New Monuments Against Rigidity: Reclaiming Public Space and Reimagining Collective Memory

Rae French

Advisor: Dr. Eddie Chambers

Abstract

We’ve been taught to interpret monuments as truth—as documentary of not only an individual who is simultaneously glorified and simplified through a bronze, immovable likeness, but of the civic values they stand for which are communicated as unarguable absolutes through intermingling notions of heritage and history in a dangerous game of revision and silencing. These figurative statues have continued power to silence because they serve as symbolic surveillance and uphold entrenched binaries of right and wrong, victor and loser, human and nonhuman, and black and white. But the homes of these figures also occupy a contestable binary of public and private—what does it mean for a space to be public? If ‘public’ spaces are purportedly for all and purportedly neutral, then the only conclusion we can draw from the overwhelming presence of these statues in ’public’ spaces is that not everyone occupying and passing through the space is actually a part of the public. Or perhaps these spaces simply aren’t public at all, insofar as the public having any say or place within them. Public is a misnomer. This thesis will explore the ways in which the rigid nature and aesthetics of these monuments (beyond who they are meant to represent) are intrinsically tied to whiteness, to dominance, and to individualism. I hope to, in turn, offer new conceptions of monument and memory which are born through and continually foster collective engagement within urban spaces by exploring the work of contemporary artists and projects working to upheave pre existing traditions of monument.