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Temporary or permanent? Considering time, memory and history in public art projects
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Temporary or permanent? Considering time, memory and history in public art projects
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Content
TEMPORARY OR PERMANENT?
CONSIDERING TIME, MEMORY AND HISTORY IN PUBLIC ART PROJECTS
by
Lauren Kimberly Walser
____________________________________________
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES
May 2010
Copyright 2010 Lauren Kimberly Walser
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Like hosting a party or traveling the world, writing a thesis is something best done
with good friends by your side. And throughout the past few months, I have rediscovered
how many fantastic, supportive people I have in my life. I lack the vocabulary to express
just how grateful I am to each of them, but I will certainly try.
I first wish to extend my gratitude to my tireless thesis committee, Janet Owen
Driggs, Ken Breisch and Joshua Decter, for their constant encouragement, guidance and
patience. I would also like to thank Rhea Anastas who always went out of her way to lend
a hand. And without Elizabeth Lovins, staying on track would have been excruciating.
Though their thesis days are in the past, I thank my Public Art Studies friends
Lauren Davis, Becky Johnson, Liz Lidgett and Sarah Nesbit for always being there when
I needed advice, support or a happy hour beverage.
My dearest friends Margarita Aibkhanova, Rizza Gonzales and Kristine Nadal
have been a constant source of support since our undergraduate days. Their support
doubled in graduate school. For that, I am grateful.
To my parents who watched me, surely with confusion, break from my lifelong
dream of becoming an intrepid journalist to pursue a path in the arts: I would be nothing
without their love, encouragement and faith in me.
Finally, none of this would have been possible without Blaise Nutter, whose
support transcends comprehension. He was a taskmaster, distraction, personal chef,
sommelier and best friend, all in one. To him, my ideas were always interesting, my
frustration was always surmountable, and my chapter completions were his victories, too.
Thank you all.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ii
Abstract iv
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Temporary Permanence, Permanent Temporariness 10
Monuments and Memorials 10
Historic Preservation 15
Temporary Permanence 20
Chapter 2: REPOhistory 27
Chapter 3: Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig 39
Chapter 4: Sam Durant’s Proposal for
White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions,
Washington, D.C. 48
Chapter 5: Conclusion 55
Bibliography 60
iv
ABSTRACT
Monuments, memorials and other historic markers are meant to function as a permanent
emblem to a community’s history and collective memory, but what happens when a
project engaging with history is meant to be temporary? This thesis attempts to answer
that question, first by critically analyzing permanent historic markers like monuments and
preservation efforts and then by examining temporarily sited projects. The theories set
forth by memory scholars Pierre Nora, Jan Assmann and James E. Young are central to
this investigation. This thesis seeks to understand what is gained or lost when history-
based projects exist in public for a limited amount of time, ultimately finding that neither
permanence nor temporariness is ever absolute. Three case studies facilitate a closer
reading of temporary history-based projects: the work produced by REPOhistory, Mark
Dion’s “Tate Thames Dig” and Sam Durant’s “Proposal for White and Indian Dead
Monument Transpositions, Washington, D.C.”
1
INTRODUCTION
In the north end of Boston, where the streets are lined with Italian markets and
restaurants that have been serving the community for generations, there sits a small
wooden house where Paul Revere, the famous midnight rider of the American
Revolution, once lived. The oldest building in downtown Boston, the wooden house
stands in great contrast to its surrounding brick structures, each of which tower above the
two-story home.
It was from this address that he set out on his midnight mission, and though Paul
Revere hung his hat here for a time, this building has housed many other important
activities since its completion. It was the boyhood home of Cotton Mather, the puritan
minister whose name has become synonymous with the Salem Witch Trials. And upon
Revere’s sale of the house in 1800, it became home to many of Boston’s Italian, Jewish
and Irish immigrants in a neighborhood that eventually became known as the city’s Little
Italy. Revere’s former house, in particular, was an important nexus of activity, serving as
tenement housing with the ground floor remodeled to hold a variety of shops.
