Affect and Commemoration Atop the Pedestal

Abstract

At the entrance to City Park in New Orleans, Louisiana, a monument to Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard rose twenty-seven feet over the citizens of New Orleans until 2017, when the sculpture was removed from its pedestal. Following the removal, Mayor Mitch Landrieu asked: “why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame… all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.” This landscape of empty pedestals was confronted by Paula Wilson that fall. Rather than erect a material monument that would directly replace the fallen General Beauregard, Wilson turned to her own body. Before the sun rose early one morning, she climbed atop the empty pedestal and began dancing in a performance titled “Living Monument.” This paper analyzes Wilson’s performance and its documentation as radical acts of refusing the logics of monumentality. In examining this work, I consider how performance as a mode of memorialization completely destabilizes the monumental presentation of a static history, thus offering a new grammar by which to think through modes of revolution and redress in the symbolic landscape.

Keywords

• performance
• monuments
• commemoration
• memorialization