpture… We have come to read cities and buildings as palimpsests of space, monuments as transformable and transitory and sculpture as subject to the vicissitudes of time. — Andreas Huyssen Present Pasts (7)
Rozentals iii Monumental Amnesia: Reading the Spatial Narratives Written by Contemporary Urban Landscapes
This thesis analyses the spatial stories inscribed into urban landscapes by monuments. Differentiating between officially sanctioned, symbolic, and everyday monuments, this thesis theorises the narratological space composed by these objects: static, imagined and transitional, respectively. It argues that monumental sites are spaces of forgetting, rather than remembering, characterised through invisibility, opacity and mystification. Infused with paradox, monuments simultaneously reveal and conceal the histories and urban memories they are expected to commemorate. The discussion then turns to contemporary art, in particular memory installations, as a practice that counters the mystification inherent within urban space, actively exposing alternative pasts and memories.
The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first analyses the contemporary, officially sanctioned monuments of Vilnius, Lithuania that celebrate an ancient nationalism, alongside two neighboring sculpture parks that display retired Soviet icons, with a particular focus on Gintaris Karosas’ sculpture Infotree LNK. The second chapter theorises symbolic monuments, and focuses on the Japanese theme park Tobu World Square as a curiosity cabinet where the contemporary spatial practice, identified by Anthony Giddens, of “disembedding” is performed in miniature. It concludes with a discussion of Susan Norrie’s DVD installation of the park ENOLA. The third chapter examines everyday monuments, focusing on the industrial ruins of Manchester to unravel the archival aspects of these monuments and their gentrification. It closes with a study of Cornelia Parker’s installation Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. Through these urban case studies and accompanying memory installations, the thesis explores how urban monuments disguise certain histories and memories of a city, and how art can reclaim alternative stories and memories from urban amnesia.
Introduction
Monuments, Urban Memory and Memory Installations:
A Theoretical Introduction
There is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments… In a word, monuments
today should do what we all have to do, make more of an effort! Anybody can stand
quietly by the side of the road and allow glances to be bestowed on him; these days
we can demand more of monuments.
Robert Musil Selected Writings (320-2)
On the surface urban landscapes appear to be built through tangible architectures: buildings, monuments, streets, houses, and a collection of other concrete materialities. Despite the illusion that cities are stable, they are dynamic spaces that are also written through the relationship between the built environment and the imagined constructs of history, memory, culture and identity. This complicated dialogue between the tangible and intangible characteristics of urban space, in particular the dialogue between monuments and memory, disrupts the seemingly fixed nature of urban narratives – the spatial stories, interpretations and manifestations of the past that are projected by the built environment. The relationship between the city and interpretations of the recent past has transformed urban and theoretical practices. I recognise that monuments play a contentious role in the composition of the urban fabric, determining how memories are retained and lost across city landscapes. In contemporary Western cultures there has been an explosion of groups, associations and societies bent on preserving the past across the city: monuments, museums and memorials are being built like there is no tomorrow. The boom in archival practices has been accompanied by widespread urban historical amnesia, where memory is intricately tied
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to forgetting, and remembrance is tied to oblivion. As Andreas Huyssen argues, “every act of memory carries with it a dimension of betrayal, forgetting and absence” (4).
Through this thesis I investigate the binary of memory and amnesia, and how it commands and confounds representations of the past in the contemporary city. I focus on the materiality of monuments, the tangible built environment, in order to explore the problematics of urban memory and to speculate upon how urban fabrics transform, determine, and influence how the past is remembered in the city. My work on urban space is directed through the paradox of monuments and memory, with the past being simultaneously inscribed everywhere but also nowhere within the city. While history is being recollected across every surface, façade, and facet of contemporary urban landscapes, at the same time the memory binary sees history suffering from the inevitable fate of becoming invisible. Although monuments are designed and presented as tools to encourage and facilitate a remembrance of the past, they are characterised through forgetting. Once the monument becomes invisible, the memories and histories embodied in these monuments are also lost. In order to question this paradox, that building memorials conquers memories, this thesis turns to another form of visual culture in order to explore the complexities of urban memory: contemporary art in the private space of the gallery, where the role that memory and forgetting play in urban space has also become a concern, forming a bridge between the space of the city and the space of the gallery. In the gallery contemporary artists are responding to the complexities of representing memory in the city through art installations that carry out a form of memory work.
The attention directed by theorists, political and community groups, and artists towards monuments, memory, and visual culture is not a localised curiosity, emblematic of only a handful of cities or countries. It is a global phenomenon. This thesis studies three specific sites, the now independent capital of Vilnius, Lithuania; the miniaturised model village of Tobu World Square,
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Nikko Mountains, Japan; and the post-industrial landscape of Manchester, Britain, to examine urban monumental space. All three sites appear to be energetic in their representations of memories and histories, where the past is represented in fixed objects. Like the lazy and invisible monuments observed by Musil, these sites are also lethargic and infused with forgetting. As I will demonstrate, memories and narratives are being obscured and forgotten in these cities through processes of commemoration. Therefore the divergent monuments that stand within Vilnius,
Tobu World Square and Manchester are characteristic of a global trend where urban amnesia is tied to commemorative space. The monuments that I theorise are expected to perform identity and memory work, but as Musil observes they are actually indolent, invisible, and inactive sites.
This thesis is an interdisciplinary project that draws upon scholarship from art history, memory studies, critical theory, spatial theory and cultural studies. In recent decades, theorists from these divergent fields have taken monuments, the urban landscape, memory, and contemporary art as their focus of research: the paradoxical nature of monuments and memory, and the inscription of history into the urban space have been questioned and contested. I build on this extensive body of work through an investigation of the city and its built architecture that is directed through the lens of urban memory and contemporary visual practices. In doing so, I am able to deliberate on the manner in which memories, histories and identities are either revealed or concealed across the urban fabric of a city, both at the level of the street and within cultural institutions. Through this thesis I call upon the works of memory theorists Andreas Huyssen, James E. Young, Adrian
Forty; spatial theorists Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Mark Crinson, Edward Soja and Steve
Pile; critical theorists Anthony Giddens, Benedict Anderson, and Homi Bhabha; cultural theorist
Tim Edensor; and art historians Lisa Saltzman, Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, to interrogate the complexities and crossovers between the built environment, memory and art.
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In order to theorise the built environment of urban space, I take the broad term ‘monument’ and differentiate it three ways: officially sanctioned monuments, symbolic monuments and everyday monuments. This separation is essential, as it provides a comprehensive and encompassing gaze across the discourse of monuments. It allows me to analyse these monuments in terms of their individual classifications, and facilitates a questioning of monuments that considers the motivations behind their creation, and in terms of the different spatial stories that these monuments write. I argue that each type of monument has a corresponding space and this is the space where narratives of the city are composed. Officially sanctioned monuments are erected by authorising powers to commemorate an ideal interpretation of the past and write static spatial narratives. Symbolic monuments are signifiers and facilitators of cultural identity and write imagined spatial narratives. Everyday monuments are multi-layered sites that literally exhibit the past and write transitory spatial narratives. Throughout this thesis a progression develops from the fixed space written by intentionally designed monuments, through the ways that symbolic sites facilitate identity in the imaginary space of emblematic objects, to the possibility that the transitory space of the everyday provides a form of monumentality that presents memory and identity in a unique fashion, where the past is not ultimately tied to invisibility and amnesia.
Contemporary theorists of monuments and memory view monumental space as unable to perform memory work. Through this thesis I will argue that the memories and pasts concealed within urban space are brought to the surface and revealed through a specific genre of contemporary art.
Building on the recent scholarship presented by Andreas Huyssen, Mark Crinson and Lisa
Saltzman, I identify a contemporary form of art that I categorise as ‘memory installations.’ These memory installations perform memory work, counteracting and compensating for the inability of traditional memorial space to do so. This is not to make the claim that monuments are inherently commemorative failures, as they do perform a range of functions within urban space; rather, urban remembrance is obscured by the amnesia that is tied to commemorative sites. I will
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demonstrate that the triggering of memories and the recollections of the past is more encompassing and effective when it transpires in the space of the gallery rather than the space of the city, when the memory work is detached from the agendas of political powers. In order to theorise the different forms of monumental architecture in Lithuania, Japan and Britain I analyse contemporary installations alongside the urban spaces in question. By concluding each chapter with a deliberation on a relevant memory installation also allows me to expand on and develop the theories that have been brought together through the divergent theoretical disciplines that are called upon through this thesis.
In order to study these monumental groupings and their accompanying space, this thesis is divided into three chapters with accompanying urban and artistic case studies, and is preceded by an extended introduction on monuments and memory. Before theorising the urban space and contemporary artwork in question, each chapter is introduced through an account of my experience of these sites, a meta-narrative of my travels to these memory installations and cities.
This introductory chapter is divided into five sections and provides a comprehensive introduction to the wealth of academic scholarship that theorises monuments and memory in terms of urban space. This first section establishes the discourse that I employ through this thesis, explaining how I approach the city and urban landscapes as texts or textures. It explicates my usage of the term narrative, an expression that traditionally refers to linguistic rather than architectural structures that I use to theorise the urban space written by monuments. The second section presents a historiography of the study of monuments that has been written across divergent theoretical disciplines, and includes a description of my definitions of officially sanctioned monuments, symbolic monuments and everyday monuments. The third section provides a historiography of memory across theoretical discourses, noting the explosion of monument making and unmaking in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-centuries. The fourth develops
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my discussion of memory by concentrating explicitly on theoretical studies that consider memory and urban space. The fifth section is an extensive and comprehensive study of the history of countermonuments and contemporary memory installations. It includes examples of the three different types of memory installations that this thesis engages with: ‘memory sculpture,’
‘spectres of memory,’ and ‘mnemotechnics of the urban space.’
Chapter One focuses on the static spatial narratives written by officially sanctioned monuments.
Using the multi-authored space of Vilnius, I examine officially sanctioned monuments in terms of the modalities of power that instigated their creation. I draw upon the idea that urban space simultaneously exposes the past, whilst concealing alternative interpretations and memories of that history. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the election of the Government of the
Republic of Lithuania in 1990 were events that saw the urban narrative of Vilnius being entirely rewritten: Soviet iconography was destroyed and monuments that commemorated ancient
Lithuanian national heroes were erected. Working from a spatial theory discourse, I take this moment in Lithuania’s history to explain how the urban landscape commands and interpolates how a community remembers the past. I argue that authorising powers use the built environment to support and celebrate their own agendas, where modalities of power are obscured by officially sanctioned monuments, and that these officially sanctioned monuments then facilitate the construction of a dominant narrative of the past that eliminates alternative interpretations from the urban landscape. I conclude this chapter with a study of Lithuanian artist Gintaras Karosas’ memory installation Infotree LNK (2000), housed at The Centre of Europe Sculpture Park northeast of Vilnius. In this work a retired Lenin monument is left stranded and crumbling on his back, working as a visual representation of the removal of Soviet iconography from Vilnius, and the replacement of this history through contemporary monuments that force the recent past into urban amnesia through myth and legend.
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Chapter Two analyses the imagined spatial stories that are composed by symbolic monuments through a detailed study of the Japanese theme park, Tobu World Square. I argue that the ideas of
‘nations’ and ‘cultural identity’ are imagined constructs – they are intangible ideas and concepts rather than material objects. Working from the discourses provided by literary theory and spatial theory, I investigate how both communities and authorising powers harness symbolic sites in different ways to foster and project the idea that a city is composed through unique cultural and urban identities. I note that this has been intensified in an era where national and cultural borders are being dissolved through the contemporary spatial practices of condensation and disembedding, processes that impinge on all categories of monuments but are most overt with symbolic monuments. Tobu World Square is a theme park that exhibits miniature replicas of symbolic sites from across the world, presenting a global model village to the visitor. The park displays a collection of symbolic monuments that are intended to compose and reinforce identity in their originating country, but these icons are then replicated and altered within the park. As such, I use this site as a tool for analysing these contemporary spatial practices and how they affect the narratives written by symbolic monuments. I conclude this chapter with an analysis of
Australian artist Susan Norrie’s memory installation ENOLA (2004). In the DVD installation that has been projected in galleries throughout Australia, Norrie screens footage of the miniature model monuments from Tobu World Square. This artwork comments on the contemporary spatial processes that are the focus of this chapter and how they alter cultural memory as space, travel and national borders become increasingly fluid.
Chapter Three studies the transitory spatial narratives inscribed by everyday monuments.
Drawing upon the industrial ruins of post-industrial Manchester, I argue that these monumental sites are historical maps that house a collection of memories. I argue that everyday monuments form an area within the study of urban space that has not undergone extensive research in terms of monuments and memory. In their exhibiting of a visual layering of time past, I contend that the
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crumbling architecture of seemingly redundant buildings reveal the narratives of workers and industry that have been forgotten by officially sanctioned and symbolic urban space. Working from the frameworks provided by memory studies, I argue that everyday monuments are spaces where involuntary memories are brought to the surface. Using the post-industrial city of
Manchester as a case study, I argue that the spatial stories that everyday monuments reveal are increasingly being obscured as these monuments are gentrified and transformed into cultural centres. Industrial ruins are stripped of their ability to exhibit the past as they are papered over with opaque, smooth surfaces: places of production are converted into sites of consumption. I conclude this chapter with an analysis of British artist Cornelia Parker’s memory installation Cold
Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1990), a suspended, exploded garden shed, and documents the ability of everyday monuments to reveal the passing of time through their decay. The installation provides a commentary on the transformation of industrial ruins into museum space, and the homologies between industrial sites and the processes of memory.
The trajectory of this thesis begins with the static space of officially sanctioned monuments, to the imagined space of symbolic monuments, to the transitory space of everyday monuments. This is in order to reach a conclusion that investigates the potentials and possibilities that contemporary art holds in the future for retrieving alternative pasts and forgotten memories from urban narratives.
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I
The City as Text:
Spatial Stories and Urban Narratives
This thesis is concerned with the ways that contemporary cities are written through their spatial elements. Across time, cities are recomposed as the built environment is written over or erased: urban space is subject to transformation as meanings change over time, and as monuments are built, destroyed, rendered, demolished. Buildings, monuments, streets and statues all stitch narratives into the urban fabric, generating stories and interpretations of the past. At any given time, the urban objects on display write spatial stories that highlight certain interpretations of history and favour particular cultural identities. In this way, the groups that have a command over the social space, authorising powers such as local and national governments or organisations, are in a position to determine the urban text. Dominant urban narratives are thereby constructed through the memories and histories that are housed and portrayed within the material objects of the city. Once etched into the urban space, these narratives suppress alternative or minor histories, as the spatial stories that have been inscribed into the city facilitate and direct particular cultural identities of and for the people occupying that space. These spatial narratives, however, are not permanent. When governments, agendas, or ideals change, so too does the urban fabric, as it is recomposed to display a contemporary interpretation of the past. The seemingly stable space of the city is disrupted through intangible concepts such as memory, history and identity. In other words, the deceptively concrete and stable nature of the monument is actually porous, where the narratives composed by monumental space are constantly shifting and changing across time.
I apply the term ‘narrative’ to explain the spatial stories that are written by the urban landscape, drawing upon a literary term to describe the historical stories that are projected by the city. Urban
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landscapes present particular narrations of the past through the monuments and other objects that are on display across cities. I construct this argument, that cities exhibit spatial narratives in order to analyse monuments and formulate a reading of the built environment in terms of memory. In his work Present Pasts, Andreas Huyssen appropriates the literary trope of the palimpsest in order to define the multi-layered space of urban landscapes. This draws an analogy between the layered manuscript that is erased and written over, with the city whose built environment is repeatedly restructured and recomposed. For Huyssen, this allows the configuration of urban space to be discussed in terms of time where the palimpsest is “the conviction that literary techniques of reading historically, intertextually, constructively and deconstructively at the same time can be woven into our understanding of urban spaces as lived space that shape collective imaginaries” (7). I combine the idea of an urban palimpsest with the theoretical scaffolding provided by spatial theorists Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre in order to identify the authors and readers of the city, where narratives of the past are projected by the tangible objects of the urban landscape.
In the city the narrators include the architects, urban planners, local councils, governments, artists, streets, monuments, and buildings that construct the material physicality of the city.
Following the work of de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life, it stands that the walker in the city is also a narrator. Providing a linguistic model for interpreting the composition of the city, de Certeau argues that a homology exists between narrative structures and spatial syntaxes, where the physical act of walking in the city and the verbal act of speaking language are analogous. For de Certeau, the walker writes the city through the enunciating of the spatial text that is achieved through his or her engagement with the urban environment at the level of the footpath. The intertwined paths of a collection of pedestrians within a city allow this collection of walkers to
“weave places together” (97); and transform places into spaces. By moving through the city, walkers actualise the possibilities of the urban space, composing the city in an ephemeral and
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fleeting manner that is different to the seemingly permanent narratives that are written by the physical objects of the built environment. De Certeau argues that the walker’s body follows the thicks and thins of an urban text, writing the city “without being able to read” its composition
(93). I contest that the walker is able to read their urban narratives and spatial stories, and it is here that I turn to Lefebvre’s work on the role of the monument in urban space in order to argue that the walker in the city is not illiterate to the narratives they have composed.
The reader of the city, like the author, is a complicated figure. Readers encompass the people that literally engage with the city, the inhabitants and tourists. Walkers in the city read their surrounding urban space as they translate the historical narratives projected by the monuments and built architectures that they encounter. Lefebvre argues in The Production of Space that the walker engages in a dialogue with monumental objects because monuments are sites of
“intensity” (144), objects that communities have been socialised to interpret as sites of significance across the urban landscape. As such, monuments call for the attention or respect of those people engaging within the space of a city. Once they have been translated as sites of intensity, monuments are able to legitimise the narratives that they etch into the urban canvas.
Monuments are therefore integral to the walker’s interpretation of spatial stories, as the memories and identities presented by monuments delineate and sketch differences between official and unofficial narratives in the city. This role of the monument presents a spatial problem that I investigate across this thesis: the question of the nature of official and unofficial narratives, that is to say, which parties have the authority to write, rewrite, and erase narratives across urban space.
The issue of monumental and urban authorship bears on all chapters of this thesis, as it is bound up with the micropolitical verities of each specific site that I take as an area of study. My research, together with existing scholarship, questions how effective monuments are at revealing the past and how visible they remain to the inhabitants. There is a social expectation that
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monuments commemorate important historical events and figures, fostering national identities and reviving local memories. This assumed role of the monument becomes contentious when the inscription of one narrative into the city space forces other interpretations of the past to become illegible. Memory theorists Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin in Contested Paths: The
Politics of Memory; and David Walkowitz and Lisa Knauer in Memory and the Impact of
Political Transformation In Public Space; theorise the narratological limitations of monuments.
They observe that decisions must be made as to which monuments are erected, which objects will become symbolic, which architectures will be forgotten, and how all these sites will convey their meanings within urban space. As a consequence, the parties that determine whether a site has monumental significance, and decide what events and memories are included or excluded from the urban narrative, play a contentious role in the composition of spatial stories.
If monuments have the ability to portray a narration of the past, Radstone and Hodgkin question which figures have the authority to compose the urban landscape and write the spatial stories by asking “who or what is entitled to speak for that past in the present” (1). This is a consequence of how monuments function as signs of the past, depicting an interpretation of history that essentially displays “what the past has been, and how the present should acknowledge it; who should be remembered and who should be forgotten; which acts or events are foundational, which marginal; what gets respected, what neglected” (13). Accordingly, whichever modality of power is in a position to design the urban landscape and determine the built environment, is also in a position to frame how the past is interpreted in the present by choosing which histories, stories and memories are exhibited, and which descriptions of the past are excluded, across a particular city. Arguably, the narratives chosen by these parties are directed by their agendas. Monuments therefore compose, erase, expose and disguise interpretations of the past, and this is determined according to the power that designates which sites are monumental. The legitimacy to authorship within the urban environment becomes contentious in communities, especially those with
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numerous cultural and ethnic groups, when the monumental sites that are expected to stimulate memories actually carve a dominant narrative into the city that omits alternative spatial stories, as the authorising parties that determine the built environment conceal residual histories, pasts, and memories.
If communities and travellers perceive the monuments of a city as sites of intensity, then the architectures and artefacts across a city direct the walker’s interpretation of the space. This means that authorising powers can use the built environment to predetermine the spatial narratives and memories that will be projected through a city, and is reason why monuments become spaces of political and cultural conflict. Memory theorists Walkowitz and Knauer observe that monumental space is a complex and variegated terrain where narratives are “imagined and enacted,” a statement suggesting that urban narratives present a version of the past that is deciphered by the walker, and from which cultural identities are built (8). Here, the agent that controls urban space also controls urban memories, where iconic objects preserve interpretations of the past by working as tools of communication. For art historians Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, this sees the monument being harnessed by authorising powers, groups that have the intention to command urban memories in terms of their own particular values. In other words, the coalescence of communal memories and aspirations at the monument “becomes a mechanism for the projection of personal values and desires” (6). Therefore, monumental sites are characterised through a complicated struggle over meaning between the official narratives inscribed by authorising powers that project their interpretations of the past onto the contemporary materiality of the city, and the unofficial narratives of residual cultures that are obscured from the same space.
The expectation that monuments can stitch versions of the past into the urban fabric sees the writing of the urban landscape as fraught with personal and cultural decisions over which pasts
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will be exhibited. This is irrespective as to whether it is governmental institutions, foreign powers, architects, artists, local communities, volunteer organisations or individuals making these choices. Radstone and Hodgkin observe that monument building and memory making within urban spaces is always subject to the disagreements and divergences of those people involved where attempts “to resolve meaning in the present is thus often a matter over conflicts of representations” (1); where cultural groups may contest the dominant urban narratives written by authorising powers. Walkowitz and Knauer also articulate the complexities of how societies wish to see their histories being remembered or memorialised in the city. They state that “struggles over history and memory have produced a virtual cottage industry in the past twenty years” (3); where the presentation of the past in public spaces, museums, and across the built environment through monuments, has been contested by community groups as public awareness has grown concerning how and what identities governments and urban planners write into the city. Although these interpretations of the past projected by dominant urban narratives are written through material objects, it stands that they are consolidated within the imaginary of those individuals engaging with the urban space in question, and this brings the tangible space of the city into a complex relationship with the intangible spaces of narrative and imagination. In order to understand how cultural identities are attached to the built environment, I use the frameworks provided by Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha. Although Anderson and Bhabha theorise the construction of the nation, these theories can be transferred onto the city, where they also account for the ways that cultural identity and urban memory are imagined and then reinforced through the urban landscape.
Building on the work presented by Anderson in Imagined Communities and Bhabha in Nation and Narration I argue that the narratives written by the built environment are intricately linked to identity and memory, where urban architectures not only write spatial stories at the level of the street, they also write national narratives and foster cultural identities and remembrances for
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inhabitants. Anderson’s seminal work proposes that nations are imagined constructs where individuals develop relations to others in their community even though they may never meet or interact with them, and objects such as monuments facilitate this sense of belonging. Imagined communities are therefore united by “deep, horizontal comradeship” (7); made possible through symbols of nationhood. Elaborating on Anderson’s theories, Bhabha merges the physical and imaginary space of the city more specifically with the imaginary space of fiction, where “nations like narratives lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realise their horizons in the mind’s eye” (1); arguing that the fully realised concept of nation or community can only be grounded in the imagination. Bhabha draws on an analogy between the invented nature of narratives and the creation of nations, where both are structured through fiction. This overlap explicitly locates the history of nations with myth, and the identification of place within stories and story telling, where the narratives written by monuments are imagined by inhabitants, and facilitate in the formation of identity, consolidating the histories remembered. As such, monuments, memory, identity, nation and culture are elaborately fused together with the idea of narration.
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II
Monuments:
A Theoretical Introduction
In The Invention of the Historic Monument, Francis Choay provides an account of the linguistic roots of the term ‘monument.’ Choay explicates that ‘monument’ is derived from the Latin term monumentum, the core of which is monere, which means “to warn” or “to recall” (6). In her article “Monuments and Memory,” Annette Hamilton similarly structures her analysis of monuments through the word’s linguistic base. Drawing upon Antoine Rascas’ seventeenth- century definition, Hamilton explains that the term ‘monument’ comes from the Latin term monitor (101). Both these lineages provide definitions of the word monument that see these objects being implicated with memory, immediately presenting a correlation between monuments and memory. As Choay states, the historical definition of monument “calls upon the faculty of memory” (6); whereas Rascas’ definition sees the monument signifying “all things which call to mind the Memory of some subject to those absent from this place or time” (qtd. in Hamilton,
101). Demonstrating the relationship between monuments and memory, these definitions provide a basis for theorising the material object of the monument in terms of the imagined concept of memory. Once the monument is defined and considered through the intangible conditions of memory, I am able to theorise how monuments perform memory work, and how effective they are at doing so.
The scholarship on monuments comes from a range of discourses, including art theory, memory and trauma studies, critical theory, cultural theory, sociology, anthropology, and spatial theory.
European Romantics argued that old buildings should be preserved and treasured as material evidence of a desired distant past, Chateaubriand stating that “a monument is only venerable in so
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much as a long history of the past has imprinted the black of centuries on its vaults” (qtd. in
Nelson and Olin, 1). The academic theorisation of monuments, however, surfaced to a more notable extent at the beginning of the twentieth century within the domain of art theory. Alois
Reigl, the first Conservator General of Monuments in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, drafted a law to preserve monuments, as this period of modernisation in European cities saw officials having the authority to demolish buildings and rebuild cities in a modernist style. Although
Reigl’s attempt at legislation never became law, it was accompanied by a theoretical essay that focused on the artistic evaluation of one monument against another, “The Modern Cult of
Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin”.1 This essay was the beginning of theoretical debates as to what makes a monument a memorial. Reigl argues that in their oldest and original sense monuments are ‘intentional’ and “created with a specific purpose of keeping single human deeds or events (or a combination thereof) alive in the minds of future generations” (21). Reigl observes, however, that the modern cult and preservation of the monument refers to
‘unintentional’ monuments, “monuments of art and history,” making particular reference to those officially designated monuments in Austria. The work of both Chateaubriand and Reigl celebrate the value of the monument, however, during the twentieth century the art world showed contempt for the classical monument as architects and designers turned to modernism.
Beginning with critical theorist Robert Musil’s accusation in the 1950s that “what strikes one most about monuments is that one doesn’t notice them. There is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments” (320); the worth and significance of the traditional monument was contested in a contemporary theoretical context. Personifying the monument, Musil calls them ‘lazy’: they are stationary objects built through stone and concrete, sites that do not call attention to themselves, or to the past, memory, event or myth they have been designed to evoke. In turn, Musil sees the
1 This biographical note comes from the introduction to Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin’s Monuments and Memory: Made and Unmade (1).
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monument, and the memory being commemorated, condemned to an inevitable invisibility. This theoretical development is a repositioning of focus, from Reigl’s advocating a celebration of the monument, to one denouncing the monument. Defining the materiality of the monument as invisible suggests that constructing a physical object to represent history forces the past to become hidden, obscured, rewritten, unnoticed or mystified. Musil argues that this was a consequence of the monument as a permanent fixture in the city, where the permanency of the monument forces these objects to lose “their ability to play a role” and impress meaning onto the viewer (321). The theoretical interrogation of the monument permeated beyond the domain of art theory and critical theory following the 1950s in contemporary spatial theory and memory studies where monuments were interpreted as objects unable to present a comprehensive narrative of the past, despite their construction as memorials. This included the work of theorists Henri Lefebvre,
Edward Soja, Adrian Forty, Andreas Huyssen and James E. Young.
In the 1970s, spatial theorists turned to the city and urban space as an area of research. Within this framework, the role of the built environment was questioned in terms of a politics of space. In
The Production of Space, Lefebvre explored the power relations that exist within the urban landscape, analysing the intentional creation of social space. If cities are constitutive of spaces that are designed by authorising powers, then a collection of political consequences arise, and for
Lefebvre this included how monuments may be used to direct how communities interpreted their pasts. This is an approach that returns me to the first part of this introductory chapter, and the theoretical debates of who has the power to write the urban landscape when this authority can alter how a community remembers history. In the 1990s, Edward Soja adopted a similar approach to the city in Postmodern Geographies, arguing that monuments could alter understandings and interpretations of history due to their inherent opacity (111). Soja argues that the spatial stories composed in urban space present the illusion that they can be read, but at the same time the built architecture mystifies the histories and memories being depicted as the modality of power behind
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their construction is disguised and obscured. Within this discourse, monuments are in a constant struggle between revealing and concealing histories, memories and power relations, and are not reliable tools for remembering and recovering the recent past.
The rise of scholarship on the built environment in spatial theory was accompanied by a similar theoretical trend in memory studies, where theorists turned their focus to monumental space. In the decades following World War II, an avalanche of texts concerned with monuments and memory came into publication. These works made a direct correlation between monument making and iconoclasm, in terms of the monument’s orchestration of memory and forgetting.
Memory theorists highlighted the paradox of monuments and the paradox of memory where sites of commemoration were theorised in terms of amnesia and forgetting, as well as remembrance. In
The Art of Forgetting Adrian Forty explicitly considers monuments in terms of forgetting, arguing that monuments are also inextricably linked to amnesia, rather than being the materialisation of memories. Forty argues that monuments are selective and misleading, and this is the inevitable feature of commemorative artefacts: “that they permit only certain things to be remembered and by exclusion cause others to be forgotten” (9). Art historian Ruth Philips, whose work is directed through memory studies, observes that although the monument may exhibit traces of the historical will to memory that was the catalyst for its creation, “the monument cannot maintain that memory in a stable form” (281). This is a consequence of the monument being subject to destruction, iconoclasm, erosion, the revision, and evolving of spatial or historical narratives, and their inherent invisibility. The monument is therefore both a site for forgetting and memory.
In Present Pasts Huyssen identifies this characteristic of monuments to be indicative of our contemporary society that is criticised of forgetting the recent past, yet is also obsessed with archiving the past in memorials and museums. By providing an extended critical study of the
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paradox of monuments, Huyssen argues that the monumental object is tied to both memory and forgetting: observing the accelerated creation of monuments, memorials, public sculptures, commemorative sites, and museums all over the world, Huyssen concludes his work by suggesting that the power of these sites to support public memory narratives, rather than simply freezing the past, is at issue everywhere (94). Naming the print and image media as contributing to the “vertiginous swirl of memory discourses that circulate globally and locally,” Huyssen argues that the problems and politics of local memories have crossed borders and created a
“global culture of memory” where struggles of how to remember are apparent (95). The memory projects that are being exercised by contemporary governments to construct and revise national narratives are effected by the transferral of information and cultures, and these interpretations of the past “are now invariably located in a space somewhere between the global and the local” (97).
Developing Musil’s theory that monuments are inherently invisible, Huyssen argues that contemporary memory practices and the building of monuments designed to be tools for remembrance are unable to perform memory work. Huyssen argues that this trait sees the monument being harnessed by authorising powers for political advantage. If monuments are condemned to be invisible, then they are built to facilitate the amnesia of the event being commemorated, and not with the intention to actively remember traumatic or politically contentious events in the recent past: “the more monuments there are, the past becomes invisible, and the easier it is to forget: redemption, thus, through forgetting” (32). This theoretical reassessment across academic disciplines that has surfaced during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries sees the monumental object as politically, aesthetically, socially and ethically suspect. In Urban Memory critical theorist Mark Crinson accuses monuments of
“pervasive amnesia” (xxii); art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson argues in “Building a Marker of
Nuclear Warning” that allegorical forms of monuments “bury and ossify the past” (194); memory theorist James E. Young argues in At Memory’s Edge that rather than preserving public memory,
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monuments displace it altogether “as if once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember” (94).
Having condoned the monument as a site unable to perform its role as a memory worker, a number of theorists have identified that alternative forms of remembrance take place: within the domain of art and visual culture. In his critical assessment of the ability of monuments to perform memory work, Young identifies an alternative form of monument – the countermonument, which he defines as a type of self-reflexive monument that defies the loss and amnesia tied to the traditional monument. As such, countermonuments are able to perform memory work as they prevent alternative pasts and memories from being obscured within the urban landscape, and frustrate the invisibility of traditional monuments. It is here that my work on monuments is located, across the domain of contemporary spatial theory, memory studies, and art theory, where scholarship interrogates the monument and seeks out alternative forums where residual narratives can be represented in the city. Through this thesis I turn to contemporary visual culture as a space where the alternative memories, pasts and histories that are obscured in the public space of the city by dominant spatial stories, are increasingly being identified by contemporary artists who exhibit these histories in the private space of the gallery.
To conclude this brief historiography of monuments in theory, I will elaborate on my definitions of the different types of monuments that I have drawn: officially sanctioned monuments, symbolic monuments and everyday monuments. Although all monuments share similar characteristics, it is the narratological space produced by these monuments that differentiates these objects: static, imaginary or flexible spatial stories. Therefore, although officially sanctioned monuments, symbolic monuments, and everyday monuments may all be celebrated by communities or annexed by governments as political tools, it is the type of narrative and spatial story that distinguishes them from each other.
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The term ‘monument’ is difficult to define beyond its linguistic derivation as these objects are intricately tied to intangible concepts such as memory. In order to theorise monuments in terms of memory, divisions between monuments need to be drawn. I have categorised monuments into three different forms with distinct characteristics, allowing me to build on the existing research on monuments. Although contemporary theorists, like Forty, Huyssen and Young, all deliberate upon the limitations of traditional monuments and the possibilities of new, alternative forms of monuments, these theorisations are directed to the ‘monument’ as an encompassing term for all memorial objects. If monuments are only considered in terms of intentionally commemorative sites, additional forms of monuments such as symbolic icons and everyday sites are not taken into account. Therefore, as I have already identified, this thesis will separate the broad field of the
‘monument’ and analyse the distinct forms of officially sanctioned monuments, symbolic monuments, and everyday monuments individually as each genus has particular distinguishing attributes, traits that determine what type of narratological space is written, and how authorising powers, communities and travellers approach or harness the site, how the monument engages with the past, and how the site operates in terms of urban memory and the binary of remembering and forgetting. What is clear is that the distinguishing trait of all monuments is that they attract
(or detract) attention to a particular interpretation of the past, which sees the built environment playing an integral role in the inscription of memory, identity and history into the urban landscape.
Officially Sanctioned Monuments
Officially sanctioned monuments are monuments that have been commissioned, designed, and built according to the agendas of authorising powers, such as local and national governments, councils, regimes, and other political committees. These monuments have received the most
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attention across academic disciplines. The monuments that Reigl has defined as “intentional monuments” (21); and Choay has defined as “built heritage” (2); are both situated within the realm of officially sanctioned monuments. The terms ‘intentional’ and ‘built’ in Reigl and
Choay’s work implicate officially sanctioned monuments as sites that relay the past through material constructions. Consequently, I approach officially sanctioned monuments in terms of the agenda of the individual or group that has commissioned the construction of the monument in question. I argue that officially sanctioned monuments are involved in a complex relationship with power, where they are tools that are appropriated by authorising powers in order to command urban space. Authorising powers are reliant on monumental space in order to direct memory and determine what aspects of the past are remembered, and my work on this relationship between authorising powers and monuments is a development of the theories presented by Jas Elsner, Robert S. Nelson, and Ruth Philips whose work is published alongside one another in Nelson and Olin’s collection of art history essays Monuments and Memory: Made and Unmade.
Officially sanctioned monuments are intricately tied to power and power relations, they are historical props harnessed by authorising powers in order to influence and command how individuals interpret the history of a city. These objects are used by authorising powers in attempts to direct the associating urban memories for communities. Nelson and Olin observe that officially sanctioned monuments are able to construct a narrative of the past, realising a government’s desire to commemorate the past in their own terms, to “mark a place, to represent the past to the present and future, to emphasise one narrative of the past at the expense of others, or simply to make the past past” (2). Ruth Philips also argues that monuments are fastened to power, and are indicative of “deposits of the historical possession of power” across the urban landscape (281). As signs of political control, officially sanctioned monuments work as indicators of an authorising party’s attempt to inscribe their own versions of the past into material, tangible
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forms that are then exhibited across urban space. Consequently, monuments are signs of attempts by political powers to locate or ground the abstract concept of memory the appropriation of the concrete materiality of the monument and attaching their agenda to the urban object.
The first chapter of this thesis analyses the officially sanctioned monuments within Vilnius that have been erected during various governments’ and councils’ reign from WWII to the contemporary national regime, in particular the current collection of monuments that were sanctioned by the Government of the Republic of Lithuania following independence in 1990. I will analyse how the inscription of each new collection of officially sanctioned monuments within the city all write a prescribed, static and indolent version of the past that often hides or
‘forgets’ moments of the recent past: Vilnius’ urban landscape has experienced perpetual and cyclical amnesia. Through my analysis of the statues and memorials that were constructed following 1990, I observe the limitations of officially sanctioned monuments and their inability to present a multi-layered or multi-authored interpretation of the recent past. I maintain that the current monuments of Vilnius exhibit a contemporary nationalistic narrative that has been written through ancient imagery, where the modality of power behind the construction of this urban fabric is hidden beneath a metaphorical surface. My analysis of officially sanctioned monuments makes the following points: that monuments are sites of intensity where a dialogue forms with the viewer presenting the illusion that the site is transparent, but it is in fact opaque and difficult to read; that contemporary modalities of power that construct the officially sanctioned monuments are obscured; and that the objects that compose the urban landscape are characterised through the illusion of opacity.
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Symbolic Monuments
Symbolic monuments are the iconic sites that have had significance attributed to them following their construction, by local and foreign communities, as well as political parties. I categorise symbolic sites as spaces of imagination as they are sites in which national and memorial significance have been placed. Symbolic monuments are similar to officially sanctioned monuments as they are architectures that are harnessed by authorising powers in an attempt to direct urban memory and cultural identity in particular ways. What is unique in terms of the symbolic monument is the role that the imaginary plays in their construction. In The Condition of
Postmodernity (1990) David Harvey argues that space and time have condensed: travel has become faster, more frequent, and more economically viable. Consequently, people travel across national borders more often, and cultures and traditions become dispersed across nations accordingly. As national borders become flexible, the geographical and cultural boundaries become increasingly blurred. Through this thesis I argue that ideas of community and cultural identities that are re-grounded and established through the imaginary are evoked and maintained through symbolic monuments. Drawing from Tim Edensor’s deliberation on the creation of national identity through symbolic sites in National Identity, and Bhabha’s Nation and Narration,
I argue that symbolic monuments have become increasingly important in terms of urban memory and cultural identity during our contemporary epoch that has seen widespread technological and mechanical advancements.
It is when geographical borders dissolve and national cultures are no longer unique, that symbolic monuments have become central in imagining identity. Communities and governments turn to the iconic sites that reinforce particular national and cultural identities, urban memory, or the remembrance of historical events, and these sites are then recognised as having particular symbolic importance. Rather than officially sanctioned objects that have been intentionally built
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as monuments, symbolic monuments are icons that are saturated with meanings, becoming symbols, representations, signs and images in order to solidify the cultural imaginaries that are no longer stabilised through once seemingly permanent national and cultural borders. I argue that the memories imbued within and the values ascribed to iconic sites are still subject to the complications and paradoxes that inhabit officially sanctioned monuments. Despite the location of their narratives within the imaginary, symbolic monuments are still tools of remembering and forgetting, which means that they also suffer the same inescapable providence: these icons disguise alternative versions of the past as their story-writing capacity and presentation of historical events and memories is limited.
My second chapter focuses on the ways in which iconic sites are designated as symbolic objects by nations and governments in order to construct and reinforce predetermined cultural identities.
In a world where borders are dissolving and there is the condensation and displacement of space, iconic objects become disembedded from their original sites and appear elsewhere as, often miniaturised, reproductions. By appropriating the Japanese theme park, Tobu World Square, this chapter focuses on the disruption of symbolic and iconic sites where the objects are replicated and reproduced. It analyses the effects on memory and forgetting when actual city spaces and sites become imaginary. This chapter makes the following points: that identity is constructed through symbolic objects; that the condensation and disembedding of space and objects in the contemporary globalising world effects the construction of identity through iconic sites; that the dissolving of national borders sees a greater importance placed on imaginary space where remembering and forgetting are manifested in alternative ways within urban imaginaries; and in turn I question what happens to local and national identities when iconic sites are disseminated through mechanical reproduction through the spatial practice that Anthony Giddens defines as
“disembedding” in The Consequences of Modernity (17).
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Everyday Monuments
In addition to officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic monuments, there is another form of monumentality that exists across the urban landscape. I argue that the within the everyday space of the built environment are a collection of architectures that engage with memory and reveal an archaeology of the past. The seemingly defunct areas of industrial ruin and decay in post- industrial cities are monuments, spaces within the contemporary city that compose unique spatial narratives of the recent past, housing memories and histories that are absent from dominant urban stories. With the exception of Tim Edensor and Mark Crinson, the role that these ruins have in the construction of the urban narrative and their engagement with the past has been overlooked – primarily because these buildings appear to be redundant and superfluous spaces within the city landscape, rather than sites of memory or commemoration. I argue that the everyday, and its embodiment in monumental architectures, provides a new lens for interpreting memorial space.
As Lefebvre argues in “The Everyday of Everydayness,” that the everyday is “the most universal and most unique condition, the most social and the most individuated, the most obvious and the best hidden” (8). Unnoticed, everyday monuments appear to be unobtrusive and escape attention, but Julia Attfield reminds us in Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life that they allow for a connection between the tangible and intangible. The everyday is “instrumental in the literal and grounded sense of mediating the link between people and artefact and therefore between the human worlds of the mental and physical” (9).
The monumental sites of the everyday accommodate and present memory and forgetting in a unique fashion. The lack of rendering and maintenance of these sites allows for the exhibition of the past through the crumbling of the material objects, a visual decay that is denied within rendered and celebrated space of officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic monuments. In particular, the architecture of industrial ruins will be analysed in terms of the ability of these
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architectures to display the passing of time and recent historical events as these sites waste away.
Even though industrial ruins appear useless and defunct, they write alternative stories and memories that are continually rewriting themselves over time. Within this thesis everyday monuments are defined as constituting flexible space, one that is transitory as these objects physically crumble, are removed from the urban landscape, or are restored over time. Despite the abilities of everyday monuments to recall the past, like the static and transitory spaces already discussed, the recent practice of gentrifying industrial ruins forces everyday monuments to be similarly caught within the modalities of power that simultaneously exhibit and hide the recent past.
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The final chapter of this thesis theorises the everyday monuments of contemporary urban landscapes. I appropriate the industrial ruins of post-industrial Manchester in order to consider how everyday monuments literally exhibit the past and reveal urban memories through their crumbling architecture that exposes layers of history. These spaces are transitional, continually changing and being rewritten as they decay and deteriorate. I argue that these fragments of redundant architecture are monumental in the sense that industrial ruins are memorials to the recent past, where the decay of the everyday monument mirrors the way in which individuals retrieve and remember memories. I focus on the varying stages of Manchester’s industrialisation in order to argue that the gentrification of industrial ruins by the Manchester City Council during post-industrialisation strips the everyday monuments from their ability to reveal the past, as the council attempts to hide moments of the recent past that potentially disrupt contemporary compositions of urban and cultural identity. This chapter makes the following points: that everyday space and industrial ruins are integral to the reading of memory and forgetting in contemporary cities; that these decaying spaces allow memory to be read as a form of archive, allowing involuntary memories to transpire; and that the process of gentrification within the modern city exorcises the ghosts of the past that are able to haunt the city in these spaces.
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III
Memory:
A Theoretical Introduction
The building of monuments and their theoretical interrogation have been accompanied by an avalanche of memory discourses. This theoretical introduction to memory is by no means an all- encompassing historiography of the term ‘memory,’ as it is studied in different ways dependant on whether it is being analysed within the sciences, the arts, or the humanities. Rather, this introduction works to signpost the significant moments where memory entered theoretical topography as a legitimate way of tracing and interpreting individual and cultural histories, pasts, narratives, and urban space within cities. As such, this section on memory chronicles pioneering memory study theorists who understand memory to be a performance that rewrites the past, how this has affected individuals and communities, and how the intangible concept of memory has been attached to fixed objects and sites such as monuments and museums.
Memory is a complicated term that encompasses two interlinked aspects. As summarised by
Crinson, memories are both the “residue of past experiences that somehow stick or become active in the mind,” but memory is also “the faculty by which we collect the past” (ii). Therefore memory includes the experiences that are mentally retained by an individual, as well as the act of remembering these events. Due to the subjective nature of memory, the concept has historically not held much academic and theoretical weight. As Huyssen observes, up until the twentieth- century the personal nature of memory saw a binary being drawn between memory and history.
History was seen as objective and scientific, whereas memory was subjective and personal: one learnt from history, whereas memory was a topic for poets (2). At the same time that Alois Reigl was advocating for the preservation of monuments, memory entered theoretical and artistic vocabularies. In 1902, Austrian novelist Hugo von Hofmannsthal used the phrase “collective
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memory,” and it was during this time that the perceived binary between memory and history dissolved.2 Rather than an intangible concept that was subject to prejudice, memory evolved into an area of scholarly enquiry that has become a theoretical discourse in itself, an obsession that has generated a flood of academic texts on memory and forgetting.
Although the rise in memory studies is interdisciplinary, one point that these divergent theorists agree upon is the enormity by which memory has saturated, inundated, and invaded all aspects of the cultural domain. In Kerwin Lee Klein’s study of memory “On the Emergence of Memory in
Historical Discourse” he notes that the scholarly fascination with memory ranges from “the museum trade to legal battles over repressed memory and on to the market for books and articles that invoke memory as a key word” (127). Huyssen observes that one of the most surprising cultural and political phenomena of recent years has been the emergence of memory as a primary concern in Western societies, “a turning toward the past that stands in stark contrast to the privileging of the future so characteristic of earlier decades of twentieth-century modernity” (11).
Whereas Crinson notes that “never before have there been so many amenity groups, preservation societies, genealogists, museums, historians amateur and professional, conservation areas, and listed buildings” (xi). The adoption of memory as a key term in the late twentieth-century is, in
Klein’s linguistic approach to the term, a shift in the historical imagination that sees memory being interpreted as “the new critical conjunction of history and theory” where memory is often appropriated and used in an untheorised way (128). Although I observe the plethora of memory discourses that have permeated critical debates and the cultural domain, the focus through the proceeding chapters of this thesis is the role that memory plays in terms of space, identity, and urban memory.
2 This genealogy of the term is drawn from Kerwin Lee Klein’s article “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” a work that provides an extensive lineage of the introduction of memory into critical theory.
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In The Social Frameworks of Memory and On Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs presents memory as a social phenomenon, establishing the theory that a unified collective memory develops within communities. In these works Halbwachs argues that memory binds groups of people together, recharging their commonality by reference to the physical spaces and previous instances of that collective identity. Halbwachs’ work saw a theoretical shift, explicitly implicating memory with social relations and urban space: “when a group is introduced into a part of space, it transforms it to its image, but at the same time, it yields and adapts itself to certain material things which resist it” (qtd. in Rossi, 172). Halbwachs’ work has undergone extensive criticism by contemporary memory theorists, primarily because his theories assume that relatively stable formations of social memories can actually exist. Huyssen argues that
Halbwachs’ sociological approach to memory is redundant as it fails to “grasp the current dynamic media and temporality, memory, lived time, and forgetting” that are at work in society
(17). Crinson, in response to Halbwachs’ theory of collective memory, also argues that it cannot exist within our contemporary climate that is obsessed with memory, due to the relationship that stands between memory and forgetting: “memory evokes loss, indeed the very triggering of memory is a symptom of disappearance of close organic communities living with their pasts”
(xiii).