1
In 1902, fearing that the house would be demolished, Revere’s great-grandson
John P. Reynolds Jr. purchased the building and began collaborating with preservationists
to restore the home back to the way it was when his great-grandfather lived there. This
included removing all later additions and modifications so that entering the house was
like stepping back in time to the late seventeenth century. Through this effort, the house
1
The Paul Revere House. “Paul Revere’s Home.” The Paul Revere House.
http://www.paulreverehouse.org/about/paulreverehouse.shtml (accessed November 11,
2009).
2
has stood as a national historic monument since 1908, offering tours, exhibitions and
public events.
2
As this house stands today, it adds an irregular element to Boston’s Little Italy;
indeed, it interrupts the Italian-American landscape and injects a dose of colonial
aesthetics to what is now otherwise very much a historic ethnic enclave. In the restoration
process, Reynolds and the preservation team effectively erased all activity that occurred
there since the home’s sale in 1800. As such, we remember this site only as Paul Revere’s
home. Such is the challenge faced by those who attempt to make history visible, whether
it be through the restoration of a historic site, the erection of a monument or the
composition of a historic site marker: choosing which moment or element of the site to
restore and preserve, thus choosing which part of history to memorialize and perpetuate.
In the case of this historic site, the building will be remembered as the place where Paul
Revere once slept. Not as the site where Cotton Mather grew up. Not as a central
gathering place for early Italian immigrants and their families.
For centuries, civilizations have sought to memorialize significant people and
events by creating permanent objects that are intended to stand in as a surrogate for that
which is being remembered. Using stone, brick or other durable materials, these objects
are made with the longevity in mind, able to withstand the test of time and last for
generations to come. But absolute permanence is not possible. An object changes in time,
both physically and symbolically. Its form crumbles, fades or deteriorates. Its context
shifts. Its meaning is changed over time as new generations come into contact with it.
2
The Paul Revere House. “Paul Revere’s Home.”
3
But as seen with the reconstruction of Paul Revere’s house, many of these
permanent objects are limited in the scope of history they are able to represent. Often, the
more traditional methods of preserving history actually erase parts of history, or they
create static, unchanging reminders of the past. There has been much criticism for
permanent historic markers in that they attempt to represent a consensus in the history
they represent, but instead offer a fractured or incomplete version of the story being told,
or they set forth a specious representation of an assumed collective identity.
With this laundry list of shortcomings, why do we even bother to build
monuments today? Many memory scholars, including theorists Pierre Nora and Jan
Assmann, have asserted that without these tangible, visible reminders of history, our
pasts would be forgotten. Nora writes, “. . . without commemorative vigilance, history
would soon sweep [memories] away.”
3
Further, permanent objects marking history have
played a crucial role in establishing a collective memory, which in turn establishes a
collective identity and dominant cultural narrative that binds a society together. But this
idea of establishing an absolute, collective identity has been put under the microscope
with the rise of postmodern thinking, as feminism, identity politics and gender theories
have stirred up an interest in reviving lost or forgotten histories. The heroic male victor
atop his steed is no longer the preferred narrative we wish to tell. Now, there is an
appreciation for and stronger dedication to championing the voice of the other and,
indeed, the plurality of voices that are present within any narrative.
When it comes to commemorating history, many artists have eschewed
permanence and longevity, instead seeking to create something intended to be removed
3
Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations
26 (1989): 7-24.
4
from the public sphere after a period of time. The temporary projects the artists create act
as a way to commemorate or make visible a person, place or event from the past, but do
so in ways that break from the traditional, permanent approaches. And just as
permanence is never truly permanent, the temporariness of these projects is never fully
temporary. Temporary history-based projects have demonstrated their potential to create
lasting impacts, be it through sparking a policy change in a community or provoking
viewers of the project to reconsider the ways they previously regarded history.
4
In setting out to make history visible, either through permanent or temporary
means, neither the permanence nor the temporariness is ever absolute. And neither
approach to evoking history is perfect; both approaches, indeed, are flawed. But when
taken together, a powerful dynamism emerges. So we must ask: How can public art best
work within the shifting relationships between history and memory, permanence and
temporariness? And how do the gray areas between the two perceived absolutes of
permanence and temporariness operate together, and to what effect? Though public art
can work with these conditions in many ways, this thesis will primarily consider the
contributions of temporary history-based projects to the tradition of making history
visible. I will argue that while monuments, memorials and other permanent attempts at
capturing history are forefront in our understanding of capturing history, temporary
4
A temporary project by REPOhistory, Voices of Renewal, inspired an ongoing
mentoring and tutoring program for underserved youth in Atlanta. Meanwhile, Jana
Napoli’s Floodwall project, a temporary, traveling exhibition, has, for many, served
as a healing mechanism for a city whose citizens all collectively experienced a
massive trauma, and gave voice to individuals and communities whose past was
destroyed.
