Fear and loathing in monuments: Rethinking the politics and practices of monumentality and monumentalization

Monumental landscapes

There is no precise, comprehensive definition to what does and does not constitute a monument, but historically monuments have been understood to be interventions in the built landscape that were intended to convey a sense of permanence and commemorate a certain person or event. Marita Sturken (2008) writes that the

traditional function of the monument was to establish codes of heroism, triumph, nobility, glorification, and affirmation of a particular regime, state, or leader, to instruct pedagogically on what should be remembered and to what purpose, and to speak with some permanence to the future as a means of guiding the values of the present. (p. 3)

Often statues, pillars, or buildings, monuments have historically operated within a particular semiotic system. Sturken (2008) explains, “Many of the originary codes of the monument were established by the monuments of antiquity, specifically through styles of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman architectures, and in Asia through the styles of ancient Chinese and Mongolian edifices” (p. 2). These early monumental codes—“the monument as tomb, the pyramid, the obelisk, the monumental figure, the war memorial, the victory monument, and the triumphal arch” (Sturken, 2008: 2)—continue to appear today in landscapes across Europe and the United States. The strong semiotic referentiality of these visual codes serves to communicate a sense of endurance and timeless permanence, aided by the material used, usually stone or another seemingly durable, permanent material.

This can be seen throughout the US monumental landscape, which has spread relentlessly for well over a century. Ericka Doss (2010: 20) writes that a “statue mania” consumed both nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans and Europeans concerned with forging nation-states—a process in which statues were seen to play an important role. In the aftermath of the Civil War, US cities and towns embraced statues and other symbolic markers with fervor. These statues celebrated American “great men”—usually Anglo-European American explorers, inventers, statemen, and soldiers. Doss (2010: 22) writes that Christopher Columbus was statue mania’s “most popular ‘great man,’” though in the decades following the Civil War, “countless Confederate monuments were built in the United States, from simple granite shafts commemorating common soldiers to towering bronze statues of Southern heroes like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis” (p. 11). The thousands of war memorials erected during this period “reified a national ideology of militarism and masculinity” (Doss, 2010: 24) and reflected “turn-of-the-twentieth-century anxieties about national unity, anxieties unleashed by the rapid advance of modernism, immigration, and mass culture” (Doss, 2010: 27). According to Kirk Savage (2005), by the 1880s,

statue monuments had spread through cities and even small towns, honoring common soldiers, civil servants, and local politicians—or, as Thomas Carlyle remarked in England, just about “anybody much heard of in the newspapers, and never yet convicted of felony.” (p. 2)

This was certainly not met with widespread approval—in 1879, the Atlantic Monthly found “people at large blazing lately with ardor, not yet spent, to cover the land with monuments, and set up statues to all their perishable celebrities” (cited in Savage, 2005: 2). Doss (2010) writes that criticism of statue mania began to grow, with complaints of “poor craftsmanship, indifferent placement, civic congestion, hyper-commercialism, and general public irrelevance” (p. 28). This is evidenced (Doss, 2010: 28) in press coverage from the time:

Leslie’s Weekly, one of the major illustrated weekly magazines at the time, complained that the United States was “being covered with monuments . . . which are, in many cases, absolute deformities, designed in utter defiance of every principle of good taste and lacking every element of appropriateness.”

And, in 1919, “the American Magazine of Art bemoaned ‘the plague of war memorials now sweeping over the land’. The editors despondently concluded, ‘Must we suffer not only war but also the commemoration of war?’” The statue mania of the late 1800s and early 1900s laid a heavy footprint (it is somewhat ironic to note that many of these statues, heavily criticized and disliked even at the time, are the monuments whose fates are being debated today, albeit for different reasons), and in the years since, the US monument and memorial landscape has continued to flourish.

Scholars have approached study of the monument and memorial landscape in various ways, usually by region, theme, or form, or through a focus on individual monuments. Seminal studies on the monument and memorial landscapes of the Confederacy (Mills and Simpson, 2003; Southern Poverty Law Center, 2019), the US Civil War (Savage, 1997), African American history in the US South (Upton, 2015), civil rights in the United States (Dwyer and Alderman, 2008), Washington, DC, and the National Mall (Longstreth, 2003; Savage, 2005), and the Holocaust (Young, 1993, 2000) are augmented by in-depth studies of specific monuments and memorials, including the 9/11 Memorial in New York (Young, 2016), the Statue of Liberty (Trachtenberg, 1976), and the Lincoln memorial (Thomas, 2002). Scholars have also developed various taxonomies that differentiate according to form, including countermonuments (Young, 1993), and spontaneous (Santino, 2006), temporary (Doss, 2010), and grassroots (Margry and Sánchez-Carretero, 2011) memorials. These studies collectively underscore the rich complexity of both the built memory landscape and the politics and practices of monumentalization and memorialization.