Although Halbwachs’ theories brought memory, identity and space together, the scholarly boom in memory did not begin its reign until the 1980s, at the same time that spatial theory was being established as an area of theoretical enquiry. The explosion of memory discourses from the 1980s has been attributed to both theoretical and political events. Huyssen argues that since 1989, the issues of memory and forgetting have emerged globally as “dominant concerns in postcommunist countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; they remain key politically in the
Middle East; they dominate public discourse in post-apartheid South Africa… they energize the race debate that has erupted in Australia around the issue of the ‘stolen generation’; they burden
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the relationship among Japan and China and Korea” (15). The rise in memory was also grounded through theoretical developments, and Klein locates this emergence within French historian
Pierre Nora’s work “Between Memory and History,” and Nora’s introduction to the anthology
Lieux de Memoire. Klein ascertains that it was works like Nora’s that indicated a “crystallization of a self-conscious memory discourse” that led to a plethora of literary works that brimmed with titles that included the terms ‘sites of memory,’ ‘cultural memory,’ or the ‘politics of memory’
(127).
In his article “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Nora posits that there has been an acceleration of history that has been accompanied by social and political perceptions that anything and everything may disappear. Rather than collective memory, Nora argues that identity is imagined through lieux de memoire, or ‘sites of memory,’ that operate as a form of compensation for forgetting. Nora argues that “there are no longer milieux de memoire, real environments of memory,” where memory has been eradicated by history (7). As a consequence, contemporary society relies on sites of memory as lieux de memoire have come to embody memory: historical figures, books, emblems, buildings, monuments and places are substitutes for the real environments. Sites of memory exist within the modern city, condensing, expressing and essentially replacing the exhausted capital of collective memory. They are spaces that have memory fixed within them and in turn “block the work of forgetting” (13). Nora argues that this is possible as memory relies on the materiality of the trace, the visibility of the image, and therefore memory “attaches itself to sites” (22). Nora’s theory of lieux de memoire has since been criticised by Huyssen who argues that Nora acknowledges a loss of national or communal identity in our contemporary climate, but trusts that the same bodies have the ability to compensate and make up for this loss. Instead, Huyssen argues that Nora’s conservative spatial binary between lieux and milieux needs to be moved in a different direction, “one that does not rely on a discourse of loss and that accepts fundamental shifts in structures” (24).
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What rises to the surface in Halbwachs’ and Nora’s establishing theories of memory, and their accompanying critiques, is the complex relationship that memory engages in with its binary of forgetting. Theorists in the contemporary academic field of memory studies approach memory in terms of its paradoxical relationship with forgetting: that memory is intricately tied to amnesia, and rather than recollecting the past, memory rewrites, revises, and recomposes history.
In Possessed By the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1996) David
Lowenthal notes that memory is responsible for exaggerating, emphasising, and de-emphasising and minimising, significant events. Therefore memory imposes a framework on the past that infuses or diffuses, remembers or forgets, the importance of historic characters and events. In her introduction to the edited collection Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, Mieke Bal argues that cultural memory is a performance that “links the past to the present and future” by continually rewriting difficult or tabooed moments of the past (vi). In Present Pasts Huyssen elaborates upon theories such as Bal’s, arguing that memory is a form of representation and recollection that makes the past present, and in this guise memory continually recomposes the past because every act of remembrance is simultaneously accompanied with forgetfulness or a misconstruing of events: “After all, the act of remembering is always in and of the present, while its referent is of the past and thus absent. Inevitably, every act of memory carries with it a dimension of betrayal, forgetting, and absence” (4). Memory is always in danger of collapsing the distance between past and present, and obscuring and rewriting the past in the process – a reason why memory studies has become such an important theoretical debate in terms of how the past is remembered for communities.
The paradox of memory sees that remembering and forgetting are inevitably linked, as critical theorist Marc Auge observes in his study of memory and amnesia in Oblivion. Auge argues that
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memory is a cyclical process, where the act of forgetting is essential for the performance of memory to transpire: how can one remember if one has not first forgotten? (3) The notion that amnesia is a requirement for remembrance further marks the paradox of memory at a cultural level. Huyssen argues that our contemporary culture enveloped in memory discourse and a
‘present past’ is at once building memorials, yet is criticised by theorists as suffering from an overwhelming case of amnesia and forgetting of the recent past: “Ever more frequently, critics accuse this very contemporary memory culture of amnesia, anaesthesia or numbing” (17). Our culture of memory with a surfeit of memorial, museums, and monuments, is also accused of an inability to remember. Perhaps, like the acts of remembering and forgetting that are inexorably twinned, it is unavoidable that a boom in forgetting will accompany the boom in memory. In
Huyssen’s words, “the surfeit of memory in this media-saturated culture creates such an overload that the memory system itself is in constant danger of imploding, thus triggering the fear of forgetting” (17). This returns us to Auge who argues that the duty to remember that our contemporary culture experiences, is also accompanied by a duty to forget, where “memory and oblivion stand together, both are necessary for the full use of time” (89).
The theories that suggest a parallel between remembering and forgetting bring the question of agency to the fore – which parties or individuals are performing this memory work. As I have indicated through the observations of Klein, Huyssen and Crinson, memory has become an important subject for a multiplicity of individuals, groups, and organisations. For many theorists within the discipline of memory studies, the role that memory exerts in terms of identity formation has become a central area of scholarship, where memory is understood to be integral to the construction of identity. John Gillis observes in his essay “Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity that identity is dependent on memory. Gillis theorises that “the core meaning of any individual or group, namely, a sense of sameness over time and space, is sustained by remembering; and what is remembered
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is defined by the assumed identity” (3). Within Gillis’ framework, individuals remember the past independently of those surrounding them. This remembrance, however, is directed through the histories, events, or figures that are commemorated by the narratives written by surrounding urban environments, popular and high cultures, or political agendas – the spatial stories that encourage individuals to remember or forget in particular ways. Gillis summarises that memory and identity are therefore political and social constructs that have “no existence beyond our politics, our social relations, and our histories” (5).3
This short historiography of memory within cultural theory indicates the complexities that riddle the binary of memory and forgetting, and these complexities exist within theorisation for a number of reasons. Across and within disciplines, theorists have disagreed on discursive definitions for memory, collective memory, individual memory, and how these work in terms of identity. The binary is also characterised through paradox, where theoretical discourses and our contemporary society that is building monuments like there is no tomorrow, engage in a dialogue with memory and forgetting simultaneously. I argue that the paradox of memory exists concomitantly with the paradox of monuments: both the intangible concept of memory and the material object of the monument that is expected to perform memory work are intricately tied to amnesia and forgetting. Therefore, not only is the term monument linguistically tied to memory, monuments are also the physical moments in the city where individuals or groups have attempted to articulate memories or interpretations of the past into the urban fabric. The contemporary theoretical and cultural fascination with memory, and the consequential building of monuments and memorials, cements the relationship between monuments and the memory binary. This intersection between monuments and memory, and accordingly memory studies and spatial theory, has seen a new area of scholarship evolve across disciplines.
3 Tim Edensor’s National Identity and Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Knauer’s edited Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation In Public Space both make similar observations in terms of the built environment, memory and the formation of identity.
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IV
Urban Memory:
Theoretical Engagements with Memory and the City
It is here that the development of my argument is situated, within the collection of theoretical texts that explicitly investigate the relationship between memory and city space. These interdisciplinary theories consider how memory is (or cannot be) exhibited across the built environment, and I build upon this academic domain to theorise the narratives of memory and forgetting that are continually being displayed and rewritten across urban landscapes. Architect
Aldo Rossi established this academic discourse in 1984 in The Architecture in the City, a work that was later revitalised by M. Christine Boyer in The Art of Collective Memory (1994). Rossi theorises the city through the lens of collective memory, interpreting urban space to be constitutive of the collective memory of its people, where the city is directly associated with objects and places. Rossi declares that, “the city is the locus of collective memory” where memory acts as the consciousness of the city (130-1). Boyer’s theorisation of the historical precedents for a city of collective memory draws upon both Rossi and Halbwachs and argues that,
“city spaces and architectural landscapes have often been the active systemizers of memory”
(133). Although both these texts collate collective memory with communal space, academic approaches to architecture and memory have evolved since Boyer’s text, where the city is no longer seen as the embodiment or locus of collective memory, as the term ‘collective’ (as criticised in Halbwachs’ work) suggests that united memory is possible, and that there is a communal agreement between communities and governments as to which monuments and memories are built into the urban fabric.
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Contemporary theorists across the academic disciplines of memory studies, sociology, art theory and spatial theory have since built on the scaffolding provided by Rossi – that the city can be theorised through the trope of memory. These theorists interpret the urban fabric as the materiality of memory, a container for memory, or sites where the act of remembering can be induced – without employing the idea that collective memory and its representation is possible.
Hodgkin and Radstone argue in their introduction to Contested Paths: The Politics of Memory that memory does not operate as an abstract system, but is embodied in the ‘stuff’ of memory, that memory is “generated and channelled through an endless variety of media and artefact” (11).
Edensor also proposes that memory is spatialised in the concrete objects in the city, that memory
“manifests itself in tangible objects” (National Identity 37). In The Destruction of Memory Robert
Bevan argues that buildings are locations where groups come together through shared experience, where “collective identities are forged and traditions invented” (12). Bevan ascertains that the built environment works as a prompt for memory, where architecture functions as a container of meaning and history, “a corporeal reminder of the events involved in its construction, use and destruction” (15).
Working across disciplines, Hodgkin and Radstone, Edensor, and Bevan have theorised that the urban landscape is built through objects that function as catalysts for memories and pasts. Within the frameworks constructed through these academic texts is the expectation that memories can and will be retrieved: that the buildings, monuments, architectures, streets and landmarks that compose a city landscape can actually function as containers of memory and represent physical embodiments of memory that will be read by the people inhabiting the space. If memory is ultimately tied to the binary of forgetting, however, then the dyad of amnesia complicates or ruptures these theories.
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Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life and Adrian Forty in The Art of Forgetting present arguments that are in contrast to the recent scholarship where monuments are seen as the embodiments of memory. Observing that memories do haunt the urban landscape, de Certeau and
Forty then move to argue that memories can never appropriate a permanent materiality within a monument or building. Instead, memories remain intangible. Although individuals may attach personal and historical experiences and meanings to urban sites, both de Certeau and Forty maintain that the built environment is unable to make the memories of a community concrete.
Within a spatial discourse de Certeau unravels the materiality of memory by arguing that
“memory is sort of an anti-museum: it is not localizable” (108). Instead, the principle feature of memory is that it “comes from somewhere else, it is outside of itself, it moves things about” (62).
Writing from an art history paradigm, Forty observes that the Western tradition of memory since the Renaissance has been founded on the assumption that memories formed in the mind can be transferred to solid material objects that then stand for the memories themselves. Forty argues that once there is an endeavour to secure memory to a site, the memory disintegrates: memory cannot be localised to a particular object or space because “when memory becomes fixed to material objects then it is in decay” (7). As I have noted, Forty maintains that monuments are the materiality of forgetting rather than memory, where the objects that are expected to preserve memory are in fact memory’s enemy: it is monumental space that ties memory down and causes it to be forgotten.
The discursive use of memory and the city that I employ through the proceeding chapters of this thesis is drawn from architectural historian Mark Crinson’s edited collection of essays from art history, cultural studies, and critical theory backgrounds. Urban Memory theorises city space in terms of memory and amnesia, bringing together architecture, monuments, museums, art galleries, industrial and urban space, memory and forgetting, in order to study the characteristic forms, individual experiences and spatial dialogues that lurk within the city through the trope of
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‘urban memory.’ Crinson’s work analyses the historical pattern that has transpired across the urban landscape across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the modernist architectural style of looking forward, to the current post-industrial landscape that is built through a myriad of commemorations, memorials and monuments. This is in order to demonstrate the dynamics of memory and history within our contemporary post-industrial culture. Crinson observes that the rise in the academic study of memory has been accompanied with a rise in commemorations being built across post-industrial cities, arguing that the crisis of memory is most obvious within the city, as urban spaces are the most physical example of the contemporary global attempt to archive obsessively. Crinson argues that the city is an inexhaustible library of memory where “the past is everywhere and it is nowhere” (i). Once urban memory is tied to urban forgetting, the complicated binary of concealing and revealing the past can be demystified through a theoretical framework that calls for a reading of the traces of history imprinted across the urban fabric.
I interpret the term urban memory in two discrete ways. Through Crinson’s work, urban memory is a theoretical construct that allows for an interpretation of urban space and an analysis of how the built environment has been used as a tool by communities and governments for both remembering and forgetting across time. Urban memory is also the means by which an inhabitant of a city interprets their past, present and future, in relation to the urban landscape that surrounds them. The first concept sees memory resting within scholarship, the other being a practice that is enacted by individuals within the city. If the city is theorised in terms of urban memory, this crossover between theory and performance allows me to analyse how memories reside in urban space. Crinson argues that urban memory indicates that architectures are comprised through a collection of objects and practices that “enable recollections of the past and that embody the past through traces of the city’s sequential building and rebuilding” (ii). As such, the historical narratives and memories written by the material objects of the city can be analysed in isolation, without the definitional complications that individual, collective and post-memories all entail.
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Instead the archaeology and topography of the city can be appropriated as a means to analyse the modalities of power operating within urban space throughout this thesis.
This thesis draws on Crinson’s approach to the city in terms of urban memory as Crinson incorporates a study of the urban fabric with its associated cultural institutions – a merging of city and cultural sites also transpires within this thesis. By incorporating research on museums, art galleries and industrial sites, like Crinson’s work in Urban Memory, I present an encompassing theoretical account of memory and forgetting in the city through a consideration of monumental and cultural space simultaneously. Huyssen’s Present Pasts and Young’s At Memory’s Edge also theorise the urban landscape and cultural artefacts concomitantly. Therefore, Crinson, Huyssen and Young provide the framework for the structuring of my subsequent chapters. The multifaceted relationship between monuments and the processes of memory are being explored within visual practices, where the fixation with memory, and monument making and unmaking, that has infiltrated social, theoretical and political discourses has also become a concern for contemporary installation art. These installations explicitly comment on the problematic binary of memory and forgetting. Therefore, as governments fill their cities with memorials, there has been the emergence of artistic ‘memory metatexts’ that function in a distinctly different way to monuments in the city. These artworks engage with memory and amnesia, by calling to the surface the absent pasts, memories and histories. As points of access to histories and narratives that have been forgotten or are illegible within the urban narrative these artworks, or ‘memory installations’ can be used by the cultural theorist to determine how the theoretical concerns of the paradoxes of memory operate in both cities, at monumental sites, as well as in contemporary art.
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V
Memory Installations:
Contemporary Art and Memory Work
Monumental space is increasingly theorised in terms of its limitations and inherent opacity, where theorists and communities are sceptical of the narratives written by these urban objects, as well as the identities that they reinforce and project. Through this thesis I filter my attention on monuments and memory through the lens of contemporary visual culture. This allows to me to theorise the static, imaginary and transitory narratives written across city space in terms of the memories and identities that are concealed by officially sanctioned monuments, symbolic monuments, and everyday monuments in a way that moves beyond the built environment. Instead of deliberating on only the monument proper, I annex these objects of contemporary art in order to elucidate upon the relationship between space, memory and materiality. With this in mind, I conclude each chapter with an extended consideration of a piece of contemporary art that relates directly to the city, the monuments, and the memories in question. This allows me to observe the limitations of monumental space, and explore how forgotten pasts can be recovered elsewhere. I do not suggest that contemporary art is a solution to the problematics of monuments, but demonstrate how contemporary art subscribes to a different agenda, one that exposes auxiliary memories and pasts. I use these art installation case studies to demonstrate how contemporary art can manipulate the way viewers interact with the past through a redirection of focus onto narratives that have been obscured from the public space of the city. As a consequence, these artworks allow the city and the past to be looked upon and understood in new ways.
My work on contemporary art as a mechanism for remembrance has developed out of a body of art and cultural theory that explores the relations between art and memory. In Present Pasts
Andreas Huyssen defines a new genre of art he calls ‘memory sculpture,’ a post-minimalist form
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of sculpture that investigates memory and remembrance by inscribing a “localizable, even corporeal memory” into the work (110). In Making Memory Matter art historian Lisa Saltzman considers contemporary artworks that use projections and shadows in order to work as mnemonic devices. Saltzman argues that these installations have an aesthetic preoccupation of giving the past a place in the present, that they are visual strategies designed “to make memory matter” (7).
In Urban Memory, Mark Crinson locates a form of contemporary art that is research based, installations that focus on the mnemotechny of the industrial city where “memory is the subject”
(196). I adopt the term ‘memory installation’ as an umbrella term to describe the contemporary body of artwork outlined by Huyssen, Saltzman and Crinson, and within this categorisation I combine and elaborate upon these theories. It is through the frame of memory installation that I consider my contemporary artwork case studies, interpreting these artworks in terms of urban memory, outlining how these memory installations complement monumental space.
Memory installations define the contemporary field of artworks that explore and examine the memories and historical narratives that are absent from the built environment of the city. Memory installations engage with, and bring to the surface, residual spatial stories, and this is their purpose – to reveal the past, but to refrain from setting agendas. As Crinson observes of contemporary artworks that present an archaeology or mnemotechny of the industrial city, these works “avoid setting utopian agendas or reaching dystopic conclusions” (196). Rather, memory installations expose concealed narratives, without having particular expectations or desired outcomes from the viewer. It is memory as a subject that drives and determines the structure of these art installations. In Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, art historian Suzanne Lacy defined a “new genre public art” where there is a two-way conversation between the artwork and the viewer that allows the viewer to understand or reinterpret the past. This is an idealised notion
– it cannot be predetermined how a viewer will interpret a particular artwork or that an encoded script will be executed. This is not the agenda of memory installations. Memories are made
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present and the viewer can appropriate the artwork to demystify the past because urban and historical memories are brought to the surface and explored within the installation, but a predetermined script or agenda has not been written by the artist.
Countermonuments
In my historiography of the study of monuments I outlined James E. Young’s theorisation of countermonuments, but are countermonuments memory installations? When urban landscapes have been destroyed through iconoclasm or war, the community and authorising powers are faced with the problem of literally recomposing the monumental sites: a government may compose a new narrative that does not acknowledge or refer to the recent past, or build a replica of the site that was destroyed, or a monument to the site that was ruined. Irrespective to how a city is restored, the voids left across a city following monumental destruction generates debate concerning how governments and communities should represent the recent past, lost generations, or traumatic events across the urban landscape. Rather than closing alternative readings of the past by commemorating the powerful through self-aggrandising monuments or presenting an idealised reading of the past and national identity, the late twentieth-century saw governments building contemporary monuments that were intended to counter the limitations of the officially sanctioned monument – invisibility, mystification, opacity. By working with artists and architects councils in Germany, for instance, have attempted to erect monuments that work against the amnesia that is characteristic of the traditional monument. These are Young’s countermonuments; monuments that attempt to reveal the past rather than obscure it, and endeavour to challenge the inherent invisibility emblematic of the built environment.
The term countermonument observes that the object is a monument, but has been designed and built to contradict the limitations of these sites. Countermonuments actively engage and highlight
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traumatic moments of the recent past that are forgotten or eclipsed from dominate narratives that inscribe an urban history. In doing so, countermonuments openly engage with the dyad of memory and forgetting, rather than suffering the fate of being amnesiac. In At Memory’s Edge
Young theorises countermonuments in terms of their opposition to the static representation of history that dominates monuments and is embodied in museums. Concentrating on memorials constructed in post-Holocaust cities of central Europe from the 1990s onwards, Young argues that these simplistic countermonuments are “brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial space conceived to challenge the very premises of their being” (7). Gillis similarly observes that the countermonument brings to attention the forgetting inherent in the traditional monument. Gillis states that, “traditional memory sites actually discourage engagement with the past and induce forgetting rather than remembering” where the politically active artists designing countermonuments and inspiring the counteractive movement call for citizens to interact with the past, challenge the status of memory as a knowable object, and “do more rather than less memory work” (16).
Young identifies Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’ countermonument Monument Against
Fascism, War and Violence – and for Peace and Human Rights (1986-93) and Horst Hoheisel’s countermonument Aschrott-Brunnen Memorial (1987) as memorials that bring to attention “the essential incapacity in conventional public institutions like the museum or the monument to serve as wholly adequate sites for Germany’s tortured memory of the Holocaust” (121-2).
Unveiled in Hamburg in 1986, the Monument Against Fascism overtly comments on the invisibility of the traditional monument by literally disappearing. Consisting of a forty-foot-high, three-foot-square pillar (made of hollow aluminium plate with a thin layer of soft, dark, lead), the
Gerz’s monument was erected with an inscription that called for people to graffiti their names on the pillar (see fig. 1). A chamber, the same height of the monument, was built beneath the pillar,
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and the Monument Against Fascism was lowered into the void over seven years. Vanishing into the ground on 10 November 1993, there is nothing at the site except for a burial stone inscribed to the countermonument (see fig. 2). As a countermonument, this work overtly comments on the inherent invisibility of traditional monuments, and for Young the work has “returned the burden of memory to visitors: now all that stands here are the memory-tourists, forced to rise and to remember for themselves” (131). Instead of becoming metaphorically invisible, Gerz and Shalev-
Gerz argue that once a monument has moved its viewers to remember the traumatic past the monument becomes unnecessary and so should disappear. They state that the invisible pictures of the absent monument will correspond to internalised images of the memorial and “now locked into the mind’s eye as a source of perpetual memory” all that remains is the memory of the monument (qtd. in Young, 134).
Horst Hoheisel’s Aschrott-Brunnen Memorial (1987) was built to commemorate the Aschrott-
Brunnen Fountain (1908), a forty-foot-high neo-Gothic pyramid fountain in Kassel’s City Hall
Square (see fig. 3). Local Nazis destroyed the fountain on 8 April 1939. Rather than restoring the fountain, an act of preservation that Hoheisel argued would only encourage people to forget what had happened to the original, Hoheisel designed a negative form to commemorate the space. The fountain sculpture was first rebuilt as a hollow concrete form and exhibited in the square. Using the space under the street, Hoheisel’s sculpture was then sunk 12 meters below the surface of the city in the ground water. Young argues that Germany’s past, in particular that of Kassel, is remembered in Hoheisel’s countermonument where the “very absence of the monument is now preserved in its precisely duplicated negative space” (99). Instead of a forgotten fountain marking the city square, there is now an invisible fountain beneath the ground that is marked on the pavement by a circular pattern that represents the original fountain and an inscribed bronze table with the original fountain’s image (see fig. 4). Hoheisel argues that, “the sunken fountain is not
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the memorial at all” but within the walker who has to stand upon the site and search for the memorial in their own mind (qtd. in Young, 100).
In Young’s study of the after-images of the Holocaust in contemporary art and architecture he does not distinguish between countermonuments and contemporary art: countermonuments and the temporary acts of remembrance performed by contemporary art are both theorised through the same theoretical framework. The Gerzs’ and Hoheisel’s countermonuments attempt to actively remember the recent past by calling upon the failings of the monument proper – urban memory is called upon through disappearance and invisibility where both countermonuments permanently store the object of commemoration beneath the ground where they were originally exhibited.4
Despite these aesthetic techniques, I argue that because the materiality of the countermonument is embedded within the history of urban monuments, then countermonuments ultimately fall prey to the limitations of traditional monuments. Even though countermonuments actively resist becoming invisible, they are still monuments, and it is inevitable that they will mystify the past, become unnoticed, and the memories that they attempt to resurrect will become obscured.
Countermonuments are not memory installations and through this thesis I make a clear distinction between the two. Memory installations are not limited through their generic conventions to intrinsic invisibility and are not restricted in their capacity to perform memory work. With no predetermined agenda, memory installations reveal the past without defining it. At the level of display, countermonuments are constructed as permanent fixtures within the city. Although the countermonument may be in flux (as is the case with the Gerzs’ disappearing monument and
Hoheisel’s underground fountain) these commemorations remain stitched into the urban fabric.
On the other hand, memory installations are temporary artworks that are exhibited for a certain amount of time, whether this is within the city or in the gallery.
4 Micha Ullman’s Bibliotek (1996) is another example of an underground countermonument. Ullman designed a library to be built beneath Bebelplatz, Berlin, in order to remember the Nazi book burnings.
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Countermonuments do attempt to reanimate the past and comment upon the events that eventuated in the need for their creation. Their ability to remain useful tools to provoke spatial and historical memories and narratives to be read, however, dissipates over time. Despite the ability of countermonuments to observe and critique the processes of memory, their location within public space forces these sites of memorialisation to inevitably be positioned as metaphorically invisible objects, becoming just as complicated as the opaque space composed by official sculptures. As time passes, original meanings and purposes fade as the countermonument, or the marker to the countermonument embedded beneath the city, becomes a standard site on the urban horizon. Young does argue that the epoch of the monument is drawing to a close, identifying temporary art installations exhibited in European cities that engage with the recent past. In particular Young focuses on Shimon Attie’s artwork as performing memory work, an example that I will concentrate on later in this introduction. Like Young’s move from a consideration of the permanent sites of countermonuments to comment upon the spatial theories and paradoxes of memory, to a study of artworks that exert memory work, this thesis will also analyse less fixed forms of artwork that function as devices for demystifying narratives and memory in urban space.
Memory Installations
In his theorisation of public sculpture and monuments, Huyssen argues that the monuments and countermonuments commissioned by governments in order to recite an interpretation of the past have difficultly in representing historical trauma. This is due to the limitations of the materiality of the monument as authorising powers attempt to concretise fluid and imagined concepts such as memory, history and identity. He asks “how can such a monument be made to function as part of a network of urban relations, rather than standing disconnected from city life and ultimately
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referring only to itself?” (101). Huyssen states that countermonuments, transitory monuments and disappearing monuments, such as Gerzs’ Monument to Fascism and Hoheisel’s Aschrott-Brunnen
Memorial, cannot fully satisfy the problematics of memory and amnesia, and as such cannot function as part of this network of urban relations and represent interpretations of the past. The need for sites, spaces and architectures that support and reveal public memories, rather than freeze the past according to a dominant spatial narrative, is very much at issue. Huyssen calls for the construction of objects that actively remember traumatic events, spaces where the past is “less susceptible to the vagaries of memory” and instead memory has the opportunity to inscribe itself into history and be “codified into national consciousness” (101).
Forgotten urban memories can be revealed through alternative cultural forms that are beyond the field of commemorative space. Huyssen identities an emerging field of post-minimalist sculpture in the arts, a genre that directly comments upon and explores the limitations of representing memory in the city. Tentatively defined as “memory sculpture,” Huyssen argues that these works explicitly engage with remembrance and consciously attempt to demystify and reveal narratives of the past absent from the traditional monumental space of the city (110). Contemporary art can bring to mind alternative narratives for the viewer of the memory sculpture, stories that have been suppressed or eclipsed in the officially erected public sculpture and countermonuments. In this sense, contemporary art could be seen to be functioning as a memory worker: an object that actively recalls contentious, forgotten, or alternative interpretations and aspects of the past.
Huyssen argues that memory sculpture is an art practice that is “not centered on spatial configuration alone, but that powerfully inscribes a dimension of localizable, even corporeal memory into the work” (110). Inscribing these aspects of memory into the actual artwork is what makes memory work distinct from the monument and memorial, and allows the addressee to engage in a dialogue with the past.
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Rather than appearing in the public realm of the city, Huyssen locates memory sculpture in the museum or art gallery. As such, the audience of the installation is “the individual beholder rather than the nation or community” (110). Memory sculpture is able to engage with memory and forgetting in a different manner to that of the monument due to the form that memory sculpture takes. Because the artists building memory sculptures handle materials and concepts that relate to a specific tradition of installation art, there is an “emphatic reliance on an experiential dimension” and as such it is “much less confined by generic conventions, they will inevitably become invisible to those engaging in the city space, or toppled through an act of iconoclasm” (110). The experimental mode of memory sculpture found in the private domain of the gallery articulates performs a memory work that “activates body, space, and temporality, matter and imagination, presence and absence in a complex relationship with their beholder” (111). Hence they speak compellingly to the concerns with memory and absence that have emerged as dominant concerns in the past two decades:
In these works, the material object is never just installation or sculpture in the traditional
sense, but it is worked in such a way that it articulates memory as a displacing of past into
present, offering a travel of a past that can be experienced and read by the viewer. It thus
opens up an extended time-space challenging the viewer to move beyond the material
presence of the sculpture in the museum and to enter into dialogue with the temporal and
historical dimension implicitly in the work. At the same time, these sculptures do not fall
for the delusion of authenticity or pure presence. In the use of (often old or discarded)
materials and their arrangement, they display an awareness that all memory is re-collection,
re-presentation. As opposed to much avant-garde artistic practice in this century then, this
kind of work is not energized by the notion of forgetting. (Huyssen 111)
In her installation Unland: The Orphan’s Tunic (1997), Colombian artist Doris Salcedo actively recalls a recent traumatic past in a work that engages in a complex relationship with presence and
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absence (see fig. 5). Huyssen interprets this work as a memory sculpture, arguing that the title of this work suggests that “land is the site of life and culture, of community and nation,” where unland “would be its radical negation” (112). Huyssen’s reading of this work indicates that the concept of ‘unland’ works as the obverse of utopia, it is a construct where life and its accompanying happiness and miseries have become unsuitable to live in. First exhibited in the
New Museum in New York City in 1998, Unland appears to be an ordinary used kitchen table, but is multifaceted in terms of what is absent. Rather than one table, the sculpture actually consists of two tables that have been fiercely stuck together, the inner sets of legs broken off, the work covered in a tunic of thin silk. Huyssen observes that the effect is “a sense of fragility and vulnerability that contrasts with the sturdiness of the wooden table” where the table appears “no more than a trace, a mute trace” (114). Unland represents the story of a girl who witnessed the killing of her mother. Following the death, the girl continued to wear the same dress (that her mother had made) day after day. For Huyssen, the dress is “a maker of memory and a sign of trauma” and Salcedo’s artwork becomes an index of death, life, and trauma from the real world
(116). As a memory sculpture, this artwork presents a trace of the past, where the human body is absent but not forgotten, and like all memory sculptures the viewer engages with “the temporal and historical dimension implicit in the work” (111). 5
Lisa Saltzman’s Making Memory Matter explores the human impulse to record and remember events and people, where visual representations and installations are indicators of attempts to memorialise. Taking as her starting point the tale of the Corinthian maiden who outlines the shadow of her lover when he was going abroad, Saltzman uses this allegory to account for contemporary aesthetic preoccupations with memory and forgetting. Saltzman, like Huyssen, sees
5 Huyssen provides an extensive interpretation of Doris Salcedo’s work in the chapter “Doris Salcedo’s Memory Sculpture: Unland: The Orphan’s Tunic” in Present Pasts. There are a number of other artists whose work could be interpreted through the lens of memory sculpture, in particular Russian artist Ilya Kabakov and Polish artist Miroslav Balka have created memory sculptures that were initiated through the complexities of remembering and forgetting in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.
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a growing concern in contemporary art with memory. Rather than focusing on post-minimalist sculpture, however, Saltzman analyses representational strategies such as projection, silhouettes and casting evinced in contemporary art where photography, video and installation are ever- present. Saltzman’s work theorises experiences and events, encompassing the individual or collective, the local or national, the everyday or traumatic, that are “retrieved or resubmitted to the present through their reconfiguration” in representational or visual form (7). These visual forms and the visual strategies that are used by artists to give the past a place in the present are, for Saltzman, aesthetic inheritances that are mobilised to “make memory matter” (7). Through her discussion of contemporary visual art, Saltzman also provides a commentary on artworks that perform memory work. Unlike the artistic genre that Huyssen identifies as memory sculpture, I define the artworks analysed by Saltzman as ‘spectres of memory.’ This is in order to account for the aesthetics of these artworks: their representational strategies, their use of shadow and light, and the way in which they invoke the past.
Saltzman has divided Making Memory Matter into chapters that concentrate on different artistic conventions. It is the second chapter, ‘When Memory Speaks,’ that focuses on projection art that is useful in terms of my analysis of contemporary artworks that perform memory work and are characteristic of ‘spectres of memory.’ In this chapter Saltzman considers artists who use photographic and filmic projection “as a means of staging an encounter with history and its subjects” (16). “Projections, silhouettes, and casts, these foundational representational techniques and technologies return in the present as a means of figuring, even if only obliquely, an ever elusive past” (20). The memory installations that can be interpreted as working as a spectre of memory are self-reflexive. As Saltzman argues, this form of contemporary art “establishes itself in relation to the work of remembrance” and is a contemporary form of mnemonic device (12).
But it is the way in which these artists of memory present their work that is the defining characteristic for Saltzman. Although they are artworks, they appropriate a style similar to that of
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the countermonument, where they exploit the indexical capacity of the visual field, only to empty it. Saltzman classifies ‘postindexical’ (post because they have been emptied) strategies at play within these art installations to include “animated monuments and amnesiac apparitions, vaudevillian silhouettes and ghostly processions, sepulchral casts and incinerated architectures”
(13); and these strategies of haunting and projection call to mind the past and forgotten memories in a way that is fleeting, yet more vivid than can transpire within the concrete materiality of the monument in the city.
Artist Shimon Attie’s temporary art installation project, Writing on the Wall (Berlin 1991-1993), is a projection-based work that literally casts spectres of memory onto the urban landscape. This project developed from Attie’s questioning of where the memories of the Jewish community had disappeared to within the contemporary German landscape (see fig. 6). Attie instigated the creation of photographic installations to perform memory work in order to prevent the Berlin people from becoming indifferent to their pasts. After researching the photographic archives in
Berlin, Attie acquired images of the Jewish Scheunenviertel district from the 1920s and 1930s.
Attempting to pin point the exact locations where these images were taken, Attie then took these photographs of murdered and deported Jews and turned them into projections, illuminating them onto the buildings and homes of the lost people. Therefore, through his transitory castings of photographs onto city streets, Attie has made a temporary trace of these forgotten people across the urban fabric of Berlin. Young argues that Attie’s work will “always haunt these sites by haunting those who have seen his projections. The sites of a lost Jewish past in Europe would thus retain traces of this past, if now only in the eyes of those who have seen Attie’s installations,” thereby recovering these memories and actively bringing them to the surface of the urban landscape (64). As can be seen from the still of Writing on the Wall, Attie’s projection of the Jewish past leaves a fleeting, ephemeral, ghostly trace of recent history that haunts the
Scheunenviertel district. Through this spectre of memory, the traumatic events of Germany’s
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history are evoked in a manner that the monument or countermonument is unable to – the lost people are cast back into the urban landscape. 6
Mark Crinson identifies a form of memory installation that is different to that of memory sculpture and spectres of memory. These artworks perform memory work through their focus on the “mnemotechny of the industrial city” (196). Crinson observes that the current post-industrial society restructures once-industrial cities, placing memory in an interesting relationship to aesthetic practices. The memories that have been lost as the monuments to industrialisation are gentrified, and the politics of dark spaces and histories of the city, are investigated through these mnemotechnic artworks. The agenda of these works is to deliberate upon the gentrification of the industrial past in the post-industrial present. Often through site-specific projects these art installations question remembrance at a time when the recent past is being papered over and obscured. The artists that map the mnemotechnics of the industrial landscape draw upon the strategies of research in the composition of their memory installations. This research and self- reflexivity see the mnemotechnics of the industrial landscape explore “the map, the architect’s plan and model, the formalities of slide presentation, techniques of surveillance and the re- evocation of film by video” (196).
This is not to say that these works have withdrawn from engagements with the politics of urban memory; “rather, that the gallery has become a place of temporary reappraisal where these politics might be opened up through a poetics of form, a place that has a secondary but still dynamic relation to the places that their art evokes” (196). Crinson’s argument is a strong counterpoint to the invisibility of the monument or countermonument displayed within the urban
6 Lisa Saltzman in Making Memory Matter and James E. Young in At Memory’s Edge provide a theorisation of Shimon Attie’s artworks in terms of their performance of memory work. Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Bunker Hill Monument Projection (1998) and Tony Ousler’s Optics (1999) are also examples of works that use projections in order to perform memory work.
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fabric. Instead of being deemed invisible or disappearing, these works use the temporary, internal space of the gallery to allow the viewer to engage with the site, memories and histories in question, through the lens of the artist and artwork. These artworks are not in any conventional sense memorials, and it would stand that if they were sites of memorialisation then they would fall prey to the limitations and paradoxes of the monument and memorial. Instead the mnemotechnic works adopt the contested nature of memory as the subject whilst “avoiding utopian agendas or reaching dystopian conclusions” (196). Crinson’s framework allows me to analyse memory installations of post-industrial space as archaeological works that reveal histories and memories through the archive, maps, and presenting traces of the past.
British artist Adam Chodzko’s Remixer (2002) is an installation that Crinson argues is emblematic of an artwork that presents the mnemotechnics of an industrial city, where Chodzko’s composition work as a mnemonic tool for uncovering the historiography of the industrial city.7
Remixer is an installation that literally maps the post-industrial landscape of Manchester, consisting of several maps that were pasted onto the gallery wall like bill posters during exhibition. On these posters Chodzko links Manchester’s legendary nightclub the Hacienda with the site of the 1996 IRA bombing by drawing a line that crosses the urban map of Manchester.
The line also passes through the officially sanctioned monumental space of Manchester’s Albert
Square where the Victorian figures of Prince Albert and William Gladstone stand, as well as crossing the urban locations where rallies and protests have taken place through Manchester’s history. As can be seen from a detail of Remixer, the map rewrites the narrative of Manchester by explicitly connecting a site of popular culture with political acts of violence, fixing the gentrified post-industrial space with sites of intentional destruction (see fig. 7). Through this installation
7 Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993), an installation where the voids of a Victorian terraced residence were used as a mould for a newly-cast, blank-windowed concrete house; and Nathan Coley’s I Don’t Have Another Land, a model of the Marks and Spencer building that was destroyed in the 1996 IRA bombings in Manchester; are both indicative of presenting the mnemotechny of the post-industrial city.
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Chodzko has composed an urban narrative that unites the renowned music scene of the 1980s with the act of terrorism that saw the upgrading of the city centre. Crinson argues that as a consequence, this work is essentially questioning how contemporary societies understand urban form, where “the sites of commemoration are not in themselves fetishised, nor are hypothetical monuments present to make them out” (204). The work combines the map, a piece of surveyor’s rationalism that channels space and organises the view, with the ordering of time in terms of how it is experienced by the individual or community: in this case joining disparate moments in
Manchester’s recent history.
Huyssen’s memory sculpture, Saltzman’s specters of memory, and Crinson’s mnemotechnics of the industrial city constitute three ways that contemporary art engages with memory and forgetting. These three classifications of art encompass sculptural installation, projection and mapping, and I apply these theoretical frameworks in order to analyse three artworks through this thesis that perform memory work. Karosas’ decaying Lenin lying on his back in the sculpture park, Norrie’s augmented miniature model village on a looped DVD, and Parker’s exploded shed in the gallery do not stand quietly. These are installations that demand the attention of the viewer, rather than remaining invisible or indolent within the urban fabric like a traditional monument.
By performing memory work these contemporary sculptures demystify the narratives of the recent past written by the monuments in the city proper as these works actively encourage an engagement with the recent past beyond the surface of the object’s image. In the public space of the city viewers are encouraged only to look at the surface of the monument, where in the gallery memories and cultural identity are exhibited in such a fashion that request the viewer to look beyond the surface and explore alternative representations of the past. The traditional ways of presenting memories through monuments, appropriating symbolic sites to reinforce identity, and the act of gentrifying everyday ruins to hide difficult moments of the past are being ruptured and questioned by Karosas, Norrie and Parker. These works contest the prescribed and assumed
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notions that local and national authorities project onto communities as the way in which monumental space should be organised and interpreted. Instead, they allow alternative ways of reading and remembering urban space to take place.
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Chapter One
Architectural Opacity:
The Static Dialogues of Officially Sanctioned Monuments
Destruction and deformation are discourses of making and unmaking monuments.
— Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, Monuments and Memory (205)
Reaching the Centre of Europe Sculpture Park in Lithuania is not an easy journey. To get there you must catch a local bus that leaves from the north side of Vilnius’ city centre. This suburb is outside the Old Town; the renovated and redecorated designated heritage area that draws large numbers of tourists and associating industry. Here, only a few blocks north of the Soviet Worker statues that stand on the Green Bridge leading out of the Old Town, is a busy road. There’s a market selling leather goods and cheap audiotapes. The noises mingle with diesel fumes, and the local business signs are in Russian or Lithuanian: there are no English translations on this street.
The bus travels north past the imposing grey concrete housing blocks, echoes of a recent
Communist past. These crumbling apartments have the stains of glue and plaster marking their exteriors, where inadequate structural repairs have been made. After twenty minutes the bus terminates on the edge of the city and I am left at a deserted roundabout approximately three kilometres west from the Centre of Europe Sculpture Park. From here I walk in the summer heat past Lithuanian country houses and farms on the outskirts of the city. There are no directions or signposts along the dirt roads that lead to the sculpture park and I constantly feel slightly lost and bewildered. After an hour of sweating in the direct sun I reach the field that marks the geographical centre of Greater Europe (Greater Europe being the land that stretches from Iceland to Russia). I pay a small admission fee and enter the sculpture park. Walking around its green
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lawns and forest I discover Lithuanian artist Gintaras Karosas’ installation Infotree LNK (2000) that houses a decaying Lenin sculpture lying on its back.
Travelling to the southern sculpture park, Grutas Park, next to the town of Druskininkai is quite a different trek. I am already aware of what the park will look like, thanks to advertising in tourist pamphlets and brochures. A designated mini-bus departs from the more legible and tourist- friendly precinct under Gediminas Tower, the remnants of a castle on a small mound behind
Cathedral Square and a statue of Duke Gediminas. This area of Vilnius has recently been redefined through a local council attempt to aestheticise the bleak urban landscape that had been consolidated during the communist era, when architecture and statues were given a concrete and
Soviet edge. The forested hill, valley and river that surround the Gediminas Tower are complemented by the newly paved streets and plastered buildings, forming a stark contrast to the polluted market and grim housing of the northern side of the river. I join the other tourists on the mini-bus that drives south along the highway. We stop by the side of the road, this time only a short walk past farms and local shops. It is autumn. I collect apples that have fallen from the trees in the orchards. Following signs I walk towards the sculpture park, paying a more substantial fee at the entrance to Grutas Park. Here duckboards lead me around the Lenin and Stalin statues while I listen to Russian pop music blasting from the megaphones erected through the park.
These two Lithuanian sculpture parks use the retired communist monuments in distinctly different ways. Lithuanian sculptor Gintaras Karosas designed the Centre of Europe Sculpture Park in
1991 as an artistic venture to showcase Lithuanian and international art in a site that saw Vilnius as the centre of greater Europe. Grutas Park, on the other hand, is a site more explicitly designed for foreign tourists by Lithuanian millionaire Viliumas Malinauskas. Despite the divergent ways that the two sculpture parks are advertised and make use of the Soviet iconography, they are united in the fact that they exhibit the fallen communist monuments. Across the streets of Vilnius
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proper, the recent communist past is concealed. Throughout the cobbled streets of the Old Town there are very few overt signifiers to the Soviet regime. The monuments celebrating these leaders were pulled down when Lithuania gained independence in 1990 and the Government of the
Republic of Lithuania was established. The city now exhibits new officially sanctioned monuments; instead of recalling the recent past, ancient emblems and myths that celebrate
Lithuanian nationalism determine the ways that contemporary visions of identity are imagined.
When tourists arrive in Vilnius they are invited to spend time in the refurbished Old Town, to visit the oldest University in Eastern Europe, and help celebrate the recent 700th birthday of the first Lithuanian King. Instead of Lenin and Stalin, the Dukes and Kings of the fourteenth-century are commemorated through the new buildings, statues, public spaces, museums and street names.
Introduction to Officially Sanctioned Monuments
Through this chapter I analyse officially sanctioned monuments, using the monumental space of
Vilnius, Lithuania, as a framework for this research. Officially sanctioned monuments are those monuments whose design and construction have been endorsed by authoritative powers, irrespective of whether this power lies within an external regime or internal governmental system.
Having previously been defined as ‘intentional monuments’ or ‘built heritage,’ what remains constant through previous theoretical monumental catergorisation and my own work is the idea of purpose: these monuments have been deliberately installed across a city for a particular intention.
In order to investigate the types of spatial narratives written by officially sanctioned monuments as the built environment is appropriated by governmental powers, I consider a city where the officially sanctioned monuments have been destroyed and remodelled according to the agenda of the political party in power. Across the twentieth century, Vilnius has experienced a continual reconfiguration of its commemorative space, through the erection and removal of monuments by various external national powers. I focus upon the urban fabric as it transformed when the reign
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of recent Soviet occupation was overthrown and the Government of the Republic of Lithuania took power. Both the former regime and current national government have used the public space of Vilnius to build monuments that represent particular memories and interpretations of history that the authorising power has deemed worthy of commemoration. In particular, it is Vilnius’ Old
Town that surrounds Cathedral Square that will be under scrutiny, a political and cultural centre that has historical, national and touristic importance (see fig. 8).
All monuments are infused with paradox. The very existence of monuments raises questions of remembering and forgetting as these objects conceal and reveal the past. As contemporary studies of monuments have shown, the act of raising a monument leads to the amnesia of the historical event being commemorated and alternative interpretations of the past becoming obscured. This relationship between the memory binary and monuments is most explicit with officially sanctioned monuments. Although symbolic monuments and everyday monuments also engage in a complex relationship with remembering and forgetting, these relationships are less obvious as officially sanctioned monuments are built with the intention that they can perform memorial and commemorative functions. I argue that authorising powers use the paradoxical nature of monuments to their own advantage: by erecting monuments that mask and expose the past, governments are able to command urban space. Within the city a static narration of history can be composed, and the memories that are housed across a public space can be dictated. I analyse the removal of communist iconography and the ensuing foundation of nationalist Lithuanian monuments to explore how monuments obscure history by commemorating certain events in stone, and leaving other events to be forgotten through their absence. The contemporary urban landscape of Vilnius will also be used to explore how monuments cloud the motivation behind their creation, as the tangible image of a monument disguises the agenda of the power that commissioned its construction.
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The first section of this chapter draws on spatial theory to explore the limitations of officially sanctioned monuments and the static interpretations of the past that they write. I open this chapter by sketching out the recent changes to the monumental space in Vilnius, reading the texture of the urban space to demonstrate what type of narrative the officially sanctioned monuments dictate.
