Reading the Spatial Narratives Written by Contemporary Urban Landscapes

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 Rozentals 1 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, Rozentals 2 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,

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