«Monuments reflect our values, and all societies deceive themselves into thinking that these values are eternal; That’s why we turn these values into stone and place them on a pedestal. However, when the world changes, our monuments and the values they represent are frozen in time. Today’s world is changing at an unprecedented pace, and monuments erected decades or even centuries ago no longer represent the values we value today.
Keith Lowe, Prisoners of History
The term “monument” derives from the Latin monumentum, from monere (to warn, to remember), denoting that which defies memory, as defined by Françoise Choay in The Allegory of Inheritance (Gustavo Gili, 1992). ) as follows: «Any work constructed by a community of individuals to commemorate or remind other generations of certain events, sacrifices, ceremonies or beliefs. This isn’t about building anything or imparting neutral information, it’s about evoking a living memory with emotion. Used to commemorate historical events or to glorify heroes or figures from the world of politics or culture, the monument became a piece linked to the urban landscape of the nineteenth-century bourgeois city, expressed in a traditional artistic language.
However, during the 20th century, the monument fell into crisis, losing its meaning and becoming a piece of urban furniture that no one cared about, as if it were invisible to the citizens. Javier Maderuelo called the crisis of the monument “the loss of the plinth”; A loss that has three dimensions: first, its meaning, second, its relationship with the urban area, the values that the monument can convey to the city. urban space and from this to that and finally to that of the artistic language used to express history or an event (The loss of the plinth, Círculo de Bellas Artes, 1994). According to this writer, the event that marked the beginning of the monument crisis was the statue of Balzac in Paris, commissioned by Rodin by a commission chaired by Zola in the late 19th century, which sparked fierce controversy and social rejection. both due to the lack of grandeur in the author’s representation (she appears in the statue in a nightgown), as well as her modern language and even the chosen location.
Currently, an incident that illustrates the degree of tension and conflict that can occur around a monument was the incident that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 over the presence of a statue of Confederate president General Robert E. Lee. The military in the North American Civil War is between those demanding the destruction of a monument glorifying the slave past and the defenders of supremacist and racist patriotism who are Trump’s followers. A pro-destruction protester was killed during the riots. The general’s statue was removed in 2021.
In the article History in Ruins. Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, author of Monument cult and destruction (Alianza, 2023), professor of history at the University of Chicago, argues that monuments limit discussions, try to freeze the past and conquer the future, and adds: «Every monument was born with a death certificate. It will fall into ruin or be erased, its historical materiality and history exposing it to the elements of time and history.
From a similar position, another historian Peio H. Riaño, in Decapitated (Ediciones B, 2021), a story against racist, slave-owning and occupier monuments, argues that the monument “is an image that freezes and enslaves those who look at it, a historical It conveys fact as historical fact and invalidates the criterion.” The solidity exhibited by monuments made not of wood or clay, but of stone, metal or concrete, is a metaphor for the solidity of the message they wish to convey; However, according to Tenorio Trillo, this solidity also aims to convey another message: that when the monument was erected, it was done on the basis of a consensus that will be maintained in the future.
From this latest book of the author, some questions about the crisis of the monument can be drawn: How is history represented in the contemporary world? Can contemporary art reveal the historical content expressed by a monument? In today’s society, it is very difficult to reach a historical, political or ideological consensus about a past event and/or its heroes. According to the author of History in Ruins – it is natural in Mexico that conflicts do and have occurred around historical monuments – one of the roots of the conflicts currently occurring around monuments lies in the fact that they “try to cleanse the understanding of historical monuments.” from a vision of history that, for some, is “nothing but unstoppable moral progress.”
As Maderuelo argues, one of the dimensions of the monument crisis in contemporary cities is the loss of the monument’s capacity to transform its site into an urban space. Tenorio Trillo argues that the commemorative monument aims to conquer the space of the environment surrounding the monument by imprinting on these spaces a symbolic value that can represent the city, as in the case of the Mall in Washington or Avenida de la Reforma in Mexico City. Among many other examples in European and American cities: «A historical monument inevitably gives new meaning to the spatial context, for better or worse (…) Monuments become urban space, visible signs, physical structures that impose themselves, focal points. they are remembered, visited or touched in the image.
The artistic expression of a monument is another of its critical dimensions that often sparks controversy. Tenorio Trillo argues that modern and contemporary art do not get along well with history; According to this historian, Picasso’s Guernica is one of the few contributions of modern art to history. On the contrary, according to Keith Lowe in Prisoners of History (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2021.), any attempt to represent a vision of history by conventional means is inadequate because it freezes the past forever, but only by “making a purely abstract monument” can be achieved. and leave everything completely open to interpretation. This is what Peter Eisenman did at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin (2005).
Eisenman’s project, implemented in 2,711 concrete blocks, tries to prevent his work from freezing history. The horror of the Holocaust was so great that trying to represent it by metaphorical means inevitably falls short: “By making this monument completely abstract and leaving everything absolutely open to interpretation, the author of the monument does not tell us what we should remember.” , leaves that up to us.” (Lowe). The idea of giving the memorial’s visitor an active role is also present in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982). Landscape designer Maya Lyn erected two statues in a Washington park, engraved with the names of all the Americans who died in that war. The monument, consisting of a polished black marble wall, carries an irresistible solemnity.
These two impressive monuments teach us a way to grasp the representation of history and memory that can mark the way to the future. According to Lowe, the monument’s permanence over time occurs when it “continues to say something important about who we are, or at least who we want to believe we are.” “They challenge both our present desires and our memories of the past.”