Arguing that officially sanctioned monuments compose a static interpretation of the past, I concentrate on the power and power relations that are housed in these monuments. Through Steve
Pile’s The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity, Ruth Philips’ “Settler
Monuments, Indigenous Memory,” and Julia Bryan-Wilson’s “Building a Marker of Nuclear
Warning” I explore the monument’s basis in power. I argue that officially sanctioned monuments are built by the powerful, but also propose that these architectures exert a particular power over the public space of the city and the inhabitants. I analyse Vilnius’ monuments as spatial coordinates, taking up Henri Lefebvre’s spatial discourse from The Production of Space in which he argues that monuments are socially coded as sites of “intensity” (144). The power relations encoded within monuments are not always legible, and I demonstrate that monuments obscure their basis in power by displacing events of brutality and violence into the poetic and aesthetic domain of the traditional monument.
The second part of this chapter theorises the opacity of monumental space and the iconoclasm of monuments in times of political upheaval. Despite their apparent durability, monuments are not immortal objects, and the narratives and memories that they inscribe into the urban landscape are subject to change when they become revolutionary tools. Following on from Musil’s work on the invisibility of monuments, and theories of iconoclasm presented by Nelson and Olin in
Monuments and Memory and Laura Mulvey’s “Reflections on Disgraced Monuments,” I analyse how the acts of iconoclasm in the city of Vilnius, during independence, eradicated Soviet iconography and saw the creation of a blank urban canvas. Following independence, a new collection of urban objects was built, and I concentrate on the statue to Duke Gediminas (1996) in
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Cathedral Square, and the statue of King Mingdaugas (2003) outside the Lower Palace.8 These two points of investigation provide reference to consider how monuments are governmental tools for remembering or forgetting events and memories. I conclude with my work on metaphorical surfaces, bringing it together with Edward Soja’s theory presented in Postmodern Geographies that urban space presents the “illusion of opacity” (111); and Lefebvre’s theorisation of monuments as sites that obscure the modalities and the will to power. In turn, I argue that monumental space presents one dominant historical narrative, forcing alternative memories, histories, and the motivation behind their creation, into amnesia.
The third section interrogates the complicated processes of remembering and forgetting within built environments. In order to do this, I move away from Vilnius’ Old Town, to two neighbouring sculpture parks that exhibit retired communist iconography. Having theorised the ways in which monuments conceal and reveal the past, I question Marc Auge’s proposal in
Oblivion that the act of forgetting is necessary if remembering is to occur – a theory that assumes a community has the power to determine what memories are exhibited across their urban landscape – in terms of urban memory. Following James E. Young, I argue that histories cannot recover themselves, that someone or something must actively remember them. If the alternative memories and histories masked from the public space of Vilnius are to be recovered, they must be vigorously recalled. Grutas Sculpture Park and the Centre of Europe Sculpture Park indicate that the ex-Soviet objects can be used for two purposes. The monuments can be used in memory installations that perform the memory work indicative of Huyssen’s artistic genre of memory sculpture, works that actively attempts to provide a format for inhabitants to understand the recent past following a sharp break from an external power. Alternatively, the retired monuments can be
8 The Lower Palace is a site under reconstruction, to be finished in 2009 to celebrate the millennial anniversary of the first mention of Vilnius in written documents.
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appropriated for commercial purposes, undertaking the role of a novelty, and becoming objects of nostalgia where the past is mystified beneath parody.
The concluding section of this chapter is an exegesis of Gintaras Karosas’ memory installation
Infotree LNK. Karosas’ sculpture is studied through the framework of memory sculpture to demonstrate the potential of this artwork to perform the memory work that is absent from the civic space of Vilnius.
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I
Monuments and Power:
The Writing and Rewriting the Urban Landscape of Vilnius
This chapter begins with an overview of the transformation of Vilnius’ urban fabric from its era as a satellite state of the Soviet Union, to its current reign as a democratic nation. Vilnius is a text that has been frantically written and unwritten through the removal and rebuilding of monuments.
The city has experienced continual national upheaval, and is riddled with a complex history of foreign occupation and political change. Although I concentrate on the most recent transformation of the urban space, from communist state to fully blown capitalist nation, similar disturbances have transpired across the twentieth century. Vilnius’ spatial décor was renovated during Lithuania’s subjugation to Germany (1915-18), Poland (1919-20), when national borders were collapsed with Poland (1920-38), Nazi occupation (1941-44), and Soviet control (1920,
1938-41, 1944-90). The complicated and reconfigured urban environment of Vilnius provides a map of enforced, yet shifting, representations of national identity. When Lithuania was a satellite state of the USSR, Vilnius’ streets were decorated with iconic busts and statues of Lenin, and the city was a gallery of his reproduced image. Following the declaration of independence from the
Soviet Union in 1990 these statues were torn down and discarded in a revolutionary-style celebration: the monuments were attacked as if the material reproductions of Lenin were Lenin himself. The toppling and dismantling of these statues and monuments saw, by the early 1990s, almost all traces of the Soviet past having been removed by the Government of the Republic of
Lithuania. This eradication of Soviet imagery was both a symbolic act of having conquered an unwanted regime, the defeat of Soviet control, as well as an attempt by the government and community visually to forget or suppress the recent past.
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Exorcising the Soviet monuments from Vilnius’ streets created empty spaces, voids in the urban fabric that needed to be filled. The removal of communist iconography transformed the streets of
Vilnius into an urban space that appeared to be a clean slate, a blank canvas where the newly elected Government of the Republic of Lithuania could etch their own interpretation of the past.
The contemporary monumental space was reimagined as recent political and social unease was hidden beneath the surface of a new monumental landscape. New monuments wrote new narratives that masked the past, and the current monuments now standing throughout Vilnius are vastly different to the Soviet monuments that had previously inundated the city streets. The recently constructed monuments of Vilnius are of Kings and Dukes from the fourteenth century where the recent Soviet era has been erased by narratives that celebrate an ancient, national moment. The elimination and rewriting of Vilnius’ monumental space is indicative of the ways that governments can direct national history through the commemorative objects they erect, or the iconography they exclude from the city landscape. The spatial stories composed by the monuments that commemorate ancient Lithuanian legends are mythologies employed by the national government to direct the urban memories and identity for the people of Vilnius in new ways. This transformation of Vilnius’ built environment is characteristic of a government making a radical break from the past through the use of the built architecture, a process similar to the establishment of the Soviet regime through iconography only decades before.
The writing of an urban landscape is complicated and regimes face a range of topographical problems when they rewrite the monumental space of a city. During the 1940s the Soviet regime demolished or discursively assimilated troublesome symbols of Lithuanian nationalism and heritage from the city space. David Crowley and Susan E. Reid’s edited collection Socialist
Space: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, argues through a spatial theory discourse that the inscription of the Soviet regime into the urban landscape of Eastern European cities simplified
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these spaces. This was because the Soviet strategy for demonstrating power was to eliminate and confiscate national symbols and replace them with Soviet iconography. Despite Soviet attempts to write a single narrative that was reinforced through the repetitive appearance of the busts of communist leaders, Crowley and Reid state that “the material past was encountered in the everyday present in the forms of buildings and streets, and allowed the possibility for people to attach a range of meanings and memories that did not fit neatly with the official account” (8-9).
The contemporary Government of the Republic of Lithuania is facing a similar problem in the twenty first century: to provide evidence of their authority the Soviet icons have been substituted with overtly nationalistic symbols in an attempt to intentionally obscure the recent past from the urban landscape. Cities do not lend themselves to this kind of inscription, and the Lithuanian government must contend with urban memories that do not fit with their description of the past.
In both shifts of power in Vilnius, to Soviet or to nationalist control, the representation of memory and history has been affected in the same way. Although the removal of the iconography to the recent past appears to provide a blank canvas for the new administrative power, material traces of this eliminated recent past will always remain. Applying a psychoanalytic discourse,
Lefebvre and Pile approach the city as a space with literal and metaphoric layers. Through this model the residue of earlier pasts always remain in the subterranean of a city, histories and memories hidden in an amnesiac present. Alternative pasts may reside in the memories of inhabitants, but these will not always be represented in the built environment. As a consequence, urban reconstruction is as much about modernising the urban fabric as it is about managing the meanings and associations that a community has with the city. Therefore the recent Soviet past resides and haunts the contemporary urban space of Vilnius in the same way that Lithuanian national heritage and history lay in the subterranean of the city during the second half of the twentieth century. There is no way to exorcise memories completely from a city: although
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governmental powers can choose to prohibit or eliminate particular memories at a visual level, they will always rise to the surface in other manifestations.
Static Space:
The Narratives of Officially Sanctioned Monuments
Officially sanctioned monuments are overtly commemorative objects in a city. They have been the centre of public debates and theorised through academic scholarship in terms of their memorial and artistic role in the city. Officially sanctioned monuments are the busts, statues and memorials that etch wars, heroes, historical figures and events into the urban narrative. This chapter draws together theoretical discussions of officially sanctioned monuments that interpret these objects in terms of discourses of power. Annette Hamilton and Julia Bryan-Wilson analyse monuments in terms of power, making distinctions between the ways that monuments embody power. Hamilton differentiates between the different types of memorials according to which authority assembled them, arguing that the most notable monuments are those built by the powerful to remember the powerful, or those built by the state or nation to commemorate historical events (101). Julia Bryan-Wilson notes a similar distinction between monuments, arguing that monuments built by the state or nation work as tools with specific memorial functions, and are emblems used to uphold and honour the victories of the current regime (198).
If they are not overtly representing the current regime, then they are being built to inform and educate the local community on a particular interpretation of history. Hodgkin and Radstone also identify that remembering the past in the present “rewrites the events for the contemporary monument and interpretations of the past become malleable tools for those in positions of power and authority” (23).
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Hamilton and Bryan-Wilson create a clear distinction between two types of officially sanctioned monuments. Either a monument is built to celebrate the current regime in power by literally representing the power in terms of the visual materiality that the monument takes. Or, the monument is built by a state or nation to embody historical events and figures in order to inscribe a particular interpretation of the past into the city. These two officially sanctioned monuments enable two different types of narrative. The first is a perpetual present, a series of symbols that embody the contemporary regime. The second writes a linear narrative of the past, presenting a depiction of what the past was and how it will be remembered within the city. The communist statues erected in Vilnius fall into the first category. These icons and symbols of power were used by the regime to celebrate the leader and assumed victories, whether this was Lenin or Stalin – they did not write a history of Lithuania or present a national past. It was a perpetual present determined through the image of a particular communist leader. The current Government of the
Republic of Lithuania’s use of built heritage in Vilnius falls into the second category of officially sanctioned monuments. Here, the contemporary memorials attempt to sculpt the past in a particular light. Rather than writing a perpetual present, these monuments are expected to work as memory builders, educating the community on the nation’s history. By taking the form of ancient heroes and mythologies, they write a historiography of the nation by emphasising a much earlier moment in Lithuania’s past, drawing on icons and periods of national rule without external control.
Although urban fabrics may be rewoven and spatial stories recomposed when a new regime comes into power, ossification and stasis are integral to the stitching of narratives into the city: although memorial space is subject to transformation, the historical narrative written by officially sanctioned monuments is designed to present a static version of the past or present. The allegorical form of the monument buries alternative interpretations of the past by ossifying history. Once cast in stone, officially sanctioned monuments become static imitations of the past
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or a perpetual presence, because the tangible monument illustrates isolated historical events or iconic figures in concrete, forcing the monument and what it denotes to become seemingly fixed.
In Vilnius, the Soviet and nationalist icons represent the past in a fixed form, and within this framework monuments are limited to functioning as static sites. This is an inherent flaw in the structure of the monument: it is restricted to depicting only what authorising powers intend them to exhibit, and the narratives remain fixed over the exhibitional time of the monument in the city.
This prevents commemorative objects from displaying a comprehensive narrative of the recent past, and the fate of monuments is to become invisible to those people engaging with the space or to iconoclasm, as regimes change and political motivations are contested.
Irrespective of what kind of narratives officially sanctioned monuments project, and whether they are tools to write a perpetual present or a national past, both forms of officially sanctioned monuments are linked in terms of the motivation behind their creation. This genre of monuments is intricately tangled with discourses of power – monuments are implements appropriated by governments to control and command communities, and these power relations are particularly complex. Essentially, monuments are erected by the powerful, by groups and organisations that have been driven through a will to power. Ruth Philips asserts that this is the traditional framework of the monument, where the memorialising object is always a “deposit of the historical possession of power” (281). In “The Politics of Memory,” Kirk Savage also employs the metaphor of ‘depositing,’ arguing that governments use public monuments to perpetuate memory. This propagation of memory does not occur within the thoughts and ideas of the community; rather, memory is accumulated through the city “in external deposits, located not within the people but within its shared public space” (130). Although the metaphor of the deposit is a rudimentary analogy, it works to summarise the way in which governments memorialise their power in stone and concrete. Through this discourse of amassing memories through material objects, officially sanctioned monuments become the sediment and residue of a government’s
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influence over a community and the urban landscape. As a consequence, the monumental deposits inscribed into the urban landscape of a city work as visual indicators as to which authorising body is in power.
Regardless of which regime writes an urban landscape, the narrative is always caught within revealing and concealing stories and memories. Nelson and Olin argue that the power located within officially sanctioned monuments “expresses the power and sense of the society that give it meaning, and at the same time obscures competing claims for authority and meaning” (7); a reinforcement of the idea that monuments exclude alternative narratives. Pile argues that this cancelling of other stories is inherent within monuments that “say what they want to say and, by doing so, they make space incontestable, both by closing of alternative readings and by drawing people into the presumption that the values they represent are shared” (213). Monuments appear legible, but they actually eliminate alternative readings of history, and are thus rendered opaque.
Officially sanctioned monuments perpetuate the authoritarian agenda by embodying and making visible certain power relations, but do so in ways that also to tend to “mask and/or legitimate and/or naturalise those relationships” (213). Once the material space of the city becomes naturalised and incontestable then alternative readings of the past have effectively been closed off. As such, monuments are characterised through their narratological limitations rather than their story-writing possibilities, and these lost stories and interpretations of the past remain unexposed, locked in the city’s unconscious.
Urban landscapes depict a dominant narrative and, as the following section will discuss, the viewer accepts the projected power relations without searching for alternative readings of history.
If a government uses the built environment of a city space to write a particular version of the past, the power that instigates the monumental space must be motivated by a particular agenda that determines what the urban landscape will narrate. In a development of the argument put forth by
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Pile, Adrian Forty argues that monuments have to be characterised through selectivity where all commemorative artefacts “permit only certain things to be remembered and by exclusion cause others to be forgotten” (9). Once an anthology of monuments has been erected a particular version of the past is printed into a city, a process indicative of the history-writing capability of monumental space. Consequently, those who design, determine and commission the memorial objects of a city play a contentious role in the writing of history where authorising powers can use the public space of the city to frame the past, selecting one representation of the past from infinite possibilities. The ability to control the historical narratives of memorial space means that the authorising powers have the faculty to announce what the past has been, and how it will be remembered and exhibited in the present.
The power that a government has to write spatial narratives into their city space through the building of monuments has been questioned by a number of memory theorists. This interrogation is driven through the problem of authorship, and how governments and regimes find themselves with the power to write the past and urban memory for a city and its people. Radstone and
Hodgkin ask of monumental space, “who is entitled to speak for the past in the present?” (1).
David Walkowitz and Lisa Knauer posit a collection of similar questions, asking, “who has the right (or power, or authority) to decide what happens at a particular site?” (2). These are legitimate questions: the monuments that communities gaze upon determine a representation of their past, but are built by powers beyond their own control. Therefore the ‘right’ or entitlement that authorities have in the construction of the urban landscape and the design of monuments needs to be questioned, especially when governments overtly use monuments to represent history in a way that explicitly hides problematic political and social periods. The local inhabitants did not write the contemporary urban landscape of Vilnius, a space where there is now an absence of visual access to the Soviet past, as the Government of the Republic of Lithuania has eclipsed these narratives through power that they hold. Instead, the new objects that are expected to
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facilitate and convey a cultural remembrance of Lithuania are superficial when the most recent events that have changed and shaped the nation are masked by the contemporary monumental space.
Adrian Forty challenges the ability for monuments to fulfil their role as representational objects or to project cultural remembrance. Forty argues that this Western idea of monuments and memory is based on the assumption that material objects can function as analogues of human memory. Questioning the role that monuments play in forgetting within society, Forty argues that it has historically been assumed by communities and governments that “memories formed in the mind can be transferred into solid material objects” (1); and that these material manifestations can eventually stand for the memories of the events themselves. There is a persistent supposition within contemporary societies that monuments can function as the embodiments of memory, where officially sanctioned monuments are expected to possess the capacity to invoke a collection of memories – a memorial function that Forty argues monuments cannot achieve. He argues that material objects cannot satisfy the mental memory because when they become fixed to tangible objects then “the actual memory is in decay” (7). Although monuments are expected to preserve memory, commemorative sites ‘tie’ the memory down. This process forces the event or history that was being ‘remembered’ to be forgotten, and limits the spatial narratives written by officially sanctioned monuments. This is the crux of Forty’s argument, that “the objects that we assume to represent and physically depict the collection of memories or a community are not the materiality of memory, they are the materiality of forgetting” (7); and this is why residual and alternative interpretations of the past are not revealed within traditional monumental space.
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Built Architectures:
Spatial Coordinates and Sites of Intensity
There is a convergence between the narratives written by monumental space, projected urban and national identities, and the ways that history is depicted. This characteristic of the officially sanctioned monument can be investigated through the spatial theories presented by Lefebvre, allowing me to study the power that is imbued within the monument itself. The monument manipulates and directs the ways that the city and its culture are interpreted by inhabitants and foreigners as they are instigated by authorising powers, functioning as signs of this power’s agenda. In The Production of Space Lefebvre argues that rather than a text, a city is a texture, a
“large space covered by networks or webs; monuments constitute the strong points, nexuses or anchors of such webs” (222). In these terms, monuments act as centers of focus, or sites of intensity, for those people moving through the city. As anchors, monuments allow for the intersection of imagined concepts, and become physical points where identity, memory and history converge. Officially sanctioned monuments become tools in assessing how a government intends a community to understand their own history and memories. Having argued that monuments have the power to write history and influence cultural memory, I move on to analyse how monuments are able to exert this power. This discussion will be divided into an account of the role of the monument as a spatial coordinate, followed by an investigation of the monument as a site of intensity.
Monuments are visual tools harnessed by the walker in order to plot the urban space and locate themselves within it. As Kevin Lynch demonstrated in The Image of the City, monuments make space legible, but this legibility is in terms of spatial recognition, not history and memory. The space that monuments make accessible or readable for the walker is the street. By anchoring the walker within the urban fabric, monuments allow for walkers to draw a mental geographical map
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of their spatiality within the city, and this is often achieved through monuments that have been constructed at prominent locations across an urban landscape. As such, monuments are spatial coordinates that direct bodies by facilitating how a walker recognises their physical positioning, and this is irrespective of the significant events or historical figures being commemorated by the monuments in question. Pile argues that the spatial authority of the monument can alter what power the monument has, where the power of the monument to geographically write urban space is transformed into the power of the monument to write historical space: the walker invests authority into the monument because they have written the topography of the city (214). This transferral of geographical power to historical power means that communities are socialised to assimilate monuments with remembrance; and as we have learnt from Lefebvre, monuments are anchors where the intangible and imagined concepts of history, memory, and identity converge.
As spatial coordinates and sites of intensity, officially sanctioned monuments are entangled within grids of meaning and power, which has a collection of repercussions. These monuments have the ability to fabricate legitimate and seemingly authentic accounts of history that are not questioned by communities and travellers as the projected histories have been naturalised through geographical discourses of power: once individuals have been socialised to recognise monuments of sites of importance, heritage and memory, then monuments are interpreted as objects that represent history. This socialisation posits power in the monument, irrespective of the ability of these monuments to present an interpretation of history, and this aptitude may be facilitated by the geographical capabilities of these objects, rather than any historical basis. Pile argues that monuments speak a “particular spatial code which commands bodies and orders space” (212); and through this framework it can be understood that a walker engages in a dialogue with monuments, but this conversation is one-sided. Infused within these power relations, monuments demand that the bodies they command are subordinate and although the city can be read, the space and commemorated history become incontestable.
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In Vilnius there are two monuments that work as signposts for locating oneself within the urban fabric. The first is the Hill of Three Crosses that stands out prominently on the summit of the tree- covered Kaln (otherwise known as Bleak Hill) that overlooks the Cathedral Square, Lower
Palace and the Duke Gediminas monument (see fig. 9). Erected on the summit of the hill in 1636, these three wooden crosses remained until 1879 when they collapsed. The tsarist regime refused to allow the crosses to be reconstructed, and the space remained empty. In 1916, sculptor Antoni
Wiwulski erected a new monument for the hill, the fate of which was to be destroyed by the
Soviet regime in 1950. The white-painted crosses that now stand on the hill were consecrated in
1989, and can be seen clearly across the urban landscape of Vilnius. The second spatial icon is
Gediminas Tower, the remaining tower of the castle in the centre of the Old Town. The tower was originally part of the Vilnius Castles, a castle complex that evolved between the tenth and eighteenth-centuries, and is a site that has been annexed, destroyed and abandoned throughout its history. The circular structure of Gediminas Tower still commands the crest of a green mound, shadowing the Cathedral square below it, and can be observed through the streets of the Old
Town (see fig. 10). On the top platform of the Gediminas Tower the tri-coloured Lithuanian flag has been raised to celebrate Lithuanian nationalism. Through their spatial elevation, the Hill of
Three Crosses and Gediminas Tower clearly command the urban space and topography of
Vilnius.
For the walker travelling through Vilnius, whether they are a visitor or local inhabitant, these two monuments are geographical markers that position and situate them within the city. For the tourist in particular, Gediminas Tower and the Hill of Three Crosses are elevated, fixed compasses that allow the traveller to read the city by enabling them to recognise their physical placement within it. Once the walker engages with these monuments and uses them as spatial coordinates, I ascertain that the two sites are also attributed with historical meaning, and this is true of
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monuments that have a geographical command over an urban space. As these monuments are constitutive of sites of intensity, the viewer interprets these icons to have significant historical value. The Hill of Three Crosses and the Lithuanian flag that has been raised on Gediminas
Tower both have a collection of historical, memorial and political functions in terms of Vilnius’ history, but the importance of these sites and their memorial value may be unknown to the walker in the city. Irrespective of the significance these sites possess, the crosses and flag are assumed to be important through the socialised practice of reading the city, and the transferral of power where a spatial coordinate is attributed with historical meaning because the walker in the city simply expects the spatial coordinate in question to hold a range of historical values.
Hiding Violence:
Brutality Within an Aesthetic Domain
It is clear that monuments influence how walkers geographically and historically interpret the city by working as visual coordinates and sites of intensity. What is more opaque, are the ways that monuments displace power through aesthetics: having been built as ‘poetic’ sites monuments relocate the authority and aggression that has generated their construction. Governments can exorcise the tragedies and failures of war through monuments that commemorate historic events without displaying the violence behind them: brutalities can be forgotten or obscured and successes can be remembered. Transforming aggression into magnificence is a common criticism of officially sanctioned monuments. As Lefebvre argues in The Production of Space, the monument erases the traces of violence and aggressiveness in social practices, replacing them with “a tranquil power and certitude which can encompass violence and terror” (222). Auge also acknowledges governmental reliance on the poetic space of monuments to hide destruction and violence, arguing that “official memory needs monuments: it beautifies death and horror” (88).
The monument can obscure violence by replacing it with the static beauty of the commemorative
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object, thereby condoning and celebrating violence by making it appear aesthetic. Malcolm Miles argues that this is an exploitation of culture, that in order to preserve the social order, modalities of power displace events and agendas “into an aesthetic domain” (58). Here the impact of power on everyday life is left unquestioned within its positioning as a cultural tool.
In order to glorify destruction, Bryan-Wilson argues that regimes substitute the violence of the past by celebrating traumatic events within elegant bronzes. This veneration of the event is a process that consolidates the tragedy “rather than activating a more diffuse and hence self- reflective decentering” (194); where the reality of the past is deferred through compensation. The conversion of violence into beauty is a form of power that Lewis Mumford locates within ineffectual regimes. In The Culture of Cities Mumford argues that the regimes most likely to consolidate tragedy and violence through their monumental space are the least effectual. These are powers that compensate their “paucity of achievement in self-aggrandising stone and mortar”
(434). This act of compensation was characteristic of the portrait painted by Soviet cities during occupation. The repetitive, yet impressive, stone, bronze and concrete busts of the heroes of communism adorned the streets of Vilnius during the Socialist regime promoted the success and the achievements of the occupying power. Instead of representing any real achievements, the urban landscape peacefully advocated Soviet control through the busts of Lenin or Stalin, irrespective of the failures, aggression and violence of communism, as well as hiding Lithuanian national traditions and heritage from being displayed across the urban landscape.
Musil’s statement that, “what strikes one most about monuments is that one doesn’t notice them.
There is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments” can be used to describe the limitations and paradoxes of monument space (320). The displacement of violence into aesthetics constitutes another level of the invisibility that is inherent within a monument. Musil argues that when governments use monuments to memorialise moments in history, the events commemorated
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become ambiguous. History is ultimately condemned to suffer from invisibility, becoming unnoticed to the public when it takes the form of a tangible object. Musil states this is because
“everything that forms the walls of our lives, so to speak set the stage of our consciousness, loses the ability to play a role in this consciousness” (321). The invisibility of the monument sees them being harnessed by national and local governments to the power’s own political advantage, in order to forget traumatic or politically contentious events. A memorial may be designed under the guise of commemorating traumas and bringing them to the fore of urban memory, with the intention that these events can be forgotten and removed from the memories of the city and its inhabitants. As I noted in the introduction to this thesis, Huyssen has observed this to be characteristic of Holocaust monuments: “the more monuments there are, the more the past becomes invisible, and the easier it is to forget: redemption, thus, through forgetting” (32).
Although these memorials portray the intent to commemorate, the very existence of the monument sees the memories ‘remembered,’ to be forgotten. Therefore, governments may erect monuments to encourage the collective amnesia of a traumatic past within a community, or to absolve the authorising power from the responsibility of remembering contentious historical events.
In the centre of Vilnius there is only one site where social-realist communist monuments still stand, where the Soviet monuments were not removed during independence. The Green Bridge traverses the Neris River, connecting the land between the Old Town and the northern quarter of
Vilnius. Completed in 1952, the four corners of the bridge were adorned with bronze sculptures, emblematic of iconic Soviet figures. The statues were designed to celebrate the four symbols of the Soviet regime’s ideology, the monuments depicting heroic soldiers, cultivators, workers, and studying youth. Although these figures represented the ideals of the Soviet regime, the four statues on the Green Bridge were left untouched in the 1990s when iconoclasm swept through
Vilnius, and the survival of these four symbolic figures presents a moment within the built
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environment where attention could be drawn to the forgetful and amnesiac nature of Vilnius’ contemporary urban fabric as a whole: the existence of these four monuments works to highlight the complete absence of alternative Soviet iconography. The reason as to why these sculptures were not demolished is not clear, but they are the only overt markers of Soviet iconography erected by the Soviet regime that remain within the contemporary urban landscape.
In the mid 1990s the Government of the Republic of Lithuania was at the height of erecting monuments that celebrated an earlier national epoch and this new collection of officially sanctioned monuments was being constructed directly into the voids where Soviet iconography once stood. During this time of urban upheaval, local artist Gediminas Urbonas assembled the temporary installation Leaving or Coming that used the four Soviet sculptures on the Green
Bridge, in 1995. Urbonas covered the heads of the bronze Soviet workers with mirrored cubes, forcing the walker to gaze at their own reflection, rather than the sculptures, when they crossed the bridge. The work, similar to the artistic project of Christo and Jean-Claude and their wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin (also in 1995), contextualises the only Soviet Realist sculptures to have survived. The attention that the mirrored cubes brought to the sculptures encouraged the walker to look attentively at the idealised totality of the post-war iconographical ensemble that had exorcised the communist iconography. The walkers of Vilnius were compelled during the exhibition of Urbonas’ installation to acknowledge the absence of Soviet icons in the city, at the only location where such monuments still stood. By making the monuments invisible, they became visible, and in turn the absence of Soviet iconography in Vilnius was revealed. What the
Green Bridge project exemplifies is that attention must be drawn to the monument for it to be noticed, as commemorative artefacts become literally and metaphorically invisible within urban space.
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Monuments force the past to become invisible as the motivations behind their creation are obscured, a characteristic that will be analysed more thoroughly later in this chapter in terms of two monuments in Vilnius’ Old Town. Urbonas’ Leaving or Coming project reminds the inhabitant of the only remaining Soviet monuments within the city, as well as bringing to the surface an investigation of the recent political past. The Green Bridge art installation draws attention to the past by intentionally obscuring it, but this layering over the past also involves time: the masking of the monuments is temporary and fleeting, lasting only for the duration of the exhibition. Leaving or Coming therefore draws attention to the metaphorical layering of memory and forgetting within the Vilnius’ contemporary urban fabric by literally covering the past up, only to reveal the monuments again. The work also demonstrates how monuments can be made visible, and the following section on the apparent durability of monuments will consider how the political act of iconoclasm and the vested interest in destroying officially sanctioned sites can also make monuments and meanings visible. Through the work of Lefebvre, I outline how monuments appear durable, but they are never permanent. During moments of political upheaval or changes in bases of knowledge, monuments may be exorcised from the urban fabric as they are destroyed or removed – literally obliterated from the city. Through a study of the iconoclasm of Soviet iconography in Vilnius, I comment upon the irony of iconoclasm: that the act of destroying monuments realises the inherent indiscernible nature of monuments by removing the object from the urban space, literally forcing monuments to be invisible.
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II
Iconoclasm:
Destroying Emblems of Power
The materiality of the monument provides the false impression that it is durable. Cast in stone, concrete or bronze, the officially sanctioned monument is built for endurance. Mumford argues that it is the materiality of the monument that allows it to portray the illusion of permanency:
“stone gives a false sense of security, a deceptive assurance of life” (434). I see two consequences of this apparent durability. The first is that the stability of the monument is confused with the stability of the regime that constructed the urban landscape. When the built architecture of a city appears to be enduring, the viewer transfers this durability onto the power of the regime. The second is that once the power of a government has been confirmed through the durability of their monuments, the past being exhibited is also interpreted to be concrete and unchanging: monuments can thereby consolidate the past through their durability, directing the ways in which a community identifies with their surroundings and history. Miles argues that the assurance of the monument results in individuals being persuaded by the urban fabric, accepting the narratives that monuments and cultural institutions project (58). By projecting ‘authentic’ representations of the past, the control exerted by monuments can be more influential than other governmental forces, and through their durability, monuments become forms of “social control less brutish and costly than armed force” (58). This is reiterated by Pile who argues that although monuments ostensibly act as celebrations of events and people they actually “have both feet in terror and violence”
(213).
Monuments achieve the illusion of durability with the delusion that they are also concrete in their life expectancy; a quality that Lefebvre argues imbues the monument with the “stamp of the will to power” (221). Although officially sanctioned monuments enforce a static interpretation of the
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past and rely on their permanency for credibility, monuments are certainly not immortal.
Monuments are built to endure the passing of time, but it clear that urban landscapes are continually recomposed across history. In reality, the city is a flexible space that is transformed according to who is in power. Lefebvre argues that the durability of the monument is never a possibility: “the credibility of a monument is never total” for the erection of a monument only signifies its inevitable collapse (221). I argue that it is the intended permanence that sees the monument as an object that will lose its ability to impress. If the narratives of history and power exhibited by monuments are façades, then it stands that there are alternative stories, urban memories and cultural histories prowling beneath the surface of the static narratives written by officially sanctioned monuments. At times where there are changing bases of knowledges or political tension, individuals, communities, revolutionary groups or other residual political collectives may draw attention to officially sanctioned monuments as sites of political questioning. This forces the seemingly static and permanent meanings projected by these monuments to become unstable, and the invisible to become visible, thereby illustrating the impossibility of the powerful to imprint indelible memories and write the past by erecting monuments across the urban landscape.
Attempts by governments to exert control through the built environment are often thwarted, and
Edensor argues authorising power is frustrated through “changing bases of knowledge” (National
Identity 46). When a community actively contests the agenda of a controlling regime then the stability of the built environment and officially sanctioned monuments is threatened. Public responses and opposition to the urban memories and histories dictated by officially sanctioned monuments are most vibrant and active during periods of political tension or upheaval. During these times monuments are stripped of their ‘invisibility’ as these objects become icons of an unwanted regime, where the importance of the monument shifts and its symbolism is brought to the surface. It follows that when the public contests the existence of a reigning political power,
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then the officially sanctioned monuments instigated and the historical narratives inscribed by this power are also challenged. As Nelson and Olin describe, the meanings of monuments transform when the surrounding community focuses on these objects and “renegotiates ideals, status and entitlement” (7); and once the meaning of a monument has been transformed or reinvented within the mind of the community, the definition of the object is also subject to revision. Having been invested with the role to write cultural history, the symbolic value of a monument can become unstable and then harnessed by a community for their own political advantages – a symbol of oppression becomes a symbol to be destroyed and the permanency of the monument is unhinged.
Instead of representing a static interpretation of history, the monument becomes an emblem of the control and agenda of an unwanted regime.
Once a monument has been imbued with new symbolism, this new meaning can become so powerful for a community that there becomes a vested interest in destroying it. Ruth Philips argues that the process of monument making and unmaking is “most visible in the aftermath of major shifts in regimes of power” (281). This is when iconoclasm, the destruction of emblems of power, occurs: when the act of damaging or obliterating unwanted icons from the urban landscape becomes a desirable action. Iconoclasm sees the officially sanctioned monuments or symbolic sites aggressively torn down by communities in political acts, where the figurative act of having conquered an overseeing power is realised by destroying monuments and presenting a vivid image of the overthrow of oppression. This image of defeat is what generates the vested interest in vandalism. The historical and political narrative depicted by monuments and memorials become sites of contest that a community can actual destroy. In this sense, iconoclasm and its associated physical destruction of monuments and social disruption, are acts that explicitly show a community’s opposition to the party in power. But the act of iconoclasm is more complicated than simply demonstrating antagonism to a controlling regime. Iconoclasm is also a mode of cultural self-defence. It is this act that provides the opportunity for groups to redirect
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cultural memory in their own terms. As Jas Elsner states in “Iconoclasm and the Preservation of
Memory,” the meaning of the destroyed monument is defined by its difference from the old monument, writing “a different past, with potentially different cultural, political, and social meanings” (211).
When the Soviet Union collapsed the iconography of this control was extracted from the urban landscape. The people of Lithuania dismantled the communist iconography that had preserved the unwanted regime across the urban landscape, as the iconoclasm of these monuments and symbols encapsulated the triumphal overthrow of socialism. In “Reflections on Disgraced Monuments,”
Laura Mulvey analyses the iconoclasm of Lenin monuments in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, arguing that the destruction of Fascist symbols seemed logical for the satellite states as it broke continuity with the immediate past. Mulvey observes that when the aesthetic appearance of a monument reflects their political significance, such as the statues resembling Lenin, the desire to destroy them is exaggerated (221). In other words, the intention to destroy monuments intensifies when they visually depict their leader, as the people are able to impose a collective symbolic vengeance onto these icons. The collection of mechanically reproduced casts of the heroes of communism displayed through Vilnius as a tool to maintain Soviet power, presented the excessive omniscience of the foreign power. Damaging these commanding signs of communist agency was a symbolic act: destroying the markers of the external regime physically demonstrated to the inhabitants of Vilnius, and to the external world observing through electronic media, that the Soviet regimes had been successfully collapsed through a physical overthrow of repression.
When officially sanctioned monuments are removed from urban landscapes through iconoclasm, the narratives they compose and the meanings once attached to them are transformed. Mulvey argues that the act of iconoclasm sees “a shifting significance of the monument before and after
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their disgrace” (220); and this is because, as a revolutionary rather than political tool, the former meanings of a monument are rewritten. The object has essentially made a transition between being an ‘invisible’ symbol within the urban fabric to a site of political contestation. This renewed awareness of the monument is a form of rupturing that gives the monument a new form of significance and a new collection of connotations: no matter how destructive and all encompassing an act or acts of iconoclasm are within a city, the signs of the erasure are still visible. In turn, ruptures are left across the built environment where performances of iconoclasm have taken place, and these fissures are sites where new acts of communication may transpire.
This sees the monumental landscape engaging with memory and forgetting in a multi-layered way, where iconoclasm is tightly bound to the discourses of oblivion and remembrance. Nelson and Olin argue that, “when the signs of destruction are present, obliteration is an act of preservation and memorialisation” (206); where iconoclasm is evidence of trying to remove a past from the urban fabric, but simultaneously sees history being embedded in the ruptures where symbols and icons have been removed.
Elsner also argues that the destruction of monuments through iconoclasm is a “mode of memory”
(209); where the act of making and unmaking monuments implicates these sites in the performance of memory – iconoclasm reveals monuments through their destruction and then erases the symbolically loaded sites from the urban landscape literally, but not figuratively. As the defacement of the urban landscape through iconoclasm removes the physicality of monument entirely, this act seems a logical way of challenging a political regime. Forty and Elsner both argue that, due to the relationship between iconoclasm, memory and forgetting, this mode of destruction actually retains the past in the present rather than removing it. Forty argues that although iconoclasm is expected to shatter any connection with the recent past and appears to be the “most conventional way of hoping to achieve forgetting” (10); iconoclasm actually stretches the memory into the present in a way that the past can no longer be understood or interpreted by
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individuals and communities. Elsner also argues that the eradication of the monument, rather than defying urban narrations of the past may actually “preserve the memory of the condemned in the very act of obliteration” (211). In other words, although the intent of iconoclasm is to obliterate a regime’s historical narrative, it might actually work to preserve it. As Mulvey summarises, iconoclasm threatens a society’s sense of self and “raises questions about continuity and discontinuity, memory and forgetting in history” and this course of remembering and forgetting complicates how “a culture understands itself across the sharp political break of revolution”
(220). The next part of this chapter investigates how Vilnius understood itself after the break from communism, and how the contemporary monuments deal with narrative and memory.
The Sharp Break:
Rewriting Vilnius Following Independence
A physical consequence of the iconoclasm of Soviet symbols in Vilnius were the gaps across the urban landscape where communist monuments had once stood. These voids were spaces where the Government of the Republic of Lithuania could compose its own contemporary historical narrative, and the amputation of monuments to the former regime was followed with the erection of a different collection of officially sanctioned monuments in the 1990s. Having free reign over how the past was to be depicted, a new story was inscribed into Vilnius that glorified an earlier moment of history that endeavoured to throw the Soviet era into amnesia. Travelling to Vilnius post-independence, I found the streets devoid of communist references: the new monuments I encountered in Vilnius celebrated a national Lithuanian heritage that had been denied to the people when the country was a satellite state of the Soviet Union. Except for the Soviet workers on the Green Bridge, I only saw glimpses of the recent past. In the alternative art district of
Uzupis I spied a bust of Lenin sitting behind bars in an antique shop (see fig. 11). The sculpture of Lenin, turned commodity, is trapped behind the window of the store. Lenin looks out onto the
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recently constructed symbolic site, the Uzupis Angel designed by Romas Vilciauskas. The Uzupis
Angel was unveiled in 2001, first as an egg that sat on top of a four meter high stone pillar, and then ‘hatched’ into an angel blowing a horn to symbolise the celebration of the rebirth of Vilnius and Lithuania following Soviet collapse (see fig. 12).
The rewriting of Vilnius following independence has been a national and nationalist revival. In
“The Palace of Ruins and Putting the Lithuanian Nation into Place,” John Czaplicka describes
Vilnius as having experienced a series of “removals, recoveries, restorations, reconstructions, and reorganisations of historical markers and monuments” (175). Most prominently, the sharp break from communism saw a revival of local history that had been obscured from the city during occupation, as the Lithuanian people dissociated themselves from the Soviet regime through numerous symbolic public gestures. The silently shared historical narratives were reinscribed into
Vilnius’ monumental landscape, and provided a framework for the new Government of the
Republic of Lithuania to reimagine cultural and national identity. Czaplicka argues that contemporary Lithuanian identities were built through the “renaming streets and squares, designating new historical sites of significance, and opening new museums” (168). This performance of restoring buildings, erecting or demolished monuments, and naming new historic sites, added new trajectories to the urban narrative, where each piece of national history exhibited was intended to define the contours and meanings of place-based identity (169). Richard S.
Esbenshade also argues in “Remembering to Forget” (1995) that contemporary national stories exhibited through cities in Eastern Europe constitute ‘counter-narratives’ that were written in attempts to reinvent national pasts. The act of resurrecting and depicting images of national identity outside Soviet boundaries configured contemporary heritage where the lost historiographies were brought to the fore in a monumental form in Vilnius as the recently removed official Soviet versions of the past were undermined. Czaplicka contends that this made
“alternative narratives of the past part of common knowledge and experience” as these earlier
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histories were incorporated into the Government of the Republic of Lithuania’s new official narratives (172).
The contemporary revision of history in Vilnius has transformed the urban sites of historical significance, where the project of historical reclamation has seen the return of symbols and stories that celebrate an earlier national past based in ancient mythology. The newly raised monuments I encountered in Vilnius wrote urban memory through monuments that honoured heroes from the fourteenth century, the Government of the Republic of Lithuania having drawn upon the ancient legends of King Mindaugas and Duke Gediminas to etch a Lithuanian national identity into
Vilnius. The 700th birthday of King Mindaugas in 2003 has seen the Old Town directed through his image and name. The memorials to Duke Gediminas project a national history through an icon and a myth, through the figure that founded Vilnius as a city. Svetlana Boym argues in “From
Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia,” that these types of cultural myths and recurrent cultural narratives often turn into obsessions for the newly independent state, and I demonstrate this through a concentrated case study of the King and Duke. The underlying narratological limitations of these legends is that they bracket history, and by doing so naturalise or spiritualise the ancient historical past. According to Boym, the national narratives of ancient mythology injected into Vilnius are interpreted by the inhabitants as reliable because these icons “appear above and beyond ideology and politics and are frequently regarded as a cultural given” by constituting “the phantasmic space of the national imagination” (134).
Czaplicka also locates a difficulty with the insertion of nationalist narratives into urban fabrics by authorising powers, with reference to the rebuilding and reconstruction of Vilnius’ Old Town. He argues that these narratives “legitimise governments and bolster particularistic political movements, which would prefer to distance themselves from the recent Soviet past and to establish their own political-historic heritage” (168). Instead of the people of Vilnius having a
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command over the public space, this power is retracted following iconoclasm, because the composition of new urban narratives to represent Lithuania’s unique culture are “beholden to the wishes of an electorate and their representatives” (169). Essentially this monumental inscription is a return or preservation of the mode in which the Soviet regime directed and commanded authorship of the urban space during Occupation, when the Lithuanian community could not determine the representations of their own culture within the city. The contemporary narrative of mythology reinforces the spatial duel between remembering and forgetting. Previously,
Lithuanian nationalism was hidden from the streets, an epoch that was followed by the erasure of the iconic communist landscape while Lithuanian heroes were revived during the 1990s. Both the suppression of communist iconography in the reign of Lithuanian nationalism, and the earlier amnesia of Lithuanian nationalism in the Soviet era, has seen the people of Lithuania to participate in a visual game of remembering and forgetting across both periods of rule. This is exacerbated when the contemporary government also uses symbols to generate identities and shared memories of the nation that community is unable to dictate.
The Government of the Republic of Lithuania was placed in the position of writing a new cultural identity and history into the urban fabric, but this inscription mirrored the way that the Soviet regime recomposed the spatial narrative of Vilnius. However, Esbenshade argues that to criticise how Eastern European governments, like the Government of the Republic of Lithuania, recomposed their urban landscapes following independence fails to acknowledge the “full complexity of the phenomenon of collective memory and of the region’s history of struggles over concepts of nation, political power, economic entitlement, and the contradictory lessons of the past” (73). As the Soviet bloc was dismantled, the problem of what to do with the monuments to the past regime and how to construct new urban landscapes emerged as dominant concerns within these post-communist countries. Huyssen observes that these newly reinstalled nations were expected to write a “contemporary history” through their monuments and museums, but it was
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unclear as to what function “these now redundant iconic objects of communism” should appropriate (15). Whether it is even possible to build urban narratives that simultaneously engage with the present and the past, what is clear is that spatial stories encourage and discourage remembering and forgetting: as I will discuss through a close analysis of the two monumental sites in Vilnius’ Old Town.
Reading Vilnius’ Old Town:
Ancient Mythologies in a Contemporary Landscape
In place of the Stalins, Lenins, communist leaders and Soviet workers that once decorated the streets of Vilnius, there are now the Kings and Dukes from an ancient past. The allusions upon which the communist monoliths depended for their meaning are no longer familiar to the people of Vilnius, as the monuments are no longer there. As I have already identified through the work of Boym and Czaplicka, Tim Edensor also argues in National Identity that the program to remove communist statues in Eastern Europe following the crumbling of communism threw the recent past into obsolescence as these symbols were replaced by “an earlier generation of national heroes sculpted in stone” (46). According to Walkowitz and Knauer, the nationalist project of etching new meanings and narratives into the city through monuments that recreate a forgotten national past is common for ruling regimes of all political stripes, where earlier pasts are selectively used as a strategic resource for fostering a desired historical narrative for the government in power. Walkowitz and Knauer argue that regimes “erect historical monuments, construct grand buildings, and more recently, create touring exhibitions of their ‘national treasures’ to bolster up their national image, shore up domestic support, or to placate critics” (4); and this can be seen to account for the agenda of the Government of the Republic of Lithuania.
The statue to Duke Gediminas and the monument to King Mindaugas outside the Lower Palace write contemporary nationalistic narratives for Lithuanian through ancient legends, and are both
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located next to Cathedral Square in Vilnius’ Old Town. Although a cultural and political centre, this area is a particularly overrun tourist site where the majority of locals who actually visit the area would be participants in the tourist market, either selling amber or watercolour paintings of the Old Town.
Duke Gediminas was called upon to etch Lithuanian nationalism into the urban space in the monument designed by sculptor Vytautas Kasuba erected in 1996 (see fig. 13). According to folklore, Duke Gediminas travelled through the region of Lithuanian in the 1320s on a hunting trip. This legend claims that during this journey the Duke dreamt of an iron wolf that roared with the intensity of one hundred wolves. According to Saulis Zukas in Lithuania: Past, Culture,
Present, this vision inspired Duke Gediminas to announce the village of Vilnius as the site of his dream, believing that the fame of this capital would spread as far as the voice and strength of the iron wolf (qtd. in Czaplicka, 170). By the late 1300s Vilnius had became the capital of the Grand
Duchy, and Lithuania was the centre of the expanding empire that stretched from the Baltic to the
Black Sea, constituting the largest territorial state in Europe (170). This era of geographical and political control has been reinstalled into the urban imaginary of Vilnius through the commemoration of the Duke in material form. The bronze statue of the Duke riding his horse stands on a marble block in front of the Cathedral. Covered in armour the Duke raises his sword to the sky, while stone wolves sit underneath him on the plinth, the monument commanding those walking through the Cathedral Square below. At a surface level the monument to the Duke represents the construction of a nationalist identity through a previous heroic moment, writing a contemporary identity through strength, courage and power.