The relationship and distinctions between monuments and memorials are often murky, due in part to overlap and inconsistency in how the terms are applied, though perhaps more importantly due to the points of convergence and divergence between the two practices themselves. In her expansive study of memorials in the United States, Memorial Mania, Doss (2010: 38) largely subsumes study of statues and other such monuments under the broader rubric of memorials, arguing that while in the United States, the term “memorial” gets used much more frequently than “monument” and has greater cachet, distinctions between the two are “tenuous” because they are used interchangeably. Others have attempted to more effectively disentangle the two. Marita Sturken (2008) writes that “[m]onuments are a means to honor the past, whereas memorials focus specifically on paying tribute to the dead” (p. 3). In a similar vein, James Young (1993: 3) who, noting Arthur Danto’s reflection that “we erect monuments so that we shall always remember and build memorials so that we shall never forget,” writes, “Many presume that ‘memorials’ recall only past deaths or tragic events and provide places to mourn, while ‘monuments’ remain essentially celebratory markers of triumphs and heroic individuals.” Young (2008) later notes, “It is as if once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember” (p. 8). Architect James Ingo Freed (1994), designer of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, commented that he

chose to call it a memorial and not a monument because monuments tend to celebrate things. Here there is no celebration. Also monuments tend to be to unified, too unitary, restricting different possibilities of readings and interpretations. So “memorial” seems to be better. (p. 89)

Compared to monuments, memorials are seen to represent a much more holistic process that, according to Judy Barsalou and Victoria Baxter (2007), “satisfies the desire to honor those who suffered or died during conflict and as a means to examine the past and address contemporary issues” (p. 1). In a similar vein, Kerry Whigham (2017: 107) writes that part of the “work” of memorials is often to construct a space of memory in honor of who have suffered, and, in so doing, to function as a form of symbolic reparation for the harm done to them and a guarantee of its non-recurrence, though, he notes, “exactly how successful a space of memory can be in preventing the return of violence is somewhat less clear.”

When considering distinctions between monument and memorial, attention to form is certainly instructive, but function and intent arguably matter much more. There will likely always be an element of overlap between the two terms—some monuments are also memorials, just as memorials can be celebratory or take any range of forms. As such, there does not seem to be much value in attempting to firmly establish fixed borders between the two terms. But it is of critical importance to recognize what monuments are understood to do (which is significantly different from memorials) and, with that knowledge, to take seriously the question of what we want them to do for our and within our communities moving forward.

Monuments effectively function as speech acts: they are public proclamations of certain narratives that are intended to simultaneously reify that narrative and lay claim to the space in which the monument has been placed. The speech act was coined by philosopher and linguist J.L. Austin (1962) who, over a series of lectures given at Harvard in 1962 that later became the influential text How to Do Things with Words, argued that certain kinds of speech are like performances—what he called speech acts. Austin breaks down in detail how speech acts work and the conditions for success or failure, arguing that successful speech acts do not simply convey information; they actually “do” something, ushering in or creating a new state of affairs. While the examples he gives are based in spoken language (e.g. the uttering of “I do” in a marriage ceremony), monuments are intended to work in much the same way—the making of the claim is an attempt to make the claim true. As a practice, monuments are neither inherently good nor bad (and certainly, many monuments are innocuous and uncontroversial); what determines their success is the nature of the speech act and its reception in the community. This is where the problem often lies. Historically, monuments were not used to bring communities together in dialogue and reconciliation but rather to secure narratives of nation-building and White, male power. When monuments are placed in prominent, central squares and downtowns where community members are likely to gather, they lay claim to those spaces, the imposing presence of their speech act made literally imposing through the form of the monument itself. If the speech act, or narrative the monument is meant to convey, is one that is widely accepted in and by a community, the monument is less likely to cause controversy (or the controversies that do arise are more likely to focus on other issues, such as aesthetics or cost). But when a monument specifically celebrates a deeply violent racist and patriarchal past, the afterlives of which continue to be lived today, it has serious potential to cause painful controversy, especially as public orientations toward the past shift. When someone or some symbolic thing is placed atop a pedestal in a prominent public space, the monument makes a deliberate, eminently visible claim about to whom the space belongs, and thus who belongs here and who does not. This is the inherited legacy of monuments in the United States.

