Monuments Must Fall

Abstract

Monumentality is an aesthetic form of social antagonism. Responding to recent protests against public statues, art historian Nickolas Lambrianou has suggested a “more generalized failure or impossibility of the monument itself”, which he describes as “the ‘exhaustion’ of a specific cultural form that will always be tied to idealized or mythologized individuality and the ‘Great Man’ theory of historical change”.1 But criticism of such sculptures are only in conflict with them if the statues themselves are read at face value. Perhaps, instead, backlash or iconoclasm is also a constitutive part of what makes a monument monumental. Many monuments are erected to do controversial work, and while they may proclaim a matter resolved or a problem consolidated, the reactions to them (sometimes long after they have been placed on pedestals) actually demonstrate the opposite is often the case. Monuments are not solely statues. Monumentality is the discursive space that surrounds certain public sculptures, including demands they be pulled down or protected, which can erupt into spontaneous or managed removal. Such a discursive space is inherently unstable, which is why most monuments ultimately must fall, physically or conceptually: either by being toppled or by having their original intentions obliterated and reimagined.