Beneath this monument, ghosts to the former communist regime literally lurk. Prior to national governance, a statue of Lenin stood in Cathedral Square at the plinth where Duke Gediminas now
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reigns: now not a single likeness of Lenin’s image lingers in the Old Town. Iconoclasm has seen the accumulation of commemorative acts on one plinth, as a new monument is built on the site of an old one. Czaplicka theorises the recomposition of Cathedral Square and the replacement of history through monumental space by stating that: “Gediminas replaces Lenin. One projection of the state’s history replaces another” (175-6); although these monuments refer to different narratives of history – the monument of Lenin is abstract and imposed from the outside, whereas the monument to the Duke is site-specific with a firm footing in the structure and material of place. Forty also identifies an historical development where new monuments are constructed precisely on the site of older ones. He argues that the rebuilding sees the accumulation of two commemorative gestures in one place “vandalism and the erection of a new idol” (11). As I have outlined, the replacement of one icon with another demonstrates that the lessons of iconoclasm are largely negative, “rather that shortening memory, it is just as likely, whether intentionally or not, to prolong it” (12). This prolonging of the trauma that the Soviet Occupation induced has been intensified through its absence in Vilnius’ public space, as there is no forum provided for the community or travellers to understand what has recently passed.
The second mythology evoked across Vilnius’ Old Town is that of King Mindaugas, although the site in question is the Lower Palace that is fronted with a monument to the King. The importance that the mythology of King Mindaugas has played in the writing of a contemporary Lithuanian urban memory has seen the restoration of the Lower Palace of the Lithuanian Grand Dukes to be completed in 2009. To honour the King’s 700th birthday in 2003, a statue of Mindaugas was erected at the entrance to the Lower Palace, standing on a circular base inscribed with a genealogy of Lithuanian Dukes (see fig. 14). Czaplicka argues this restoration of the Castle
Complex is the most significant project of restoring pre-war historical topographies into the city of Vilnius. The Lower Palace sits at the bottom of Castle Hill, the excavation and archaeological
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dig of the site reinforcing the inscription of a new national identity that stands outside Soviet bounds by calling to a different historical moment. Located beneath Gediminas Tower, the Lower
Palace and the statue of King Mindaugas reinforce a Lithuanian nationalism through the mythology of the nation’s only monarch: a site that had fallen into ruin now signifies the strength and power of a lost era. Having generated a contemporary identity for the people of Lithuania through the erection of imagery of the Grand Duchy, the Government of the Republic of
Lithuania has created public support to reconstruct the Lower Palace as it now holds symbolic value for the community.
The establishment of public support for Lithuanian mythologies and the recovery of the history of the Lower Palace have filtered into other localities across the Old Town. Czaplicka notes that there is a government impetus to excavate and rebuild other sites of the Castle, and he argues that this is representative of a national identity that has been propelled by the will to “return to
Europe” and to “instantiate markers of a peculiarly Lithuanian national history in the old and new capital city” (171). The architect in charge of the Palace Research Centre in Vilnius, Napoleonas
Kitkauskas, archaeologist Vytautas Ubanivicius, and head of the castle restoration society
Edmundas Kulikauskas, led the rebuilding of the site. Czaplicka states that this group of artists and historians subscribe to a site-specific reconstruction and replication of all lost historical details at the site, and are bent on rebuilding a potent national symbol on its remnants, where all available iconographic material and remnants will be exposed and incorporated into the façade of the reconstructed building on the archaeological remains (177). Therefore, the entire reconstruction of the Lower Palace has been historically and nationally loaded. In rebuilding the
Lower Palace, the remains and remnants of the Duchy have literally been brought to the surface through the archaeological dig, and Czaplicka argues that this mode of historical restoration is fraught with complications as it recomposes Lithuanian identity in a directional manner.
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Aesthetically, Czaplicka argues that the reconstruction of the Lower Palace might be a positive influence on alternative improvements through Vilnius’ Old Town. Historically, however, the site rewrites a Lithuanian history prior to Soviet control whilst excluding and refuting alternative histories of the city. During the dig, the masonry remains discovered predated the dominance of
Polish culture in the city, yet the post-Soviet Lithuanian national awakenings exclude this element of the past. For Czaplicka this contemporary nationalism there betrays “traces of anti-Russian, anti-Soviet, and anti-Polish sentiments” and these sentiments have become apparent through the ways that the country has been “selecting and adopting a heritage in Vilnius” (180). It is worth noting that this forgotten Polish history was largely Jewish. The reconstructed Lower Palace is part of this contemporary project to compose a Lithuanian national history that is associated with a specific place, and is one of a collection of commemorative devices or sites within the city that are being used to engender a place-based identity for Lithuania. Along with the statues of Duke
Gediminas and King Mindaugas, there are a constellation of monuments, street names, museums, and designated historic sites that are being called upon by the local government to write local identity. This becomes particularly problematic when the site intended to prompt place-based nationationalism “stands both with history and against it” (185).
Monumental Façades:
Metaphorical Surfaces and the Illusion of Opacity
These two contemporary monuments in Vilnius, the statue of Duke Gediminas and the museum of the Lower Palace whose entrance is dominated by the monument to King Mindaugas, package
Vilnius’ history in terms of legend or myth. I argue that this process can be explained through four theoretical frameworks that I will go through individually. Although these frameworks interlink, they do not overlap entirely and therefore they need to be theorised separately. The first theory is drawn from Soja’s Postmodern Geographies, where he argues that city space is not
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transparent but characterised through “the illusion of opacity” (111). The second is my own concept of a “metaphorical surface,” that argues the surface of a monument always contrasts with the agenda behind its construction. The third point to invoke here is Lefebvre and Pile, who both argue that monumental space hides both the modality of power and their will to power behind their creation. The fourth is Lefebvre’s development of Freud’s constructs of condensation and displacement, where he applies this psychoanalytic binary to the way in which monuments in the built environment alter or disguise meaning. Through these theories I am able to analyse in depth how monuments write one narrative whilst hiding the modality of power that created it. In particular, I am able to consider the ancient mythologies that the contemporary monuments of
Vilnius project and foster, as well as the motivation behind their creation that is obscured.
In his work Postmodern Geographies, Edward Soja theorises the built environment in terms of
“the illusion of opacity.” This theoretical proposition argues that monuments and other architecture present the illusion that they are opaque, appearing to write a dominant spatial narrative where no alternative interpretations or spatial stories are hidden beneath the surface. As such, officially sanctioned monuments present the illusion that they can be read, but in fact are illegible as residual histories and memories are eclipsed beneath the surface: the multi-layered nature of monuments is obscured as alternative interpretations cannot be seen, and the object appears ‘solid.’ Soja also argues that monuments also conceal the modality of power that generated their construction behind this illusion of opacity, where the built environment is designed by authorising powers that harness these objects with the intention that these monuments will mystify the past by presenting a dominant interpretation of history, whilst simultaneously hiding this agenda (111). As a consequence, the memories and histories commemorated by monuments are not only deemed to an inevitable invisibility, officially sanctioned monuments are purposefully designed by authorising powers to undertake this role and have these pasts and motivations hidden from view.
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The illusion of opacity has a number of consequences for those people engaging within city space. Soja argues that the spatial quality of opacity, inherent within monuments, forces those people engaging with and reading the built environment to have access only to a short-sighted interpretation of their surroundings. The illusion of opacity sees that communities and travellers can only concentrate on the exteriority of the monument due to a “confusing myopia” that forces alternative histories and memories to be clouded and presents the walker from reading spatial stories comprehensively (112). In Vilnius, the contemporary officially sanctioned monuments appear to present a seemingly linear narrative of an ancient national past. Through the illusion of opacity the monument to Duke Gediminas and the statue of King Mindaugas present the false impression that the only narrative at work at these sites are the narratives of legend, tradition, heritage, and nationalism. The fact that these sites embody a collection of spatial stories and memories are obscured, and remain out of sight, the illusion of opacity successfully hiding the modalities of power at work behind their construction.
The opaque nature of monuments exemplifies their paradoxical nature. Although monuments are tangible objects within the built environment that can be gazed upon by the walker, and appear visually accessible, their intrinsic opacity forces monuments to be illegible. Lefebvre also theorises in The Production of Space that authorising powers rely on the façade of the monument, because the surface of a monument prevents alternative interpretations of the past and residual urban memories from materialising within the urban fabric. Lefebvre argues that the façade of a building or monument metaphorically hides residual histories and memories, resulting in alternative spatial stories to lurk beneath the surface. This transpires because the façade of the monument is “the face directed towards the observer and is the privileged side or aspect of a work or an art or a monument” (125). Once the walker in the city only reads the exteriority of the urban landscape, then it stands that only the dominant spatial narrative is revealed across urban fabrics,
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and the alternative urban memories are left uncovered – an argument that supports the paradox of monuments as sites that simultaneously hide and reveal interpretations of the past.
The exterior or façade of the monument essentially disguises histories and memories from the urban landscape. In order to account for the role that the tangible exterior of the monument plays in obscuring the past I have devised a theory called the ‘metaphorical surface’ of officially sanctioned monuments. The metaphorical surface is a categorising term conceived in order to explain how monuments furnish the illusion that there is nothing beneath the physical materiality they represent. This term describes how monuments submerge the recent past and conceal history through their directional capability over the walker, who has been conditioned to concentrate on the tangible façade of the built environment. The metaphorical surface calls to mind notions of fiction, story, myth and narrative, simultaneously suggesting that removing the paint or destroying the monument will not allow for alternative narrative or modalities of power to rise to the surface. In other words, the façade of the monument always works as a metaphor, a substitutional image, of what the monument essentially stands for. One spatial story is projected by the materiality of the monument, and is presented in such a way that no alternative narratives appear to exist. This is not to say that other narratives are not available – they do lurk beneath the surface of the monument – but an individual gazing on a monument must be given the means to uncover or demystify the metaphorical surface in order to read other stories. In the Old Town of
Vilnius, the metaphorical surface of King Mindaugas and Duke Gediminas work as such: the materiality and physical shape of these monuments write narratives of national mythology through the heroic imagery of the legendary figures that they depict. Through the strength of these images, these officially sanctioned monuments appear to signify national identity, and obscure the existence of alternative and residual narratives beneath the surface of these ionic figures.
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The discourses of the “illusion of opacity” and the “metaphorical surface,” provide a framework for understanding how monuments appear to make space and history transparent, but are actually making the past indecipherable. Also evoking the idea of the façade, Pile argues that monuments operate as signs of pure surface that “mask the modality of power that produced them” (213).
Lefebvre also argues that, despite claiming to express collective thought, monumental buildings and structures actually “mask the will to power and the arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and collective thought. In the process, such signs and surfaces also manage to conjure away both possibility and time” (143). In conclusion, although monuments make surrounding space transparent by allowing urban topography to be read (working as spatial coordinates), officially sanctioned monuments are selective signs that obscure the modality of power that produced them. Following from Pile and Lefebvre, it stands that the contemporary monuments exhibited in Vilnius mask the modalities of power, as well as the motivation, behind their creation. Although Vilnius’ urban fabric presents the illusion that the space is intelligible, the exhibition of an ancient past clouds the determination that eventuated in their insertion into the architectural landscape. I argue that there are a number of modalities of power to which the viewer of the monument in Vilnius is illiterate, and these are veiled beneath the static narrative the exteriority of these objects present.
It is here that I theorise the role that tourism plays in the current structuring of Vilnius’ urban landscape. Instead of making an earlier moment of history transparent, I argue that tourism is one of the modalities of power that has been disguised by the contemporary monuments of Vilnius.
The nationalist sculptures of King Mindaugas and Duke Gediminas compose a redesigned monumental space that is to be gazed upon. The King and Duke mask the role that tourism has had on the local community, where the government’s desire to capture the tourist dollar has been obscured beneath the guise of history writing. As a consequence, the country’s rapid envelopment into capitalism following the collapse of the Soviet regime lurks beneath the surface of the
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monumental space. The contemporary monuments present the intention that they are recovering lost memories and writing a Lithuanian identity in terms of a heroic past through a heritage that was lost during a recent period of foreign occupation. Prowling beneath this façade, however, is the Government of the Republic of Lithuanian’s attempt to throw the recent past into amnesia through a form of forced nationalism, as well as obscuring the control that the tourist market has over the structuring of the urban landscape. Czaplicka remarks that the recent project of writing the ancient past into Vilnius was driven through the desire to recover a lost past, but explicitly tied with economics, pointing out that the impetus to represent these earlier pasts was from “a mixture of national and local pride, nostalgia, legitimisation, guilt, and the prospect of economic gain through tourism” (167).
Nelson and Olin also observe a complicated relationship between monuments and tourism, stating that “monuments themselves are created for their photogenic, commodifiable presence, and this creation extends to the city itself, as tourist zones fill the areas around monuments” (12). The successful entrance into the tourist market has generated an increased selling of Vilnius as a tourist hub. The touristic codification of Vilnius has seen the redecoration of the Old Town, an all-encompassing change in the mise-en-scène, from the condition of the footpath to the reconstruction of the streets. The Old Town now constitutes a type of precinct within Vilnius that has been defined by Dennis Judd as a ‘tourist bubble,’ spaces that are, “self-contained, well- marked, and well-maintained” (37). As the visual and objectifying gaze of the tourist ensures that the icons of a city must not be uncompromised by unsightly surroundings, the reformed space of
Vilnius has been created as one that is gazed upon, and is a world above and beyond the dilapidated Soviet housing blocks that surround the city centre. Nelson argues that the construction of monumental space as a tourist destination is consolidated through additional props, and this transforms how tourists accept monuments as authentic sites: legitimising factors such as guidebooks or travel literature that structure the city experience, stimulating interest in the
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monuments and justifying their importance (64).
Tourist literature invariably presents images of a city that invoke a romanticised, nostalgic sense of history and culture, in a way that legitimises this history for the outsider. Although a government can commission monuments and decree that a structure is of monumental importance, Nelson explains, “guidebooks and other such markers make it a social reality” (64).
This process is evident in the touristic realm of Vilnius. Although the statutes of ancient heroes are named as historically and nationally significant monuments, there are very few possibilities for the people of Vilnius to form a cultural understanding of the past through these objects. Just as these monuments have been designed and engineered by the national government in order to foster nationalist imaginaries and recall earlier pasts, they have simultaneously been generated through the government’s drive to entice tourists to the city (travellers who accept this narration of history through their textural introduction to the urban landscape). The monuments that have been prescribed to allow a culture to understand itself after a sharp political break from communism are not for the people of Lithuania, even though they present an earlier, albeit ancient, moment of their history. The only walkers gazing upon these statues are tourists watching from behind their camera lenses and it is arguable that the primary motive behind their formation is to capture the tourist; these monuments are aesthetically attractive and dominate their surrounding area. The significance of this tourist audience is that it signposts just how important monumental space is in drawing tourists to a city.
Having argued that monuments obscure meanings, agendas and the motivations behind their creation, I turn to a psychoanalytics of space to analyse how monuments condense or displace meaning. Lefebvre’s theorisation of social space combines Freud’s dream analysis with Lacan’s structural linguistics in order to facilitate a psychoanalytic reading of the city. Lefebvre argues that there are two primary processes that operate in social space, social space being the built
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environment produced by architects and embodied with monuments: condensation and displacement (The Production of Space 225). This is a theory that has been adopted by other spatial theorists, including Pile and Edensor, who both investigate the ways that monumental sites are able to compress or dislocate meaning. Condensation and displacement work in the following ways within urban landscapes: sites may condense meaning by substituting one set of meanings for another, but they might also displace meaning by making a spatially circumscribed site stand for something universal. As a consequence, monuments become the metaphorical and quasi- metaphorical underpinning of society. It follows that at the site of the monument various substitutions of meaning transpire, which allows for religious, political and historical narratives within a society to symbolically exchange attributes: through displacement the Eiffel Tower becomes a symbol of romance, and through condensation a war memorial celebrates the individual hero rather than the governmental power that has involuntary conscription. These spatial processes will be theorised more extensively in the following chapter, but condensation and displacement are at play within Vilnius and is a framework that allows me to analyse what powers and values that are manifest within the contemporary monumental space.
In Vilnius, the Duke is representative of the qualities honour and victory, and is indicative an iconic figure being appropriated to mark or code the city as one that has been built through strength and courage. The monument displaces meaning and stands for universal qualities of triumph and success. The King represents an authorising power that is Lithuanian and nationalistic, where the force of a monarchy is condensed to represent freedom, national traditions and heritage. In this way, the nationalistic myths and legends displace and condense meaning, by obscuring the past in order to celebrate the present. This is a process that Lefebvre theorises as mutually reinforcing, where the authority of the myth is transferred backwards and forwards: the myths foster governmental control, and the government fosters the myth (255). As a consequence, condensation and displacement see the horizontal collection of monuments within
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an urban space to be “replaced by a vertical superimposition of meanings and ideas” (255). This creates a hierarchy, which promotes the idea that values can be displaced, condensed, and transformed into monumental sites.
It is a statue, described in brochures and guidebooks as a tourist site, that allows for a consideration of a contemporary identity following the break from communism. This is an object that incorporates a surreptitious awareness of the recent past (although it must be realised that it was not a governmentally designed statue). It is a four-meter high silver pillar that holds a bronze bust of American experimental rocker Frank Zappa, erected in front of a concrete wall that has been painted with street-art style graffiti and depicts a psychodelic Zappa in concert (see figs. 15-
16). Zappa’s bust is promoted and coded through tourist literature as an example of ‘wacky’
Vilnius, although it was erected outside the typical tourist boundaries where only the most enthusiastic tourist would venture: located in a courtyard next to the Central Police Station and a
Psychiatric hospital. The Zappa monument is more politically loaded than the monuments of an ancient duke, as the existence of the Zappa bust allows for an alternative historiography to be written. Its conception arose when a group of Lithuanians decided to contest the authenticity of their newly found independence. The Vilnius Frank Zappa Fan Club believed that if Lithuania had truly become a democratic nation the government would have no choice but to allow for the construction of such an absurd monument that celebrated an American alternative music icon.
The Government of the Republic of Lithuania agreed to endorse the construction of the monument, providing they were not responsible for the costs of building the bust. The manufacturing of the bust to Zappa was privately funded through a donation by the radio station,
M1, which ran during Vilnius’ Occupation. The sculptor was Konstantinas Bogdana, who churned out statutes of Lenin when Lithuania was a satellite state, and was commissioned in 1995 to design the Frank Zappa monument. The bust of Zappa is realist in form, both mimicking and
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celebrating the socialist-realist style of the Soviet era. This is a peculiar artistic consistency to find in Vilnius, where an artist is employed to build the bust of a rock star in a space where his imitations of Lenin have been removed. Interestingly, Bogdana publicly advocates for the preservation of communist art for its artistic value, not its ideological content, as he sees the destruction of the Soviet-influenced sculpture as a negation of their art history. The Zappa monument, unlike the monuments to the fourteenth century, is an object that the government deems something of a joke, but it is a moment in the city space where monumentality questions authority and identity, an element absent from the officially sanctioned statues.
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III
Oblivion:
Forgetting to Remember
Vilnius has seen the erasure of the material communist monuments, and the role that forgetting plays across the monumental landscape is particularly important. Transferring my attention to the binary of forgetting, rather than remembering, allows me to investigate the reasons as to why communities and governments might engage in the process of iconoclasm. Marc Ague argues that history can never be entirely lost, as the destroyed monuments leave residue across the urban fabric. Although pasts and memories may have been forgotten or erased from the city, they can ultimately be recovered because memories leave traces whether these imprints are visually accessible or not. Auge theorises that forgetting the recent past is important, for it is the process of oblivion that allows for remembrance to take place. Arguing that memory and oblivion as twinned, Auge states that memory needs forgetfulness: forgetfulness is a necessity to both a society and its individuals, as “one must forget the recent past in order to find the ancient past again” (3). In other words, a community or person can only remember and make sense of the past if they have gone through the process of forgetting it: oblivion is essential if one is ever going to remember.
Within the memory studies discourse the importance of forgetting and its correlation with remembering, has seen the concept of oblivion as increasingly significant within this theoretical framework. In his foreword to Auge’s Oblivion, James E. Young states that: “without forgetting there is no space left by which to navigate the meaning of what one has remembered” (viii).
Lowenthal has also speculated in his introduction to Forty’s The Art of Forgetting that: “to forget is as essential to keep things in mind, for no individual or collectivity can afford to remember everything. Total recall would leave us unable to discriminate or to generalise” (xi). In
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establishing a language of forgetting, Auge posits that oblivion takes three different forms. For this chapter, the first mode of oblivion is most relevant. The first mode of oblivion is the establishing mode of forgetting for a community, and is described by Auge as “the return” (56).
Within the framework of ‘the return’ a community attempts to “find a lost past again by forgetting the present – as well as the immediate past with which it tends to be confused – in order to re-establish a continuity with the older past” (56). Auge, Young and Lowenthal are therefore arguing that in order to remember, it is crucial that the act of forgetting first transpires, and this includes the amnesia of the immediate past.
This method of rewriting history by forgetting the recent past is characteristic of the recomposition of the urban fabric in Lithuania. The fracturing of Soviet Union saw an abrupt separation from an authoritarian regime, and it presented a challenge to the community and government as to how Lithuanian identity would be understood following this event. It was essential that the contemporary urban identity exhibited by the newly erected officially sanctioned monuments was based in nationalism, but it was also necessary that this spatial narrative was not confused or connected to the perpetual present written by the communist iconography of Soviet leaders. By recovering a lost history, the Government of the Republic of Lithuania could forget the immediate past, relieving themselves of the need to deal with these recent traumas in the present. Auge argues that the difficulty with returning to an ancient history is that it simplifies the recent past, eliminating “the compound past to the advantage of a simple past” (56). Instead of composing a complicated landscape that incorporates the past, present and future, the nationalist mythologies established by the nationalist government write a positive and straightforward
Lithuanian image through the virtues of strength, courage and leadership, as displayed by King
Mindaugas and Duke Gediminas. Therefore, Czaplicka argues that the recomposition of Vilnius’ urban landscape saw the language and community of Lithuania to be rewritten, simplified, and
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poised on the fissures of the present, where monumental space became characterised through “the rhetorical figures of a national past” (294).
Although this process of erasing the recent past and replacing it with ancient mythologies simplifies the present, Ague maintains that the act of oblivion is essential if these lost pasts are ever going to be recovered: “the importance of oblivion is that is brings us back to the present”
(89). Ague argues that the eventual return of the recent past facilitates a community’s ability to live within the beginning, the present, the past and the return, instead of one particular moment or interpretation of the past. In theory, the act of forgetting fulfils its objective by allowing a community to eventually live within an urban landscape that displays the layers, memories, and complexities of history simultaneously. The problem with Auge’s theory, however, is that it fails to explain how a community has the control over the urban fabric to determine what pasts are forgotten and when they are later remembered and recovered. If authorising powers, such as the
Government of the Republic of Lithuania or the Soviet Union, determine the built environment and write the monumental space of Vilnius, then the performance of ‘forgetting in order to remember’ is clearly difficult for the individuals of the city to dictate. The Lithuanian community does not have the means to recollect the recent past, as they are unable to determine what objects are commemorated within a city, and no choice in deciding what events and pasts will be cast into amnesia and forgotten from the streets of their city. Homi Bhabha also argues that the syntax of forgetting transpires across urban landscapes, and that this language throws national identity into question:
To be obliged to forget – in the construction of the national present – is not a question of
historical memory; it is the construction of a discourse on society that performs the
problematic totalisation of the nation’s will. That strange time – forgetting to remember –
is a place of ‘partial identification’ inscribed in the daily plebiscite which represents the
performative discourse of the people. (311)
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Despite the obvious correlation between memory and oblivion – that one can only remember something after they have forgotten it – this framework does not readily lend itself to the construction of national and individual identity within a spatial discourse. Auge’s mode of oblivion accounts for why the newly instated Government of the Republic of Lithuania established a contemporary urban narrative through legend and mythological figures, following
Occupation. Auge’s theory also rationalises the Government of the Republic of Lithuania’s process of forgetting the recent traumatic past and ignoring the present in the contemporary monumental space of Vilnius’ built environment as this act allowed for the composition of a nationalist Lithuanian history to be etched into urban fabric. Auge’s theory of oblivion, however, does not account for the loss and repossession of urban memories for the individuals of Vilnius. It fails to explain how and when the community can harness monumental space in order to identify with, and remember, the pasts and memories that have been obscured and removed from the urban landscape – especially seeing that these people have had little or no power over the built environment (except in cases of iconoclasm, but this revolutionary act, as we have seen from
Forty and Esbenshade, only works to prolong the memories being destroyed).
Urban Memory in Vilnius:
The Tenuous Link Between Past and Present
The theoretical discourse of memory studies provides the structure for understanding how the past is remembered in the present, and the effects that the recollection of the past has on history.
Radstone and Hodgkin theorise the past as having a transitory nature: “the past is not fixed, but is subject to change: both narratives of events and the meanings given to them are in a constant state of transformation” (23). Irrespective of what history is being recounted, whether it is personal, communal or national history, it is always modified according to whom it is being communicated
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by; and this is continually affected by the present. A memory or event is rewritten each time it is described and this recomposition is intricately tied to the fact that remembering is a mode of representation that belongs to the present. The referent of memory is always the past and therefore absent, and as Huyssen observes: “the act of remembering is always in and of the present” (4); where the performance of remembering is “always in danger of collapsing the constitutive tension between past and present” (10). This is due to the tenuous link between the past and the present where the actual process of remembering is an act that recollects the past, but occurs in the present. As such, communities, nations and individuals continually re-write the past every time a new construct for reflecting upon historical events is created.
In “Memories in the Museum: Preposterous Histories for Today,” Mieke Bal argues that the presentness of memory and its continual restructuring of how the past is remembered is a process that raises questions of agency. If the cultural domain is going to solicit reflection on the past and the value of memory, then Bal argues that there needs to be active involvement from individuals within a community. Although communities, nations and individuals all continually recompose memories when they reflect within the present, this does not account for how the urban fabric represents the past when the depiction of memory across the city is determined through authorising powers and regimes. If monuments are to work as vehicles for presenting remembrance and history across the urban fabric, then communities must be provided with an opportunity to play a more active role in this composition. Although Bal does not state how individuals or collectives can appropriate this compositional role, she does warn against the dangers that may arise if the memory of a culture is composed without the involvement of subjects. Without this involvement, memory may fall into “escapist nostalgia, self-aggrandising monumentalism, or historical manipulation” (xv). The exhibition of the communist iconography that had been removed from the cities of Lithuania during independence presented an occasion for the nation to reflect on recent historical events within the present, where these destroyed icons
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and symbols were illustrative of how the recent past shaped their current national identity. It appears, however, that these busts and sculptures have fallen prey to the escapist nostalgia identified by Bal.
Post-Communist Nostalgia:
Resurrecting Soviet Icons
The Soviet monuments removed from Vilnius’ streets through acts of iconoclasm during the move into independence, are absent from the contemporary urban narrative, but are on display outside the realm of the city. The role that tourism has played in aestheticising the Old Town of
Vilnius has also influenced how the retired communist objects are currently exhibited in
Lithuania. The collection of Soviet icons has seen the development of a communist nostalgia theme park south of Vilnius – Grutas Sculpture Park – on an area of reclaimed swampland near the town of Druskininkai. The woodland park of Grutas Sculpture Park exhibits 65 bronze and granite statutes of former Soviet leaders and protagonists, including Vladimir Lenin, Joseph
Stalin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and the head of the Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerhinsky
(see figs. 17-18), as well as Soviet iconography such as groups of partisans, or paintings and motifs of school children and workers (see fig. 19). Each reclaimed monument is accompanied by a plaque that notes the where the monument was located, who it represents, and the artist who designed the sculpture. They are also accompanied with the quote, “their activities terrified the world and ruined millions of lives.”
The brainchild of the controversial park is Viliumas Malinauskas, a local mushroom millionaire.9
Malinauskas won the right to “borrow” the State-owned Soviet realist sculptures of the Lenins
9 This description is not a metaphorical reference to Malinauskas’ multiplying wealth but rather operates literally as he made his fortune in tinning mushrooms.
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and Stalins in a competition organised by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture in 1999. The project was particularly contentious and sparked local debates. Some accuse Malinauskas of winning the competition because he was the only entrant that did not require state funding and the park is motivated by profits rather than reclaiming history. Alternatively, others declare that Malinauskas has saved the history of Lithuania. Irrespectively of these local debates, it stands that the park is maintained through investments from Malinauskas’ Hesona mushroom company, rather than state funding.10 Arguably, the decision to grant Malinauskas the monuments was influenced by the fact that the project was self-sufficient, rather than any political, historical or artistic merits or intentions.
The removal of the Soviet officially sanctioned monuments from their traditional location in the civic space Lithuanian cities, to the private space of the statue park, transforms how these objects are gazed upon. Once the commemorative object enters the heritage space of the park they become subject solely to the tourist gaze, rather than being observed by the communities and individuals who engaged with them as objects within the built environment of urban landscapes.
In “Cast in Stone: Monuments, Geography, and Nationalism,” Nuala Johnson analyses the Soviet iconography at a similar sculpture park in Budapest, Hungary. Theorising how these monuments appropriate a different role in the park, Johnson argues that once a monument is removed from the city and transformed into a tourist icon, it can no longer be relied upon to depict an interpretation of history. Instead, the monuments become “subject to the tourist gaze in a forum designated to generate foreign revenue” (51). Once monuments appear in a sculpture park there is a change in their spatialisation, which in turn alters their meaning. The way that the urban landscape displays monuments is in contrast to their exhibition in the space of a specialist theme park. In Radstone and Hodgson’s response to Johnson’s work, they argue the Hungarian sculpture
10 While I travelled through Vilnius in 2001 and 2003 these debates were circulating through the Lithuanian English- language press, and were also discussed by tour-guides, tourists and locals.
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park that displaces the Soviet iconography to the margins of the city, “registers the complex way in which new regimes attempt to come to terms with the predecessors in the public space” (26).
In Vilnius, the monuments to the Soviet regime once wrote a perpetual present through the image of a leader, and were icons designed to write a particular urban memory. The monuments to
Lenin and Stalin are no longer markers to the communist regime or objects subject to iconoclasm during the rise of a Nationalist movement. These monuments are now are exhibited in a space where the past is relegated to and diminished through an ironic presentation of history that has transformed recent Lithuanian history into a spectacle for the tourist. At Grutas Sculpture Park, these monuments are props in a heritage park where they exhibited in a forum that resembles a funfair. In tourist literature, such as pamphlets and guidebooks, the park has been nicknamed
‘Stalin World,’ and Stalin World advertises and markets itself as an amusement park and open-air museum concomitantly. On arrival at the park the tourist is greeted with panoramic views of
Malinauskas’ mansion. In conjunction with the barbed wire and guard towers that circle the park, it is evident that this space is particularly complex in terms of memory, capitalism, novelty and the tourist industry. Having been collected en mass the retired communist monuments are presented through the park along a circular duckboard through the forest. The monuments are accompanied by a petting zoo, museum, shop and café. At the epicentre is the children’s area, where the younger tourists are encouraged to lift weights to find out if they are the strongest man in the world – hauntingly reminiscent of a tyrannical leader’s quest to rule the world.
Grutas Park’s brochure advertises that during their visit to the park, the tourist will encounter
“sculpture with ideological content [that is] a unique phenomenon” in a park that displays “idols and symbols thrust upon the Lithuanian nation during the tragic Soviet era [that] reveal to us and our children the historical truth about Soviet occupation in Lithuania” (Grutas Sculpture Park,
Tourist Guide). Although the tourist paraphernalia that is distributed by the Grutas Sculpture Park
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attests that the site is enabling the local community to interact with the past and facilitate a remembrance of recent traumatic historical events, the park’s agenda to ‘reveal’ the country’s authentic history is muddied when the site overtly relies on parody to re-present the past. The park, although exhibiting Soviet icons, negates the experiences and hardships suffered under communist rule by relegating the collection of artefacts through the placement of the monuments and busts alongside zoo animals, next to shops that are housed inside original deportation wagons, and for the experience of the past by the visitor to be audio-accompanied by Russian pop music that persistently blasts through speakers across the park.
An advertisement that was published in the weekly tourist guide Vilnius in Your Pocket described the park as a site that “combines the charms of Disneyland with the worst of the Soviet Gulag prison camps.” This fusion of recent Lithuanian history with the spectacle of the amusement park forces the historical narrative of Lithuania’s past to be obscured by the hectic and ridiculous display of the monuments with animals and children’s play equipment. Tourists are enticed to visit the park, not to engage with the recent past, but to experience the past in a forum that removes political or traumatic tensions as history is reduced to a commodity that operates within the realm of novelty. Grutas Sculpture Park is a funfair that simply embraces nostalgia rather than commenting upon it or allowing the walker to engage with it. The park is a site that is in danger of mystifying the past further by presenting recent history without any historical agenda, and without providing a forum for a dialogue with the past to emerge, and where the memories of the recent past have been obscured by novelty and the retired monuments cannot work as vehicles for remembrance.
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IV
Lenin Retired:
The Memory Sculpture of Gintaras Karosas
The retired monuments to communism, and what role they will play in the contemporary urban landscape of Vilnius, are emblematic of the intricate relationship between monuments and memory and forgetting. Having analysed the nostalgic space of the Grutas Sculpture Park in terms of novelty and parody, I will move on, by way of conclusion, to consider another sculpture park outside the boundaries of the Vilnius. This is the Centre of Europe Sculpture Park, 17km north east of Vilnius, a site that was designed by Lithuanian artist Gintaras Karosas. My particular focus will be Karosas’ installation, Infotree LNK, will be analysed in terms of memory, forgetting, and how alternative pasts and memories can be presented in an artistic realm. I argue that the sculpture subverts the conventional history that the monuments in Vilnius’ Old Town interpellate. In turn, I shall illustrate how contemporary art installations can perform the memory work that the officially sanctioned monuments, and retired Soviet icons at Grutas Park, fail to execute comprehensively. In order to study Infotree LNK as a memory installation, I draw upon the artistic framework of memory sculpture, provided by Andreas Huyssen. This theory provides the scaffolding for understanding how Karosas’ installation actively engages with the recent past and calls to the surface residual and alternative urban memories and histories.
The intentional act of performing memory is integral for an object that is anticipated as a site of recollection and contemplation. If the contemporary monuments of Vilnius are simultaneously clouding alternative histories of the city space (which is problematic in terms of memory and forgetting) and the modality of power behind their production (which is problematic for the development of a national identity when it is fused with the development of tourism) then an alternative space or means is required where objects can operate as memory and identity re-
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builders. As James E. Young explains in At Memory’s Edge, we cannot be so naïve to assume that the city can remember its past by itself:
Presence of the past is apparent only to those already familiar with the site’s history or to
those who actually carry a visual memory of this site from another, earlier time… memory
of a site’s past does not emanate from within a place but is more likely the projection of the
mind’s eye onto a given site. Without historical consciousness of visitors, these sites
remain essentially indifferent to their pasts, altogether amnesiac. They “know” only what
we know, “remember” only what we remember. (62)
Young argues that it is only possible to construct an historical consciousness of a city’s past for the coming generations of inhabitants, and for the travellers who visit a city, through sites or objects that function as intentional acts of remembrance. Without intentional acts of remembrance, “buildings, streets, or ruins remain little more than inert pieces of the cityscape”
(62). Within the artistic world of Vilnius the prescribed historical narrative of public sculpture is contested, forcing the walker to engage in this intentional act of remembering. The mnemic traces of communist occupation, concealed from the streets of Vilnius, have been made apparent in a contemporary artwork that has been constructed with an ‘anti-monument’ motivation. Lowenthal suggests in his introduction to Forty’s The Art of Forgetting that this type of site is a space where forgetting manifests into an art: “art as opposed to ailment, choice rather than compulsion or obligation” (xi).
At the Centre of Europe Sculpture Park, Infotree LNK operates as a site where forgetting and memory manifests itself within an artwork built around a retired sculpture of Lenin. Not all the sculptures in the park are commentaries on the Soviet regime, but the site functions as a forum where the modern art that was not exhibited during Occupation is made visible. In addition to the works of significant foreign artists, such as Sol Le Witt and Dennis Oppenheim, the park displays
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local works that amalgamate the current climate of Lithuania as well as acknowledging the recent communist past. As I have outlined in the discussion of memory installation, memory sculpture is a term used to define artworks that have been composed through material objects but do not present themselves as sculpture in the traditional sense. Rather, Huyssen argues that memory sculptures articulate “memory as a displacing of past into present, offering a trace of that past that can be experienced and then read by the viewer” (111). Particular works in the sculpture park present this trace, calling to mind the traumatic events of communism through installations that encourage the viewer to consider the recent past, and prevent this past from being obscured further.
Infotree LNK is an extremely large installation that the visitor to the park can literally engage with and walk inside, a labyrinth-style artwork that if viewed from an elevated position defined the shape of a synthetic tree within a pine forest (see fig. 20). Having arranged 3000 broken and vandalised Soviet television sets in rows stacked four high, the visitor can walk inside the walls of the installation, becoming lost in the maze of former ideology and technology (see fig. 21).
The height of the televisions works to form an opaque barrier to the outside world, and once inside Karosas’ sculpture only glimpses onto the park are provided. At the centre of the mass of obsolete televisions, Infotree LNK has been constructed around an old and discarded Lenin monument. The statue of Lenin, the nucleus of the labyrinth, has been left lying on his back.
Though the passing of time the statue has decayed, where the concrete is continually crumbling from Lenin’s body in the graveyard of televisions. Since the construction of the installation in
2000 Lenin’s head has since broken away from his body, and now lies loosely connected by a metal rope that sticks out through his neck where the backbone should be. Lenin’s jaw is dislocated, and his left arm that once pointed to the sky lies dormant next to his body (see figs.
22-23). This recycling of the Soviet iconography, in terms of Forty’s argument concerning the manifestation memory, can be seen as transforming the object as the materiality of forgetting in a
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site of memory. For Huyssen, the use of the discarded objects is emblematic of memory sculpture and demonstrates Karosas’ awareness that all memory is representation and recollection (111).
The Lenin statue that disintegrates within the public space of the park also holds a symbolic purpose. Mulvey states that an iconic monument ‘once disgraced,’ such as the Lenin lying on his back, can actually “shift the monument’s meaning further, out of the political into emotional or cultural resonance” (223). Karosas’ installation functions as an abstract representation of how
Lenin’s ideology was conveyed to the people of Lithuania, but it also depicts the eventual disintegration of the communist party. This is epitomised with the body of Lenin decaying at the heart of the maze of televisions. Lying incongruously on the ground the embodiment of Lenin has lost his dignity. Crumbling and corroding away, Lenin can no longer be a signifier of power.
Instead the figure of Lenin metamorphoses and becomes an object representing a tyrant and a regime that has been conquered. Therefore the way in which this piece of Soviet iconography has been deliberately allowed to decay is directly related to memory. Mulvey argues that is because any disgraced monument or acts of deformation that deliberately alter the sculpture or monument are “specifically formal gestures within a material semiotics” (210). The preserved damaged object simultaneously signals both its original state, which incorporates a different past, with potentially different cultural, political, and social meanings, along with its altered state. This dual presentation allows for both a consideration of the recent past along with the present, in turn elucidating a moment in history that is absent from the city streets of Vilnius.
Infotree LNK performs memory work by juxtaposing images together that allow the visitor to the park to consider the recent past that has been masked in the public space of Vilnius. The synthesis of the contemporary with the iconography of the past, Huyssen argues, encourages the viewer to
“enter into a dialogue with the temporal and historical dimension implicit of the work that is beyond the space of the museum” (111). Karosas’ sculpture allows for the formation of a
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narrative that concurrently considers the contemporary national moment with the recently past communist occupation, and this is an act that the officially sanctioned monumental space is unable to achieve. Karosas displays Lenin in a way that does not reduce the regime to novelty or parody, which is the fate of the monuments at Grutas Park. Instead the once heroic individual becomes a decaying emblem of communism, rejected and left amongst a labyrinth of televisions that are no longer able to communicate the ideology of the past. Following the seventy years of communist rule that has been marked by waves of iconoclasm, many Eastern Europeans interviewed by Mulvey in 1991 stated that a capacity to exist with images of the past was important as “an ability to live with the monuments to the heroes of communism would now mark an ability to live with the past, however hostile to that past they might personally be” (222).
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V
Conclusion
The increase of officially sanctioned monuments being stitched into the urban fabric of cities is indicative of the global obsession that contemporary cultures have with the discourse of memory.
The rise of the monument and the theorisation of memory have transpired simultaneously with a boom in, and a fear of, forgetting. Huyssen has identified the paradoxical nature of our preoccupation with memory: that the very culture obsessed with memorialising is additionally criticised of amnesia, anaesthesia or numbing, and monuments are indicative of this trend (17).
Although monuments are designated sites of commemoration, their inherent invisibility deems these objects to hiding alternative pasts, histories, memories, as well as the modality of power and motivation behind their creation, beneath their metaphorical surfaces and opacity. Authorising powers and the static narratives of officially sanctioned monuments cannot be relied upon to provide a comprehensive narrative of the past, and as urban space cannot remember by itself, residual pasts and alternative memories must be intentionally brought to the surface if they are not to be deemed to cultural amnesia.
The contemporary landscape written by officially sanctioned monuments takes the material form of ancient mythologies in the attempt to create a contemporary nationalist identity that is built through the virtues and heritage that the legends of King Mingdaugas and Duke Gediminas invoke. The new nationalist identity intentionally negates the recent past, where traumatic periods in Lithuania’s history are erased from the urban landscape. It is within the realm of the gallery or sculpture park where these alternate histories are being investigated and walkers are enabled to perform memory work. As evidenced by Grutas Park, however, these spaces can similarly reduce the past to nostalgia rather than allowing for an interaction between the viewer and alternative historical narratives. Although the erection of monuments continues to complicate the duel
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between memory and forgetting, it is curious that one finds in the world of installations that this dialectic is being investigated. Memory installations, such as Karosas’ Infotree LNK, allow for a demystification of the past that the officially sanctioned monuments of Vilnius are unable to provide the inhabitant and the tourist.
The state narratives of officially sanctioned monuments obscure the past, masking residual urban memories and interpretations of history according to the agenda of the authorising party that determines the built environment. The following chapter analyses a different form of monumental space, that of symbolic monuments. Although these monuments compose spatial stories through the imaginary, these architectures create recognisable and iconic landscapes are attributed with a similar memorial or monumental significance that governments and communities ascribe to officially sanctioned monuments: both forms of monuments are expected to perform memory work, solidify cultural identity, and establish a dominant interpretation of the past. Despite the fact that monuments are increasing viewed as politically and ethically suspect, masking the past rather than revealing it, officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic monuments are still being built into our contemporary urban landscapes. Both these types of monuments disguise alternative urban memories and modalities of power, except they differ in the way that they commemorate, structure urban memory and compose spatial stories.
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Chapter Two
Imagined Spaces:
Symbolic Monuments And The Collapse Of Spatial Boundaries
The cleverer I am at miniaturising the world, the better I possess it.
— Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space 150
In a darkened room, sitting on a chair designed for a child, I watched the entire world float by me.
I was rather confused. Although the images depicted on the screen were of iconic objects, recognisable monuments from various capital cities, their positioning next to one another was impossible. I gazed upon the Eiffel Tower, but I could see the World Trade Centre in the background. There was the Forbidden City, but the Taj Mahal was nestled in behind it. I saw the pyramids of Egypt, but what was the Empire State Building doing alongside them? The camera panned across the monumental forms in a jagged fashion whilst metallic music accompanied the visuals. As I observed the uncanny images, I was certain that this looped film with no credits or momentary black screen to indicate a beginning or end, had been constructed by splicing together footage of famous monuments. Someone had evidently visited these locations, filmed these iconic buildings and monuments, and then juxtaposed the images together to create an unheimlich presentation of the world. Recognisable, yet impossible. This is how my interest was generated in a particularly bizarre theme park, Tobu World Square, and the work of Australian artist Susan
Norrie. Norrie had assembled this curious illustration of the world in her DVD installation
ENOLA, exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art during the 2004 Sydney Biennale. The artwork was not comprised through visual recordings of monuments from the ‘real’ world that had been married together to formulate a digital global city. Instead of traversing continents,
Norrie had simply visited Tobu World Square, a miniature world that exhibits models of
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symbolic monuments. Norrie then appropriated the miniature architectural diorama as a readymade set for her installation that explores memory and destruction in our contemporary climate. The artwork, a spectre of memory, explicitly comments upon Japan’s traumatic history: the title itself a reference to ‘Enola Gay,’ the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan in
1945.
The Nikko Mountains, Japan, are home to Tobu World Square. This theme park is a peculiar architectural miniature village that displays the world as a petite panorama. Containing a collection of 102 replicas of buildings and landmarks from twelve countries and manifold cities,
Tobu World Square allows the visitor to observe symbolic sites that have been collected from cities including Paris, Moscow, Beijing, New York, Tokyo, London and Rome, all in one journey. The anthology of model monuments at the park essentially provides the visitor with a traditional grand tour, but it is a comprehensive exploration that is contained within the minuscule. In order to allow the visitor to travel around and sightsee, Tobu World Square has been divided into several individual zones that are determined according to the region and time frame that the original symbolic monuments originated from. Entering the park, the visitor walks around the miniaturised iconic sites in a choreographed journey that takes them (in order) through
Modern Japan (see fig. 24), America (see fig. 25), Egypt (see fig. 26), Europe (Denmark, France,
Holland, Italy, Spain and Russia) (see figs. 27-28), Asia (Cambodia, China, India, Iran and
Turkey) (see fig. 29), and concludes with Ancient Japan (see fig. 30). This is a performance indicative of the scripted narrative of museum space identified by Tony Bennet in The Birth of the
Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1990) where visitors to cultural institutions followed a predetermined script as they engage and walk through these sites.
You would be impressed how mysterious the Parthenon appears against the sun setting into
the Nikko Mountain range. (Tobu World Square website)
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The bonsai miniatures of Tobu World Square have been rebuilt with a perverse quest for realism and authenticity, and are incredibly precise model replicas. The Parthenon has been built with marble dust, the pyramids created with solidified sand, the Colosseum with fragments of bricks, and the temples of Kyoto with splinters of wood. As the miniatures have been constructed at a scale of exactly 25:1 to the iconic landmarks duplicated from the real world, there is a strange relationship between reduction and duplication that is characteristic of all models. Despite this level of miniaturisation, however, the monuments from different zones can be seen simultaneously across the park, creating a fictional panorama of a global city comprised of the world’s most unique monuments. Within the imagined urban cityscape of the European zone, the
Eiffel Tower can be viewed at the same time as the Colosseum, but European, Asian and
American cities and monuments can also be seen. In France, New York is in the near distance. In
Egypt, the visitor is a step away from New York and Paris. From the Great Wall of China and the
Forbidden City, the entire world is in sight (see figs. 31-36).