5
projects have the ability to fill in many of the gaps left in their permanent counterparts,
while still leaving behind traces of their own permanence.
In order to investigate this query, I will first introduce a few key theories that have
laid the groundwork for my thinking, including the theories laid forth by Nora and
Assmann. I will then examine the issues surrounding so-called permanent historic
markers, including monuments, memorials and historic preservation markers. I will then
study three temporary history-based projects that have been completed in the past two
decades in order to demonstrate an approach to commemorating history beyond the
approaches with permanence as their goal: REPOhistory’s sign projects, Mark Dion’s
Tate Thames Dig and Sam Durant’s Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument
Transpositions, Washington, D.C. These projects were chosen for inclusion in this essay
because taken together they demonstrate the range of temporary practices that have
engaged in the capturing history, each with varying degrees of temporariness and
permanence.
Both Nora and Assmann have argued for the necessary presence of a physical
object in commemorating history—Nora in his 1989 essay “Between Memory and
History,” and Assmann in his 1995 essay “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” It
is their theories that will drive this paper, offering definitions and a framework for
investigating history-based projects.
Nora, a French memory scholar, famously coined the term lieux de mémoire, or
“sites of memory.” These sites are “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself.”
5
They
are “simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at once immediately available in
5
Nora, 7.
6
concrete sensual experience and susceptible to the most abstract elaboration.”
6
Nora
writes that these sites of memory are material, symbolic and functional, and are created
when memory and history interact. Sites of memory are born with the sense that there is
no spontaneous memory; without a concrete reminder of things past, memories would be
swept up in history and lost. Memory, he says, relies on visible images, which serve as
symbolic storehouses of that which we cannot remember on our own, and so sites of
memory exist to help us recall the past.
7
Thus sites of memory are essentially objects that
help to perpetuate and concretize memory and are necessary for keeping memories alive.
Without them, memories would eventually be buried and forgotten.
A key concept set forth by Nora, in addition to the idea of sites of memory, is his
distinction between memory and history—a distinction that will be used in this discussion
of permanent and temporary history-based projects. Memory and history, Nora writes,
stand in total opposition of each other. Memory is always evolving, allowing for a
constant process of remembering and forgetting. It is a living thing and only
accommodates facts that suit it, and it can include recollections that are not completely
accurate, often twisting memories beyond the realm of accuracy on a subconscious level.
Meanwhile, he writes that history involves a reconstruction and serves as a tool for
helping our modern societies organize the past. It is a wholly intellectual and secular
production, requiring analysis, criticism and critical discourse. History, he writes, is
“perpetually suspicious of memory.”
8
6
Nora, 18.
7
Nora, 11-13.
8
Nora, 8-9.
7
Like Nora, Jan Assmann also argues for visible reminders of history. He believes
that collective memory can exist through oral communication for a limited amount of
time (he estimates eighty to one hundred years), but a physical manifestation of the
memory is necessary to prevent it from being lost or forgotten.
9
He has one key addition,
however: This visual object must be accompanied by some kind of ritual to anchor the
memory, much in the way we have wreath laying ceremonies at war memorials. These
rituals, coupled with visual objects, create what he calls a “concretion of identity.”
10
Both Nora and Assmann discuss the ideas of collective memory and sites of
memory in terms of permanent historic markers. Meanwhile, James E. Young, in his
book The Texture of Memory, offers an interesting dimension to the notion of
permanence within historic markers, which will be investigated throughout this paper. In
The Texture of Memory, he studies the vast collection of permanent monuments and
memorials that have been erected to commemorate the Holocaust, finding that while
many such projects remain static and unchanged in their physical form, their meanings
and significance do not. This is because, he writes, “memory never stands still.”
11
Indeed,
as the public interacting with these projects change, so, too, do the meanings that are
thrust upon them. Further, as peoples’ memories of the Holocaust changes, the way they
interact with and regard these memorials change, as well. And as younger generations
grow more and more removed from first-hand accounts of this time in history, they, too,
9
Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65
(1995): 127.