Fierce conflict has arisen regarding the fate and future of different monuments across the United States, ⁸ but it is remarkable how often the arguments being made to keep the monuments in place seem to elide the actual provenance and purpose of the monuments under debate. These arguments range from concerns that monuments are keepers of history, and if they come down history will be lost, to fears that once monuments start coming down it will never stop, thus painting the picture of an ongoing monumental massacre that will not end until all the men and horses of stone and metal have been wiped off the American city streets. This seems unlikely. It’s worth remembering that not all monuments are under debate, but rather only a selection of those figures and forms seen to celebrate racism and White patriarchal supremacy. The risk is not and has never been lost histories—history is not preserved in stone, and no one learns history from a statue alone. If anything, discussions about whether to remove a historical statue and what could potentially go in its place stand to be more of an educational experience for a community than a monument is ever likely to be on its own. Furthermore, the specific undercurrent of fear embedded in this argument—that “we” will lose “our” history—is a reminder of the dangers of privileging monuments as pedagogy. Beware the single story under which the silences of thousands lay buried. Monuments often valorize single persons and events from the past—but historical events and social change are shaped by movements formed of hundreds and thousands of people, the majority of whom will never be known or monumentalized. Monuments detach people from their larger context, a reality made all the more dangerous by the actual history of monumentalization in this country. Because many of our historical monuments were not the result of representative community-based decision-making but rather represent wishful reframing (as is the case with so many Civil War monuments) and a White, wealthy elite’s desires to immortalize themselves, the argument that these monuments must be preserved for history’s sake simply do not hold up, unless the argument is explicitly in favor of honoring White supremacist re-envisioning and ways of being at the expense of the incredible erasure of and violence against Black communities. As Caroline Randall Williams (2020a) has powerfully argued,

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

She continues further in her essay,

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

There is no single, simple answer to the question of how to address the heavily saturated, deeply biased American monumental landscape—and nor should there be. Many monuments will likely be left as they are, while others will be removed, relocated, or have additional contextualizing monuments and plaques added to their surrounds. The latter solution runs the risk of adding to what is already considered an excess of monuments (one imagines a built landscape that begins to resemble a dark fairy tale, walking through crowds of humans turned to stone), but ultimately each controversial monument should be addressed on a case-by-case basis through an inclusive community-driven process grounded in principles of citizenship participation and restorative justice. These processes should call upon individuals and communities to ask themselves: what are we attempting to preserve and why? As a community, who and how do we want to be? How should we move forward? The United States may be a post–Civil War country, but it is not remotely a post-conflict country. We are in deep crisis. The removal of statues will not erase racist historical legacies nor the ongoing lived realities of racial and systemic violence; neither will the addition of a few more. But through the monuments themselves, and the ensuing corollary dialogue about more equitable and inclusive monumental landscapes and societies, the United States may be able to move toward long-overdue social change.

This is the irony of monuments: they are often backward-facing, serving as reminders of the past, but they can also play a critical role in opening dialogue, encouraging citizen participation, addressing long-standing erasures and silences, and igniting cultural reckoning with racist, brutally violent pasts and their lived afterlives. In this, they are future-facing, their presence serving as proclamations about the values and narratives that define a community’s present and thus its future. Monuments matter precisely because they are symbolic, because they are celebratory, because they are speech acts about cultural values. As a cultural practice, monumentalization thus has incredible value. It is incumbent upon cities and regions to more fully democratize the practice so that monuments do not represent only the wealthy elite but rather celebrate the broader communities within which they reside. We must also reorient how we conceive of monuments and the practice of monumentalization to focus less on form and material and more on monuments as speech acts with the potential for real effects in the present and future. The need for such reframing is exemplified in myriad contemporary monument projects that challenge older monumental frameworks and suggest exciting new possibilities for the future of monumental practices. Bosnian refugee artist Aida Šehović’s transnational nomadic monument to the Srebrenica genocide, ŠTO TE NEMA, and Ada Pinkston’s performance-based monumental intervention, Landmarked, are two such projects.