Egypt Zone features grand pyramids, which make various appearances depending on the
sunlight. They look particularly mysterious in the orange glow of the sunset. Why don’t
you eat an ice cream on a hot midsummer day, while looking at the pyramids? It would
taste especially good! (Tobu World Square website)
Introduction to Symbolic Monuments
This chapter examines the symbolic monuments within urban landscapes and the imagined narratological space that these objects compose. Symbolic monuments are the icons, sites and architectures that are imbued with significance and have a collection of meanings and associations attached to them following their construction by individuals, communities and governments. This distinguishes symbolic monuments from officially sanctioned monuments, the traditional commemorations that are intentionally built by authorising powers to function as
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memorials. Therefore this chapter presents a movement from the static narratives of officially sanctioned monuments, to the imagined narratives of symbolic monuments. Symbolic monuments have become increasingly important for governments and communities as the global spatial practices of condensation and disembedding have forced temporal and spatial borders to collapse or dissolve, making national and cultural borders more flexible. Symbolic monuments become icons that are used to express the unique nature of a particular city and the individuality of the community’s heritage, and are harnessed by communities and governments in an attempt to promote the individual nature of a nation and write a particular urban memory of that space. In order to theorise the dissolving of cultural and national boundaries, and the consequences of attaching of identity and nationhood to symbolic sites, I apply the fictional global cityscape of
Tobu World Square as a case study. This site is analogous to and illustrative of the contemporary spatial practices in question within this thesis enabling me to determine how these spatial practices, in miniature, are at work in our globalised society.
Tobu World Square is a self-evident microcosm of the world, a site where the expectations of symbolic icons can be analysed and contested. This miniature world of symbolic monuments is a space that exaggerates the inability of symbolic monuments to adequately embody and represent the uniqueness of an individual culture in the ‘real’ world, providing evidence to the ways that symbolic icons are employed by authorising powers to direct or transform the urban memories of a city and its people Through this chapter the imaginary comes to the fore as the intangible concept that allows for identity formation. I argue that symbolic sites are the tangible objects that are expected to embody the invisible concept of identity, and the associating ideas of nationhood, culture, and memory, for the inhabitant of an urban landscape and for the foreign spectator. This chapter analyses the complicated relationship that exists between symbolic icons and travel, the reproduction and disembedding of symbolic objects as they are disseminated across time and space, both of which allow me to develop my interrogation of the monument and memory in the
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first chapter. I will also consider the ways in which symbolic sites organise space as bodies cross national and international borders, and how they write cultural narratives revealing the different ways that communities are imagined and constructed.
Critical theorists Homi Bhabha and Benedict Anderson have both provided extensive descriptions of the fictitious, imagined and invented nature of nations. I unravel these foundational fictions and narratives of nations that are designed to construct and direct national identity though an analysis of the material urban objects of the cityscapes. This brings a collection of communal, individual, and national imaginaries to the fore, allowing me to consider how the intangible concept of the nation is built through tangible symbolic sites. Therefore, this chapter weaves between the imagined space of the nation and the city, but also analyses how symbolic monuments are expected to perform memory and identity work. As I have argued through the introduction and first chapter of this thesis, although monuments are structured and designed as sites of remembrance, these objects are unable to fulfil these commemorative roles entirely as monuments are ultimately bound to amnesia and are indicative of forgetting. Symbolic monuments may project the illusion that they are sites where urban memories and cultural identities can be housed, but through the rubric delineated by theorists of monuments, I have already demonstrated that the fate of all monuments is to mystify the past and to become invisible. In order to demystify the imagined narratives written by symbolic monuments, analyse how they are intricately tied to spatialising the city, investigate how these sites engage with contemporary spatial practices, and the inability of these icons to perform memory work, I divide this chapter into four sections.
This first section of this chapter explores the role that the imaginary and narrative play in the construction of the nation, rather than the construction of the state through officially sanctioned monuments discussed in the previous chapter. Having established symbolic icons to be the
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monuments within the urban landscape that have had meaning attributed to them by individuals, communities, governments and foreigners, I argue that these sites are attempts to materialise the intangible concepts of nation, identity, memory and culture. Though the frameworks provided by
Homi Bhabha in Nation and Narration and Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, I demonstrate how symbolic sites are deeply tied to fiction in order to facilitate a sense of national identity within a community. Inhabitants may use the identities projected by these icons as a mirror, but the narratives may also be used by external observers in order to spatialise the spaces, monuments and traditions they have not personally encountered. I elaborate upon David Harvey’s assertion in The Condition of Postmodernity (1990) that there has been the compression of spatial and temporal boundaries, arguing that it is the porous and incomplete nature of the fictitious and imagined construct of national borders that exaggerates governmental and community needs to rely on symbolic sites for the composition of identity and urban memories. Ironically, the national icons that ‘concretise’ these imagined concepts create a desire for foreign spectators to travel to these sites, seeing an increased velocity of international travel. Accelerated movement, and the accompanying transferral of knowledges and cultures, further dissolves national borders as travellers ‘collect’ monumental sites in contemporary global tours.
The second section travels from the iconic monument to the iconic city, where urban landscapes are symbolised through their built environment. With a particular emphasis on contemporary travel patterns and the movement of tourists and monuments, I develop a conceptualisation of urban symbolic monuments that is directed through the lens of fiction and the imaginary. Calling upon Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Donatella Mazzoleni’s essay “The Imaginary City,” I argue that like the cultural identities attributed to nations through the use of fictions and spatial stories, the cultural and urban identities of individual cities are also composed through the imaginary: it is within the imagination that the memories and identities of a particular place are etched into the urban canvas. In other words, although the city can be ‘seen,’ unlike the nation
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that is essentially intangible, both concepts have memories and identities attributed to them through the imaginary. It is here that I harness Tobu World Square as a case study, exploring the fictional landscape written and displayed by the miniature symbolic monuments. In order to read the miniature in terms of the city I turn to Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the
Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection and Elizabeth McMahon’s “Tasmanian
Lilliputianism: Miniature Villages and Model Citizens on the Tourist Trail,” both of which allow me to consider the miniature world in terms of spatial practices and memory. I argue that Tobu
World Square overtly removes spatial boundaries, and at this site the collapse and fluidity of actual borders is explicitly augmented: global borders are literally removed at this site. Rather than a concept, the global city becomes a reality in the fictional world of the park. This is exacerbated as Tobu World Square is promoted and advertised as a place that houses UNESCO world heritage sites – the miniatures are presented as the actual heritage sites, rather than the original architectures that exist in the ‘real’ world.
The third section of this chapter considers symbolic monuments as curiosities, sites to visit across urban landscapes. My analysis of symbolic monuments is directed through spatial and critical theories. I build on the psychoanalytic discourse employed by Steve Pile and Henri Lefebvre in order to theorise the body and the symbolic monument in urban space. I investigate the ways that symbolic monuments condense the intangible meanings and memories attached to them, I also consider how symbolic monuments are literally displaced through Anthony Giddens’ theory of
‘disembedding.’ Through his work, Giddens’ observes how contemporary spatial practices see buildings and objects “lifted out” from their original sites of conception and relocated in new spaces in new forms (17). I argue that the disembedding of symbolic landmarks, a practice explicit at Tobu World Square, induces a sense of the uncanny as these monuments become increasingly familiar to those people who are unfamiliar with them. Not only is Tobu World
Square a disembedding ‘machine,’ it is also characteristic of the role that collecting and the
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curiosity play in this practice. This links the site of disembedded symbolic monuments to a historiography of travelling and wonder. Tobu World Square is indicative of a display cabinet where the world’s symbolic monuments have been gathered together, and as a site of collection, I argue that the miniature world writes back to the World Fairs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through a presentation of the globe and its icons in one place. Rather than being the object of curiosity, however, I demonstrate how Japan returns the imperial gaze through the diorama of Tobu World Square that presents an anthology of symbolic monuments as curiosities.
The final section of this chapter concludes with a study of Australian artist Susan Norrie’s memory installation ENOLA. This DVD installation is an artistic study of Tobu World Square.
Through this spectre of memory I analyse the ways in which Norrie’s installation bring the condensation and disembedding that transpire at Tobu World Square to the fore, demonstrating the ways in which contemporary art is a forum for memory work to take place. In the dream-like space of ENOLA, where the symbolic monuments are returned to their original size, and two
Japanese women move through this global city, I examine the inability of symbolic sites to embody the imaginary.
Through this chapter I argue that symbolic sites may never fulfil their role as cultural icons for the community or work as identity building tools for authorising powers. Nevertheless, symbolic sites are a way for spatial theorists to deconstruct the creation of national identity. Nuala Johnson argues that the monument is a site that the theorist can use “as a vehicle for conceptualising the nation-building process” as they form “points of physical and ideological orientations” where
“circuits of memory” are organised (“Cast in Stone” 63). Therefore, although symbolic monuments may not be stable sites to inscribe the intangible concepts of memory and identity, they provide a space where an exploration of symbols, urban memory, and contemporary spatial practices can transpire.
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I
Foundation Fictions:
Narrating the Nation through the Urban Landscape
Through the framework provided by spatial and critical theorists I investigate the layers and complexities of symbolic space. Although I acknowledge that there has been a complex history behind the defining of politically weighted concepts such as nation and culture, the focus of this thesis is the type of narratological space produced by symbolic monuments – the space of the imaginary. The imagined concepts of nation and nationhood have undergone rigorous study in the social sciences in the past half-century. Within this paradigm the definitions of nation, national identity, and community have been extensively debated. I do not ignore these concerns, rather my areas of focus are the spatial narratives and urban memories that are composed by symbolic sites, and the rewriting of urban landscape through condensation and disembedding, rather than the genealogy of how terms are used to define nations or debates on the restrictions and policies of individual nation-states. By observing the ways that individuals engage with their surrounding urban landscape on a day-to-day level, as well as analysing the collapse of spatial and temporal boundaries in our contemporary globalised world, my work stands alongside these definitional dilemmas and debates that surround nationhood. I consider how governments and communities use iconic sites and symbolic monuments to depict certain urban memories and cultural identities across a built environment.
This chapter is transitional within this thesis in terms of the type of narratological space that I examine. It moves from the static narratives inscribed by officially sanctioned monuments to the imagined narratives attributed to symbolic sites, and is a bridge between the first and final chapter of this thesis. Where the first chapter theorises the static narratives of officially sanctioned monuments, the third theorises the transitory narratives of everyday ruins. My work on the
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imagined space of national identity and symbolic sites connects the monuments built by authorising powers to commemorate a particular version of the past, with the everyday monuments that are neglected by communities and councils and become monumental through the residual histories and memories that they reveal. As I stated in the introduction to this thesis, I am aware that the defining categories of monuments I have drawn are porous: some symbolic monuments may share certain characteristics with officially sanctioned monuments or everyday monuments. In particular, the complexities of monuments see crossovers between officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic sites, where the inhabitants of a city may attribute symbolic meanings to a building or object, but these imagined narratives may then be regulated and maintained by the authorising power that determines the built environment. It is the narratological space, however, that differentiates these monumental objects within this thesis.
Officially sanctioned monuments are relatively straightforward. As argued in chapter one, officially sanctioned monuments obscure alternative interpretations of history and the modalities of powers that built them by appearing to write a permanent, transparent and accurate historical narrative through the illusion of durability and stasis. Symbolic sites are not built with the memorial function of commemorating an event, person, or dominant narrative of history. Rather, symbolic sites become monumental through their representational values as different meanings are ascribed to them following their creation, whether local communities, authorising powers, or external spectators draw these associations. The narratological space of symbolic sites is not designed to be static as the attribution of signification is performed within the imaginary. It is this aspect of the symbolic monument that I draw upon, as it exemplifies and develops the arguments raised in the previous chapter: that although memories and identities are intangible, there has continually been the attempt by governments and communities to solidify these imaginings within concrete realities. Having had their importance structured through the imaginary, symbolic monuments are emblematic of attempts to materialise intangible concepts in a manner that is
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different to the process of building officially sanctioned monuments. Rather than being built by authorising powers as tools to write a static interpretation and narration of the past, symbolic monuments have had their significance fabricated, imagined, and attached to them, irrespective as to whether these sites are later harnessed by different governmental powers to their own political advantage.
Symbolic monuments are used as signposts or markers to in order to denote the individual and unique nature of a culture and nation, and this is a matter that will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. In Art, Space and The City: Public Art and Urban Futures, Malcolm Miles provides a definition of symbolic monuments through an Australian example. He states that monuments are built within a dominant framework of values as “elements in the construction of national history, just as such buildings as the Sydney Opera House contribute to a national cultural identity; they suppose at least a partial consensus of values, without which their narrative could not be recognised” (58). Irrespective of whether a community likes or dislikes a particular building, symbolic monuments are familiar across most urban landscapes that stand for a “stability which conceals the internal contradictions of society and survives the day-to-day fluctuations of history” (58). Symbolic monuments direct narratives of national cultural identity by disguising the political unease that exists within a community, thereby monuments becoming emblems of what it means to be connected to a particular city. The Sydney Opera House holds symbolic values for the inhabitants of Sydney who use symbolic monuments to visualise and consolidate their own cultural identities. It is a monument that is also appropriated as a symbol of Sydney and Australia by governmental powers for political advantages. Narratives are also fastened to this monument by foreign spectators who have complex associations of the space, generated through the electronic and print media. As these complex and multi-layered associations, memories and imagined identities are pasted onto symbolic monuments, it stands that these meanings become mystified and opaque.
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In order to theorise how the individuality of cities and nations is imagined and consolidated within symbolic sites, I draw upon Anderson and Bhabha whose work on nations has been influential in postcolonial theory, spatial theory, and critical theory. Anderson’s Imagined
Communities and Bhabha’s Nation and Narration provide a framework for theorising how the intangible concepts of nation and community are grounded through fiction and the imagination.
For Anderson and Bhabha, the nation is not tangible – although the space of the nation can be gazed upon, the nation itself is essentially conceived through ideas that are then transformed into arbitrary geographical lines and markings on a map. Anderson argues that nations are imagined spaces; they are defined, constructed and maintained through the imagination. Anderson configures the genealogy of nations as spaces that have been structured through a collection of imagined communities, allowing me to theorise the construction of the city, symbolic monuments and their projected spatial stories in terms of the imaginary. Bhabha, building on and working from Anderson, takes a more literary approach to the nation. Bhabha argues that the construction of the nation is analogous to the deployment of narrative. According to this framework, nations and national traditions are written through foundational fictions that compose and direct the various aspects of a community’s national identity. Bhabha’s work facilitates my narratological approach to the construction of national identity and spatiality through this chapter. Anderson and
Bhabha represent a critical theory tradition that engages with space, identity and nation-building by positing the fictional and intangible concept of identity alongside the imaginary. This provides me with the scaffolding to establish an analysis of symbolic sites in terms of national identity and urban memory.
If the nation is an imaginary concept then it will always be unstable and volatile. This instability is aggravated when the foundational fictions that structure the nation are themselves changeable, flexible and elastic. As Bhabha notes, “national texts are discontinuous and interruptive” (5);
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therefore suggesting that there is a duality of volatility, both in the foundational fiction and the concept of a cultural identity. The instability of narratives and nations, according to Bhabha, is a consequence of two factors: the transitional nature of history, where the nation is relatively a new concept; and the conceptual indeterminacy of the nation, where the structuring borders of nations are intangible and essentially only ever imagined. Although governments and international organisations have attempted to secure nations through borders, this is never fully achievable as boundaries are rewritten and erased. Adopting a linguistic approach to the nation, Bhabha argues that these two factors eventuate in the idea of the ‘nation’ wavering between vocabularies; the nation as a form of narrative has its own history, “textual strategies, metaphoric displacements, sub-text and figurative stratagems” (2). It is this collection of sub-texts and strategies that sees the concept of the nation to be in flux, and is exemplary of the nation having been built through the imaginary, uncertainty, ambivalence, and a collection of differing narratives and interpretations.
These factors force the concept of nation to be incomplete. Never fully realised or written down, the nation is always in the process of articulation where “meanings may be partial, history may be half-made” and contains “thresholds of meaning that must be crossed, erased, and translated in the process of cultural production” (3).
The attempt to secure nations through their borders is executed by ruling powers for strategic reasons. Not only are these boundaries an attempt to physically separate countries, they are also devised in the attempt to distinguish the difference between cultures. Edensor argues that borders are “imagined to enclose a particular and separate culture, a notion which is articulated by hegemonic ways of differentiating and classifying cultural differences” (National Identity 37).
Through the late twentieth century, however, the movement of people across borders intensified.
Although there has been global travel for centuries, this recent collapse in spatial and temporal boundaries was unprecedented. David Harvey argues in The Condition of Postmodernity that the technological developments of modernity allowed people to travel across geographical terrain at
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an accelerated pace and this eventuated in the compression of time and space. Scientific advancement saw an increase in the speed and decrease in the cost of travel, both factors reducing the physical and temporal distance between countries. The number of bodies who could afford to travel was amplified, as too was the pace at which they could across national borders. This intensification of movement eventuated in the collapse and flexibility of national and cultural borders, as these boundaries became porous with the increase of cultural flow, travellers, cultures, information and knowledges between nations.
Our contemporary globalising society has therefore forced the already unstable foundational fictions and imagined communities that structure nations and identities to become increasingly unhinged. Although borders can be imagined, these volatile demarcations have dissolved as globalisation requires the bounded and secure areas of nations to be obsolete in order for the flow of information and bodies. As Edensor explains, “nations need to have more permeable borders to admit financial, informational, commodity and cultural flows which circulate the globe”
(National Identity 39). It is clear that geographical borders are not able to define, stabilise or maintain individual cultural identities or narratives. If the permanence and concretisation of the individual nation is no longer possible beyond the lines drawn on a map, then cultural identities, urban memories and spatial stories must be secured through other discourses. This is where the built environment is increasingly relied upon by communities and authorising powers to construct a sense of statehood and cultural identity for the inhabitant, where urban memories and histories are attributed to symbolic monuments and icons in order to facilitate a sense of belonging to a community. The attribution of cultural identity to the built environment is an idea that I will elaborate upon in the following discussion, and has been drawn from the argument put forth by
Lefebvre in The Production of Space. Lefebvre argues that the built environment works as a mirror, where monuments offer “each member of a society an image of that membership, an image of his or her social visage” (220). As such, the narratives projected by symbolic
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monuments act as reflections of how individuals see themselves culturally in terms of their city and their nation where these monuments constitute “a collective mirror more faithful than any personal one” (220).
Nations have masqueraded as historical entities, and their worth and uniqueness have been justified and defended through the fictions they proclaim. In National Identity, Anthony Smith argues that the fictions that configure cultural identities signify the “bonds of solidarity among members of communities united by shared memories, myth, traditions” (15). I agree that individuals may be bound through these memories, myth and traditions, but argue that these foundational narratives cannot purely be secured through these factors. It takes more than the intangible concepts of memory, stories and heritage to ground the similarly intangible concept of nation. This, as we have seen from Lefebvre’s metaphor of the mirror, is where symbolic monuments come into play. Communities and governments call upon symbolic monuments to embody the fictions and urban memories that arrange and define cultures into material objects. It is the combination of memories, and the objects that are expected to house these memories, that allow foundational fictions to be written and distributed accordingly throughout a community. The precarious narratives of nations are reliant on symbolic sites to present the illusion that they can be stabilised and represented within material objects, where inhabitants then gaze upon symbolic sites as embodiments of what it means to be part of a culture: they are the sites where the nation becomes visible, appearing to have been stabilised and concretised in a tangible entity. The icons that form memorable landscapes thereby write the nation, facilitating in a transformation of the metaphorical and imagined concepts of foundational fictions to appear real, despite their location in the imaginary. This suggests that the nation can only ever be a fiction, where a visual exhibition of the illusive is necessary. As Nuala Johnson argues in “Cast in Stone,” the ambiguity of the nation can be strengthened through iconic sites where “nationalist imaginings emerge and are structured symbolically” (52).
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Before I investigate the complicated manner in which symbolic monuments are expected to ground cultural identity, I first turn to Geoffrey Cubitt’s work in Imagining Nations to note that the narratives and meanings of symbolic monuments constantly evolve. Cubitt argues that irrespective of how well established the symbols that denote nations are, they will always “remain elusive and indeterminate, perpetually open to context to elaboration and to imaginative reconstruction” and this is a consequence of the intended signification that is imprinted onto an iconic site by a community or a government is altered accordingly through time (3).
Reading Synecdoches:
The Signification of Symbolic Monuments
If symbolic monuments are the tangible points when urban memory and nationhood are articulated through cities, then these national fictions need to be legible in order for them to be distributed across an urban space and read by a population. The framework provided by semiotics allows me to theorise the ways in which the inhabitants of an urban landscape observe and interpret their surroundings. This discourse has been employed by Bhabha in order to theorise the ways that inhabitants read cities through signification. Bhabha argues that the modern nation is written through a collection of arbitrary signs that direct and “disrupt” the visual and aural imaginary of a group of people (60). These arbitrary signs are the anthology of icons exhibited across the urban fabric, sets of symbols that have been attributed with particular cultural meanings. Inhabitants of a city read these arbitrary signs of cultural identity, consuming a particular version of the past and the present that eventually fosters a sense of community that has been facilitated through symbols, icons, objects, memories, traditions and heritages. This imagined community has thus been grounded through geography, politics and time, and then spatialised within these symbolic monuments. As Anderson states, nationalism has to be
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understood through the “large cultural systems that preceded it” (19); and these are the cultural symbols that embody the foundational fictions.
The spatial signs that are read by inhabitants of a city could be interpreted as tools for solidifying a sense of community, as these icons allow the walker to recognise their historical and cultural place within the surrounding built environment. For example, in National Identity, Edensor argues that this sees symbolic monuments becoming “highly selective, synedochal features which are held to embody specific kinds of characteristics” of the individual nation (45). Smith also argues that it is essential for the authorising powers of nations to define a definite social space within a community in order to locate the people within a particular time and space, where symbolic monuments are called upon for this identity building and solidification work: authorising powers “provide individuals with ‘sacred centres,’ objects of spiritual and historical pilgrimage, that reveal the uniqueness of their nation’s ‘moral geography’” (16); where “national symbols, customs and ceremonies are the most potent and durable aspects of nationalism. They embody its basic concepts, making them visible and distinct for every member” (77). The attempt to engrave cultural identities into the urban landscape sees the built environment acting as a repository for heritage and traditions, where there is “an active shaping repertoire of meanings and images, embodied in values, myths and symbols that serve to unite a group of people with shared experiences and memories and differentiate them for outsiders” (187). Therefore, by providing a society with sacred centres and symbolic monuments, governments attempt to bestow individuals with a sense that they belonging to a unique place with a distinct cultural identity.
When no common set of symbols for a community seem apparent across an urban landscape,
Smith notes that it may be an imperative of the authorising power to select multiple symbols and iconic monuments so that diverse groups can be encouraged to “confirm their allegiance to the national project” (155). Cubitt argues that the range of symbols being called upon by
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governmental powers to build a uniting cultural narrative eventuates in the construction of the nation to be “an imaginative field on to which different sets of concerns may be projected, and upon which connections may be forged between different aspects of social, political and cultural experience” (1). This collection of concerns and connections can be thought of in terms of
Bhabha’s notion that the coherence of the narration narrative is always threatened by the disproportionate collection of temporalities and meanings attached to a different site, where objects will always mean different things to different people. Therefore, the reasoning behind the gathering of multiple symbols for identity formation is in order to consolidate cultural identity and is indicative of political attempts to counteract the disproportionate number of temporalities and meanings that one iconic object houses, by providing several symbols that construct a corresponding significance for the entire community, inscribing an individual and unique image of that culture across the total urban landscape.
The inscription of cultural and national identity into the built environment is always fraught with complications, two of which I will now discuss. The first is the appropriation of symbolic monuments for political purposes by authorising powers, in the attempt to direct the development of cultural identity. The second is how communities and governments both attempt to establish identity in the city through monuments, but this endeavour is made with the assumption that symbolic monuments have the capacity to perform identity work in a way that can be read by individuals engaging within this urban space.
Once individuals within a community have fastened national and cultural symbolism to a material object, the now symbolic monument can be harnessed by authorising powers to their own political advantage. Edensor argues that the appropriation of symbolic sites to ground the culture of a nation sees these symbols becoming “the source of much conflict between different powerful groups” (National Identity 8). Whether it is individuals within the community who attach
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meanings to these sites, or authorising powers who have a vested interest in seizing these symbolic monuments for advantageous political purposes, symbolic monuments fall prey to a number of the complications that are also emblematic of officially sanctioned monuments. If symbolic monuments are expected to group and signify a culture then, like officially sanctioned monuments that are appropriated to direct a projection of history throughout urban space, these icons may be exploited by ruling powers who use the urban fabric to foster, command and maintain cultural identities through objects that a population may already invest with cultural connotations and associations.
Communities and governments may attribute symbolic monuments with a collection of meanings in order to compose unique cityscapes and distinctive cultures across built environments. It cannot be assumed by these parties that these symbolic icons can perform memory work, represent the individuality of a culture, or that the narratives that these objects compose can or will be read and appropriated in the same way by the community in question. This is a problem that I considered in relation to officially sanctioned monuments: how can governments, communities and theorists know that the inhabitants of a city will read the urban space in a predetermined, presupposed and prescribed manner? I argue that the ability of symbolic sites, or any monumental space, to direct cultural and national identity in such a seamless manner will always fall under scrutiny: what prevents symbolic monuments and their attached cultural meanings and urban memories from becoming invisible? The argument that national symbols make culture visible and unites groups fails to explain how individuals can read these architectural texts in the same way. Irrespective as to whether communities can read these symbols in the supposed manner, it still stands that these icons are harnessed by all sectors of a culture. What predetermined narrative do these monuments then call upon? Anderson argues that the icons and imaginaries intended to visualise a nation and celebrate an idealised notion of a unique cultural and identity, call upon “a horizonless past” in order to imagine a culture in the
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present (144). Although, like the memories and histories that governments and communities are attempting to spatialise and materialise within the city, this horizonless past is also volatile and subject to change.
This is where the imaginary is overtly at play, where symbolic sites remove the past and the future in the attempt to compose a cultural identity in the present. Edensor argues that this perpetual present attached to the narratives exhibited by symbolic sites is drawn from two sources: those monuments that engage with a glorious or prosperous past, and those monuments that are emblems of modernity and technological advancement (National Identity 47). Edensor’s categorisation provides me with the framework to determine the symbolic sites that call upon a horizonless past. Listing the Taj Mahal, the Egyptian Pyramids, and the Parthenon as examples,
Edensor argues that these sites are indicative of symbolic icons that invoke a contemporary cultural identity through ancient monuments that, having been built during a perceived and ancient glorious past, call upon a horizonless past so celebrate the unique qualities of a contemporary identity. Edensor acknowledges a second symbolic monument that does not call upon a horizonless past, but a perpetual present of progress, those icons that celebrate the modernity of a nation. These sites include symbols of progress and beauty, such as the Eiffel
Tower, the Sydney Opera House, or the Empire State Building, and similarly are imbued with significance that work to structure the sense that a particular city and nation have a unique culture and heritage.
These symbolic monumental sites, whether they invoke glorious pasts or the perpetual presence of modernity, are visibly symbolic to those people engaging with their urban landscape. As I have already outlined, there is no way of ensuring that a community or authorising powers will always agree about which objects will become symbolic and what narratives or foundational fictions these symbolic monuments will ultimately represent internally within a culture. This does not
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mean, however, that these symbolic objects do not become significant externally for people and authorising powers from other cities and nations. Moving my focus from the harnessing of symbolic monuments as tools for providing cultural frameworks for individuals within a society or whether these individuals structure their urban memories in accordance or contradiction to the cultural identities being projected, I argue that symbolic sites also function as signifiers for external communities. Symbolic monuments become fundamental in the projection of a cultural identity for foreigners gazing upon a particular city or nation. Therefore, despite the problematics inherent within the appropriation of symbolic monuments internally, these icons do provide memorable or recognisable landscapes for external parties. These monuments become the scaffolding for how outsiders visually interpret an unknown cityscape, how this space is coded as unique and different to their own urban landscape, and what the accompanying cultural qualities might be for the community being gazed upon.
The importance of this overlap between nationalist and tourist discourses is that symbolic monuments mean distinctly different things to internal and external groups. Symbolic monuments may be expected to reinforce cultural identity for a particular community by directing their urban memories and readings of the past. For the foreign spectator, the same monuments become the keys for interpreting and imagining an unknown urban landscape and culture. Therefore the spatial symbols of a city simultaneously project the foundational fictions by materialising imagined communities into tangible architectures, but the same monuments also signify what constitutes a city’s ‘otherness’ for external viewers. Foreign spectators gain visual access to the iconic monuments of unfamiliar landscapes through the recycling and reproduction of images through electronic and print media, as well as other various discourses. Individuals amass a collection of images of foreign cities through guidebooks, movies, souvenirs, photographs, postcards, magazines, documentaries, films and other paraphernalia. The process of distributing images of symbolic monuments across cultures transforms unfamiliar cityscapes into recognisable
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landscapes. This has a series of consequences. Firstly, these symbolic monuments become tourist attractions as the image library generates the desire within the external spectator to travel and experience the landscapes and icons beyond the local, and to venture to the monuments of monumental cities. Secondly, the symbols and memorable landscapes of a city spatialise this landscape within the imaginary of the external viewer. Thirdly, these symbolic monuments become synonymous with the particular city and nation being looking upon. Finally, foreign spectators attribute a cultural significance to these symbolic monuments, thereby grounding the foundational fictions (or a variation of these narratives) that may or may not hold cultural worth in the host city.
Through a study of the icons of Paris, Edensor elaborates on the role that symbolic monuments play in composing and facilitating in the interpretation of the cultural identity of a city and nation for those people gazing upon the space externally. Edensor argues that the Eiffel Tower projects two different meanings, one to the Parisian inhabitants and the other to the foreign spectator. For the French, the tower works an ideological statement about Frenchness and the republic of France within France. It is an icon that visualises the comradeship of nationhood, and what it means to be
French, irrespective to whether the inhabitants of Paris engage with this narrative to build their cultural identity (National Identity 46). The panorama of Paris and the Eiffel Tower is familiar to the external spectator as the landscape has been distributed through electronic and mechanical mediums, and also works as a signifier of France for outsiders. The tower spatialises Paris for the spectator, allowing the viewer to imagine the urban topography of a city they have never visited, as well as generating the desire in the foreign spectator to travel to this symbolic monument as a tourist destination. These are two widely varying interpretations of the same site. The first structures the understanding of how an individual may respond, interact or imagine their own city, identity, nation and culture. The second is how a geographical identification and spatialisation of a foreign city and its icons can transpire externally. These internal and external
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understandings of the same icon testify, in Edensor’s words, to “the ways in which such places become freighted with different identities” (47); and where there is a specific relationship between the site and the inhabitant, and the site and the external viewer.
This is important in terms of my theoretical framework as it implicates symbolic monuments with the contemporary spatial practices of condensation and disembedding. In this way, the objects that are expected to concretise cultural individuality within a city come to comprise the motivation to travel there. This means that the iconic sites that are expected to ground national borders and epitomise the uniqueness of a particular culture generate a desire for foreign spectators to traverse national boundaries to visit these cities and sites in question, in turn making the national borders more fluid through tourist movement. Thus symbolic sites have a multifaceted relationship with contemporary touristic practices. Memorable landscapes are expected to perform the cultural work for an inhabitant to negotiate their own cultural associations with the city and nation they live in, but these icons also work to attract travellers in a society characterised by webs of travel, movement, and the transport of bodies. This desire to travel to the symbolic sites of foreign cities is a complex process. As I will demonstrate, the familiarity a tourist has with a city and its built environment prior to their actual travel works to govern their experience when they physically encounter the material structure of the symbolic site. This is a move away from considering the monument in stasis, to considering the movement of the monument in terms of its dissemination through images, and movement of the traveller who traverses boundaries to gaze upon the monument in the ‘real’ world.
The relationship between the traveller and the symbolic monument is multi-layered and elaborate.
The familiarity that foreign spectators have with symbolic sites prior to any physical pilgrimage to the location of these monuments is a principle reason for this complexity. Not only have symbolic monuments become increasingly accessible through their digital and mechanical
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reproduction into different mediums and localities, these forms of reproduction have seen a new form of travelling. In “The Moving Landscape” Mitchell Schwarzer argues that technological developments have effectively transformed space as they allow symbolic monuments and icons to travel across cultural borders. Rather than a world where icons are fixed to particular locations, contemporary spatial practices see monuments metamorphosing, becoming “moving landscapes”
(83). This means that there are two forms of travel: a traditional form where the individual physically traverses across borders into new cultures and cites, the other a contemporary digitised form of transport where monuments traverse borders electronically and the stationary traveller encounters these sites without any physical movement. Irrespective as to whether it is the tourist or symbolic monuments travelling, this journey is constitutive of a whirlwind of movement.
Movement is therefore essential to travel, and this can either be the body literally travelling to encounter new spaces, or where the traveller is in stasis as they read urban narratives of foreign countries through monuments in digital transit. It is this intensified mobility of symbolic sites that exacerbates the aspirations within the traveller in stasis to visit these sites as these monuments become universally recognisable.
The ambition of the contemporary traveller to experience the symbolic monuments of foreign cities has seen the evolution of nineteenth-century grand tours into global tours designed to incorporate notable and recognisable monuments, allowing the tourist to encounter fleeting views of spectacular sites. Edensor argues in National Identity that this “highlights the touristic pursuit wherein ‘world sites’ become ‘must-sees’ and tourist and itineraries are organised accordingly”
(3-4). Visiting symbolic monuments at an accelerated speed allows travellers cover cultural and geographical terrain swiftly. Travellers can collect an anthology of monumental sites within a short period of time, where monuments are visited, glanced at, and then ticked off from a list of places to visit. These contemporary global tours are analogous to pilgrimages, involving the journeying to an anthology of symbolic sites and cities that have been attributed with specific
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cultural worth. Nelson and Olin argue that this form of contemporary pilgrimage is transformative: “travel to the monument, like all forms of pilgrimage, transforms object and beholder” where the journey to the monument connects the object and the viewer to larger social structures that remake “the memories of individuals” (6); eventually inculcating a sense of personhood and history that society deems important. This argument supports and builds upon
Lefebvre’s assertion, discussed in the previous chapter: that monuments work as sites of intensity through which individuals are socialised to consider authorities in the narrativisation of history and urban memories. Nelson and Olin are also suggesting that there is an expectation that the traveller will gain knowledge and personal worth by inserting themselves into a collection of histories and social structures as they gaze upon foreign iconic objects.
The pilgrimage to the symbolic monument, whether it is touristic or religious, eventuates in a capturing of the space. Sites are photographed, postcards are bought, souvenirs are purchased, and these tokens of travel determine, “what the monument is and how the trip is remembered” (11). As
Celia Lury observes in “The Objects of Travel,” a memento collected when travelling becomes an
“object or image that symbolises those places, those cultures – the photograph, the postcard, the souvenir” (75). I argue that the act of collecting objects and images is homologous to the traveller also collecting memories of the iconic sites and monuments housed in the cities they visit. The pictorial record of a traveller’s journey becomes the defining trait of the monument or symbolic site that has been visited, a consequence of the rate and method of travel. Nelson and Olin argue this new inscription of the iconic site has become a feature of monumentalism, an aspect that is further affected in the age of global travel where the simulacrum and representations of the monument in electronic forms have already begun to replace the existing monument. Through the capturing of images the traveller attempts to collect, even materialise for themselves, the culture and cultural icons that were previously only imagined. It is here, with the capturing of the city space, that I turn my concentration onto imagining the city.
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This is where the significance of Tobu World Square comes to the fore in a number of ways. The iconic monuments displayed at this theme park are indicative of this trend in travel, where space and time are dissolved and historical truth is negated, in order to satisfy the touristic desire to undertake a global pilgrimage where sites can be viewed, but the globe does not need to be traversed.
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II
Imagining the City:
Fictional Panoramas and Tobu World Square
The miniature diorama of global cities at Tobu World Square is representative of the collapse of bounded space through globalisation, as well as being a site that accommodates for the touristic desire to undertake accelerated global tours. Tobu World Square functions as a microcosm or an intensified and amplified miniature parallel of our surrounding world. I draw this parallel from
Susan Stewart’s argument that the accurate and artificial nature of the bonsai or miniature directly comments and responds to the real world, where these miniatures are “a cultural product, the product of an eye performing certain operations, manipulating, and attending in certain ways, to the physical world” (55). Through this framework I am able to theorise contemporary urban narratives and spatial practices through an analysis of the bonsai buildings housed in the miniature world of the park, as these models respond and refer to the real world. The symbolic monuments of real cities have been reproduced, replicated, relocated and manipulated at the fictional city of
Tobu World Square, where the park becomes emblematic of the dissolving of temporal and spatial boundaries, disembedding and condensation. As a consequence, the incongruous landscape of the park is analogous to contemporary spatial practices, where these practices are magnified within a miniaturised format. This intensification allows me to make use of Tobu World Square to consider how cultural and national foundational fictions are composed, to question the complicated imagined concepts of nationhood, identity and memory, and study how symbolic monuments are operate within our contemporary society.
Before using the microcosm of Tobu World Square to deliberate on contemporary spatial practices, I want to draw attention to similarities in the ways that nations and cities are imagined.
The nation is consolidated and solidified through the imaginary because it is intangible, while
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cities are tangible and physical spaces. Nevertheless, theorists and novelists have still considered the composition of the city through the lens of the imaginary, where memories and histories are etched and attached to urban landscapes through fictions and imaginations. In “The Imaginary
City” critical theorist Donatella Mazzoleni argues that behind the visibility of the architecture that structures tangible cities “there is something else which is difficult to represent with concepts and words” (285). These are the fictions, narratives and memories that lurk beneath the materialised and tangible space of the built environment. Mazzoleni argues that the memories and histories of the imaginary city always haunts the urban landscape, and these memories are both embodied and obscured by the material landscape, making the imaginary difficult to locate or describe. In his collection of short stories, novelist Italo Calvino also brings the relationship of the city and the imaginary to the surface. Through this text the imagined cities invented by Marco Polo for Kublai
Khan are described. Although these narrations are descriptions of Venice, it is the fictional and the imaginary accounts of strange and unknown cities that the reader encounters. In ‘Cities and
Memory 3’ Calvino poetically describes Mazzoleni’s theory of the imaginary that lies behind the material of city. Marco Polo observes that he could easily describe the city of Zaira in terms of the built architecture – the zinc scaled roofs and the arcades’ curves. Polo states, however, that the city does not simply consist of the buildings and streets: “but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past” (10).
Calvino is describing how intangible aspects such as activities, movements, events, memories and interactions all compose the city. It is through the ephemeral and the intangible that the city ‘soaks up’ memories: whether it is the progress of a cat along the tilt of a guttering, or the leap of the adulterer, that writes the narrative of the urban landscape. For Calvino’s narrator, the city “does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows” (11); where all the spaces in the city are marked with scratches and etchings of the past. Drawing upon the theories put forth by Mazzoleni and Calvino, cities cannot
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be theorised solely in terms of its built environment, as the layers of memories imagined within a city also write the urban space. From Mazzoleni’s theoretical and Calvino’s fictional approach to urban and imaginary space, I argue that the nation and the city are sites that are invented, imagined and performed. This is complex as the buildings and urban landscapes that ground the imagined concept of nation for a community are housed in cities that are also composed and realised within the imaginary, where the narratives are multi-layered and multi-authored.
Symbolic monuments therefore work to ground the stories housed in cities and the intangible space of nations, writing the spatial narratives that are tied to the imaginary. This is how I approach Tobu World Square, as it fuses the theoretical with the fictional, and the built architecture with the imaginary.
The panorama of Tobu World Square writes a complicated fiction through its presentation of an unheimlich representation of global cities. The park is an imaginary city with a false skyline, but this fiction has been extracted from real world. Within the park I gazed upon an assortment of buildings that I recognised: Tokyo Dome, in the suburb where I stayed in my recent trip to Japan, the Parthenon, the Chrysler Building, the Notre Dame Cathedral, Angkor Wat, and an unfinished
Sagrada Familia. Some of these iconic sites I had physically visited, others were only familiar through their mechanical or electronic reproductions. The duplicated monuments in this imaginary city, although exceptionally realistic, are in geographical disorder as the geographical topographies of individual global cities have been flattened or ignored in their miniaturised duplication. This means that the walker visiting the park encounters a flattened globe where the oceans between countries and continents are replaced with asphalt, and the distant horizon replaced with the Nikko Mountains that have been magnified due to the miniaturised size of the symbolic monuments. In the miniature Paris at Tobu World Square the Sacré Cœur Paris does not sit on top of the hill of Montemarte, instead it is at the same level as the Notre Dame and the Eiffel
Tower, creating a geographical inconsistency at a park that is built through meticulous recreations.
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The fastidiously recreated symbolic monuments from global cities with its accompanying topographical inconsistencies is, according to Stewart, typical of miniature landscapes where the
“image that is produced not only bears the tangible qualities of material reality but also serves as a representation, an image, or a reality which does not exist” (60). The model iconic architectures of
Tobu World Square are representations and doppelgangers of real monuments. When taking photos within the park, I could capture these miniatures in such a way that I appeared to have travelled to St Peter’s Basilica, the Great Wall of China, the World Trade Centre, the Sacré Cœur, the pagodas of Kyoto, as well as numerous other symbolic monuments, rather than simply photographing the mirror images of these icons in Tobu World Square (see figs. 24-30). As identified by Stewart, this flattened fictional landscape provides the visitor with a reality, but this reality is the image of an impossible cityscape that does not actually exist. With all its accuracy and truthfulness to the original architectures from the real world, Tobu World Square is an all- compassing panorama and representation of the world, but an invention that has been mined from the world. This impossible landscape is exaggerated within the park when numerous cities, countries and continents can be seen at once – the park overtly functioning as an analogy to the contemporary spatial practices where cultural and national borders have dissolved.
In the surreal panorama provided by Tobu World Square monuments have illegitimate and impossible meetings. As well as flattening the topography of individual cities, the miniaturisation of the symbolic monuments has other visual ramifications for the visitor to the park. Although the bonsai buildings have been separated into regional zones – Japan, America, ancient Egypt,
Europe, Asia, Ancient Japan – numerous zones can be seen at one time. The visual merging of zones is not because Tobu World Square is contained within a small space. Although the zones are in a relatively close proximity to each other, the park extends through a large area in the valley of the mountains, and as such these zones separated and distanced from each other to an extent. The
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merging and assimilation of countries is foremost a consequence of the degree to which the symbolic monuments have been miniaturised. Although these icons are petite versions of the original architectures, the reduction at a scale of 25:1 sees that these bonsai monuments still stand as grand structures: despite having been miniaturised within the park, the model Eiffel Tower continues to tower over the visitor. As a consequence, the visitor is unable to distinguish between national or continental zones, cementing the fictional cityscapes into one urban narrative. Spatial boundaries have been collapsed through the construction and organisation of the miniatures to the extent where a variety of geographical locations have been merged together, existing as one enormous city space.
While I walked around Tobu World Square my vision was unhinged by the bizarre organisation of buildings where scale and perspective are confused. In model Paris I could see other European countries including Moscow, Madrid, Rome and London. In the distance I could also glimpse the sites of New York that were hiding behind pine trees, the flora providing an uncanny resemblance to how one might gaze up onto the skyscrapers of New York from Central Park (see figs. 31-32).
Not only could I see the Chrysler Building, the World Trade Centre appeared to exist, and did so within only a short walk from the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe.When in Rome, the pyramids of Egypt can be seen in the horizon, alongside the Parthenon, and only a few steps from
Red Square (see fig. 33). From Egypt I saw New York and Paris simultaneously, while in the
Forbidden City of Beijing, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower and New York could all be seen in the far distance (see figs. 35-36). The conflation, amalgamation and collage of cities magnify the miniature world’s fictitious nature, but so too does the existence of the World Trade Centre and the ancient monuments of Japan that have been destroyed through history, within the park. Tobu
World Square becomes a space where the iconoclasm of symbolic monuments can be reversed. As a consequence, the park operates as a utopic world city as symbolic monuments are reinserted into
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a global urban landscape that incorporates different cities, and by rewriting their architectural histories, incorporates various temporalities from these cities’ pasts.
The panorama of Tobu World Square depicts familiar monuments in one circular perspective, and provides an urban narrative that is impossible to capture in the real world; as Elizabeth McMahon notes, the grand panorama of the miniature is “more comprehensive than in the world” (71). In his essay “The Eiffel Tower,” Roland Barthes defines the panorama as a “dialectic and complex euphoric vision that seeks to be deciphered” (10). Referring to the elevated voyeur at the top of the Eiffel Tower, Barthes argues that the spectator of Paris attempts to find familiar icons, to
“recognise known sites, to identify landmarks” (10). De Certeau correspondingly theorises the elevation of the walker, who from the 100th floor of the World Trade Centre, argues that the height of the building provides a panorama that “transfigures him into a voyeur” and “puts him at a distance,” thereby allowing the city to be read (92). Although the visitor is not literally elevated from the monuments at Tobu World Square, the miniaturisation of these symbolic icons distances
(and therefore ‘elevates’) the walker from these sites. It is this elevation and distancing that presents the visitor with a gaze of the world where the symbolic sites can be identified. Working from Barthes, this is where the satisfaction lies in the park; the process of decoding the landscapes that has been simplified for the viewer. The non-symbolic (and therefore unrecognisable) sites have been eradicated from cities when they are tied together at the park.
The real world is constantly available at Tobu World Square, but in a panorama that is more inclusive: four continents are presented in one circular movement. The reduction in scale of the monuments, and the corresponding magnification of the walker’s gaze is an experience analogous to Gulliver’s experience in Lilliput. In Tobu World Square you are constantly encountering the little monuments that are accompanied by thousands of the static figurines of diminutive people visiting the miniature symbolic sites, as well as gardens and landscapes made from bonsai flora.
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The walker’s perspective of the buildings and size of their footsteps have been reconfigured into those of a giant. This confusion is, as McMahon has observed, “stock in trade” for miniature exhibits where the visitor moves across the miniature scenery with a “giant’s aerial view” (70-1).
Theorising the model world through the fiction of Gulliver is a useful parallel for the progression of this chapter. Not only does the traveller as giant suggest a correlation between the traveller and conqueror of the monumental collection, it also grounds the link between the miniature world and fictional narratives by bringing the story of a giant in a miniature land to a theme park that miniaturises cities and enlarges the gaze of the viewer.
National and cultural borders, time frames and individual cities are all compressed at Tobu World
Square through its presentation of a global city. Although the theme park is evidence of the dissolving spatial and temporal boundaries characteristic of contemporary spatial practices, as will be theorised in more detail in the following section, this collapse of borders is contradicted by the bordered nature of Tobu World Square, where the miniature world is dependent on stringent margins. Rigid limits and boundaries are essential within the space of the miniature world in order for the site to successfully maintain the illusion of a fictional world within the real world.
McMahon observes the miniature world’s reliance on borders, stating that despite the miniature’s capacity to “establish trajectories and connections across the globe” by removing spatial and temporal boundaries, this is accompanied by a “physical and discursive insistence of frames and borders within the miniature world itself” (75). Without these borders there is nothing preventing the outside world from contaminating the utopic world housed inside the miniature space. Stewart similarly notes this absolute necessity of borders, arguing that it is only as an island that “the miniature world remains perfect and uncontaminated by the grotesque so long as its absolute boundaries are maintained” (68).
