A Questionnaire on Monuments Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00327/1754211/octo_a_00327.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monu- ments and other markers involving histories of racial conflict. How do these charged situations shed light on the ethics of images in civil society today? Speaking generally or with specific examples in mind, please consider any of the following questions: What histories do these public symbols represent, what histo- ries do they obscure, and what models of memory do they imply? How do they do this work, and how might they do it differently? What social and political forces are in play in their erection or dismantling? Should artists, writers, and art histori- ans seek a new intersection of theory and praxis in the social struggles around such monuments and markers? How might these debates relate to the question of who is authorized to work with particular images and archives? —Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty OCTOBER 165, Summer 2018, pp. 3–177. © 2018 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 4 OCTOBER LUCIA ALLAIS Commission after commission has been convened, by institutions and munic- ipalities, to deal with contested monuments on their grounds. One emerging solu- tion that has proved popular is “recontextualization”: A monument can stay, but its original context must be explained on site, thus conveying “historical complexi- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00327/1754211/octo_a_00327.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 ty.” Such will be the fate of Christopher Columbus in New York, Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, and many more. I want to point to the tragic inadequacy of this contextualism, as both con- cept and tool, for the task at hand. 1. Against Content There is a real danger that considering the content of each individual monu- ment, however thoughtfully, avoids taking monumental collections for what they have also always been: instruments of territorial management, penetration, and control. The statues of segregationists that began to occupy town squares across the American South in the late nineteenth century were intended to intimidate the urbanizing waves of former slaves. As time went on this spatial punctuation became more fine-grained. When statues were flanked by public amenities such as drinking fountains, the same social message was delivered by both public systems, even if in the fountain’s case it was the WHITES | COLORED labels that did all the work. Conversely, waves of monumental empowerment can be discovered in American history. As Southern towns were installing their statues, Italian masons and stoneworkers emigrated to the northeastern United States to apply their trades on the ornate revivalist architecture of the East Coast. These workers used their control of the industry to construct statues, name streets, and invent a cultural heritage in perfect synchrony with their social elevation to positions of civic power. These monuments were not only historical portraits. They were signposts, markers used to attract and repel certain constituencies, affect housing policies, anchor planning decisions. And so it is today: White nationalists have reactivated not the symbolic value of Confederate statues themselves but their capacities as a mass media writ far and wide. They do not recuperate specific statues’ identities, but instead leverage their ubiquity and their availability for a range of race-baiting messages across platforms (cue the live, torchlit mob). The fact that the sculptures are largely interchangeable works is key to their potency in reproducing a vague but persistent message of fear. A Questionnaire on Monuments 5 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00327/1754211/octo_a_00327.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Jimmie Durham. Still Life with Spirit and Xitle. 2007. Photograph courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. 2. Against Context All the talk of recontextualization seems almost comically quaint because it has been four decades already since Rosalind Krauss radically redescribed the rela- tion between sculpture, architecture, and landscape as an “expanded field.” Drawing from the history of the monument, she showed that all sculpture was dis- appearing into the manufacture of context, the congealment of space, and the reconfiguration of land. This is hardly an obscure reference. Some prominent American artists have already leveraged this congealment to political ends. Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, a gigan- tic sphinx modeled of white sugar, monumentalizes the material output of a sugarcane field—a slave’s territory—in a defensive posture that is also an offensive gesture (crouching, all the better to take it in the rear). Now that Jimmie Durham is the target of identitarian politics, his Still Life with Spirit and Xitle stationed in front of the Hirshhorn Museum looks like it was made by hurling a piece of a national monu- ment from the roof of a federal museum, marking the spot of a crime that is equal parts state violence and character assassination. 6 OCTOBER Such gestures of sculptural affront are not limited to the United States. In central Germany, the Centre for Political Beauty installed a rotated replica of a portion of Monument to the Murdered Jews in front of the village home of an anti- immigration politician, redeploying congealment as political aggression against the protection of aristocratic privilege that “locality” provides. Does anyone really believe that putting a plaque near a sculpture, or even Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00327/1754211/octo_a_00327.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 leaving a niche empty, will convey “historical complexity”? More likely, donors and legacies will suffer a little historical ambiguity in return for the benefit of the auratic afterglow of monuments, and the power to distribute people in space in very complex ways. 3. The Territorial Turn The real and expanded context is territorial. This recent conflation of race wars and monument wars has thrust the US into a worldwide wave of heritage conflicts—a veritable “territorial turn”—where disputes over monuments inevitably ooze outward to encompass entire parks, city centers, pilgrimage routes, etc., acquiring immense political valence and potentially devolving into revolution. Monuments serve as a dispersed cultural archive; their preservation involves control of nothing less than the national narrative. The US is uniquely positioned within this territorial turn not only because of its clear history of spatial segregation but also because US national monuments have been territorial all along—parks mostly, and plots of land with only inciden- tal architecture or sculpture. This means the US’s monuments bureaucracy was integrated into land management and social policing from the start. In the early twentieth century, southwestern tribal lands were set aside as national monuments by the federal government in part to preempt more expansive claims of self-deter- mination and delimit Native belonging in space. Federal recreation sites were segregated well into the 1960s. Even today, the fight against environmentalism unfolds over the “right” to throw away a plastic bottle in a national park. The US is also a nation with a class of cultural experts that is decentralized, multicultural, and not particularly government-inclined. This makes for a possible mobilization that goes far beyond being impaneled about this monument or that. During World War II, it was refugee American scholars who compiled thou- sands of pages listing and locating Europe’s monuments, handing them over to Allied commanders for “avoidance.” What they did far exceeded what had been asked of them: They produced a managerial bird’s-eye view of Europe’s entire cul- tural landscape, a picture that no nation on the continent could muster. While there is no longer a frightful aerial threat to prompt us to imagine such a project, America’s territory and its civil society are undoubtedly being fig- ured defensively, in part through monumental effects. The Trump administration has announced, with apparent satisfaction, that it has, for the first time in the country’s history, “shrunk a national monument.” The areas of Utah that were just A Questionnaire on Monuments 7 “given back” will likely soon be re-monumentalized in other ways with rigs and mines—landmarks whose territorial power is as evident as their cultural obsoles- cence is assured. The analogy with the 1940s isn’t perfect. The salvage plan America made for Europe was unabashedly white and Eurocentric. But today’s expert field is far less homogeneous. It should not be intimidated by the false equivalence of finding Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00327/1754211/octo_a_00327.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 good objects “on both sides,” or kept busy demonstrating—worse, verifying—the spatial inequalities that have been obvious all along. Will any experts rise up to become an organized force, ready with a vision? There is a latent project of system- atic selection here. 4. If we are to move and remove monuments on a large scale, we had better think of a systematic convergence of the territory, the archive, and the citizen. Monuments are the memory-retrieval