ŠTO TE NEMA

After Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1992, increasing ethno-national divisions soon led the new country into war, with violence predominantly occurring between the three major identity groups of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Bosnian Serbs, and Croats. ⁹ In July 1995, escalating violence and unrest forced thousands of Bosniaks to flee to the United Nations Safe Area of Srebrenica for protection. Bosnian Serbs then attacked the Safe Area, and, after relocating most women and girls away from the Safe Area, proceeded to murder the remaining 8372 men and boys there seeking refuge. ¹⁰ This massacre was officially ruled genocide by the International Court of Justice in 2006, but the Bosnia and Herzegovina of today remains deeply segregated, with Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs, and Croats tending to live, work, and learn only with those from within their own ethnic group. ¹¹ Each group has their own education system, and while they have similar math and science curricula, they learn different versions of history, each positioning itself as the victim of the other groups. Because there is no consensus among the major ethnic groups about the violence of the 1990s, and Bosnian Serb leaders continue to deny the genocide, these ethnic divisions and tensions continue to be reinforced today, and many of the Bosnian Muslims refugees who fled the violence remain abroad. ¹²

ŠTO TE NEMA is a nomadic, participatory monument that began in 2006 and only came into being one day each year. (The last edition of this iteration of the monument was in 2020 on the 25th anniversary of the genocide.) Every 11 July, on the anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica, in a different city square around the world, Aida Šehović arrived in the morning with an international group of volunteers to lay out fildžani (the small porcelain cups traditionally used for coffee in Bosnia). Setting down empty coffee cups, she and her team invited passersby in the square to fill the cups with Bosnian coffee, brewed on site, and place them with the other accumulating cups, collectively contributing to the building of ŠTO TE NEMA. As they poured, volunteers educated participants about the genocide, raising awareness and expanding communities of knowledge. The coffee remained undrunk, in memory of the victims. By laying the empty cups down and inviting others to fill them, Šehović invited viewers to participate in a shared process of learning, remembering, mourning, and healing. As survivors gifted cups to her memorial, it expanded to include the voices and memories of thousands. When Šehović first did the performance in 2006, she had 932 cups, given to her by the members of the Women of Srebrenica Association from local families in the region. She has now gathered over 9000. The small cups are non-distinct from a distance, but when viewers step closer, the cups are recognizably individual, possessed of their own unique characteristics: a splash of delicate blush-colored flowers, fine vertical lines, trimmed in gold, polka dots, vibrant blue with an etched white design. Each one of these cups represents an individual person, a person who could have been sharing coffee with family and friends but was instead murdered. With the cups serving as reminders of individual lives lost and the poured—but not drunk—coffee of the ongoing felt presence of their absence, ŠTO TE NEMA is a powerful speech act and reminder that such genocidal loss comprises many individual stories and lost loved ones whose memory must continue to be recognized and honored (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

ŠTO TE NEMA nomadic monument on July 11, 2019 in Venice, Italy. Photo: Adnan Šaćiragić © Aida Šehović. All rights reserved.

ŠTO TE NEMA challenges traditional notions of monumentality in almost all ways. When I asked Šehović who the intended audience was, given that the monument has primarily traveled outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina, ¹³ and why she had chosen to call ŠTO TE NEMA a monument, given its nomadic, ephemeral, participatory nature, she explained that it was important to her that the cups travel because it is precisely by traveling that the cups go to Bosnia. She reflected,

Half of Bosnia’s population had to leave their homes, their Bosnia, because of the war. The Bosnian diaspora is Bosnia—but displaced from the physical country. ŠTO TE NEMA has always gone places it has been invited by the Bosnian diasporic community. (Šehović, January 2021, interview with the author)

By traveling to the Bosnian refugee community, ŠTO TE NEMA enables them to participate in collective remembrance and mourning in their different cities. Šehović’s understanding of the purpose of the monument has also expanded and changed over time. She explained,

At its most fundamental, ŠTO TE NEMA was for the people who were killed, because the actual gesture of serving coffee is for them. But it is also for the women and families from Srebrenica that survived, and for all the Bosnians and Herzegovinians and people who live in the Balkans who were affected by the war.

She paused and said,

It seems so broad when you say ŠTO TE NEMA is for everybody, but in a way, it is for everybody because remembering a genocide shouldn’t be a Bosnian issue. We should all remember it as humans. I don’t want it to belong to just one group, I want it to bring people together.