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In “Narrativised Spaces: The Functions of Story in the Theme Park,” Deborah Philips theorises the spatial stories composed by theme parks. Philips argues that theme parks are presented as islands – spaces that are distanced from the everyday – and this allows the site to present itself as a utopia or world in itself: “in its mapping, landscaping and in its naming, the theme park offers itself as a boundless world” (91). Drawing on Foucault’s paradigm of the heterotopia, Philips argues that in order to achieve this, theme parks are situated beyond urban centres “in a recognisable geographical location, but it makes no reference to the local landscape or culture”
(92). In addition to the physical location of theme park that allows the site to be segregated from urban centres, the arrangement of the theme park as an island is reinforced through tourist maps of these spaces that tend to illustrate the site as an island detached form the everyday world. Through the use of borders, theme park maps depict these sites as an isolated space where the outside world is portrayed to lie at a remote distance from the park. This is the essence of Philips’ argument: that the framework of the island preserves and maintains the narratives written by and housed within the space of theme parks (91).
The utopic narratives composed by theme parks are, for Philips, a collage of spatial stories with contradictory locations (103). As I have illustrated, Tobu World Square exhibits a compilation of disparate urban sites, but it is through the structuring of the miniature world as an island that preserves and maintains the illusion of the miniature city’s utopic narrative. Tobu World Square is characteristic of these types of boundaries and distancing that Philips identifies as transpiring at these locations. The park is located in the Nikko Mountains, two hours north of Tokyo. This area is renown for its sacred temples and pagodas, but rather than reference this ancient past, Tobu
World Square uses this isolated location to compose its utopic island narrative. The borders are further maintained through the placing of the site in a valley, where the only landscape that can be seen from the park is the green forest of the Nikko Mountains. On arrival to Tobu World Square, the visitor is provided with an A4 map of that depicts park and its global zones as a bounded
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landmass, an island that is separated from the surrounding mountains (represented by green ink) by a thick black border, and except for the arrow that points southeast in the direction of Tokyo, there is no reference to the world beyond the theme park’s walls. A consequence of the location and mapping of the park sees the world beyond the miniature to be obscured, where the utopic city and narrative of Tobu World Square reigns.
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III
Contemporary Spatial Practices:
The Relocation of Meaning through Condensation and Disembedding
Tobu World Square’s skyline is unheimlich as the urban silhouette has been extracted from real urban landscapes. It is within these moments of uncanniness – when the miniature symbolic monuments are recognisable yet unknown – that the world of Tobu World Square magnifies contemporary spatial practices and the compression of temporal and spatial boundaries.
Stewart provides two frameworks in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the
Souvenir, the Collection that allow me to use the miniature symbolic monuments at Tobu World
Square to investigate how contemporary spatial practices are at work in our surrounding world.
Theorising the miniature book, Stewart argues that these objects “always calls to attention to the book as a total object,” where the reduction in dimensions only has a peripheral bearing on the overall meaning of the text (44). Through this lens, Tobu World Square calls to attention the collection of the urban landscapes that have been miniaturised at the site, without transforming the meanings of these cities in the real world – these miniaturised symbolic monuments are representation of the cities where these objects actually exist. Later in this chapter I will consider how the meanings of the symbolic monuments are transformed when they are lifted from their original location and placed within the park, but the cities themselves remain the same even though the urban objects have been miniaturised – Paris is still Paris even through there is a miniature Eiffel Tower at the park, and Tokyo is still Tokyo, even though you can visit Tokyo
Dome at the park. The only exception, of course, is ancient Japan and America, where symbolic monuments that been destroyed through acts of iconoclasm or collapsed through the passing of time are still represented in Tobu World Square.
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Stewart also argues that the miniature can reveal and annunciate a secret life. Through the exposing of mystified and hidden narratives from the real world, miniatures are able to unveil a set of actions by presenting a “narrativity and history outside the given field of perception” (54). I argue that miniatures are able to disclose the modalities of power and contemporary spatial practices that are at work within contemporary cityscapes, but are simultaneously obscured and hidden by these urban landscapes. This unveiling works on a literal and theoretical level in Tobu
World Square. By displaying an urban narrative that cannot be read in the real world, the site literally provides the visitor with a spatial narrative that is outside the given field of perception presented to them in the real world. At a theoretical level, the miniature iconic buildings reveal the foundational fictions and modalities of power at work in contemporary cities where symbolic sites are expected to direct cultural identity. Through its ability to demystify of the modalities of power and spatial practices at work in contemporary urban landscapes, the miniature city of Tobu World
Square demonstrates the way in which symbolic monuments simultaneously conceal and reveal urban memory and cultural identities.
The mystification of alternative histories and memories by the inscription of officially sanctioned monuments into the urban fabric also transpires when meanings and cultural significance are attached to symbolic monuments. I use Tobu World Square as a microcosm for our contemporary climate to theorise the effects of the spatial practices of condensation and disembedding have on symbolic monuments – where urban memories and cultural identities are obscured – through a spatial studies framework and a psychoanalytic discourse. This discourse has been drawn from
Lefebvre who appropriates psychoanalytic precepts and terminology (by recombining Freud’s analysis of dreams and Lacan’s structural linguistics) in order to advance his analysis of the production of space. Pile explains that the synthesis of Freudian and Lacanian tenets “enable an analysis of social space, in general, and of monumental space, in particular, which charts these spaces by placing them within chains of association and substitution which, horizontally and
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vertically, link up to masked aspects of these spaces” (214); where psychoanalytics facilitates in a reading and demystification of symbolic monuments where signs and meanings have been substituted and obscured. As I identified in the previous chapter, Lefebvre argues there are two primary processes functioning within social space: condensation and displacement (225). I argue that condensation, in particular, plays an integral role in rewriting the metaphors and meanings associated with and attributed to symbolic monuments, where condensation alters the significance and symbolism of the monumental site and thereby obscures memories, histories, and identities that have been attached to these iconic objects.
Lacan argues that condensation is essentially a metaphoric or analogical process that merges a collection of seemingly different things or meanings together in order to create some form of unity (1996). Condensation is therefore the representation of numerous ideas, images, symbols or objects through a single world or image where the different elements and meanings have been unified into one object or idea. As Arthur Berger argues, condensation involves combination, as one item may have many meanings (111-2). Lefebvre applies the trope of condensation onto the built environment of urban landscapes, arguing that condensation involves the substitution of various meanings that exist within a space through metaphor and similarity (225). Developing the work of Lefebvre, Pile argues that architectures “condense relations of abstract power, property and commodity exchange onto particular sites” (212); where intangible concepts are consolidated together through a united symbol by attaching them to an object such as a symbolic monument.
This means that the emotions, memories, identities and histories that are connected to a collection of people, as well as the discourses of power and authorities who determine the urban landscape and its accompanying narratives, are all fused together at symbolic site.
A consequence of condensation is that the merging of meaning and histories onto one object lead to the simplification of significance, where a collection of intangible narratives and meanings
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housed across an urban landscape are conflated onto one, and then embodied within a particular site. Pile provides an example of condensation, arguing that this spatial practice takes place at the
Taj Mahal. He argues that the multi-layered and multi-authored histories, spatial stories, urban memories, identities of Indian history and culture that surround this symbolic site are consolidated within the monument that then becomes a metaphor for love. Condensation merges these divergent narratives into this metaphor, despite the history of royal arbitrary power and brutality that has taken place at this site. Instead, these histories and memories are eclipsed and obscured as they are condensed into this symbol that works as a metaphor of love.
Condensation can be theorised through the microcosm of Tobu World Square, where this spatial process has been magnified. Instead of collating a collection of meanings and histories from an urban landscape and simplifying them into one metaphor that is then attached to a symbolic monument, Tobu World Square performs this at an exaggerated level. The park has assembled a collection of symbolic monuments that have condensed the urban narratives from their place of origin in the real world. Through the consolidation of these monuments within the miniature world of Tobu World Square, the metaphors of all these individual monumental sites are condensed yet again, where the various metaphors of these symbolic monuments are condensed within the narrative of the miniaturised monumental landscape. Therefore the histories, meanings, and stories housed within individual cities are further estranged through the condensation of the collection of symbolic monuments at the park, Tobu World Square thereby highlighting the effects that condensation has within individual communities by inflating this process. Having further obscured cultural identities and urban memories, Tobu World Square reveals how condensation simplifies spatial stories in our surrounding world.
Another contemporary spatial practice that implicates symbolic monuments and the imagined narratological space that they compose is “disembedding.” Intricately linked to condensation,
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disembedding has been identified and theorised by critical theorist Anthony Giddens in The
Consequences of Modernity where he argues that the process of disembedding began during the epoch of modernity when the collapse of spatial and temporal boundaries saw the distancing of time and space. Disembedding is a term that captures the shifting alignments of time and space in our contemporary society, as well as the removal of objects from their local context of interaction, eventuating in the restructuring of the object “across indefinite spans of time-space”
(21). Disembedding, like condensation, is a spatial practice that recontextualises the urban landscape, however disembedding occurs when cultural icons or relations are ‘lifted out’ from their original location and brought to a new site or space. Urban narratives and memories are therefore collected and consolidated through condensation when these spatial stories are attached to a symbolic monument. The metaphors that have been fastened to iconic sites are then literally relocated and rewritten when symbolic monuments are disembedded from their original location.
Disembedding restructures the meaning of the object in question. For example, returning to the case of the Taj Mahal, condensation recomposes urban narratives as they are attached to the symbolic monument through a united metaphor, but then this metaphor is literally transferred from India to Japan when the site is miniaturised at Tobu World Square.
A consequence of disembedding is the mechanical and electronic removal of symbolic monuments from their original location, a process that is indicative of the technological developments that eventuates in cultures, icons, knowledges and histories becoming increasingly transferable across nations. Disembedding allows iconic images to become familiar to those who have not gazed at the monumental sites in question: for instance, the Eiffel Tower is disembedded when it is electronically reproduced and its image is screened in a movie or aired on television, or mechanically reproduced when the tower is manufactured into souvenirs or printed in guidebooks. Disembedding thereby effects how symbolic monuments construct, direct and maintain cultural and national identity. I have argued that communities and authorising powers
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have increasingly relied on iconic sites to reinstate ideas of nationhood in order to reinforce cultural identity as global boundaries have dissolved. The already difficult and problematic process of inscribing and attaching cultural meanings to symbolic monuments to ground the imagined and intangible concepts of nation, culture, identity and memory becomes even more troublesome when the fluidity of boundaries and transferral of culture sees iconic monuments being disembedded from their original context. As such, disembedding exaggerates the compression of spatial and temporal boundaries and the collapse of national and cultural borders as it facilitates the replication and reconfiguration of symbolic monuments to alternative spaces in alternative forms.
Tobu World Square is a site where a collection of symbolic monuments have been disembedded from a range of cultural landscapes and have been relocated in miniature within the park: the model monuments have effectively been duplicated from their original location into the new context of the park that dissolves cultural, spatial and temporal boundaries. Tobu World Square is thus a disembedding machine that relocates cultural icons from their original context, and is a space composed through a narrative of globalisation and time-space distanciation. By displacing the collection of iconic objects representative of individual cultures and exhibiting them alongside monuments from different countries and epochs, the park has effectively reorganised, as Giddens describes, “social relations across large time-space distances” (53); and within the space of the park these monuments have been stripped of their original meanings. The metaphors and meanings attached to the Eiffel Tower are rewritten as they are disembedded from Paris and exhibited within the bounds of Tobu World Square. The Tower no longer signifies a French national identity for the Parisian inhabitants or the foreign spectators visiting the city, rather it has become part of a miniature global diorama; a disembedding that is further estranged when it is exhibited alongside monuments such as the pyramids of Egypt that were built thousands of years prior to the Tower’s construction.
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The disembedding of symbolic monuments within Tobu World Square is accompanied with the park’s endeavour to provide a landscape of world famous heritage sites. Of the 102 miniatures within the park, 42 of the miniature monuments are replicas of celebrated sites that in their original context have been declared World Heritage sites by UNESCO. Rather than advertising that Tobu World Square exhibits a collection of these historic structures in a miniaturised format, the miniature world reinforces the lifting out of these cultural icons by describing the model monuments on the park’s website and in its brochure as if the petite models were the original architectures from the real world. Walking through the park, the pagodas of Kyoto, the Parthenon, the Egyptian pyramids are marketed as the actual UNESCO heritage sites. Clearly the miniature monuments in Tobu World Square are not World Heritage listed architectures, but the assimilation of the miniature and the original symbolic monument in these terms augments the confusion between reality and fiction within the park. Not only are the iconic sites disembedded, they are also disembedded through their construction as refined and ‘authentic’ miniatures.
The conflation between the miniature monuments and the symbolic sites at Tobu World Square is reinforced in two ways. Firstly, Tobu World Square attempts to build the miniatures in the most authentic manner possible, down to the type of material the models are comprised of. The construction of the miniature Parthenon is characteristic of this attempt, where Tobu World
Square sought the approval of the Greek government before they instigated the creation a miniature Parthenon. The Greek government responded with the statement that they would approve the building of the miniature Parthenon, as long as the model was fabricated with marble.
As marble is susceptible to the elements when cut to such a minute and intricate size, powdered marble was painted onto the plastic exterior of the model, and with the marble dust in place approval was granted for the miniature. Secondly, Tobu World Square disembeds the original monuments through the light that the site is conserving the world’s iconic monuments. The
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executive director of Tobu World Square argues that Tobu World Square is not an amusement site but “an intelligent, historical museum,” where the agenda of the park is to act in the same spirit that motivates UNESCO’s effort to restore historic structures (Tobu World Square website). This frames the park in the light of conservator, rather than a space that replicates, and this places an unfulfilled significance and importance on the park. Although there are miniature symbolic monuments at this site, they are not the originals, and even if the park’s motivation is the same
‘spirit’ as UNESCO, the original monuments are not being preserved through their disembedding at Tobu World Square.
Tobu World Square is a gathering of disembedded foreign cultures and their associating cultural icons. This act of disembedding is characteristic of contemporary cultural flow where borders become more permeable and images of icons can be distributed across boundaries. This is a state that Bhabha identifies as one of dissemination and scattering, but also of gathering. I argue that the space of Tobu World Square is analogous to this scattering and gathering: although foreign cultures have been disseminated, they have simultaneously been gathered together. Bhabha argues that the gathering of cultures occurs at the edge of cultures, frontiers, and this may be retroactively or within the present (291). Once cultures, identities and ideas are disseminated, the nation fills the void left in the uprooting of communities and “transfers the loss into the language of metaphor” an act that transfers the meaning of belonging across cultural and geographical distances that “span the imagined community of the nation-people” (291). For Bhabha, the nation then comes to replace or rectify the scattering or things in its ability to resolve dissemination as it allows for the development of strategies of cultural identification that makes people and nations immanent subjects and objects within a collection of social and literary narratives. This makes the nation, as an apparatus of power, a narrative strategy that produces a “continual slippage into analogous, even metonymic categories, like the people, minorities, or ‘cultural difference’ that continually overlap in the act of writing the nation” (292).
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Bhabha’s theories of dissemination and gathering argue that just as monuments are employed to inscribe the history and memory of a city across an urban fabric, the nation itself is also characterised through gaps and absences. As a site of gathering and dissemination, the narrative of
Tobu World Square underscores this contemporary spatial process. The site, having both scattered and collected iconic symbolic monuments, emphasises the gaps and absences inherent in the construction of the nation by presenting an urban landscape that literally displays these holes and disparities. Bhabha’s argument accounts for the restructuring of nations following the scattering and gathering of cultures. I argue that the scattering and gathering of cultures in conjunction with condensation and disembedding recompose the narratives written by symbolic monuments and alter urban memory, and how these varying levels and modes of reproducing cultural icons inevitably adjusts the way that individuals engage with and read their surrounding urban space. It stands that when objects are disembedded or have their signification condensed, the meanings of these monuments are rewritten, irrespective as to whether these sites are later gathered together again. These spatial processes revise the way communities understand their monumental sites, and it also influences and reshapes the memories of place, nation and community.
The disembedding of symbolic monuments and cultural icons transforms how individuals engage and respond to their surrounding city. In “Nostalgia Unbound: Illegibility and the Synthetic
Excess of Place,” Fiona Allon argues that the contemporary spatial practice of lifting out cultural icons from their original location, and the dissolving of cultural and national boundaries that sees an increase in movement across borders, has forced urban landscapes to become strange, alien and illegible to the inhabitants of a community. Allon’s argument diverges from earlier arguments that
I outlined in this chapter. Academics such as Harvey, Edensor and Schwarzer theorise the compression of time and space in terms of the external spectator, where the fluidity of information and culture across borders allows for unknown iconic sites to become familiar. Allon, however,
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concentrates on the individuals who were already familiar with their urban landscape, and their changing relationship to this space through contemporary spatial practices. Instead of making spatial stories more recognisable for the local inhabitant, Allon argues that practices such as condensation or disembedding induce spatial anxieties, encouraging “the fears and uncertainties about place, belonging and recognition” which emerge when “cultural topographies shift and when identities of place are transformed” (275). Therefore cultures are “no longer bounded and discrete wholes fixed in location or place” and the iconic landscapes that were once recognisable and familiar “are now seen as illegible and disturbingly unfamiliar” (275).
When symbolic monuments are disembedded, condensed, or mechanically and electronically reproduced, the spatial stories composed by urban landscapes that once allowed inhabitants to recognise their surrounds become illegible and disturbing unfamiliar. As Allon states “the movement of culture outside the social relations of a specific local history or language also produces illegible landscape and geographies in which some no longer recognize their ‘place’ within prevailing political and cultural discourse” (275). This disruption and tampering of a community’s orientation and sense of place has been a consequence of the alteration of urban space to the point where the city is “merely an incoherent and synthetic collection of signs, a multitude of fragments unable to provide any real sense of anchorage, orientation or spatial coordination” and causes “a sense of local isolation, estrangement and exclusion” within the community (276). Allon argues that the increased mobility of culture and the fractured nature of nations have eventuated in compensatory place building in an attempt to affirm the meanings and memories that are perceived to be threatened and soon to be lost through contemporary spatial practices. This compensatory act is defined by Allon as “unheimlich cosmopolitanism,” and accounts for reactive attempts to fix and bound the cultures that have become increasing mobile
(276).
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The Collection:
Tobu World Square and the Return of the Imperial Gaze
The condensation of meaning at symbolic monuments, the disembedding of cultural icons, the compensatory act of unheimlich cosmopolitanism, and the dissemination and gathering of cultural symbols are all practices that bring the idea of collecting to the fore, as these are spatial processes that bring together an accumulation of cultural icons. Gathering and collecting culture is not a contemporary activity: the wonder and marvel of accumulating objects from foreign cultures has inspired travellers to amass foreign objects for centuries. In Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Stephen Greenblatt theorises travelling practices in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, arguing that the chronicles of these explorations find their strength in “the shock of the unfamiliar, the provocation of an intense curiosity, the local excitement in discontinuous wonders” (2). As I have argued, foreign objects do not necessarily hold the shock of the unfamiliar as they become increasingly recognisable in our more intensely globalised world.
Nevertheless, there is still the desire for travellers to collect and accumulate articles from foreign cultures. Collecting is not simply an assembling of texts or performances, but is intricately tied to the movement of bodies and objects. Greenblatt argues that collecting involves “the mobility of the spectacle and spectator alike, the unreality of images paradoxically linked to the power of display” (6-7). Tobu World Square is indicative of collecting and the power of display identified by Greenblatt, and although his focus is the wonder associated with early travel narratives, these concepts of awe, wonder and collecting are pertinent to the collection of miniature monuments housed at Tobu World Square.
Through the theorisation of wonder and the collection presented by Greenblatt, the final section of this chapter concludes with a move from the study of contemporary spatial practices through the microcosm of Tobu World Square, to a brief investigation of Tobu World Square in terms of
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collecting, museum practices and nineteenth-century world fairs. This conclusion works as a segue between my analysis of symbolic monuments in terms of the miniature world and my exploration of memory installation in terms of Susan Norrie’s installation, ENOLA, that is comprised of footage taken at Tobu World Square. I argue that Tobu World Square is not simply a magnifying glass onto the processes of constructing and establishing cultural identity through symbolic monuments or demonstrating the porous nature of national and cultural borders. The attempt to present a complete and authentic presentation of the world’s most iconic objects within one diorama sees that park writes back to this earlier mode of collecting identified by Greenblatt, and in doing so allows Tobu World Square to return the imperial gaze that was bestowed upon
Japan when its culture was exhibited in world fairs; where the model world is a logical place from the return of the imperial gaze. As identified by cultural theorist Susan Davis in “The Theme
Park: Global Industry and Cultural Form” the roots of the theme park are cultivated from popular and commercial culture, where its ancestors include “the circus and the carnival, but also the industrial expositions and World Fairs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (400).
Japan’s colonial past is complex, having been both coloniser and colonised throughout history.
The moment of Japanese history that holds particular relevance to this thesis is the era where
World Fairs and expositions in Europe and America displayed Japanese arts, gardens and villages. In “Foreign Country Theme Parks: A New Theme of an Old Japanese Pattern,” Joy
Hendry argues that these exhibitions presented Japanese people and culture “as illustrations of contemporary theories of evolution” where these displays were constitutive proof of “the value of the imperial activities of the host countries” (215). Writing back to the history of Japan and the
East as a site of wonder for the traveller and explorer of earlier centuries, these world fairs distributed the traditions and heritage of Japan throughout the West as a spectacle. I argue that by exhibiting monumental icons from across the globe, Tobu World Square has effectively collected the symbols of cultural identity from various nations and put them on museum-style display
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within the theme park. Tobu World Square is able to call upon its imperial past through the frame of the miniature, a space that McMahon argues is constructed rhetorically and functions as a recollection of a previous existence, where “the homelands of the miniature operate in a personal as well as national/ historical discourse” (77).
Instead of being exhibited as a spectacle at Western world fairs, Japan actively returns global and imperial gazes through the utopic fictional city of Tobu World Square – a site where the world fairs of the modernist era are remembered, but reversed. Tobu World Square is a space that recalls Western colonising practices over non-Western countries, but is also indicative of how a colonised space can return the imperial gaze. It is symptomatic of Japan’s own cultural imperialism. As argued by Brannen, the selective importation of Disneyland style artefacts and cultural icons into Japan does not see the country being subordinate; rather the introduction of these objects is “part of an ongoing process of Japanese cultural imperialism” (qtd. in Hendry
214). The world of Tobu returns the imperial gaze by collecting cultural symbols and removing the agency from these icons by miniaturising them, a process that is augmented when the miniaturised monuments are exhibited alongside one another as a collection. This return of the imperial gaze is reinforced across Japan, where there is an anthology of culturally themed parks across the country where recognisable traits of other countries are painstakingly recreated as individual worlds. Across Japan the tourist can visit a range of cultures, from Germany, Denmark,
Russia and Canada, all in the form of theme parks.
It is through a condition defined by Svetlana Alpers as “the museum effect” that allows Tobu
World Square to return the imperial gaze that was cast on Japan during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Alpers argues that at sites of display, whether this is a diorama at a cultural institution or a model village at a miniature world, the museum effect directs how the visitor will approach the exhibits. Through the isolation of these objects from the rest of the world, visitors
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enter these spaces with the socialised knowledge that they are gazing upon a collection of artefacts that are worthy of consideration and observation. Not only is the fictional global city of
Tobu World Square constructed as an isolated bordered island, the disembedded icons on display have been extracted from their ‘real’ urban context and exhibited in isolation from their original site of exhibition. Once these miniature monuments are on display within the park, the museum effect sees that the visitor is conditioned to gaze upon these objects with a particular visual curiosity and concentration, and this act transpires because the miniature symbolic monuments that have been collected and put on show at Tobu World Square have been “judged to be of visual interest” by those designing the park and interpreted as such by the visitor (25).
The museum effect structures the way that a visitor to a cultural space interacts with the objects on display as it imbues the exhibit with historical or cultural importance. This is significant in terms of Tobu World Square. When the miniature symbolic monuments that have been stripped of their original cultural value and historical importance are gazed upon with this visual interest, then the return of the imperial gaze that transpires at the theme park is legitimised. The icons from colonial powers have been gathered together and are looked upon in a forum that showcases this collection of symbolic monuments as spectacles, wonders from foreign lands that have been brought together and exhibited alongside one another. To summarise, Tobu World Square becomes elaborately implicated in the historiography of the imperial gaze and exhibiting cultures, writing back to the history of the East as a site of wonder for travellers and explorers of earlier centuries. Having once been the exhibit, the miniature world actively returns the imperial gaze that once distributed Japanese culture and traditions across the globe, by miniaturising the monuments of imperial powers and transforming them into exhibits. The visitor to Tobu World
Square validates the miniature world’s return of the imperial gaze that was thrown onto Japan during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by reading and engaging with these exhibits as sites of visual interest, icons that have been conquered and collected within the park.
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Despite Tobu World Square’s complicated relationship with borders and boundaries, nation and narration, symbols and spaces, and the imperial gaze, the miniature world is not a site designed or intended for memory work to take place: the theme park is not a memorial, monument, countermonument, memory installation or site of commemoration. The park is a space of entertainment, travel and novelty, presenting a fictional panorama of real cites and that collapses spatial and temporal borders. Consequently, Tobu World Square can be harnessed as an intensified microcosm of our contemporary climate in order to theorise contemporary spatial practices, the compositional capabilities of icons, the role that symbolic monuments exert within the city, and how these icons are expected to direct cultural memory and ground intangible concepts such as nation, identity and memory. To conclude this chapter on the imagined narratological space written by symbolic monuments, I develop my analysis of spatial practices and Tobu World Square through a theorisation of Susan Norrie’s memory installation. I argue that Norrie’s DVD installation ENOLA, a looped film of Tobu World Square, is one that actively engages with the spatial complexities that this chapter has been theorising, Norrie demystifying and bringing these elements to the surface in a memory installation that is constitutive of a spectre of memory.
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IV
Spectres of Memory:
Susan Norrie’s ENOLA as Memory Installation
This section moves from the miniature world of Tobu World Square, to the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Sydney. I am returning to Susan Norrie’s DVD installation ENOLA, approaching it as a memory installation that performs the memory work that symbolic sites, whether these are originals in our surrounding world or the intricate replicas in a fictional global city, are unable to perform. As I explained in my introduction to this thesis, I identity three forms of memory installation, and ENOLA rests in the second category as a ‘spectre of memory.’ This generic classification defines a style of contemporary art that incorporates the use of projections and film as mnemonic devices in order, as Saltzman theorises, to give the past a place in the present or to “make memory matter” (7). Here there is an echo to the scholarship through this chapter: that of incorporating the intangible into a material object. Where individuals and ruling powers attempt to concretise the imaginary into the built environment, spectres of memory have an aesthetic preoccupation with placing history and memories. It is this, I argue, that allows installations such as ENOLA to perform memory work through their visual strategies. In order to study and comment upon the ways in which Norrie presents a commentary of alternative histories, memories and identities, my first endeavour is to consider how the art installation functions in comparison to the miniature world itself.
By relocating the theme park to the gallery Norrie dissolves the spatial boundaries that have already been dismantled within Tobu World Square. A dreamlike mise-en-scène is created within the installation as urban landscapes are presented within one installation as the camera scans across the monuments of the world in a looped DVD that ultimately compresses these cities and their icons as they are grouped in a cyclical film. As art critic Lilly Wei states of ENOLA,
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“meaning and history are flattened and uncertain” (65); which is representative to the way that space and time are affected in Tobu World Square. This collapse is exaggerated, however, as there is no end or beginning in the world of ENOLA, it is only the miniature monuments and the perpetual repeat performances on screen. I argue that as a spectre of memory the installation is able to perform the memory work that symbolic sites cannot. Norrie’s installation is characteristic and suggestive of the spatial practices of disembedding and condensation, and the return of the imperial gaze that occurs at Tobu World Square, through the way in which ENOLA is constructed, the built environment is presented, and the type of lighting used throughout the installation. The most explicit way that ENOLA achieves this memory work is the way that Norrie captures the miniature monuments through her camera. The spectators at Tobu World Square are endowed with a gaze that reduces the size of the monuments. Curiously, although the viewers of
ENOLA are presented with the same miniatures, the petite models when presented in Norrie’s work appear to be the originals from our surrounding world.
Norrie has achieved this confusion in scale by capturing the miniature monuments of Tobu World
Square through the lens of her camera in such a fashion that they are restored to their correct dimensions. They are no longer exist as 25:1 miniature replicas of symbolic monuments, and this is where the confusion rests: the monuments in ENOLA exist as doppelgangers, doubles of the real monuments, as they are presented as an obscure reality. A redemption of scale has transpired as the filmed miniatures become the monuments from real world. The dreamlike world of
ENOLA and its amendment of scale can be summarised through Gaston Bachelard’s theory of the miniature in the poetic imagination presented in The Poetics of Space. Bachelard states that
“geometrical contradiction is redeemed, and Representation is dominated by Imagination” (150); and Norrie’s fictionalisation of the fictional utopic city of the theme park produces a film that is characterised by exhibiting monuments as apparitions of authentic objects. The installation augments the miniatures to their full proportions but it achieves this through an illusion, the
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redemption has not literally transpired but is accomplished through the imaginary. ENOLA completes a circular progression of miniaturisation and augmentation. Monuments from the real world have literally been shrunk through their bonsai replication in the fictional narrative of Tobu
World Square, which is exacerbated when the miniatures are additionally fictionalised and returned to their original size and presented as the authentic sites in ENOLA (see fig. 37).
While gazing upon Tobu World Square in the gallery the voyeurism of the walker, like the artistic re-presentation of miniature monuments through ENOLA, is infused with the double. The theme park experience is not only mediated through the lens of Norrie’s camera, but also through two
Japanese women wearing brown-hooded jackets who are featured throughout the installation.
According to Norrie, the only characters in the installation are “dressed in outmoded futuristic clothing reminiscent of B-grade sci-fi movies. They are survivors and time travellers in a lost world” (42) (see figs. 38-39). For the most part these women stand with their backs to the audience, surveying Tobu World Square through the imaginary binoculars that they hold to their eyes. Norrie’s camera circles around the women, and then the monumental objects, while the women scan the horizon of the theme park. The observation of the miniature world, therefore, is meditated through the lens of Norrie’s camera and the Japanese women’s absent binoculars. The binoculars not only operate as a metaphor for the miniature and its redemption in size, but also the act of holding these imaginary objects allows the women to shield their eyes as the world of
ENOLA is characterised by an almost blinding light (see fig. 40). This scorching glow alludes to the effects that radiation had following the atomic bombing of Japan, but also transforms the miniature mannequins that are frozen in the exhibitions in the diorama of the park. These stationary figures, when projected in ENOLA, become apocalyptic characters that are still motionless, yet their static nature is the consequence of a sudden wave of radiation.
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It is this blinding light through ENOLA that emphasises Norrie’s project as one that comments on disaster in our contemporary climate, and this is supported through the tinny Musak that accompanies the visual imagery. Norrie states that her choice in music is designed to “lull people into believing a brave new world” (42); and includes versions of ‘Walk on By’ and ‘It’s a Small
World After All,’ choices in melody that are indicative of the darkly humorous aspect to Norrie’s work, signifying the invisibility of the monuments as they become unnoticed to the inhabitants of an urban space, as well as the miniaturised nature of these symbolic monuments. Art critic Anna
Zagala argues that the persistent sounds of bells tolling and the digital bleaching of the image through the Norrie’s installation that is juxtaposed with elements of Disney classics (an genre that a number of Norrie’s works write back to) allows ENOLA to allude to “the destruction of
Hiroshima and offers a sly critique of imperialism” (1); this spectre of memory thereby exploring the imperialist history of Japan in a different way to the scattering and gathering of disembedded monuments at Tobu World Square.
Rather than being a space that actually collects symbolic icons and returns the imperial gaze,
ENOLA directly references an historical event and its aftermath through the installation’s title.
Instead of relying on footage of the bombed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ENOLA comments on the traumatic moments of the past by filming the park that reciprocates an imperial gaze, in turn commandeering the site and filming it as a miniature apocalyptic world. The apparent visual absence of the recent historical past is what brings these histories and memories to the fore, and this is accentuated by Norrie’s decision to film the miniature world on the 50th anniversary of
Godzilla (1954); a film in which the mutant Godzilla is awakened by the bombing of Japan and performs a reign of destruction through the city. As Enberg notes, although the monster never appears in ENOLA, its presence “hovers over things like a fateful prophecy” (567). The significance of this homage to Godzilla not only evokes the role that binary of giant vs. miniature
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plays within Tobu World Square, but also brings to mind the imagery of destruction and the monstrous nature of the unknown that is prevalent within our contemporary society.
The merging of artistic and ordinary landscapes, the exhibition of the installation within the museum and the miniatures from Tobu World Square, allows Norrie to present a dreamlike vision for the viewer. This act of gazing upon the phantasmagoria of ENOLA, is self-representative of the act of remembering, the recapturing of the past, and the space of the imaginary where memory takes place. Norrie’s installation not only performs memory work as a spectre of memory, it is also engaged in a process of condensing and disembedding the miniature world itself. The panorama of Tobu World Square collates an anthology of symbolic sites in one space. The model monuments literally dissolve spatial boundaries by exhibiting the world as a fiction of itself.
Norrie’s ENOLA further fictionalises the theme park and metaphorically dissolves spatial boundaries by transporting the theme park into the space of the gallery via the lens of the camera.
As a consequence, the sense of the uncanny has been intensified within ENOLA when Norrie returns the miniatures to their correct proportions and presents the footage of the park as images from a futuristic global village. Therefore, although Tobu World Square and ENOLA present the same miniature monuments, they differ in the manner in which they collapse spatial boundaries.
These two texts are particularly complex: they are concurrently the same monuments, however they have been mediated through the lens of Norrie’s camera and transformed through her artistic intentions. As a consequence, Tobu World Square remains a theme park where contemporary spatial practices are realised; whereas Norrie’s work is a commentary, an engagement and a theorisation of these practices.
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V
Conclusion
Symbolic monuments are architectures that have had significance attached to them, by both communities and authorising powers, writing imagined narratives across the urban landscape.
These connotations, like the history inscribed into officially sanctioned monuments, are intended to ground the intangible concepts of memory, culture and national individuality. The materialisation of memory or cultural and national identity cannot be sustained – it is not possible to fix the intangible and the imaginary to concrete objects as these concepts are always subject to renarration and recomposition. Nevertheless as national and cultural borders have dissolved through temporal and spatial compression, the reliance on these objects to signify the uniqueness of a culture has amplified. This act is further complicated through the contemporary spatial processes of condensation and disembedding, practices that alter and modify the meanings attributed to symbolic monuments as their meanings are literally and figuratively transformed.
Through the utopic fictional panorama presented by Tobu World Square, I have theorised these contemporary spatial practices and demonstrated the inability of symbolic monuments to imagine cultural identities. The narratives of cultural identity are always going to be divergent, housing a multiplicity of memories, individual cultures, and political agendas. The allusive nature of the nation, and the politics behind the construction of memory and identity in the city, is brought to attention within Susan Norrie’s memory installation, a work that returns the symbolic monuments of Tobu World Square to their original size, further commenting on the flexible and transitory nature of spatial stories and urban narratives.
Symbolic monument are landmarks across the urban fabric that are used by communities and governments in an attempt to ground cultural identity and urban memory as national and cultural borders are compressed, and the iconic objects are scattered and gathered through the spatial
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practices of condensation and disembedding. Although these symbols are coded as monuments, memorials to the unique nature of a particular culture and city, these icons ultimately obscure the urban memories and histories they are expected to inscribe into the urban fabric. Like the static narratives of officially sanctioned monument, the imagined narratives of symbolic monuments engage in a complicated relationship with concealing and revealing identity and memory.
Irrespective of the inability of officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic monuments to become containers for the intangible concepts of memory, culture and identity, our contemporary climate is saturated with attempts by governments and communities to solidify these concepts into the built environment. Concomitantly to the intentional creation of these memorials and commemorations, is the decay of everyday monuments, the third type of monument that I explore within this thesis. Unlike officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic monuments, everyday monuments are not deliberately constructed as memorials or have meanings and memories ascribed to them. Everyday monuments are forgotten markers to the recent past, and in turn, write transitory spatial narratives that are divergent from the static and imagined narratives of traditional monumental space.
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Chapter Three
Transitory Ruins:
Everyday Monuments and the Gentrification of Industrial Sites
Memory is redundant: it repeats signs in the city so it can begin to exist.
— Italo Calvino Invisible Cities 19
Within the red brick walls of the steam factory that has been converted into the Tate Modern on the banks of Thames sits British artist Cornelia Parker’s installation Cold Dark Matter: An
Exploded View (1991). Gazing upon the work for the first time I was unaware that these hanging fragments of charred wood, household objects, and destroyed matter, had been collected following the controlled explosion of a garden shed. It was simply a floating diorama of debris and shadows. The only source of light emanated from a globe at the centre of this exploded mass of scorched and wrecked fragments. I walked around the installation that formed a suspended cube in the middle of the room, identifying a bicycle wheel, a windowsill, and gardening equipment. It was incredibly quiet, the only sounds being my shoes on the cold floor, and as I watched the installation I realised that each hanging piece was slightly swaying. The fragments of wood slowly oscillated on the thin wires that connected them to the ceiling, and this movement was exaggerated by the shadows that these timber pieces cast onto the gallery walls. The silhouettes projected onto the walls were constitutive of an artwork in themselves, an installation of outlines and ghosts, the memories of and companions to the sculpture hanging in the exhibition room.
The Manchester Ship Canal allows the walker to interact with a collection of urban sites. To begin the journey one must slip away from the network of roads, highways, train tracks and
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developing inner city, and travel beneath the urban fabric. The steps from Oxford Road to the canal remove the walker immediately from officially composed space of the city of offices, apartments and commodities. It is then that the walk past floating rubbish, redevelopment, shrubs, geese, undergrowth, working factories and industrial ruins begins. Until recently this was a literal wasteland of crumbling warehouses and factories. In the current post-industrial era, however, this urban space is experiencing a regeneration of mass proportions – one where manifold narratives of industry, decay and progress are simultaneously displayed across the urban canvas. Red brick warehouses with broken windows stand alongside factories that have been converted into fashionable bars and cafés. Rubbish intermingles with property advertising. Rusting boathouses decay next to the highly modern loft living with open plans. Dark spaces of industrial ruins are counteracted by the glass fronts of fashionable units. The footpath that stretches beyond the redeveloping industrial district, and along the canal towards Salford, directs the walker through a region of weeds and wasteland (see figs. 41-45).
This vacant realm is haunted, not only by failed industry, but also by a local council attempt during the early 1980s to rejuvenate the unproductive de-industrialised space. This effort was instigated by the Manchester City Council in an endeavour to transform the once productive industrial space into a socially active space, and a collection of objects were built along the shipping canal designed to encourage community activities, including a gazebo for outdoor concerts, a number of ironwork canal boat stops for a proposed ferry service between Manchester and Salford, and benches for people to sit on and gaze at the view onto the water. These objects rust, disconcertingly out of place as they litter the canal as ghosts of a forced effort to humanise the empty space that has resisted attempts by the council to compose a beautified environment.
The lime green gazebo looks ridiculous against a backdrop of unused factories. The proposed boat to transport people never eventuated and so the anchorage points where travellers would have been collected are now in decay, never having been used. The benches for walkers are
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almost impossible to sit on due to the collection of rubbish and weeds that spear through the gaps in the wood (see figs. 47-48). Now an assemblage of debris, these objects are the memories of projects that were never fully realised and within a changing landscape provide evidence of earlier attempts of transformation, props that form an additional layer of ruin to an already decomposing area.
Introduction to Everyday Monuments
The final chapter of this thesis moves from the imaginary space of symbolic sites, to the flexible space of everyday monuments. It is the closing piece in a thesis that commenced with the static narratives of official sanctioned monuments, travelled through the imagined space of symbolic sites, and now approaches its conclusion with the transitional stories of the everyday. Why, however, is it necessary for me to have developed a generic classification of the monument that incorporates the everyday? The exploration of the everyday as a category of commemoration is frequently overlooked in the theoretical discourses of monument or spatial studies. I argue that we need to theorise the monumentality of everyday sites because the everyday is an inescapable element of modern life, one that encompasses all realms of activity, and that these spaces house an anthology of memories that are not represented or commemorated within other monumental sites. The everyday is also indicative of sites and objects that are politically contentious, and, in turn, this sees the everyday as a valuable tool for demystifying social and political spaces. As
Lefebvre observes throughout The Production of Space, the everyday engages in a complex dialectical relationship with modernity as the everyday contradicts the assumed progress and seamlessness that is associated with the modern.
Within the discourses of cultural theory, spatial studies, memory studies and art history, the narratives written by officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic sites have been studied,
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investigated and questioned. Across these disciplines, the ability of these sites to perform memory work has been interrogated by a number of theorists including James E. Young, Pierre Nora,
Adrian Forty and Andreas Huyssen. Officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic monuments have been politically and socially accepted as sites that engage with and reveal memories and histories. As the preceding chapters argued, these objects are recognised by theorists including
Henri Lefebvre, Steve Pile and Tim Edensor as significant due to their explicit commemorative and iconic value to communities and ruling powers, irrespective of how effective or ineffective they are at performing memory work. Everyday monuments, on the other hand, easily slip into theoretical oblivion, and are neglected in terms of how they engage with urban memory, reveal histories, and their commemorative capabilities. This chapter resurrects the everyday monument through a memory studies discourse, and in order to do so the area of focus through this chapter is the industrial ruin. As everyday monuments, industrial ruins are emblematic of this type of transitional commemorative space. They are monuments to the recent past, monuments to failed prosperity, monuments that are representative of the problematics that modernity and progress entail. I turn to the industrial ruins that crumble along the canals and railway lines of Manchester as a backdrop for framing the transitional spatial narratives of everyday monuments in terms of their intricate relationship with memory, and comment on the memorial possibilities that this genre of monuments present. These ruins allow for a comprehensive study of how everyday monuments rupture urban space, and how they provide windows onto recent histories and forgotten pasts.
In order to theorise the memories housed within the architecture of the industrial ruin and how everyday monuments can be figuratively mined to investigate alternative interpretations of the past, this chapter has been divided into four parts. The first provides an account of the aesthetics of the industrial ruin and the spatial stories that they house, analysing the discourses of decay that surround everyday monuments, despite the spatial possibilities available at these sites. The
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second section focuses on the ghosts that haunt industrial ruins, the analogies that can be drawn between everyday monuments and the metaphors of memory. The third section considers the consequences of the gentrification of everyday monuments in our post-industrial climate, where buildings are smoothed over in an attempt to dignify an industrial past. The structure of this chapter allows me to analyse the transitory spatial stories written by everyday monuments, the residual memories that remain within these sites of decay, and the erasure of these sites as post- industrial landscapes are gentrified. The final section is a study of Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark
Matter as a memory installation, a sculpture that engages with the mnemotechnics of the post- industrial city in order to provide a commentary of memory and the fragment.
In the first section of this chapter I argue that the industrial ruin opens the spatial narratives of the post-industrial city to wider interpretations, through their disruption of dominant historical narratives and the ordering of space. Despite the coding of industrial ruins as sites of waste within political and social discourses, they are not superfluous spaces. Instead, memories, histories and narratives reside within, and haunt, these spaces of decay. My work is established through a discursive analysis of the way in which everyday monuments are linguistically defined through decay and decomposition. The inherent redundancy of industrial ruins provides opportunities for urban space to be reordered, and allows for the inhabitants of a city to use these spaces for alternative artistic pursuits. My argument is a development of Tim Edensor’s work in Industrial
Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality and Tom Nielsen’s theorisation of urban space in “The
Return of the Excessive: Superfluous Landscapes,” who argue that waste sites allow for social activities that are not possible within the surveyed and scripted urban space of the city. I argue that the everyday monument provides evidence of the points where modernity has failed: industrial ruins constitute moments in the contemporary post-industrial city where the ideologies of modernity are contradicted. The decaying architecture of the industrial ruin counters the idea
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that the modern city is ceaselessly and seamlessly improving; and as such the spatial stories are entirely different to those written by the smooth surfaces of the post-industrial city.
The second section of this chapter is a concentrated investigation into the memories and residual histories that lurk within the industrial ruin. I argue, through the metaphor of the ghost, that the recent past is not obscured or hidden within the everyday monument: in everyday monuments histories and memories are archived. These histories and memories can be resurrected within these spaces in a manner analogous to a ghost or a spectre because, unlike the renovated spaces of the contemporary city, industrial ruins allow for a multiplicity of spatial narratives to rise to the surface, allowing for alternative forms of remembering to transpire. Within the dark spaces of ruins a myriad of memories reside, and as a consequence everyday monuments are spaces where involuntary memories can be realised, which sees the everyday monument working with memory and remembering in a way that is entirely different to the scripted memory space of officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic sites. By developing the spatial theories of Michel de
Certeau and Luce Giard from The Practice of Everyday Life Volume 2, I argue that it is because industrial ruins are sites that decay without architectural rendering or repair that the ghosts and spectres of the past are able to haunt these architectures. Through this section I draw an analogy between the way in which memories are forgotten and then recovered, to the ways in which industrial ruins physically decay. This parallel sees a relationship develop between the everyday monument and the archive, where the ruin becomes a literal and visual archive of the passing of time.
Having argued that everyday monuments allow for spatial and social reorganisation, that ruins are the embarrassing underside of the perpetually modernising contemporary city, and that the ghosts that disturb these dark spaces allow for an interaction between the inhabitant and the recent past that is absent from the dominant narratives of the urban landscape, the third section of this
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chapter considers what eventually happens to industrial ruins. I observe that everyday monuments experience a transformation in appearance and use – from sites of production when they are working factories, to sites of redundancy and decay when they stop being used, to their eventual gentrification into contemporary smooth landscapes characteristic of post-industrial cities.
Factories and warehouses have metamorphosed into sites of consumption: they are recomposed as loft-living apartments, bars and cafés, as well as cultural and artistic centres. Following from the work of Helen Hills in “Half-Forgotten Streets: Architecture and Amnesia in Manchester” and
Edensor’s Industrial Ruins, I argue that the scaffolding of the industrial ruin has become a fashionable aesthetic. Although they were once sites of social embarrassment across the north west of England, everyday monuments are now spaces that the middle classes consume, and I will argue that this post-industrial nostalgia for the forgotten industrial culture has a number of consequences. These sites become places of consumption, instead of production, forcing the ghosts of the recent past to be exorcised from the city, and the ability of the everyday monument to resurrect the industrial past and its memories is suffocated.
To conclude my work on everyday monuments, I return to the world of memory installation.
Rather than memory sculpture or spectres of memory, this chapter investigates contemporary artworks that incorporate a mnemonic aspect, using the framework provided by Mark Crinson in
Urban Memory. This genre of memory installation is characterised by works that are directed through an interest in traumatic experiences that have restructured history and subjectivity. In
Unsolved Mysteries: Gothic Tales from Frankenstein to the Hair-Eating Doll Christopher
Grunenberg argues that there is a contemporary fascination with industrial ruins, one that focuses on the “dark nightscapes, abandoned parking lots, factories, warehouses and other remnants of abandoned post-industrial culture” (196); but I argue this aesthetic is the one appropriated and fetishised within the loft-living and renovated gallery spaces on the post-industrial city. Memory installations that are built through ideas of the mnemotechny of the industrial city engage with,
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and perform, memory work in an entirely different way. Through a study of Cornelia Parker’s
Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), I investigate the way in which these art installations mirror the decay of the industrial ruin, the decay of memory, and the importance of the fragment in the binary of memory and forgetting. Although artists Gintaras Karosas and
Susan Norrie, whose work I employ as case studies in order to response to the urban spaces being questioned in the previous chapters, have gained notoriety, Cornelia Parker’s artwork has become internationally infamous. I choose Parker’s work for this reason. Where everyday monuments and industrial ruins are sites that are deemed superfluous by communities and governments, an art installation that comments on the process of the ruin and the archive provides a useful counterpoint to the label of redundancy applied so often to these monuments.
