DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12484 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Agonistic interventions into public commemorative art: An innovative form of counter-memorial practice? Anna Cento Bull1 David Clarke2 1University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK 2Cardiff University, 66a Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3AS Correspondence Anna Cento Bull, Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath, BA2 7AY. Email:
[email protected] David Clarke, School of Modern Languages, Cardiff University, 66a Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3AS. Email:
[email protected] 1 INTRODUCTION Public monuments and memorials, which are erected in the urban environment in order to commemorate significant historical events and personalities, have been recognized by scholars as sites at which hegemonic understandings of the past are reinforced (Saunders, 2018: p. 33). They constitute symbols of “public memory” (Bodnar, 1993) and can take on the function of significant lieux de mémoire (Nora, 1989), giving concrete form to dominant conceptions of national history and identity. Given the resources that must be mobilized to create them, both monetary and political, such forms of public commemorative art (as we will term them here) have been acknowledged as a means by which “those with political power within a given society organize public space to convey (and thus teach the public) desired politi- cal lessons” (Levinson, 2018: 7). This hegemonic function of public commemorative art is most often associated with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which emerging bourgeois democracies in capitalist nation states sought to establish the dominance of their values in an explosion of “statuomania” (Michalski, 1998: pp.