As to why she called it a monument, Šehović explained that while ŠTO TE NEMA is obviously both monument and memorial, she was not solely interested in remembering and mourning loss but also impacting the present and future. In this sense, she said, calling it a monument made a statement—and made it a statement—that felt important, saying,

I get really frustrated that we are stuck with these really old patriarchal forms of monuments that don’t function. They just become backdrops and are largely ignored. I was really interested in thinking about, “if a monument is supposed to be relevant because it’s a way for us to talk about our history, and it’s a way for us to remember together collectively in a public space, what does it need to do to actually really function, to really work to bring people together and transform them from passive viewers into participants?” (Šehović, January 2021, interview with the author)

Ending cycles of violence—whether it is recovering from previous conflict or preventing future conflict—necessitates functioning relations grounded in connection and support—both felt and practiced—between those in governance and society and between the identity groups of which society is comprised. ŠTO TE NEMA is a reminder that reconciliation and violence prevention are intricately linked, multifaceted processes that rely upon increased and shared understanding, trust, and respect to effectively dismantle entrenched grievances and social fragmentation. As Sarah Maddison (2016) writes, reconciliation is both process and goal and requires “a change of values, a willingness to venture beyond the promotion of rigid identities that result in war and cultivate a new attitude towards others” (p. 46). This is the basis from which to address the “major material and structural challenges that so often cause post-conflict societies to slide back into war . . .” This is akin to what John Lederach (2005: 3) has called the “moral imagination”—the ability to be grounded in the realities of the present while imagining and working toward a different world. Monumental speech acts like ŠTO TE NEMA can play a critical role in this process because they encourage people to listen, learn, and connect. In an August 2020 interview, Šehović reflected,

Art can be the way toward preventing violence. For people who feel safe and comfortable, whose life is safe and comfortable, it’s really, really hard for them to understand, without disrupting their comfort and safety, to understand, even in a small form, what it means to not be safe, what it means to be hurt.

But she believes that artistic interventions like ŠTO TE NEMA have a unique role in making that violence accessible. Šehović (June 2020, interview with the author) stated,

If you are someone who has never felt unsafe, has never felt that your identity has been threatened, if you hold that cup in your hand, you are connected forever. You can never tell me you don’t know. Your understanding of Srebrenica and hopefully all genocide and atrocities changes, because here you were holding a cup that represents one human who was killed because of who they were.

This intimate connection to the past, this ability to hold it in one’s hands and to understand it as an individual life lost, can create shared spaces of remembering and mourning, listening and learning, and envisioning and committing to more peaceful futures. As Rachel Kerr (2017) argues, effective reconciliation requires the “ongoing processes of building relationships and mutual respect that are crucial to social repair” (p. 3). And while monuments and the arts more broadly are not and should not be considered a replacement for more formal policy-based processes, arts-based processes can “provide a ‘creative pathway’ to reconciliation, breaking silences, transforming relationships, communicating across cultural divides and providing a means of dealing with trauma and restoring human dignity.” Effective conflict recovery and prevention requires the meaningful encouragement and development of social cohesion, aided by efforts to imagine and cultivate different sets of relationships and ways of thinking and being in community. This is a goal and process to which projects like ŠTO TE NEMA can make a profound contribution. ¹⁴

Landmarked

Ada Pinkston, a Baltimore-based artist, educator, and activist, began Landmarked (2018) as a means of exploring the empty spaces left by the removal of 48 Confederate monuments and practices of monumentalization more broadly. Seeing the empty spaces left by the Confederate monuments as “metaphors for the silences that exist in history” (Pinkston, January 2021, interview with the author), Pinkston sought to investigate our relationship to monuments, the stories they tell, and the many lives left silenced and unseen in public history, especially those of women who, throughout US history, have contributed to the development of the country but whose names will never be publicly known. In our 2021 interview, Pinkston explained that many of the now-removed monuments were built in the 1920s and 1930s during the Jim Crow era, long after the Confederacy lost the Civil War. Reflecting on the gap between historical White desire for grandeur and reality, Pinkston said, “there are all these Black women whose names are not known, and they don’t show up in official public narrative, but their work and contributions have made the country what it is today.” She continued, “I’m interested in creating spaces that are liberating for Black women, public spaces that don’t exist to reify signifiers of white supremacy. I wanted to ask the question, ‘what would a monument to all people look like?’” Landmark comprised three phases: a series of regional workshops and conversations in public spaces in the communities where the monuments have been removed, the interpretation of these ideas into a multimedia sculpture, and a series of site-specific performances in public sites and atop the vacant pedestals that were left behind once the monuments were removed.