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I
The Aesthetic of the Industrial Ruin:
Discourses of Decay and Spatial Possibilities
Through this chapter I categorise industrial ruins within the boundaries of everyday monuments.
Despite my theoretical classification, communities and governments frequently interpret these buildings to be sites of waste: they are architectures within the built environment that conjure a collection of images and meanings, which see the industrial ruins to be interpreted as redundant sites that should be removed from the urban landscape. It is this interpretation of the industrial ruin as a waste site that allows me to investigate these sites through the framework of the everyday: once defined through the framework of waste, industrial ruins must be intricately tied to the everyday. In “Everyday Speech,” Maurice Blanchot defines everyday objects as comprised of waste: “The everyday is platitude (what lags and falls back, the residual life with which our trash cans and cemeteries are filled: scrap and refuse)” (13). The important step to make is to reconsider waste, beyond the framework of the discarded, expelled, redundant or excess, as this approach does not allow for an exploration of the connections and interactions that industrial ruins have with memories and histories. In Waste-Sites, Brian Neville and Johanne Villenuve observe that the objects of history “take on the aspect of waste” (13); an idea that sees a relationship develop between waste and history, the everyday and memory. Within this chapter I call for an analysis of industrial ruins as everyday monuments, but in a way that observes the multi-layered nature of these sites. Although industrial ruins appear redundant in terms of their productivity, they also function as architectures, objects and spaces of urban memory.
The relationship between officially sanctioned or symbolic monuments with memory is of a transparent nature. Irrespective of how effective these monuments are at performing the expected memory work, the commemorative or symbolic function of these monuments is apparent to the
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viewer who has been socialised to approach these objects as sites of intensity. The relationship between everyday monuments and memory, on the other hand, is not as obvious, as industrial ruins and other everyday monuments have not been built as traditional commemorations.
Nevertheless, everyday monuments engage in a collection of dialogues with the recent past.
Forgotten memories, historical narratives, and cultural identities all resound within everyday monuments: the memories of the workers and the recent industrial past converge at these decomposing sites, and it is their decay that determines the type of narratological space that everyday monuments stitch into the urban fabric. Unlike the static narratives of officially sanctioned monuments, or the imagined narratives of symbolic sites, everyday monuments compose narratives that are constantly in transition, spatial stories that mirror the architectures of these sites: the metamorphosis of the productive factory into a dormant ruin creates a space that is in constant modification, a flexibility that is mimicked by the spatial trajectories that these buildings write. As the materiality of industrial ruins are recomposed through decay, so too are the memories that these sites physically and metaphorically reveal.
If industrial ruins are left to crumble then it stands that their location within the post-industrial must be on the periphery to the working space of a city. Edensor locates these sites to be within the forgotten areas of the urban landscape, arguing that they are “typically adjacent to railway lines and canals, amongst the huddle of buildings surrounding harbours, or amidst the scattered remnants of industry” (Industrial Ruins 7). The everyday monuments of Manchester are clustered as such, adorning the shadowy spaces along train tracks, under the arches that cross the waterways, and extending into the outskirts of the city. They haunt the wasteland along the
Rochdale Manchester Ship Canal that travels west to Liverpool. They loiter along the rail network that connects Manchester’s city centre to the decrepit industrial precincts of Salford and
Trafford. The sites that once manufactured and stored textiles are now in varying stages of decay that is dependent on the vulnerability or resistance that a particular building has to decomposition.
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As Edensor describes, some industrial ruins may “linger and decay for decades, turning into heaps of rubble over the years, whilst others stay for a while until the first signs of decay take hold then are demolished” (Industrial Ruins 4). Despite rates of decay, the industrial ruins of
Manchester are characterised through their red brick exterior, that is accompanied by an assemblage of weeds, broken glass, brick debris, fragments of concrete and plaster, rubbish, rust and rubble.
Discourses of Decay:
The Language Used to Describe Industrial Ruins
According to the aesthetic of the industrial ruin, the celebratory discourse that is typically employed by councils or communities to describe the appearance of officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic sites is not applied to the everyday monument. The language used to describe industrial ruins does not reverberate with terms that would suggest a visual appreciation of these sites. Instead, the descriptive language for the industrial ruin is closely in tune with the vocabulary of death and decay. Identified with decomposition and the corpse, industrial ruins are verbally described as objects that rot through the passing of time, as sites that ultimately present a skeleton of their original form. To align ruins with death implies a collection of negative connotations. Within this dialogue, ruins exist as unpleasant blemishes upon the urban fabric, cancerous sites in the city space. Industrial ruins crumble, collapse, decay, disintegrate, decompose, fragment, and perish. The literal allusions to death are magnified as industrial ruins become mouldy, smelling and rotting like cadavers. Despite the olfactory and visual analogies to the deceased corpse, ruins are not dead, useless spaces. I argue that it is through this discourse of decay that allows me to theorise the spatial and political possibilities of industrial ruins. Like
Edensor who celebrates the “inevitability and decay” of the industrial ruin (Industrial Ruins 15); I argue that the demise of these sites facilitates a contestation of the spatial organisation of cities.
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It is the literal decay of the industrial ruin and the language used to describe these sites that allows everyday monuments to function as spaces of memory and facilitate social interactions that are different to the ways in which officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic icons function as sites of memory. Industrial ruins appear superfluous, and, as Tom Nielsen notes, industrial ruins are frequently classified by authorising powers as being “comprised through the material structure of the city that cannot be defined positively and therefore is in excess” (53). Everyday monuments do, however, have a number of positive or productive aspects. Edensor argues that it is the inevitable decay of the industrial ruin that allows these sites to be “free from the gloomy constraints of a melancholic imagination, and can equally represent the fecund” where everyday monuments are transformed into sites where “new forms, ordering and aesthetics can emerge”
(Industrial Ruins 15). Defining the archaeology of the ruin through the seemingly negative terminology of death and inevitable decay produces two outcomes. The first is that everyday monuments disrupt and rupture prescribed ideas of how cities should be used by inhabitants, and I will examine this disruption of spatial organisation through the aesthetic and artistic practices that take place within the space of industrial ruins. The second (to be discussed in the following section) is that these sites have the ability to remember forgotten spatial stories through the resurrection of the ghosts of workers and activities that haunt the sites of waste.
As everyday monuments deteriorate, they unsettle the prevailing ideas that are advocated and endorsed by governments and councils, as to how urban space should be organised. Mary
Douglas argues in Purity and Danger that social groups, authorising powers, and local governments are all structuring capacities of culture. They determine and classify what objects or spaces fall into the category of waste, debris or refuge. Sites of waste, however, are able to disrupt the social systems that catalogue them because, as Douglas states “where there is dirt, there is system” (35). This means the everyday monument has a number of useful political
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implications, rather than simply existing as spaces of social and economic redundancy. Industrial ruins become the tools for questioning and rupturing the modalities of power, as well as the social projections of politicians and entrepreneurs, who determine spatial practices and compose urban landscapes. In the Ethics of Waste Gay Hawkins summarises Douglas’ work as deneutralising waste by placing it “firmly within the terrain of cultural rituals and their symbolic meanings” showing that “dirt is not outside of order but what makes systems of order visible” (2). Therefore, instead of existing within the post-industrial landscape as seemingly superfluous sites, everyday monuments are sites that can be appropriated by the urban theorist to question how spatial systems are built.
Spaces of Excess:
The Artistic Possibilities of Everyday Monuments
As waste sites, everyday monuments give evidence of, and provide ways of reading, the larger social systems at play within the contemporary city. Industrial ruins allow me to read urban space, in particular through my case study of Manchester, beyond the limitations and constraints of ordered space. By ordered space, I refer to the realms of the contemporary city that are controlled, monitored, and composed by authorising powers such as the local councils and governments that direct the composition of the city in attempts to maintain the uniformity, regulation and order of urban landscapes. Therefore, ordered space includes the spatial narratives written by officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic sites, as these architectures are tools for authorising powers to direct urban memories and cultural identities. Ordered space also includes the regions of a city that are under surveillance from governmental or council control, where continual observation determines how individuals use their surrounding space and deters them from performing certain activities within the monitored realms of the city. According to Edensor, the regulation of the built environment sees the post-industrial city to be “coterminous with
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regulation, surveillance, aesthetic monitoring and the prevalence of regimes that determine where and how things, activities and people should be placed” (54). David Sibley argues in “The
Purification of Space” that the process of regulating urban landscapes, whether this is achieved through conforming the urban aesthetic or directing an individual’s activity, is indicative of authorising powers’ attempts to execute a “purification of space” (409).
The post-industrial space of Manchester has been rebuilt through these systems of regulation and surveillance. This restructuring of Manchester following de-industrialisation has completely restructured the city centre, and this transformation was most overt when several city blocks were condensed into a single building, as was achieved through the rebuilding of the Arndale Centre shopping precinct in 1996, when the shopping district was converted from an outdoor commercial strip into an internal walled mall. Through this urban renewal, Manchester became a space that could easily be surveyed during the day, and literally locked up at night. What more complete way could the movement and actions of bodies within a city be controlled and directed by authorising powers? Richard Williams argues in The Anxious City: English Urbanism in the Late
Twentieth Century that this saw Manchester confirming to an authoritarian agenda, arguing that it eventuated in the city being “simplified into a discrete function that can be controlled within one space” (206). This is indicative of the city having become an organised or a staged space, where local councils and police authorities can monitor the public realm of the urban fabric with relative ease. Returning to Douglas, by analysing the everyday monuments or waste areas of the city, the regulation and ordered nature of urban space can be deconstructed, because everyday monuments disagree with the officially determined ideas of how a city should look, what spatial narratives are composed there, and how people should behave within the contemporary city.
Despite the level of surveillance and regulation of public spaces within post-industrial cities like
Manchester, dark, gloomy and sinister spaces continue to prevail. Industrial ruins, as everyday
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monuments, are indicative of these shady spaces. These are spaces in the city that are not monitored, where the spatial narratives are not controlled, and where the activities performed by individuals are able to contradict the specified and socialised modes that determine how one should interact within the ordered space of the city. If waste reveals the social systems at work, then industrial ruins are spaces where these social systems are exposed: and this is realised when the activities performed within industrial ruins contradict the prescribed ideas of how inhabitants are expected behave in the regulated regions of the urban landscape. Therefore, although classified by governing powers as obsolete sites, everyday monuments are sites where inhabitants are able to contest regulated social movement and activities – allowing systems of order to be made visible. The ruined space of cities has the potential, according to Edensor, to open the post- industrial city to historical and temporal interpretation, because industrial ruins are spaces where the practice of the city is liberated from the “constraints which determine what should be done where, and which encodes the city with meaning” (4). Instead, industrial ruins are sites that inhabitants can interact with, consume, and use, in unique and different ways.
Irrespective of the illusion that everyday monuments are superfluous, industrial ruins provide alternative spaces for consumption beyond the policed zones of the contemporary city. As industrial ruins and waste sites are not heavily policed or surveyed, they present realms within the urban field where alternative activities can take place. As Nielsen explains, industrial ruins form the backsides of the city and can be “used and reappropriated as alternative public spaces, accommodating the rituals and meetings of people” (53). The less monitored vacant factories and empty warehouses, the monuments to a recent industrial past, can therefore be used by the community in ways outside the “scripted event space of the city” (53); the regulated and controlled spaces I have just discussed. Everyday monuments are embroiled in a collection of practices, activities that Edensor observes range from “the carnivalesque to the mundane”
(Industrial Ruins 50). Whether these activities are illicit, secretive, or artistic, they complicate the
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projected ideas of social order and control within cities through contradiction. In this chapter, my interest lies within the ways that people consume ruined spaces through inventive or creative endeavours. Hawkins argues that once individuals notice the presence of waste sites within cities, the discarded objects and architectures appear animate. These spaces can then be used by people who are “able to imagine different uses, able to reanimate” and use the space creatively (74).
Creative pursuits, such as graffiti, stenciling, paste-ups, stickering, and painting are artistic activities that can be performed within the concealed and dark spaces of cities. Everyday monuments allow for an interaction with the architecture and the materiality of the city that is not possible within the scripted areas of urban landscapes. Industrial ruins are transformed into exhibition halls, gallery spaces, and museums of illicit art that haunt the dormant factories and warehouses of the post-industrial city. Graffiti and stencil artists tend to be the most active artists in these spaces, as the vast vertical surfaces of empty rooms present ideal canvasses for them to display their work. Ruins are sites where artists can develop their styles, take part in collaborative compositions, inside exclusive exhibition halls that have a limited and select audiences gazing upon the art. Quite often these temporary art spaces become more permanent art galleries, as the artworks are not erased as quickly as they would be from the commercial spaces of the urban landscape. As Edensor identifies, this is because there is “little sanction against graffiti, since it makes little difference to a site already identified as unsightly and excessive” (Industrial Ruins
33). The stencil and graffiti art that is erased from urban centers survives within industrial ruins because these everyday monuments are spaces already in disrepair. Once the industrial ruins become canvasses for artwork, the sites transform: a factory becomes a secluded art gallery; a wool store becomes a space of artistic composition; a warehouse becomes a site of creative endeavour. Consequently, the urban landscape is used in new ways through these distinctive and wide ranges of creative industries.
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The disused and decaying factories and warehouses of Greater Manchester were eclipsed from social consciousness following de-industrialisation. These empty and seemingly superfluous sites are being adopted and used by groups of people who intentionally remove themselves from the organised spaces of surveillance and control within the policed urban centre, in order to engage in both legitimate or illegitimate artistic activities. At a disused cinema and factory near Stoke on
Trent, 40 miles south of Manchester, a collection of Manchurian stencil artists recreated the urban fabric of the industrial site in August 2005. Having no space to exhibit their work within the policed and monitored areas of Manchester proper, the artists prepared an assortment of stencils and designs to exhibit at the factory, and travelled south. Attacking the site during the night, the artists clambered onto the building to paste-up already composed paintings, spray pre-cut stencils, and to perform freehand drawings. Without any official exhibition or opening night the collective created a composition of artworks onto the seemingly defunct site, rewriting the narrative of the building by imbuing it with a new use and value. The artistic pursuits performed by these young artists explicitly contradict the general assumption that industrial ruins are spaces of excess and waste. As Edensor observes, industrial ruins simultaneously exhibit “positive social, material, aesthetic qualities” (Industrial Ruins 9); where sites that are otherwise redundant become active, creative, and used spaces for imaginative and productive activities.
When the industrial ruin is appropriated for alternative pursuits and spatial organisation is disrupted, it stands that the physical space of everyday monuments is rewritten. Not only do these creative activities allow artists to inscribe additional spatial stories into the city, the process also sees the everyday monument etching new stories into the urban canvas as they are transformed into private spaces, both processes multiplying the collection of stories within a city. The stories written by individuals that harness the space of everyday monuments for creative purposes further alters and transform sites that are already in a state of transition, due to their decomposition and yielding to the passing time. In turn, the everyday monuments that already house a wealth of
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histories and activities beyond the dominant narratives of the scripted event space of the urban landscape only have these stories multiplied when they become the canvas for artworks. As a consequence, the wealth of stories inscribed in everyday monuments becomes twofold: not only are industrial ruins depositories of manifold pasts and lost memories, they are also spaces where new stories are composed. De Certeau and Giard summarise the story writing capacity of the everyday monument by stating that, “stories are composed through the world’s debris” (133).
This is supported by Neville and Villenue, who poetically state that “waste produces stories inchoately – stories of both multiple and singular, stories not without form, not without plot or puzzle, if often only the puzzle of an impossible story. The relationship between waste and stories becomes metonymical; stories emerge out of traces and refuse” (17).
In addition to the new spatial narratives that are painted onto everyday monuments by creative individuals, this practice also sees contemporary urban memories being inscribed into the built environment. Within the space of the industrial ruin there is a convergence of contemporary urban memories of artists and practitioners of the space, with the memories of the recent industrial past. It is here that the generic disparities I have drawn between different monumental forms are brought to the fore in two ways. Firstly, the inhabitants of the city are able to interact and creatively engage with everyday monuments in a way that they are unable to do with the officially sanctioned monuments or symbolic sites that are located within the scripted event space of the city. Secondly, recent and contemporary histories are entwined within the space of everyday monuments. This is both literally, as the decaying walls are also artistic canvasses; but also metaphorically, as the memories of the past and present are both able to haunt the space as these memories are not suffocated, controlled or concealed by external parties. Unlike the static space written by officially sanctioned monuments or the imagined space composed by symbolic monuments, there are no predetermined ideas of what memories or histories should be narratavised or displayed by everyday monuments, and in turn the contemporary and the recent
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past can both be commemorated. In summary, the tangible layers of industrial decay are literal evidence of the multiplicity of stories, memories and histories that exist within the city; they constitute narratological spaces that are in contrast to those written by officially sanctioned and symbolic monuments.
Manchester’s urban fabric is a dialectical, multi-authored space. As a post-industrial city, its everyday monuments allow for the inscription of new stories and the surfacing of residual narratives that the renovated realms of the city attempt to suppress. This is not a recent phenomenon in Manchester, a city where processes of development and decline have continually reordered and restructured the city’s skyline: emerging as the world’s first industrial city in the
1820s, the topography of Manchester was utterly transformed. Crinson observers that Manchester was, “no longer dominated by church spires but by a multitude of tall chimneys whose smoke wreathed the spreading and thickening maze of houses and mills below” (18). Since the transformation of the city in the nineteenth century, a compilation of urban narratives have been written across Manchester’s landscape, as the diverse structural designs allow for a multiplicity of spaces to exist simultaneously. Following de-industrialisation in the 1950s, sites of decay have crumbled alongside renovated ruins, churches, loft apartments and entirely new architectures.
This type of urban landscape that houses an amalgamation of architectures has the potential to open the walker to a collection of readings and interpretations of the past. As the number of spatial stories multiplies as everyday ruins decay the process is only exacerbated when the everyday monument allows for the converging of the past and the present.
In this way, everyday monuments write spatial stories that challenge those written by officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic monuments, through their multiplication of narratives and memories, and the rearranging of spatial organisation. If the social activities that take place within industrial ruins, as well as the literal decomposition of their architecture, are both in stark contrast
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to the renovated and controlled regions of the post-industrial city, then this must have consequences for the surrounding city space as everyday monuments disrupt the urban landscape.
De Certeau and Giard, although discussing the ruins of Paris, argue that the ruins of the city
“burst forth within the modern, massive, homogeneous city like slips of the tongue from an unknown, perhaps unconscious, language” (133); industrial ruins working as counterpoints to the more glamorous, rendered architectures of the city. The rough edges, the residue and the decomposition of these ruined sites are counterpoints to the beauty of the officially sanctioned monument, the spectacle of the symbolic monument, the gleam of contemporary architecture of glass and steel. As Edensor observes, the disordered and messy nature of industrial ruins is in contrast to the “increasingly smooth and highly regulated spaces of the city” (Industrial Ruins
53); and I argue that by presenting this opposition to traditional urban space, everyday monuments have the capacity to open modernity to historical difference.
Everyday monuments are architectures that challenge the ideologies that accompany modernity.
This is primarily achieved through the industrial ruins’ ability to break the illusion that the modern city is always engaged in a linear process of flawless improvement. Joe Moran argues in
“History, Memory and the Everyday” that everyday sites offer a corrective to the spectacularising discourse of modernity by challenging the perpetual progress that it projects: “the everyday is modernity’s embarrassing underside, that which it attempts to conceal through compensatory narratives of innovation and abundance” (55). It is through their transforming and transitional narratives that everyday ruins demystify the fantasy projected through the modern era that continual progression is possible, because industrial ruins are awkward ruptures in the composition of the urban narrative. Everyday monuments embody the moments where modernity has failed; they frustrate and thwart the notion that this progression was ever even possible by ridiculing the ideals that advocate the advantages and the existence of a seamless modernity. The rejected sites of once productive industrial space depict the darker side of the contemporary city.
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Their superfluous excess, their disfunctionality, and their restructuring of urban practices work against spatial narratives highlighting historical and cultural success, and function as symbols through which Edensor argues the “ideologically loaded versions of progress that are embedded within cultures of consumption and industrial progress” can be critiqued (Industrial Ruins 15).
Industrial ruins shade the dominant narrative of success promoted through the ever-improving city, by turning attention to alternative narratives and memories that have been forgotten: and this is true for both the present and the recent past. Not only do everyday monuments counteract existing spatial stories, they also ‘write back’ to the failed industrial past, and to the memories and lives of those who once worked and inhabited these spaces. In turn, the everyday monument raises questions of how history is narrated and urban memories are exhibited through the city.
The traces of the past, found amongst the rubble of industrial ruins, are markers of additional city narratives, and these stories undermine a conception of history as straightforward and linear – a process that relies on the past being fixed. As Edensor observes, a city with a collection of architectures where the industrial ruin decays and multiplies spatial stories, prevents linear readings of the past because everyday monuments upstage a straightforward interpretation of history by presenting “a host of intersecting temporalities which diverge and resonate” (Industrial
Ruins 126). A consequence of the spatial and historical reordering exerted by industrial ruins is their removal from the urban landscape, and the gentrification of post-industrial cities will be theorised in the third part of this chapter. The following section of this chapter will investigate the memories housed within ruins, and the way in which everyday monuments allow for the surfacing of involuntary memories that does not transpire within the narratological space written by officially sanctioned and symbolic monuments.
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II
Ghosts of the Urban Landscape:
Everyday Monuments and the Metaphors of Memory
Everyday monuments are spaces where memories from the recent past mingle with contemporary urban memories. Through the following section I investigate the relationship between everyday monuments and memory, arguing that not only do industrial ruins allow for residual memories to surge to the surface of the urban landscape, but that these sites work as metaphors for the fragmentary nature of memories as ruins crumble in the same way that memories fade and dissolve. In order to do so, I organise the following theorisation of the everyday monument around the figure of the ghost, as a way of interpreting how memories and recent histories haunt the dark spaces of the post-industrial city. Using the image of the spectre to theorise industrial ruins allows me to consider how the past is housed within everyday monuments in a way that is entirely different to how memories, histories and identities are fixed onto the materialities of officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic sites. Instead, I see the transitory and changing narratological space of industrial ruins as working as passageways between contemporary landscapes and the recent past, as the residual histories that are absent from the scripted event space of the city remain within sites of ruins. Forgotten pasts lurk among the decaying architecture, figures and activities of the recent past remain imprinted on the walls and within the spaces of everyday monuments. Therefore, although the architecture of the industrial era may erode and decay, I will demonstrate how the past continues to be revealed and evoked through the involuntary memories that disturb these spaces.
As I have observed, the terminology used to describe industrial ruins is derived from the language used to describe death and the decomposition of the human body. During my discussion of the memories housed within everyday ruins, I return to this discourse with my appropriation of the
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metaphor of the ghost. I argue that the ghosts that lurk within industrial ruins are indicative of a presence of an absence. As Michael Bell maintains in “The Ghosts of Place,” there are ghosts of the past that are locked within the ruin, and these spectres are “always presences and as such appear to us as spirits of temporal transcendence, of connections between past and future” (816).
Edensor similarly describes a relationship between presence and absence within the industrial ruin, stating that the emptiness of the ruin instills the sense of an unexpected presence of absence, a presence that prowls the space like a phantom or a “spooky absent presence of the past”
(Industrial Ruins 145). The ghosts that haunt industrial ruins perform a duality: that which is visible, a presence, and simultaneously that which once existed, an absence. By presenting a juncture between the past and the present the industrial ruin becomes an unintentional commemoration of the past, even though they are not designated sites of intentional acts of remembrance. As Walter Moser argues in “The Acculturation of Waste,” the waste-object “is itself a memorial as it is to say that it induces remembrance” (98). Moran similarly states that the sites of decomposing objects of material culture offer “fertile ground” for exploring memories and the everyday (61). Consequently the archaeology of the everyday monument can be figuratively mined to extract fragments of memories, forgotten pasts, and lost histories.
Revealing the Past:
The Layers of History Within Urban Space
The very materiality of the ruin is fragmentary, and it is the fragmentary nature of everyday monuments that allows for the development of a relationship within the space of industrial ruins, between these spaces’ architectural decay and their presentation of an historical archiving of the past. This relationship exists because, in its decomposition, the industrial ruin metamorphoses into an archaeological site: the everyday monument literally presents a figuration of the past as it crumbles through the passing of time. With every brick that disintegrates, with every layer of
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plaster that deteriorates, and for each sheet of concrete that decomposes, the industrial ruin physically presents the passing of time as a process of disintegration. Neville and Villenue argue that the collapse of an industrial ruin allows for the space to work as a “living map” of the recent past (15); and it is the fragmentation of the architecture of everyday monuments that allows these sites to becomes spaces where history is literally revealed as façade and surfaces crack and corrode. Once industrial ruins perform the role of exhibiting the materiality of the past within the post-industrial city, it is then that they become living maps, or archives, of a seemingly redundant recent industrial epoch. This transformation facilitates new analogies between the everyday monument and memory. Industrial ruins are no longer simply spaces of decay and waste, they are archaeological maps of the recent past. In this vein, a parallel can also be drawn between the tangible and transitional space of the ruin, with the binary of memory and forgetting.
Industrial ruins are analogous to processes of memory. Although the industrial ruin is tangible, and memory intangible, they are both incomplete spaces that expose time as a perpetual past, present and future. As described by Edensor, “the ruin is an allegory of memory, it is fragmentary, imperfect, partial and thoroughly incomplete” (Industrial Ruins 141). Previously sites of production, industrial ruins are constitutive of the ghosts and skeletons of a site that formerly existed. Once a moment in the present, a memory is only a shadow and an obscured projection of a collection of events and histories for individuals, communities, and urban space.
This is the most overt similarity between the everyday monument and the memory binary: the architecture of the ruin decays in the same fragmentary manner as memories, which mentally slip into oblivion but are later remembered and recovered. There is an echoing and a mirroring between the architectural structure of the industrial ruin and the processes of remembering and forgetting, and it is through these literal and metaphoric spaces that the fragment allows for narratives and histories to be recollected. Edensor summarises this relationship between the industrial ruin and memory: “For memory, rather than a sequence of happenings which blend
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into each other as part of a seamlessly recollected and narrated story, is composed of fragments.
And like ruins, memory is a continually shifting collage of these fragments, some appearing, others disappearing” (Industrial Ruins 140).
As memories and narratives are revealed or concealed through the incomplete nature of the industrial ruin and processes of remembering and forgetting, the relationship between industrial ruins and memory extends further. I have already suggested that industrial ruins are archaeological maps as they allow histories and memories to be physically exposed as layers of architecture disintegrate. Aleida Assmann builds on this similarity in “Beyond the Archive,” suggesting that the industrial ruin has a more intricate and complicated relationship with the archive, one that stretches beyond the everyday monument as a space that divulges the past through its material decomposition. Assmann argues that archives, in the traditional sense, are repositories for objects that are deemed worthy of preserving, such as libraries, databases, stored research. As a consequence, the archive in this sense has “a reverse affinity with rubbish dumps, where things are accumulated and left to decay” (71). It stands, however, that this opposition between a site of waste and the celebrated archive is not oppositional at all. Rather, Assmann argues that industrial ruins as archives, as storage spaces of the recently past, can be interpreted as “emblems and symptoms for cultural remembrance and oblivions” (71). This theorisation of the industrial ruin as spaces that are indicative of urban memory and forgetting clearly establishes the everyday monument as archives, archives that are elucidating devices for uncovering alternative pasts that have been obscured from the narratives of officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic monuments, and as spaces where memories and histories can be retrieved and recorded.
Everyday monuments are therefore constitutive of two differing, yet related, types of space that have complex relationships and associations with the exhibition of the past. Industrial ruins decay
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in a manner that is allegorical to the way that memories are forgotten and recollected, presenting an archaeological map of the past. They are also spaces that are analogous to the way in which stories are accumulated and stored within the archive. It is within these two moments that the transitional and fragmentary nature of the narratives written by everyday monuments becomes increasingly palpable. The spatial narratives written by industrial ruins are continually in flux, a process that sees the spatial stories composed by everyday monuments mirroring the transitional nature of the crumbling architecture of these sites. Everyday monuments, in displaying a visual chronology of the passing of time, are characterised through their continual change. In turn, the fluid narratives written by everyday monuments stand in contradiction to the static narratives indicative of officially sanctioned monuments, or the imagined narratives of symbolic monuments, because industrial ruins are constantly being rewritten. This reinscription includes the various stories that are projected by their physical architecture as they decay, as well as alternative and residual urban narratives that are revealed through their decay. In other words, the narratives exhibited and written by the everyday monument must always be in flux, as the sites that write these stories are continually changing as they decompose.
The spatial stories written by industrial ruins exhibit a cross-section of time, working as screens that illustrate the degradation of time having passed within the present. Irrespective of how dirty or stained these factories and warehouses may become, they provide a unique image of history. In surviving the transformation of their shape and resisting the elimination of their debris, these everyday spaces have not been suffocated or written over by the smooth surfaces of concrete, fresh paint and new plaster. It is through their physical resistance to renovation that ruins are able to exist as compositions or depictions of earlier moments of the urban space. Helen Hills, describing the role of architecture in terms of memory within Manchester, argues that old
“buildings are very good at remembering, but new architecture is adept at forgetting, and, at best, can only evoke” (32). Therefore, the decay inherent in ruins is intrinsically linked to how we may
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remember the past. Ruins thus provide glimpses onto the world of forgotten industry and design: they are monuments to lost memories of wealth, work and ingenuity. By housing these memories, ruins indicate a space where the past remains durable, despite their architectural decay. It is their resilience that enables everyday monuments to hold memory, as forgotten past can be brought forth unexpectedly within the crumbling spaces of the city.
One reason why industrial spaces can resuscitate the past is because they are waste sites. As everyday monuments have been abandoned they have not been rendered, repaired or reshaped, but they have also not been eradicated completely from the urban landscape. In turn, a residue of the past remains, and the ghosts and memories of forgotten industry are able to prowl and inhabit spaces of dereliction. The spectres of the recent past can infest industrial ruins because, as
Edensor observes, these ghosts have not been “consigned to the dark corners, attics and drawers, papered over and swept away, reinterpreted and deliberately recontextualised” (Industrial Ruins
154). Instead, the crumbling physiology of ruins are spaces where the memories of the past may present themselves in a multiplicity of guises – memories may remain through a decaying poster that peels on a warehouse wall, through the rusting bolts of a redundant machine that lays dormant in a room in a factory, through the roof of a factory that has collapsed onto the floors below. As a consequence, industrial ruins are comprised of, and built through, a collection of ghosts that counteract the amnesia inherent within contemporary urban landscapes. Unlike the memories that are attached and fixed to officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic monuments, the recent past has not been ascribed to the material architecture of the industrial ruin: the materiality of the ruin is the memory.
As a factory crumbles, wallpaper, plaster and paint peel away, revealing hidden layers of construction. Once these layers are revealed, so too is the history of the site, and this allows for memories and meanings to multiply. Edensor argues that the fluid nature of the industrial ruins
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eventuates in the manifold temporalities of everyday monuments to be manifest as these sites:
“conjure up various histories, evoke a range of memories, signify obsolescent fashions and products” (Industrial Ruins 125). In the architecture of the everyday monument the industrial past, its aesthetics, and their associated products are housed. These histories are different from that of the post-industrial city, and the manifold temporalities are apparent as recollections and pasts flow into each other and diverge within the space of ruin. Edensor argues that the multiple memories housed within industrial ruins “might be used to critically assess dominant ways of producing memory in space” (Industrial Ruins 126). Everyday monuments have a memorial capacity that is beyond that of traditional monumental space, because the memories housed within these sites deviate from the traditional forms of commemoration assigned to specific sites of memorialisation across the urban landscape. Industrial ruins allow for alternative memories and pasts to be brought to the surface, glimpses into the past and onto the histories that have otherwise been suffocated or obscured through the traditional forms of remembrance. For the urban landscape of Manchester, as I will later discuss, these industrial ruins present alternatives pasts that are obscured by the city’s officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic sites.
The ghosts of history are able to haunt the industrial ruin in a way that the rendered architecture and traditional monuments of the post-industrial city are unable. Industrial ruins facilitate a relationship to the past that is not realised in the scripted event space of cities, where the dominant spatial stories see a reconfiguration of the past in order for alternative memories to be stifled through construction and development. In the scripted event space of the city, memories cannot be as readily retrieved or brought to the surface, as they can within the decay of the ruin.
Consequently, industrial ruins are illustrative fragments of forgotten pasts. De Certeau and Giard write of Paris’ everyday monuments that these “closed down factories, the debris of shipwrecked histories, still today raise up the ruins of an unknown, strange city… They surprise” (133). By invoking and calling to the surface the prosperous industrial past, these ruins are windows onto a
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history that is slowly being forgotten. Rather than being defunct, the discarded objects and memories of everyday monuments allow for a new understanding of the past and present to develop. Everyday monuments remember history in a different way to the remembrance performed by officially sanctioned monuments that have been designed by local governments and authorising powers with particular agendas: to glorify, celebrate and depict certain moments of history that they determine as necessitating of commemoration. This sees everyday monuments working to offset the narratives written by conventional monumental space, as they open the recent past up to theorisation, interpretation, and consideration.
Rewriting the Past through Monuments:
Obscuring the Industrial from Manchester’s Urban Narrative
This argument sees me returning to the establishing definitions drawn in the introduction to this thesis: that although industrial ruins are monuments, they are not commemorations in the traditional form. They are markers of a recent past, but they are not intentionally built memorials and have not had symbolic significance attributed to them. Instead they are spaces where alternative spatial and historical memories and stories reside, where the narratives that are absent from the rendered space of the city can be brought to the surface. As sites of presences of absences, everyday monuments counteract the dominant stories recited across the urban fabric by traditional monuments. The officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic sites of Manchester
(unlike the bars and cafés that use an industrial aesthetic for commercial purposes, that I discuss in the following section of this chapter) do not display any reflection of the recent past. When it comes to the monumental space of this post-industrial city, the only monumental space that depicts narratives of the recent industrial history is that of everyday monuments. Rather than celebrating the industrial past, the officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic monuments that adorn Manchester’s urban landscape either commemorate earlier histories or a contemporary
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modernity: these are monuments to the Royal family, they commemorate notable politicians, writers and other notable figures of the past, they are religious icons or war memorials. The contemporary urban landscape is also inscribed through contemporary public sculpture that attempts to write spatial stories that celebrate everything but the industrial past: there are steel sheep, metal brooms, abstract sculptures, battle ships, and the bust of a girl reading. The traditional monumental space makes no explicit references or acknowledgement to the industrial histories and memories; they are characteristic of the illusion of opacity, concealing the recent past by celebrating the virtues of historical figures and events beyond the industrial.
In order to consider the residual narratives housed within everyday monuments, I will outline the dominant spatial stories written by Manchester’s contemporary officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic sites that narrate urban memories and identities through the exclusion of the industrial past. The monuments that have been built during post-industrialisation commemorate a collection of pasts and presents, but the industrial remains absent. Outside Manchester University is A Monument to Vimto (Kerry Morrison 1992), an oak sculpture of a Vimto cordial bottle surrounded by raspberries and blackcurrants. The work is four meters high, and dominates a public courtyard, and was built in order to celebrate the Manchester born Noel Nichols who was responsible for creating the health tonic cordial (see fig. 48). The Ishinki-Touchstone (Kan
Yasuda, 1996) rests to the northeast of Piccadilly train station. The touchstone is an18 tonne polished monolith, shaped like a large white pebble, and is intended to be a place of meditative silence within the heart of the city (see fig. 49). In the Northern Quarter, a site of old warehouses and factory space is sculptor George Wylie’s New Broom (1999), a steel broom on two stone blocks. The broom was commissioned as part of the arts program associated with regenerating and gentrifying the quarter in the late 1990s. It celebrates the ordinary workers who give the area its character and vitality, the cleaners and the sweepers – not the industrial workers from an earlier moment of history. In the same area David Kemp’s Tib St Horn (1999) was built on the
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exterior of a former hat factory, a sculpture that was designed as a marker to establish the gateway into Manchester’s creative quarter, where industry had once flourished (see fig. 50).
When an officially sanctioned monument was designed to memorialise the industrial past, its existence within Manchester was only short lived. In 1977 the council commissioned Franta
Belsky to compose a sculpture for the Arndale Centre shopping precinct. Belsky’s work Totem consisted of four sections, each part intended to reflect the region’s economy, and included a capstan from the Manchester Ship Canal. When the mall was redesigned and gentrified between
1987-8 during the height of de-industrialisation, however, the monument was dismantled. There was no local council intent to replace or resituate the monument, and there is no record of a public demand for the return of the work. Manchester’s “Public Monuments and Sculpture
Association” catalogued the location, dimensions, and reasons behind urban objects in their
National Recording Project, available online. According to this association, Totem’s current location is recorded as ‘lost.’ Therefore, it appears that the only statue that did explicitly reference the recent past has since been exorcised from the urban fabric during renovations of the city in post-industrialisation. As a consequence, the vast collection of monuments within the city centre of Manchester consists of people or events beyond the boundaries of the industrial era, writing a history that exists independent from industrialisation and presents an idealised version of the past and present, typical of symbolic icons or officially sanctioned monuments that highlight progress and not corrosion.
These examples of officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic sites that decorate the public sphere of Manchester’s contemporary post-industrial landscape are indicative of the monumental space that I have been investigating through this thesis. These are objects that write static narratives of the past, or they are public works that the local residents are expected to attach interpretations of identity and urban memory to. The contemporary smoothed-over urban
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landscape of Manchester is one where the objects are limited to exhibiting one narrative in a united object. I argue that everyday monuments promise an element of the unexpected, a range of narratives housed within one space, because the crumbling monuments of the industrial past, as I have indicated, write a narrative that is characterised by their fluidity, rather than being static or imagined. This means that industrial ruins compose an assemblage of fragmented and volatile dialogues, a wealth of memories that have left imprints on, or are, the ruined sites. It is here that this chapter weaves towards the memories that are housed in ruins, but with a more concentrated study on how these memories can be recovered and read – rather than simply stating that industrial ruins exist as repositories for these memories. I therefore conclude this section of my chapter through an investigation of involuntary memories and how industrial ruins are sites where these memories are salvaged with relative ease.
Involuntary Memories
There are an abundance of spatial stories housed within everyday monuments that may rise to the surface in the form of involuntary memories. As Bill Brown argues, discarded objects have
“history in them” (qtd. Hawkins 151); and involuntary memory is one manner in which these histories can be retrieved from abandoned sites of industry. Rather than the memories that are attached to traditional monuments, the recent past is always visible within the industrial ruin as these sites are built through memories and residual histories that already haunt and are housed in these spaces of debris. In “Trauma and Memory in the City,” Graeme Gilloch and Jane Kilby state that “Memories, individual, collective, may remain blurred, disfigured… In the dialectics of demolition, these things will always be the debris, the loose threads, the drips, the dust of these are all the remains of last things, what memories are made of” (4); and it is within the dialectics of demolition, of loss and recovery, where involuntary memory comes to the fore. Through the framework of involuntary memory I will argue that the industrial ruin allows for spatial stories
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and urban memories to be recovered because everyday monuments are able to perform memory work, in turn allowing the urban dweller who interacts with industrial ruins to engage with moments of the past that the gentrified surfaces of the post-industrial city close off and conceal.
There are several theorists of involuntary memory that I bring to the fore to demonstrate how everyday monuments facilitate in a form of remembrance that is absent from the static and imagined narratives written by officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic sites. Through the frameworks provided by academic scholarship, I define involuntary memories to be the residual histories that are housed within objects and spaces. Involuntary memories remain unseen across the built environment until they are inadvertently brought to attention of the viewer. In Theatres of Memory, Rapheal Samuel argues that involuntary memories are the “sleeping images which spring to life unbidden, and serve as ghostly sentinels of our thought” (27). These ghosts are only salvaged when the commonplace material objects of the recent past accidentally survive, and find themselves being revealed within to the present. The close association between involuntary memories and ghostly images is echoed in the work of both David Gross and Eslie Leslie. In
“Objects from the Past,” Gross argues that everyday monuments give the viewer a “glimpse of something that shoots beyond the past as such and calls out to be recognised and responded to the in the present” (34). The spontaneity of involuntary memories and their retrieval therefore connects the recent past with the present. In “Souvenirs and Forgetting: Walter Benjamin's
Memory-work” Leslie describes this as the memories being summoned like strips of montage images that “flash past in a rapid sequence” (117). Samuel, Gross and Leslie all argue that involuntary memories are conjured through sites of residue, such as industrial ruins, spaces where fleeting remembrances and accidental reflections on the past are brought spontaneously into the present. As I have argued throughout this thesis, however, all processes of remembrance are always intricately tied to forgetting, and as a consequence involuntary memories must also call to mind amnesia.
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For Gilloch and Kilby, involuntary memories are described as “the sudden, fortuitous, fleeting remembrance of the forgotten past occasioned by some contingency, some chanced-upon correspondence in the present” (7); but they also acknowledge that these spontaneous recollections are strongly implicated in and connected to forgetting. Involuntary memories therefore represent signs of absence. They are forgotten pasts that have left traces and residue on the objects, architectures and spaces that they are part of. By connecting lost histories to their physical spaces, I argue that involuntary memories entwine everyday monuments within an historical process that collapses temporalities. The past is brought to the present, when the absent memories are brought into presence. Merewether argues that this is part and parcel of the ruin, sites that are essentially “traces that embody a sense of loss. Ruins hold out an image of a once glorious present, another time, revealing a place of origin no longer as it was” (25). Therefore, the spaces of everyday monuments and their decay appear to be sites of defunct activity, they are actually testaments to the alternative histories of the recent past that are absent in the narrative of city-as-progress through their evocation of involuntary memories.
I have argued that everyday monuments allow forgotten and residual memories to surge to the surface and be recollected in the present, as these sites have not been deliberately altered. The memories intrinsically linked to, and housed within, industrial ruins have their basis in everyday life, unlike officially sanctioned monuments that have their basis in power relations, and symbolic monuments that have their basis in the construction of cultural identity. In Manchester, the everyday monuments in question used to be spaces of production. The now decaying ruined sites were once factories and warehouses where entire working-class communities would work together, holiday together, and all live in surrounding housing together. Edensor argues that the ghosts of workers and their routines haunt these urban ruins, and that the habitual memories of entire communities that were located within the operating factory still remain in the now
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seemingly redundant space: “echoing through the different set routines those ex-workers have fashioned for themselves, or perhaps evident into the coming into consciousness of a past way of life, fuelled by a reflexivity about what previously was a largely habitual and mechanical approach to daily rituals of work” (Industrial Ruins 148). The memories drawn from the monumental space of the everyday, according to Edensor, will “inevitably connect with personal histories, but they are also unavoidably linked to social practices and routines” (Industrial Ruins
59); thus the experience of walking along the canals of Manchester is a distinctly eerie experience. The disused factories that line Manchester’s Shipping Canal haunt the city, housing the historical narratives and memories of industry. Embodied with inactions, the routines and spatial stories of the workers are then communicated by these sites as their ghostly traces lurk within the everyday monuments.
Contradicting the regulated spaces of the city, industrial ruins are sites of controversy. They are architectures that are socially and politically ‘dangerous’ for local councils because the narratives and memories evoked by everyday monuments cannot easily be controlled powers. As industrial ruins simultaneously write stories of the past, present and future, they allow for fluidity between these temporalities. As the following section will argue, this movement between temporalities, and the literal and metaphorical decay of the ruin, eventuates in gentrification or erasure of industrial ruins across the urban landscape. Once a site contradicts the perpetual progress and smooth surfaces of modernisation then the motivation for authorising powers to remove these sites of tension develops. As I will argue, this papering over sites of decay transpires in a number of ways, transforming the sites of production into sites of utilised consumption.
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III
Dignifying an Industrial Past:
The Gentrification of Everyday Monuments
In the first part of this chapter I argued that everyday monuments allow for spatial reorganisation by offering an alternative to the scripted event space of cities; that when industrial ruins are used for creative purposes new urban narratives are composed; that everyday ruins are where the memories and histories of the contemporary and the recent past coexist; and that these sites contradict the ideological assumption that modernity is characteristic of linear progress and ceaseless improvement. In the second part of this chapter I observed how ghosts and memories are housed within industrial ruins; the relationship between everyday monuments and archives; and how involuntary memories of the industrial past are able to rise to the surface within everyday monuments. The demise of sites that were once epicenters of progress highlights the acute moments where a society has failed to function according to the prescribed order, and as such I argue that they are interpreted by political powers to be redundant, messy, superfluous sites that no long fulfill their original purpose as sites of fabrication. Everyday monuments are flags of a failed recent past, and as a consequence Edensor argues that they become signs of “negative waste for local politicians and entrepreneurs” (Industrial Ruins 7); as these sites provide evidence that an area is lacking, and signify that a particular building or industrial area has a vanished propriety. Consequently, industrial ruins become social texts that determine how a local government may establish a new cultural identity in a city’s post-industrial state, and a relationship develops between councils and entrepreneurs. The once productive industrial territories, and their accompanying contemporary alternative practices which local authorities want to erase from post-industrial urban narratives, are sites that can be sold to private investors for development. Industrial ruins, scars on the urban landscape that contradict the progressive space of modernity, can be transformed through the act of gentrification.
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A gentrified urban landscape is one where the projected spatial narratives rest outside the boundaries of industrialisation and de-industrialisation. Instead of being spaces of production, I argue that the gentrification of everyday monuments transforms industrial ruins into spaces of consumption. Industrial ruins become part of the glamour of the modern city, as the ruptures in the urban landscape are rewritten, incorporating and conforming these architectures into a new urban narrative where the hiccups and counterpoints of progress are obscured: the dark spaces of cities are flattened, papered over, covered up, stripped, smoothed, dignified and transformed into entirely new architectures as the residue of the recent past is camouflaged. Since the 1980s, the landscapes of industrial ruination that dominated northwest England have been hidden with paint, plaster, concrete and glass, as the buildings have been refurbished and remodelled. Urban reinvention and the gentrification of cities of industry has been, according to Edensor, a project for local councils to “fill in the blanks” (Industrial Ruins 58) and smooth over the jagged edges of the industrial past. Gentrification creates depthless cities of façades and surfaces, rather than the multifaceted narratives that everyday monuments compose. As authorising powers assimilate everyday monuments and their crumbling layers into ‘productive’ urban spaces this eventuates in the erasure of the recent past and its memories from the city narrative. This aspect of gentrification, however, will be analysed later in this chapter. For the moment I will examine how industrial ruins are metamorphosed into commodified spaces, and what uses these new architectures have for authorising powers.
