Monuments as Cultural and Critical Objects: From Mesolithic to Eco-queer

Description

Monuments as Cultural and Critical Objects explores monuments as political, psychical, social and mystical objects. Incorporating autoethnography, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, postcolonialism, and queer ecology, Houlton argues for a radical, interdisciplinary approach to our monument culture. Tracing historical developments in monuments alongside contemporary movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter, Houlton provides an in-depth critique of monument sites, as well as new critical and conceptual methodologies for thinking across the field. Alongside analysis of monuments to the Holocaust, colonial figures, and LGBTQIA+ subjects, this book provides new critical engagements with the work of D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Eve Sedgwick, and others. Houlton traces the potential for monuments to exert great influence over our sense of self, nation, community, sexuality, and place in the world. Exploring the psychic and physical spaces these objects occupy―their aesthetics, affects, politics, and powers―this book considers how monuments can challenge our identities, beliefs, and our very notions of remembrance. The interdisciplinary nature of Monuments as Cultural and Critical Objects means that it is ideally placed to intervene across several critical fields, particularly museum and heritage studies. It will also prove invaluable to those engaged in the study of monuments, psychoanalytic object relations, decolonization, queer ecology, radical death studies, and affect theory. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Dedication Contents List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: ‘face the dark confusion’: experiencing monuments Marion Milner and creative dependence Scope of the work Monument—memorial Coda: COVID-19 Part I The monument: histories and theories 1 The monument and the arts of memory What is a monument? Monument to Karl Marx, Highgate Cemetery (1956) Memory and the monument The Neolithic and the monument 2 Theorising the monument Alois Riegl: the art of the monument Robert Musil and Lewis Mumford: ‘our cities must not be monuments’ Pierre Nora: memory, history, and the nation-state Paul Cummins and Tom Piper, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, the Tower of London (2014) Part II The monument and psychoanalysis 3 The monument, the Holocaust, and the crypt: Rachel Whiteread, Jacques Derrida, and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s cryptonymy Monuments, mourning and melancholia Monuments, Archive Fever, and the future Rachel Whiteread, Memorial to the Austrian Jewish Victims of the Shoah, Vienna (2000) On the threshold of the crypt and the illness of mourning 4 D.W. Winnicott and the destruction of the monument Introduction: acts of vandalism The monument and the potential space: Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin (2005) The monument and the antisocial tendency 5 Countermonuments, transitional objects, and the fear of breakdown Introduction: monuments, rituals, and uncontainment Countermonuments Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, Monument Against Fascism, Harburg (1986–1993) The monument, postmemory, and anxiety Part III Monuments, colonialism, and imperial spaces 6 Monuments and colonial domination Introduction: Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter Monuments to Queen Victoria and the “common sense” of whiteness 7 Cecil Rhodes, Oriel College, and the will to change Rhodes Must Fall Oxford Capitalism, racism, and the liberal–intellectual colonial legacy: Basil Champneys, the Rhodes Building, Oriel College (1911) The will to change 8 Decolonising Edward Colston in Bristol: the contrapuntal monument The antinomy of the monument: Derrida and postcolonial hospitality John Cassidy, monument to Edward Colston, Bristol (1895) Edward Said and the contrapuntal monument Hew Locke, Restoration (2006) Unknown artist, Here and Now (2018) Marc Quinn, A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) (2020) Diversity, or decolonisation? Part IV Queer monuments 9 LGBTQIA+ monuments, sacred heterotopias, and the fantasy of purity Introduction: trans* visibility, monumental futurity Sacred spaces, monumental heterotopias Monuments and the fantasy of purity Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism, Berlin (2008) 10 Stonewall, political visibility, and the pressures of LGBTQIA+ memorialisation Introduction: out of the closet, into the monumental George Segal, Gay Liberation, Madison WI/New York NY (1980–1992) 11 Paranoid monuments, Eve Sedgwick, and queer remembrance: (or, you probably think this monument is about you) Paranoid reading and the anticipation of violence Reparative remembrance Queer monuments and agency The monument and non-existence 12 The monument and queer ecology Introduction: why queer ecology? The ‘nowhen’ of stone Funerary flowers: John Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ Paul Harfleet, The Pansy Project (2004–present) Cruising the monument: Derek Jarman, public sex, and small pleasures ‘Death the Skeleton and time the shadow’: the monumentality of yew The tree as monument: Warsaw Jewish cemetery Chełmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka: nonhuman witnessing The trees of Warsaw Epilogue: Mesolithic monuments, ecosystemic collapse, and hope in the time of coronavirus Monumental failures: COVID-19 and mass extinction Return to the Mesolithic The potential space as ecological space Index