In these performances, which she (Pinkston, January 2021, interview with the author) called “ephemeral monuments,” Pinkston resembles a ghostly presence come to life, exploring what it means to suddenly take physical form in the present. She wears a billowing bell-shaped white Antebellum hoop skirt with colored ribbon lining each of the hoops and a white spaghetti-strapped top. Bracelets stack along each wrist, and a long, gauzy, golden veil drapes over her head down to her waist. Her skirt swelled out on either side of her body, Pinkston moves slowly across the pedestal, pausing, then moving again, like a statue come to life. She shifts from one statuesque position to another: her arms slowly raise and lower, she stares down toward the viewer and up toward the sky. Across the platform, Pinkston moves from shape to shape, turns in a slow circle, shifts, removes, and replaces her veil. She pauses, then begins again (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Landmarked. Performance in July 2018 in Baltimore, MD. Photo: Chris Chapa. © Ada Pinkston. All rights reserved.

Her ghost-like presence atop the pedestal is a jarring reminder of the exceptionally narrow range of historical figures likely to be into monumental form—and how unlikely they are to be Black women. As a monumental speech act, her moving form reminds us of all we do not know, of all the stories and individuals lost, their lives now wrapped up in the embrace of her moving body, forming part of a collective, a legacy of centuries of women once silenced now taking their place on these pedestals upon which their abusers once stood. The images made through Pinkston’s body are striking and powerful. There is no mistaking that she is directly referencing monuments, women, and the past, directly invoking these women lost to history and offering them form through hers. Pinkston uses semiotic codes but subverts them, enabling audiences to clearly recognize what she’s doing but also just how different it is. Her slow, embodied, ritualistic movement magnifies the power and vibrancy of her presence, contesting the flat stillness of so many of the stone men.

The ghostly presence that Landmarked evokes seem to weave in and out of time, reminding us that history is always present, just waiting to be seen. In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon (2004) writes,

If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition. (p. 8)

This sense of transformative recognition is accomplished in Landmarked through performance-based monumentalization. The felt recognition of the dissonance of a living Black female body in a place usually occupied by a White male made of stone or metal is a fierce reminder of what has been overlooked and largely erased from mainstream historical narratives. In this, the ephemeral monuments, brought to life through Pinkston’s form, are profoundly empowering speech acts. Atop the pedestal, skirts flaring, arms raised, these monumental forms seem to claim the future as their own, the women embodied in the performance the corporeal form to Williams’ powerful argument that the man-made monuments of stone and metal must come down. Williams wrote that she was made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels; in Pinkston’s piece, laurels have been stripped, women have climbed up to take their rightful place, and they raise their hands in triumph.

Like ŠTO TE NEMA, Landmarked challenges conventional notions of monuments and monumentality (akin to Young’s notion of “countermonuments”), but in Landmarked, the reference to older monumental forms is obviously much more explicit, as she assumes both the literal place of monuments and incorporates their form into her movement. In this, Pinkston plays with the same visual codes, using similar corporeal forms and shapes but subverting them into something dynamic and new. By highlighting the erasure of Black female voices from the built monument landscape, Landmarked offers powerful rumination on the deep violence done to Black bodies, and specifically Black female bodies, in the United States that started during the time of the transatlantic slave trade but whose lived afterlives continue to shape contemporary life in the United States. The embodied rituals atop the monument pedestals are corrective, recentering the narrative on Black women, thus challenging viewers to reflect on the silences and erasures in our monumental landscape. Landmarked’s ephemerality gives it power, akin to the nomadic nature of ŠTO TE NEMA, but whereas Šehović’s monument travels to different city squares, the actual square not as important as the people who now make their home in its surroundings, Landmarked is anchored by the pedestal remains of Confederate monuments. Neither monument is interested in glorifying the individual—to the contrary. ŠTO TE NEMA is grounded in the collective; although Pinkston is alone on the pedestal, she takes on no character. Deliberately unknown, she embodies thousands of women, offering both a powerful corrective to the deeply skewed historical narratives promulgated through the monumental landscape and pointed suggestion for more honest and innovative monumentalization moving forward. Both honor the dead; both address the lived afterlives of past violence; and through this work, both, albeit in different ways, work to foment the conditions for an end to ongoing cycles of violence.