The process of gentrification not only removes industrial ruins from the urban landscape.
Developers and entrepreneurs also appropriate everyday monuments as the scaffolding for new buildings with different uses: in order to prevent ruins from contradicting the progress of modernity they must be distorted into spaces that are ‘constructive’ and ‘beneficial.’ In northwest
England, the adaptation and alteration of everyday monuments was a consequence of the “Great
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English Cities” promotion that saw industrial ruins reconfigured into tourist sites. Launched in the
1980s, this campaign designed to capitalise on the recent past: local authorities and urban planners embraced the use of gentrified industrial imagery across the urban landscape for commercial purposes. As a consequence, this campaign saw a series of astonishing transformations of waste sites into ‘useful’ sites. Despite the appropriation of the industrial aesthetic, once these sites are renovated and harnessed for political and commercial gain, everyday monuments can no longer write back to the same past working-class past. Instead, the repellent images of the industrial town are recoded as commodified sites of interest as textile mills become tourist sites and re-aestheticisation redeems unproductive spaces by restructuring them according to profit and commodification.
Edensor has theorised that the transformation and assimilation of industrial ruins into the post- industrial narratives written by the local councils of England is intricately connected to the idea that contemporary cities are expected to present “seamless, smoothed over appearances to signify prosperity, to attract tourists, and new middle-class inhabitants” (Industrial Ruins 59). Inevitably, the gentrification of post-industrial cities results in lacklustre landscapes. De Certeau and Giard argue that in Paris, the ghosts of the industrial past are exorcised from the city under the guise of
“national heritage” (134). Although Manchester was more industrialised than Paris during the twentieth century, there has been a similar attempt to conceal the past through the pretext of national heritage as the Manchester City Council renovates the urban landscape to envelop the tainted past within a contemporary identity of progress under the ruse that this gentrification is in the interest of cultural history. Once the decaying architectures have been redesigned, the darks shadows of ruins have been eliminated from the urban composition, and the phantoms of a seemingly obsolete past have been expelled, the post-industrial city is effectively presented as a heritage site – even if these building do not engage with the recent past at all. This means that the national narratives written into the post-industrial urban fabric conceal industrial urban memories,
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and the pasts that could be brought to the surface at everyday monuments are suffocated beneath a dominant contemporary narrative of ‘progress’ and consumption.
Manchester City Council and urban developers have therefore ‘dignified’ the narratives of its recent industrial past. In order to rewrite the decaying industrial precincts, new apartment buildings and offices have been built along the Rochdale Manchester Ship Canal (see figs. 51-
53). Another means of recomposition is the gentrification of factories and warehouses that once ruptured dominant spatial narratives, transforming them into sites to be used and inhabited (see fig. 54). Both processes sees the abundant derelict sites to be in decline – and will continue to be renovated as authorising powers erase the sites that present a stark contrast to the contemporary urban horizon of gentrified industrial ruins and sterilised architectures. There is a shift from sites of production to sites of consumption, from sites of work to sites of leisure. Rather than representing the struggles of de-industrialisation, these buildings become sites of ‘acceptable’ social activity, prestigious living, and gourmet meals. Therefore, post-industrial Manchester is being increasingly defined outside the imaginary of the industrial, even though the scaffolding and aesthetics of the industrial have been used. In City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester, urban theorists Jamie Peck and Kevin Ward argue this has been driven in an attempt by the
Manchester City Council to “galvanise the development of a decayed city centre” (2); a city that
Peck and Ward observe as having been always on the move. Manchester is “in an almost perpetual state of restructuring, right back to its early stirrings as the crucible of industrial capitalism” (1).
Manchester’s everyday monuments are being gentrified into two different types of space, both intricately tied to consumption. The first is the gentrification of everyday monuments into sites that are used in middle class day-to-day living: loft apartments, offices, work places, cafés and
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bars. The second is the gentrification of industrial ruins into cultural centres: galleries, museums and theatres.
The suburb of Castlefield was once a key space of production during Manchester’s industrial era.
Following industrial collapse, the railways and canals of this area were marked as derelict, and the buildings were neglected and began to decompose. In recent years, the industrial aesthetic that had been a source of embarrassment for the Manchester City Council has been harnessed during the nostalgia for the recent past that has eventuated in these everyday monuments becoming spaces of daily consumption. According to Helen Hills, Castlefield has become one of the most fashionable places to live in or visit in Manchester following redevelopment, as the area is rebuilt through “bars, stylish cafés and nightclubs” (34). This urban reconstruction has seen the transformation of dormant factories, warehouses and mills to become “infested with sleek loft conversions” (34). Rather than hiding the residue of the past, it is refurbished and transformed into an ‘acceptable’ aesthetic, the architects designing these loft apartments and cafés highlighting the stripped floors and iron columns of old factories. This gentrification that embraces the industrial aesthetic has been summarised by Edensor, who argues that “the fabric of the past must be trampled down or converted into a sandblasted approximation of its former self, functioning as private accommodation or office space” (Industrial Ruin 58); and Crinson and
Tyler who note in their article “Totemic Park: Symbolic Representation in Post-Industrial Space” that these sites have “become the norm for aspirational living” (100).
The cafés, bars and lofts that line the Manchester Ship Canal have been decorated through the aesthetic of the recent past, but this has been achieved through a mystification and falsification of this history. Although these buildings are relics from the industrial past, the props that represent the industrial aesthetic are not actually artefacts from this epoch: the contemporary spatial narratives have been written through an appropriation and commodification of Manchester’s
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warehouses and factories has been directed through a fetish for this aesthetic. As interior designs call back to the industrial, the relics displayed in the buildings of Castlefield have been constructed as exhibitional pieces within these contemporary sites. The gentrified everyday monuments contain fictitious pipes and metal trappings that have been, as Hill identifies,
“manufactured expressly for the cafés and bars themselves” (37). Therefore, although appearing to harness the recent past, an authentic narrative of industry does not exist. It is a simulation in which objects are used to conjure an impersonal world of industrialisation, where industrialisation is constitutive of generic machinery, rather than memories and histories. As Hills argues of
Manchester’s gentrification, the workers and memories of the earlier era are lost, and fictitious industrial props write the past, “rather than the social relations of warehouse owners, workers and slaves” (37). As spatial narratives are rewritten, the sites of industry designated for the working classes are transformed into sites of consumption for tourists and the urban middle classes. This is a perverse process, where industrial disintegration indicative of a history of actual work and activity is rewritten as aesthetically attractive for leisure and consumption: a matter I will return to in the conclusion of this section.
The obsolete ghosts and skeletons of Manchester’s industrial past have also been gentrified into officially sanctioned art galleries or cultural centres of consumption. Although the avant-garde style of the industrial ruin as gallery space was once considered a radical aesthetic, Williams argues that is has been “wholeheartedly appropriated by the establishment. It no longer signifies marginality, rather the reverse” (122). In our contemporary society aspiring post-industrial cities are littered with converted warehouse museums, architectures that have become “the badge of cultural respectability signifying its accession to a realm of sophisticated, international urbanity”
(122). There are connections between the industrial gallery space and the picturesque cult of the ruin. Williams argues that this aesthetic central to English understandings of architecture and urbanism, was codified in the eighteenth century, but had a profound influence on the country’s
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post-war reconstruction where the urban landscape was romanticised following the bombing.
Like the industrial aesthetic of loft living that dominates the private space of Manchester, everyday monument have also been appropriated as sites that can perform cultural work: factories become public galleries, and warehouses become cultural centres, and this process has been widespread across England. For example, the Liverpool branch of the Tate Gallery (1988) was once a mid-Victorian dock warehouse; the Baltic at Gateshead (2002) was once a flourmill; and the Salt Mill of Saltaire is now the David Hockney Gallery.
Industrial Ruins as Cultural Centres
Manchester’s urban landscape has seen the metamorphosis of everyday monuments into cultural centres during recent years. Williams describes the transformation of the urban landscape in the following terms: “Against a backdrop of public squalor, these long-decayed and inward-looking conurbations became self-consciously spectacular, juxtaposing extraordinary wealth with equally extraordinary poverty, modernity with the ruins of the past, urban sophistication with entropic decay” (1). The contemporary incarnations of industrial architecture has created a city where vastly contrasting sites coincide, and again I return to the idea that sites of production and the working class are being sanitised and gentrified into sites of consumption. The Museum of
Science and Industry in Manchester was the Liverpool Road Station, a site intricately linked to industry and distribution: the station received and transported objects of industry until 1975. The industrial scaffolding of the station provided ample space for gallery development, and the
Museum opened in 1983 (see fig. 55). The gentrification of the site could only be realised through adequate funding, and until the Manchester City Council and national government provided sponsorship the site in the late 1980s, the site was undeveloped and unrestored. The space is now sponsored through the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and this funding has seen an expansion of the museum. The Museum of Science and Industry is not only located within the
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retired rail station, the dormant Lower Campfield Market Hall in Manchester’s city centre was acquired in the late 1980s and the space redesigned and converted into an Air and Space Hall.
Similarly, the Manchester Art Gallery has seen a transformation in its space following de- industrialisation. The site had housed the City Art Gallery when Manchester Corporation purchased the building in 1882, but the buildings that were bought in the industrial era were left to decay – despite the projected plans by the city council that these buildings would become spaces of expansion and consumption. These plans were not realised until 1998, when the gallery was closed for four years, opening in 2002 after the buildings had been refurbished (see fig. 56).
Builders connected the two original individual historic buildings of the museum and fused these sites together by incorporating the surrounding redundant urban landscape and a car park. In turn the site was magnified, and the buildings modernised and gentrified. The Manchester City
Council now celebrates the site, and uses a once redundant space by having appropriated it as a cabinet of display to showcase artworks and artefacts. Like Museum of Science and Industry, the renovation of this site has transpired under the guise of fostering local and cultural heritage.
While the Museum of Science and Industry rewrote an obsolete rail station into a site of culture, the Manchester Art Gallery rewrites the city by fusing a failing site of culture with surrounding architectures to produce a functioning space in an de-industrialised city centre.
Despite the differing ways that these cultural centres have developed, both the Museum of
Science and Industry and the Manchester Art Gallery are both part of the same cultural project.
They are attempts made by the Manchester City Council during post-industrialisation to rewrite the city in terms of a contemporary urban identity of progress, culture, and a successful era of modernisation. This has been achieved by obscuring the spaces of the urban fabric that contradict the aspirations of improvement and progress: the redundant railway station, the unused buildings and empty spaces across the city canvas. Eventually the sites of industrial failure become cultural
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accomplishments, and so the redesign and inscription of cultural centres in cities like Manchester has become increasingly commonplace. This standard re-inscription of spatial narratives has a major ramification, eventuating in the recent nature of this architectural phenomenon and the motivations behind this urban restructuring to be forgotten. Rather than triggering memories and histories, these renovated sites have become enveloped within discourses of gentrification and cultural ‘improvement.’ Inhabitants, visitors and councils no longer question the objectives and consequences of these urban projects. Instead, the transformation of the industrial city into the artistic or cultural city becomes desirable for all, and infiltrates every aspect of the urban environment.
The existing architectures that have been transformed into cultural centres are not the only sites of cultural consumption within Greater Manchester. The gentrification of the urban landscape has also included the transformation of wasteland into ‘useful’ sites. Across this chapter the
Manchester Ship Canal has featured prominently as a site of redundant industry. This waterway was opened in 1894, and connected Greater Manchester to the Mersey Estuary near Liverpool. It allowed ships to sail into the industrial heartlands of Manchester and the surrounding northwest, and provided access to the area that enabled the cities to enter a time of industrial prosperity. The industrial estates of Trafford, Manchester and Salford (all three intersecting on the canal) manufactured and exported textiles and machinery, but by the 1960s this industrial boom was in decline and the once prosperous areas became wastelands. These sites, like the outmoded buildings in Manchester city centre, have since been reconfigured into places of artistic and memorial consumption. The Imperial War Museum North (2002), designed by architect Daniel
Libeskind, is located at The Quays in Trafford along the Manchester Ship Canal (see fig. 57). The metallic gleam of the museum resembles an inner city high rise, rather than a museum on the periphery of an urban centre. Here the superfluous space has been converted into a site of remembrance, a memorial to war rather than to a recent industrial past. Nestled behind the
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radiance of the museum rests the dull exterior of Hevic bread factory, the public space of the
Imperial War Museum presenting a stark contrast to the site of production.
The city of Salford, directly across the Manchester Ship Canal from The Imperial War Museum, is an area that has also undergone a recent and obvious retransformation of the urban landscape in an attempt from the local council to redesign and re-aestheticise an area that became socially defunct. In an endeavour to recompose and regenerate the docklands of failed industry, the Lowry
Centre and Lowry Outlet Mall were built (see figs. 58-59). During the 1900s the site was a departure and arrival point of thousands of ships annually. Following a national dock strike in
1972 the shipping companies were sold, and the docks closed in 1982. In order to redeem the site in its post-industrial life the gleaming steel Lowry Centre was erected, a cultural centre that incorporates a museum, theatre, gallery, café, but also a designer outlet store directly alongside the main building of the Lowry. The architects James Stirling and Michael Wilford built the site as an abstract manifestation of a ship, the geometric silver shapes an attempt to evoke a maritime presence. Despite their attempt to memorialise the historiography of the area through the physicality of the building, the recent past does not resound across the site. Rather, the cultural centre is immersed in contemporary practices of consumption that overshadow histories and memories of industry. It is a complicated cultural space that rewrites a site of residual industry, but is accompanied by the remnants of previous failed attempts to restore the canal of Salford, attempts that have ironically reinforced the decrepit nature of the space – and these local monuments that write Salford’s contemporary urban space speak to larger national and global narratives about trade shifts.
In the context of this history, post-industrial cities are reliant on a contemporary cultured identity in order to legitimise new urban narratives that have been removed from the industrial past. This is not only achieved through institutions that reside in repaired historical sites, such as
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Manchester’s Science Museum or Gallery, or within entirely new structures built on superfluous land, such as the Imperial War Museum and the Lowry Centre. The exhibition of public art is also imbricated in the gentrification of these decaying industrial areas, as it becomes a vital prop for regenerating and marketing the city landscape. Bella Dicks argues in Culture on Display that the key to the creation of an exciting, carnivalesque, post-industrial city “has been the promotion of their artistic identity” (76); as these artistic endeavours are seen to validate the newly arranged spatial stories. Rather than limiting this contemporary cultural identity to internal spaces, the artworks that have traditionally been contained and designated to official gallery space, have made a move to the external space of city streets. Although there has been a history of permanent monumental artworks displayed across the urban landscape for the public as public art, Dicks locates an emergence of temporary exhibitions dissipating into new areas of cities from the 1980s onwards. Site-specific installations have became commonplace (such as the public artworks already discussed in this chapter that were commissioned for Manchester’s artistic Northern
Quarter) as cities of industry become cities of culture, and I argue that there is a direct correlation between the post-industrial city obscuring the recent past with the emergence of these public art installations. This transpired in the commercial centre of Manchester when local graffiti and stencil artists were invited to compose artworks onto the surface of an officially sanctioned monument that was undergoing restoration.
This is a site and event that sees a synthesis, and a gentrification, of the illicit artworks that are composed within industrial ruins being transported into the public space of the post-industrial city. The officially sanctioned monument Struggle for Peace and Freedom (1998) designed by sculptor Philip Jackson cannot be seen (see figs. 60-61). Hiding outside the Manchester City
Library and Town Hall, a rendered and repaired area of the city, the bronze figures of the sculpture are literally invisible, the monument having been locked behind bars and wood when it was damaged several years ago. This cage has then been entirely masked by an opaque exterior, a
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three-dimensional square formed from gigantic sheets of plywood. Concealed in such a fashion, the public sculpture stands suffocating: an ironic turn of events considering the title of the work.
While waiting repair it has been to its housed inside the decaying wood box until restoration. As such, the monument – or really the façade – has been nicknamed the ‘Cube.’ I have argued that post-industrial cities gentrify their spatial narratives and architectures by calling upon fictitious imaginings of the recent past commodities. It also appears that the illicit activities that transpire within sites of ruin, graffiti and stencil art, are brought to the gentrified areas of cities, but in a controlled and ordered manner.
The Cube was given a new specific artistic aesthetic when it was transformed into a canvas and the scaffolding was used as a temporary exhibition hall. At the end of 2005 Manchester’s Contact
Theatre commissioned local and international stencil artists to spray artworks onto the surface of the Cube, an urban and cultural scenario that is becoming fashionable in post-industrial cities: the graffiti and stencil work that is removed and erased from the urban fabric, or is exhibited illicitly within everyday monuments, is relocated into space where it would typically be resisted by local residents and councils. In this particular case, the artworks are displayed in front of the
Manchester Public Library. The artworks that are interpreted as blemishes by authorising powers when they are composed illicitly by artists onto the urban fabric, become signifiers of a contemporary artistic identity for the post-industrial city. This appropriation of this art style, however, is particularly complicated. The work by Manchester artist Hammo is such an example.
The artwork consists of a young man, blankly watching television inside an apartment, whilst a futuristic robot crushes, dismantles and destroys the urban landscape behind him. Sitting on a couch watching the television, the boy is oblivious to the devastation that is taking place behind him (see fig. 62).
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The Contact Theatre commissioned Hammo’s composition during the 2005 Doodlebug Festival.
This is a yearly art venture in Manchester that brings graffiti and stencils to the more public areas of Manchester. During this festival the windows of the fashionable Cornerhouse on Oxford Road, a gallery, bar and bookshop sponsored by Damien Hirst and Steven Coogen, were turned into a transparent canvas for a collection of painters; murals composed across the walls of the Northern
Quarter; and the surfaces of the Cube were called into play by Hammo and other contemporary graffiti artists (see fig. 63). Although Hammo painted his work onto the Cube in early November, the exhibition of his work was brought to an early retirement. Without warning, the work was erased, painted over in thick grey paint, on the morning of Remembrance Day. How could the public of Manchester, who gather outside the Town Hall on the 11th of November, possibly commemorate the war heroes with contemporary art alongside them? It appears that although graffiti may be condoned, even endorsed, by local councils to project a youthful and alternative urban identity, this contemporary artistic urban identity must be regulated, surveyed, and controlled. Like the architectures and objects of the industrial past that are used to depict the aesthetic of the recent industrial past without the political and social problems, the work of graffiti artists is celebrated, but the creative pursuit that once disrupted the scripted event space of the city has been gentrified. Consequently, these artists and their work become props in the
Manchester City Council’s projection of an open-minded and artistic community, as the artist and their compositions are stripped of their ability to disrupt dominant spatial narratives and organisation, or given the opportunity to open the urban space up to alternative stories and memories.
The transformation of industrial ruins into galleries and cultural centres as traditionally illicit artworks are permitted within the urban landscape forms a complicated cycle of gentrification. As decayed spaces, industrial ruins present themselves as viable sites for the creation of impromptu galleries where artworks can be composed, exhibited and displayed by certain sectors of the
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community. These unofficial or illegal art sites also fall within the boundaries of vandalism, and as such are blemishes on urban narrative of progress and spatial order. As urban ruins are converted into artistic canvasses, an ironic transformation takes place where industrial ruins are gentrified. These illicit galleries are erased from the city, as ruins are restored and converted into heritage sites, and are paradoxically reconfigured as institutionalised artistic centres. In turn the ruins along the docks and canal systems in northwest England are slowly transformed as they are converted into officially sanctioned cultural sites. Factories where the working class interacted are retrieved for traditionally high culture purposes, and industrial ruins are ‘improved’ as they are renovated into houses for the arts and sciences. This is an interesting crossover of appropriating the same space for two similar, yet distinctly different purposes: private art sites for the prohibited graffiti artist, and public art sites for the celebrated and institutionalised artist.
Despite this metamorphosis of waste site into a landmark, it is one instigated by local art councils and governments, and this gentrification defeats the projects of artists who want to use the city in a way that disrupts the scripted event space.
Contemporary post-industrial projects designed by local councils, such as the Manchester City
Council, to smooth over the ruptures that industrial ruins etch into the urban fabric ultimately work to foster the myth that urban development is progressive. The recomposition of cities cultivates this fiction of progression by erasing or revising of episodes from the past that counteract the linear development of modernity. This may be through the gentrification of decaying factories into sites of consumption or taking control of illicit forms of artwork that have the potential to disrupt spatial organisation. Once the architectures and activities of industrial ruins are gentrified, the alternative memories and histories stored within these spaces are concealed behind glass, concrete, and plaster. Further, the sanitising of everyday monuments also sanitises the past. Even if a gentrified industrial site has been reconfigured in such a way that the site evokes history and urban memories, the everyday monument has still been stripped of its
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ability to present a comprehensive archaeology of the past or be a space where involuntary memories may rise to the surface. As a consequence, there is the loss of an earlier culture that the ostensible presence of the past through architecture does nothing to recover: gentrification prevents ruins from performing memory work.
Once everyday monuments have been gentrified, the labours and actions of workers and machinery, the poverty associated with failed industry, and the individual, cultural and urban memories associated with an industrial site, are all obscured from the urban narrative. This is a consequence of recoding the past in order for history to be presented in a consumable manner. If a local government is to incorporate the industrial past within the contemporary narratives written by the post-industrial city, then it stands that certain elements of this past must be repressed.
Therefore, the contemporary city that appropriates the aesthetics of decay does so in such a way that is intricately tied and related to processes of social and historical amnesia. As the industrial past is redefined by current architectural and political practices of gentrification, Hill argues that the recent past is released from its “troubling association with conflictual social relations” (34); but this release does not necessarily indicate productive or progressive outcomes. Not only does the scrubbing of the industrial debris from post-industrial urban narratives obscure the past, it also masks the motivation behind this gentrification, where the processes that ‘remember’ the industrial past force this recent history to become unrecognisable. The memories and histories of the working class activities and individuals are lost as the post-industrial fetishises the industrial aesthetic, forcing the industrial past to be illegible to those who once used these spaces.
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Memories and Modernity:
Concluding Comments on the Recomposition of Manchester
Everyday monuments facilitate the reorganising of the scripted space of cities, constituting architectures that can be used creatively by offering an alternative to the spectacularising and ceaselessly improving discourse of modernity. Industrial ruins are also realms where ghosts and memories from the recent past can rise to the surface, where involuntary memories can be retrieved. In other words, industrial ruins provide spaces of activity that exist beyond the policed and staged urban centre, and their rough edges and decay contradict the apparently smooth surfaces of modernity. These characteristics of industrial ruins eventuate in the gentrification of these sites, from apparently redundant spaces into zones of consumption. Therefore, despite the relationship between the everyday and ways of remembering the recent past that are absent from dominant urban narratives, the importance and usefulness of everyday monuments is concealed by contemporary spatial practices. This limits the spatial stories and narratological possibilities present by industrial ruins, as the ability of everyday monuments to house and re-site the past in unique ways is hindered. By papering over the sites of redundant industry, the contemporary post- industrial city deems the everyday monument as banal, worthless, and contradictory to notions of progress. Industrial ruins are obscured from view across the post-industrial urban landscape, through the transformation and gentrification of these sites from ‘unproductive’ to being culturally ‘useful.’ This has a stream of consequences in terms of memory and the recent past. If industrial ruins are made invisible, or are suffocated, then the ghosts of the recent past that haunt these spaces are prohibited from resurrecting the memories that are housed within the sites of decay.
According to Peck and Ward, the authorising powers that dictate the recomposition of the post- industrial city may reconfigure industrial ruins through “a humantistic desire to heal the urban
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wounds left by industry” (115). Although this motivation may be generated through the intent to improve an urban landscape, these attempts to repair the ruptures left by a failed industrial era alter access to the past and tamper with urban memory in complicated ways. The act of gentrification conceals the layers of alternative memories and stories housed in industrial ruins, the result being that everyday monuments are no longer able to perform the memory work that made them so unique in comparison to officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic sites.
Where these monuments have had memory ascribed to them, everyday monuments were the memories they housed: a synergy existed between the architecture and the ghosts of the recent past. When industrial ruins are dignified and conform to the contemporary urban landscape, the obsolete buildings of industry have been restored and a dominant narrative written over the residue of the recent past. The effect is that the contentious and politically difficult industrial narratives are obscured, and, more importantly, the relationship between the everyday monument and the recent past is severed. Moran argues that a consequence of this practice is the amnesia of additional spatial narratives that could otherwise constitute “elements of the past [that] might have conspired to forge an alternative present” (142).
When the post-industrial city sees the erasure of all the architectural abrasions, the everyday and its memories have essentially been disguised under a flattened surface that obscures the modality of power at work (authorising powers remodelling the city in terms of progress) and also hides additional narratives of the past. This reaffirms a contemporary dominant memory of the space that attempts to exclude the defunct and the crumbling, irrespective of whether these waste sites have evolved to present innovative and alternative uses for the community. The current re- spatialisation and gentrification of the city distances industrial ruins from their original context as they are camouflaged and resituated in their immediate social context without a past. This prevents everyday monuments from revealing pasts, as ruins in their decay are places of transit, where the ghosts of the past merge with the imperatives of the present. They are passageways that
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constitute interchanges between foreign memories and a circulation of collective or individual experience, and they are sites that house ghosts and memories and allow involuntary memories to transpire. The gentrification of the industrial ruin smothers, chokes and exorcises the ghosts of the recent past from residual urban narratives.
The renovation and gentrifying of everyday ruins eventuates in their assimilation into narratives of progress and consumption. The memories of the past are clouded beneath this guise. As I have observed, the rise of loft-living, the appropriation of the industrial materials as props in these spaces, and the remodelling of these sites into galleries and cultural centers, actually denigrates the recent past and forces it into the realm of kitsch and nostalgia, and this is a process that disregards and contradicts the use values and earlier narratives of work, production and industrialisation. This process is reductive: industrial disintegration that represents an actual history of work and activity is rewritten into a space that is aesthetically attractive for leisure and consumption. This is primarily because the effacing of history to create a contemporary gleaming surface that cannot lock the complex past into the subterranean of the urban fabric, for it is in the ruins that these narratives can be retrieved. Hills that the dynamism of histories and memories housed in industrial areas is collapsed during gentrification as the upwardly mobile middle classes “colonise for leisure and residence the space of the working class, especially places of working class labour and places once closely associated with unruliness and transgression” (36).
The recomposition of the Manchester skyline sees the everyday potentially being silenced or drowned from the space. Peck and Ward acknowledge this potential difficulty in rewriting the space, stating that Manchester has “never had much patience for nostalgia or tradition” and has essentially “trampled over its past on the way to a new future” (4). Williams suggests that this condition of Manchester is an effect of the city having been characterised through anxiety where a preoccupation with the future and the potentials of what Manchester could become, neglects the
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present and past. Therefore the space and its activities are “being directed towards the future, headless of what chaos is might actually bring” (200); indicative of rampant redesign of factories and warehouses along the Manchester Ship Canal in the past ten years. Manchester has suffered from a tearing and scattering of memories as the industrial past is forced into the unconscious and the ruins are hidden from both the urban landscape and the memory of its inhabitants. The consequence of this is that the spatial narratives of workers and industrial sites have been rewritten and gentrified to the point where the shadows and spectres of the working class past are further removed and obscured, making it almost impossible for these narratives to haunt the urban memories of Manchester. This is only exaggerated when the recent past is reconfigured, as
Williams identifies, through a “self-deceiving celebration of an auratic and fictionalised industrial past” (39); where gentrification has eventuated in the taming and smoothing of difficult and contentious pasts within the renovated space of the post-industrial city.
Post-industrial cities are in danger of losing their recent pasts, as these narratives are thrown into oblivion. There is little chance for these histories to be resurrected within the dominant urban landscape as authorising powers and governments are obscuring and papering over these pasts – the idea that traditional monumental space will commemorate failed industry and lost industrial histories is not a likely scenario. The absence of the industrial past from the city forces the memories to also be omitted, and it is mainly within the industrial ruin, the depositories of memories, that these pasts can be retrieved and the betrayals of memory can be readily recovered.
I return to the world of contemporary art as a space where memory work is performed, memory work that is absent from the urban landscape. This is essential: involuntary memories of the past need to be saved as this form of involuntary remembering allows for pasts and neglected memories to become visible. In the academic and artistic community of Manchester there has been a combined attempt by theorists and artists to halt the forced amnesia and mystification of the recent past that has transpired as the contemporary post-industrial city is renovated, by
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revealing alternative pasts, urban memories and involuntary memories across the city. The result was the multi-disciplinary exhibition Fabrications (2002), an event organised by the Manchester
Metropolitan University and the Cube Gallery (a private gallery, not the public Cube that contains
Philip Jackson’s damaged sculpture) that brought theory, contemporary art, and the issues associated with memory and the urban landscape, to the fore within Manchester.
Fabrications combined artists and architectural historians who had appropriated Manchester and its architectural diversity as sites of communication, where the research of these cultural theorists and artists was focused through the lens of urban memory in order to theorise amnesia, remembering and urban space in Manchester. Natalie Rudd, in the text that accompanied the collaborative projects, states that Manchester is a city where “a network of seemingly arbitrary unions, chance developments and oppositional narratives has proved a rich area of investigation”
(6); and the accompanying artworks contest and question the architectural and social changes that have affected Manchester following the collapse of industry. The aim of the project was summarised by Rudd: “Neither the art works nor the academic research relies on notions of an absolute truth or on an overriding linear development or ‘progress.’ In the gap left in the absence of such ‘certainties’ exists a parity of different voices and an engagement with the coincidental, irrational and forgotten aspects of the city” (9). Artists Adam Chodzko and Nathan Coley, given as examples of memory installation that incorporate the mnemotechnics of the industrial city into their work in the introductory chapter of this thesis, had their work exhibited in Fabrications.
This project is an appropriate juncture of moving from a study of the post-industrial landscape of
Manchester, to my concluding section on this form of contemporary art and a study of the urban memories with which these types of installations engage.
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IV
Mnemotechny of the Industrial City:
Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View
This concluding section moves from the external urban landscape of Manchester, to the internal space of the Tate Modern art gallery, London. Whilst contemporary post-industrial landscapes are writing over the recent past, as industrial ruins are gentrified into sites of consumption, there has been the concurrent development of an art movement in which artists employ mnemonic practices to recover the rapidly disappearing industrial era from urban space. Crinson, who identifies this form of memory installation, argues that these works that consider the mnemotechny of the post- industrial city have a preoccupation with “the way traumatic experience restructures both history and subjectivity” (195). These installations engage with urban memory, not through the evocation of the trace, but through self-reflexivity, research, and site-specific installations. This sees these artworks explicitly exhibiting the past, overtly relying on the presentation of the artist’s research undertaken in the creation of their work. Crinson argues that these works offer a number of ways to rethink and reimagine the relationship between memory and the city; rather than appropriating the guise of the memorial in the conventional sense, these memory installations:
take the contested nature of memory itself as their subject…they are reactions to a new wave
of urban transformation aimed at finalising the projected post-industrial city on the very sites
and in the very buildings of the old industrial city: the trumpeting of loft living, of urban
villages, of public-private partnerships, of millennium squares and so forth. (196-7)
The gentrification of industrial ruins, and the obscuring of the memories housed in these sites, has eventuated in the creation of artworks that actively engage with discourses of remembering and forgetting in the post-industrial city. As everyday monuments are erased from the urban fabric, and residual spatial stories forced into oblivion, they are resurrected within the world of
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contemporary art by artists whose agenda is explicitly connected to the recent industrial past. In their exhibition of mnemotechnics of urban space, Crinson argues that these memory installations place memory “in an interesting relationship to aesthetic practices” (196). Cornelia Parker’s Cold
Dark Matter is a memory installation that writes a binary between official or traditional forms of memorialisation with acts of devastation. Providing a commentary on destruction and recreation,
Parker’s work investigates the relationship between architecture and memory, fragmentation and remembering, decay and forgetting, in our post-industrial climate. Although not as overly site- specific as Chodzko’s Remixer, Cold Dark Matter works as a map of time that has passed, a map of how memory works. Parker’s installation resurrects the urban memories lost through gentrification in its presentation of mnemotechnics of urban space, where the sculpture mirrors the decomposition of the industrial ruin. The suspended installation of Cold Dark Matter is also indicative of the tensions that exist between ruins and memories, working as an analogy of the ways that memories are lost and altered when they are recollected (see fig. 64).
Cold Dark Matter is built through the remnants of a garden shed that was blown up in a controlled detonation by the British Army School of Ammunition: it has been assembled though a deliberate process of calculated destruction where the shed needed to be distorted but the objects housed within it not altered completely. The contents fragmented during the explosion and were scattered across a field (see figs. 65-68). These damaged, melted, burnt, scorched, charred, broken, fragmented, decomposed, demolished, or destroyed objects include household objects, sporting equipment, domestic appliances, old toys, gardening tools and a copy of Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past, were all fragments rescued by a platoon of soldiers following the explosion. These pieces were then suspended from the ceiling of the Tate Modern in a 4m x 4m x
4m cube, as if caught in mid-explosion. The fragments are illuminated from the centre by a single light source, a globe at the centre. As the destroyed shed is porous, the light radiates through the hanging explosion and casts shadows of the debris onto the gallery walls. The remnants are
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imperfect and shattered, but still recognisable as the ghosts of their former selves; charred or melted they haunt the gallery providing glimpses of what once was. Therefore the instantaneous waste was strategically generated to comment on the way in which society comes to define or accept waste, deliberates upon how we remember, whilst placing the debris within the gallery proper.
The shed was initially displayed in whole at the Chisenhale Gallery in London, before it was destroyed and elaborately reconstructed in its altered form (see fig. 69). In the shed’s second incarnation in the gallery as the installation Cold Dark Matter, it is characterised through mobility, having been suspended by wires rather than being held by a solid base to the gallery floor. Consequently the entire work has the potential to change and morph, and this trait is most evident or emblematic within the shadows that are cast onto the gallery walls. As the installation hovers from the ceiling the remnants of the shed sway slightly on the wires. This mobility is intensified by the silhouettes of the artwork that recompose themselves on the gallery walls with each minor movement of the hanging fragments. In this way Cold Dark Matter as a whole is not static and through its fluidity the work secures its definition as memory sculpture as it contradicts the fixed and rigid space of officially sanctioned monuments, in turn becoming anti-monumental.
By dialectically evoking the monument and monumental in nature and culture through its fluidity it powerfully inscribes a dimension of memory that is distinct from the memorial. As a memory installation Cold Dark Matter speaks to the concerns of memory and absence, literally and metaphorically offering a trace of the past. Rather than suffering the fate of static monuments that are illegible or opaque, Cold Dark Matter allows the processes of memory to be demystified.
The shadows produced by the installation see the void between the fragments of the shed, and the walls of the gallery, becoming integral. This empty space in Cold Dark Matter allows for a manifestation of the shape and the image of the remnants. A sense of the uncanny is created when
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the chaos of the explosion is lit by the light source and the fragments are altered within the void between the installation and the gallery walls. This empty space allows the remnants to be most visually returned to their original whole, where the shadows present the charred objects as apparitions of their original shape. In their display as silhouettes the remnants of the explosion become figurations of the original, where the burnt bicycle wheel manifests itself as undamaged through the blackened shadow that does not reveal its decay. Although the remnants have been removed from their state of decay they are, ironically, simultaneously empty. Presenting a glimpse of memory, the shadows of the shed haunt the gallery as ghosts of their former selves, visibly presenting a figuration of the past through the history imbued within them. This hovering between emptiness and a return to the whole indicates a fascination that Parker’s works have with dualities, most overtly the relationship between remembering and forgetting. In turn the installation reinforces the similarities between fragments and memory.
Within Parker’s work the shadows operate as traces of memory, but the discarded objects are also affectively charged fragments that have history and memories housed within them, and stand for the absent whole of the shed and its contents. The remnants present a living map, visually exhibiting a figuration of the past making Cold Dark Matter an articulation of the passing of time and the displacing of the past into the present. When the ruined remains of the shed, the pieces of burnt, broken, decayed, fragmented and destroyed rubble are reconstructed following the explosion the work it constituted through objects that are familiar and recognisable. Yet, they have been altered. The recomposed fragments are suspended as an echo of the original shed and the actual detonation, but however charred and shattered the elements of the mobile are they can still be deciphered. The work literally provides evidence that the act of remembering will never be identical to the original, but an echo or trace that can still be recognised. The fragment, in its imperfect, partial and thoroughly incomplete disintegration, is analogous to the ways in which memories change and morph each time they are recollected. Like the act of remembering in the
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present that always rewrites the past, the remnant recalls the object it once was and perpetually rewrites its relationship to its former self. Parker’s work overtly acknowledges the mirroring between the disintegration of objects and the amnesia inherent in memory through its generation of destroyed and corroded objects. They bring to our attention the point that memory is always recollection and representation, in that objects and sites crumble in the same way that memories are mentally recovered.
Although Cold Dark Matter appears to be a work that simply damages the seemingly banal garden shed, I argue that the exhibition of the shed in its entirety, the process of obliteration, and its return to the gallery in an altered form, is metaphorically loaded and the artwork is intricately tied to the processes of memory. If we explicitly align the processes of memory with Parker’s installation then the original undamaged shed can be interpreted as the memory that we are attempting to retrieve; the explosion of the shed is then emblematic of the amnesia inherent within the storing and recollection of memories; and the shadows of the fragments on the walls is the remembrance, the altered recollection of the original memory. Between the hanging explosion and the shadows on the wall exists a space that is analogous to oblivion, and I argue this is representative of where the memory work takes place. This is the paradox of memory: that every act of remembrance is accompanied by an act of forgetting or a betrayal of memory. The shadows thrown onto walls are echoes of the original objects, they have been altered through the act of remembering in the present, and it is this space between the wall and the installation where the memory work takes place. Through the fragment, this work is operating in a different manner to monumental space, drawing a boundary through installation art and urban development projects.
Memory installations call to mind memory, retrieve alternative pasts, and reveal modalities of power, unlike officially sanctioned monuments, symbolic sites and gentrified everyday monuments that work to obscure residual memories and pasts.
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Conclusion
Resilient Monuments:
Potential Futures for the Built Environment and Memory Installations
Monuments are reminders that memories and buildings are not enduring: cities and their architectures are transitory and transformative, even though they appear to be concrete realities.
In our contemporary society, monuments are increasingly viewed by communities, governments and theorists as politically, aesthetically, socially and ethically suspect, and the limited capacity of all monuments to perform memory work has been interrogated by spatial theorists, art historians, theorists of memory, and critical theorists. Through this thesis I have argued that the intricate relationship between memory, forgetting, and the monument is a paradoxical relationship indicative of our contemporary society that is simultaneously criticised of archival fever and historical amnesia by academics and communities. The boom in remembering has been accompanied by a boom in forgetting, and this dual explosion is symptomatic of the shift from postmodernism to globalisation, where nostalgia in our technologically-focused society sees cultures attempting to live in the past in the present. Although monuments appear to be durable architectures that reveal the past through the carving of spatial stories into the urban landscape, they ultimately obscure spatial stories, mask alternative narrations of the past, hide residual urban memories, mystify history, and disguise the modality of power behind their construction.
As we have learnt from memory theorists Andreas Huyssen and James E. Young, monuments cannot function within the urban landscape as memorials as they are disconnected to the pasts that they reference. Once cast in stone, memories and pasts are forgotten, become detached, and cannot be comprehensively read in terms of the spatial stories they are inscribed within. Rather than examining these narratives in terms of collective memory, post memory, or individual
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memory, I approach contemporary urban space in terms of urban memory. I specifically align my theorisation of the past with the city, arguing that monuments are spaces in the city where the intangible and imagined concepts of history, memory, forgetting and identity converge.
I have critiqued the invisible nature of monuments and their narratives. These narratives are most obvious in terms of the static space written by officially sanctioned monuments that is determined by authorising powers, and the imagined space composed by symbolic monuments that have cultural and memorial significance attached to them by both authorising powers and individuals within the community. I have argued that the salient characteristic of monuments is that they are tied to oblivion, as their compose dominant spatial stories mask residual memories and pasts.
Building on my interrogation of officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic sites, I studied the transitory space narrated by everyday monuments, the forgotten monuments of post-industrial cities that appear to work as archives. The seemingly superfluous architectures of everyday monuments reveal an archaeological layering of history that allows the ghosts of the past to be resurrected, as these buildings literally and metaphorically expose the stratum of urban history. I have shown that the contemporary practice of gentrifying industrial ruins in post-industrial cities stifles the capacity of everyday monuments to reveal a collection of urban memories, and as a consequence, these monuments also bury and conceal the past in the manner as officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic sites.
Irrespective of the apparent redundancy of the monument as a memorial object, at the same moment in time when these objects are judged to be insufficient tools of memory, officially sanctioned monuments and symbolic monuments are still being relied upon by governments and communities, such as post-independent Vilnius, to solidify the intangible concepts of memory, identity, history and culture, and everyday monuments are increasingly being gentrified in an attempt to remove residual pasts from the urban landscape, such as the conversion of factories
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and warehouses into cultural centres in post-industrial Manchester. This is the fundamental paradox of monuments: they are inadequate as commemorative sites because they camouflage alternative interpretations of the past, disguise the motivation behind their creation, and hide the present movement of fetishising origins. This is also why the study of monuments at this moment in history is crucial: to realise that prevailing memorial techniques fail to suitably and comprehensively reveal urban memories and histories, and that monuments actually conquer the ability of cultures to remember. Despite these flaws, there continues to be an acceleration in the number of officially sanctioned monuments being constructed across cultures as the duty to remember the past in the city has become a dominant global phenomenon; an increase in attaching meanings and identities to symbolic monuments to signify the unique nature of cities as national and cultural borders collapse; and a wave of gentrification as everyday monuments are transformed into sites of consumption.
I propose that the gentrification of everyday monuments is indicative of a complex relationship between gentrification, the ruin, and memory. These sites of production and manufacturing are currently being renovated into architectures of consumption as industrial ruins are converted into cultural centres and loft-living apartment buildings, as the residual spatial stories written by everyday monuments are recomposed to align with contemporary spatial and cultural agendas.
Once gentrified, these monuments are unable to work as elucidating devices for uncovering alternative pasts and involuntary memories from the city. This transformation of everyday monuments is also suggestive of a form of ‘life-style monumentalism,’ where industrial ruins become monuments that people live inside: communities are literally inhabiting their own urban pasts and memories, an act that is symptomatic of the contemporary attachment for the industrial aesthetic in our post-industrial climate.
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Without intentional acts of remembrance, buildings, streets, ruins and monuments are inert materialities within the cityscape: irrespective of the boom in monument making, I have demonstrated that these objects are unable to actively reveal the past. The rise in the construction of countermonuments and anti-monuments, especially those built in German cities to mark the traumatic events of World War Two, is evidence that this epoch of monument making and unmaking has been a precursor for a contemporary form of visual cultural studies that explores the complexities of urban memories and brings residual pasts to the fore. As memory and forgetting have become central concerns in the composition of urban landscapes, I have discussed the development across cultures of temporary art installations that engage with the recent past in a way that officially sanctioned monuments, symbolic monuments, and everyday monuments are unable to achieve. If the urban fabric cannot remember for itself, despite the saturation of cities with monuments and commemorations, it stands that others will endeavour to create intentional acts of remembrance that actively demystify the public space of the city. It is with memory installations that residual urban memories can be disseminated within contemporary culture.
The monument has become an increasingly outmoded tool for remembrance and inscribing history into the built environment, and the temporal forms of memory installations contradict the solidity of the monument. Memory installations perform memory work, they are alternative spaces where residual histories, memories and identities can be recovered, retrieved and reconsidered in the present. These site-specific installations include Gintaras Karosas’ Infotree
LNK that appropriates a destroyed monument in order to respond to the inherent invisibility of the monument, Susan Norrie’s ENOLA that casts the past into the present through a DVD projection in order to comment on contemporary spatial practices, or Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter where the archive and the fragment are brought to the gallery to remind us of the incomplete and partial nature of memory, remembrance, oblivion and amnesia. Although contemporary art does not ultimately resolve the problems and difficulties of representing pasts and memories across the
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urban landscape, a process that is fundamentally tied to political agendas and power relationships, it is a forum where histories and memories are exposed. These pasts will always be recomposed when they are reinserted into the present in a cultural form, but these memory installations provide access to forgotten narratives, stories that have slipped into oblivion.
The rise of contemporary memory installation, artworks that critically assess the invisible and indolent nature of monuments by performing memory work, marks the beginning of alternative ways of recovering and representing residual pasts. Nevertheless, I do not argue that these artworks mark the end of the monument, and this is evinced by continual attempts by governments and communities to solidify pasts and memories into concrete realities. In the regulated space of the city, monuments work as material reminders that memories are fleeting, that governments and communities will attempt to consign pasts to objects, and that alternative interpretations of history can ultimately be eradicated from contemporary memories. Memory installations stand in contrast to the gentrified fabric of urban landscapes and the controlled space of the monument, allowing the city to become an archival form rather than a stage for determining fixed narrations of the past, and offer new ways of reading monuments and their narratives. Critiquing the evolution of memory practices in our contemporary society demystifies the static, imagined and transitional narratives of urban space. Monuments are ideological constructs support power relations, and this is why they are continuing to be inserted into the urban landscape. It is beyond the scope of this thesis, however, to determine what the future of monument making and unmaking ought to be. As far as contemporary art and urban landscapes are concerned, there is a case for monuments and memory installations to exist concomitantly, where artworks provide commentaries on the rigidities, potentials and drawbacks of official and unofficial memorials, on nostalgia, on the fetish for the past, and on global attempts of cultural and historical demarcation through the use of the built environment.
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Websites
Tobu World Square. 7 October 2004.
National Recording Project. Ed. Public Monuments and Sculpture Association. 10 July 2007.
Images
The Aschrott-Brunnen, 1908. Facing History and Ourselves. 10 October 2007
Attie, Shimon, The Writing on the Wall, 1991. Claude Samuel. 1 November 2007.
Chodzko, Adam, Remixer, 2002. Ride Media. 5 August 2007
Gerz, Jochen and Esther Shalev-Gerz, Monument Against Fascism, War and Violence, 1986.
Shalev Gerz. 10 October 2007
---. Monument Against Fascism, War and Violence, 1993. Shalev Gerz. 10 October 2007
Hoheisel, Horst, Aschrott Fountain, 1987. Facing History and Ourselves. 10 October 2007.
Jackson, Philip, Struggle for Peace and Freedom, 1998. National Recording Project. 18 October
2005
Karosas, Gintaras, Infotree LNK, 2000. Centre of Europe Sculpture Park. 28 August 2004
Kemp, David, Tib St Horn, 1999. National Recording Project. 18 October 2005
Morrison, Kerry, A Monument to Vimto, 1992. National Recording Project. 18 October 2005
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Norrie, Susan, ENOLA, 2004. Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Visual Arts Queensland.
15 August 2004
---. ENOLA, 2004. Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Experimenta. 15 August 2004
Parker, Cornelia, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1999. Tate Modern. 22 September 2006
---. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1999. Tate Modern. 22 September 2006
---. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1999. 22 September 2006
Salcedo, Doris, Unland, 1995 – 98. Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. Museum of Modern
Art, San Francisco. 10 October 2007
Yasuda, Kan, Ishinki-Touchstone, 1996. National Recording Project. 18 October 2005
All other images are photographs taken by Darien Jane Rozentals.
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