These monuments are fleeting; the spaces will be empty once they’re gone. There is no permanent claim to land, no power struggle, just a whisper and a song, of endurance, of power, and movement, of ghosts whose blood soaked the earth, honored and remembered through embodied ritual. Yet both ŠTO TE NEMA and Landmarked encourage audiences to reflect and ask ourselves, what do we need from our monumental landscape? What imaginings? What other ways of being together in community and place? How can we honor the richness of our history? How can our monuments tell the truth? Our monument landscapes do not need more tokenized representation, more false and single hero narratives, or more posthumous reenactments of historical violence through representation without reparation. The urgent yet long-standing crisis of violent racism and White supremacy, now exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, will not magically dissipate on its own. Powerful change is needed on all fronts, including in our memory landscapes.

Monumental futures

Such efforts are being taken up by Monument Lab, a public art and history studio founded in 2012 by Paul Farber and Ken Lum and based in Philadelphia, PA, that is working to build regional and national conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments through an array of monuments-based programs and projects. In 2020, the Monument Lab was awarded $4 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s new $250 million initiative, The Monument Project, to conduct a definitive audit of the nation’s monuments and subgrant $1 million to create 10 new Monument Lab field offices focused on monuments in cities and regions across the country. Currently in progress, Monument Lab’s National Monument Audit draws on existing data on monuments derived from national, state, municipal, and publicly created sources to create the first comprehensive investigation of the national monument landscape; it is also intended to be the beginning of a much bigger project to review and improve the built monument landscape—however, makes sense in different communities. Farber does not think all monuments should or will be removed—to the contrary. In a 2021 interview, he explained, “There are definitely circumstances where a legacy monument could stay, and you could add a piece next to it, or you could ask an artist or a community to ceremonially reimagine it” (Farber, January 2021, interview with the author). But, he added, “It’s telling that there’s a protection, sometimes, of property over people. It’s reflective of the kind of systems of power and systemic racism that we have.” He continued,

It’s not a simple answer. But it’s just important to look at it in context, thinking about how do we uplift people over property? How do we think about monuments as part of the story, and how do we imagine the next generation of monuments?

While the results of the National Monument Audit and the ensuing conversations and monumental interventions and additions will be years in the making, Monument Lab’s broader body of work stands to carve out a new chapter in the US monument landscape alongside the works of other artists currently exploring how to subvert and innovate through monuments and their corresponding visual codes. This includes Aida Šehović’s ŠTO TE NEMA and Ada Pinkston’s Landmarked and also numerous others, such as Kehinde Wiley’s “Rumors of War” series ¹⁵ ; Onyedika Chuke’s (n.d.) “The Forever Museum Archive” ¹⁶ ; Kelly Kristen Jones’ “Coverings,” “Dodging Tools,” and “Healing Tools” ¹⁷ ; Wangechi Mutu’s “The NewOnes, Will Free Us” series ¹⁸ ; and Karen Olivier’s “The Battle Is Joined,” ¹⁹ to name but a few. These monuments and monuments-based interventions reckon with the violent values embedded in many historical monuments and monumental tropes, but they also underscore the dynamic future of monumentality and monumentalization. In and of itself, the practice of monumentalization is neither dead nor the problem; it is rather that our understandings and expectations of what monuments “are” and “do” require radical update.

In the end, the US monumental landscape is a work in progress, as it has always been. The fierce debates about monuments are entirely in keeping with historical practice, if of a different tenor than in the past. These debates are important. They are the sign that people are fighting for what they believe in, and for the right to feel safe in and belong to and in shared public spaces and communities. Such conversations are how democracy is cultivated and maintained. I do not see how the United States makes it through this deep moment of prolonged crises, of dual pandemics, without encouraging spaces and practices of citizen participation, community-building, healing, empathy, and dialogue. As speech acts, monuments give us an incredible opportunity to determine and to proclaim our commitment to how we, collectively, will work toward better futures—and to determine what must, finally, become part of the past. And so, a few more stone men may end up rolled into rivers. Others may be melted down and remade into new forms that serve as a pedagogical bridge between what was and what we have committed to become. Still others may be rehomed in statue parks, cemeteries, and elsewhere, their relocation now an important part of their greater story. And new monuments and monuments-based interventions will emerge to both reify and usher in a new state of affairs.