10
Assmann, 128.
11
James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), x.
8
come to regard the Holocaust and the memorials that commemorate it differently than
those who lived through the time. This changing meaning of monuments is one of his
larger points of interest, and thusly he focuses his efforts on understanding “the ever-
changing life of the monument over its seemingly frozen face in the landscape.”
12
The role of art in the concretizing of memory is not specifically addressed by
Nora, Assmann or Young, but when combined, their theories raise interesting questions
when applied to the field of public art. This paper will continue their conversation in light
of temporary history-based objects created by artists, while also examining permanent
history-based objects. By investigating both permanent and temporary works through the
lens of Nora, Assmann and Young’s theories, this paper will question how, exactly, they
function to create history and sustain memories. This investigation will begin in Chapter
1, where I will look critically at the notion of permanence in monuments, memorials and
similar traditional works that serve as permanent historic markers, analyzing them and
the way they function as sites of memories.
The next three chapters will engage in case studies of three temporary art projects
that take on the idea of history and perpetuating memory. Each of these three projects, to
varying degrees, have taken the idea of history and historic markers and turned it into a
temporary yet provocative object, inciting various responses and impacts. The aim is not
to create a list of best practices, but rather to explore what characteristics of public art
best support the concretization and perpetuation of collective memory. Chapter 2 will
continue the earlier discussions of REPOhistory, studying this collective’s larger body of
work, all of which engaged critically with history and focused on the relationship of
12
Young, x.
9
history to contemporary society. A prime, if not obvious, choice for exploring
temporariness in the commemoration of history, REPOhistory’s projects have served as
springboards for open dialogues about the ways we as a society choose to remember
history. Chapter 3 will explore Mark Dion’s 1999 piece Tate Thames Dig, in which the
artist took a literal excavation of two sites in London to unearth artifacts and display them
for the public. Using the posture of an archaeologist, Dion uncovered history as a way to
show us that it is always present and is quite literally underfoot at all times while also
creating a permanent physical object to represent that notion. Chapter 4 will look at Sam
Durant’s Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington,
D.C. in which the artist proposed to bring existing monuments commemorating the
massacres during North America’s colonization period to the National Mall as a means to
question the United States’ treatment of Native Americans in its historic markers. In
doing so, Durant upended the language of monuments and memorials, using their very
forms to call attention to their blatant disregard of the multivocality of history. Each of
these projects will be investigated with a few key questions in mind: Do they function as
sites of memory, as theorized by Nora and Assmann? In what ways, if any, do they
contribute to the collective memory of a community or society at large? What, if
anything, is lost when these sites of memory are temporary? Are these projects better
suited for capturing collective memories than large, permanently-sited objects? The paper
will conclude with Chapter 5, which will facilitate a broader discussion comparing
permanent and temporary history-based projects.
10
CHAPTER 1: TEMPORARY PERMANENCE, PERMANENT
TEMPORARINESS
In this chapter, I will first give a brief definition of the terms monuments and
memorials and historic preservation as well as an overview of the criticism they have
received, as these methods of permanently commemorating history will guide the
discussion of using permanent historic markers in the concretizing and perpetuating of
history within the public sphere. But permanence, as I will demonstrate, is not absolute.
Even that which is intended to endure, and that which is to remain untouched and
unscathed by the hands of time, will shift and morph over the years. This temporary
permanence will be discussed, using the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington,
D.C. as an example.
MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS
The definitions of the terms monument and memorial have long been hotly
contested, as James E. Young illustrates in his book The Texture of Memory. He
summarizes the many previous discussions of these terms, saying, “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.”
13
But he points out that monuments can also serve as sites of mourning,
much like tombstones do, and memorials have also existed to mark past victories. He thus
concludes, “Insofar as the same object can perform both functions, there may be nothing
intrinsic to historical markers that makes them either a monument or a memorial.”
14
13
Young, 3.
14
Young, 3.
11
Because these terms are so nebulous and fluid, for purposes of this paper, the terms will
always be used as a pair: monuments and memorials.
The idea behind this kind of history-based work is that it makes visible the
collective experiences or memories of a community of people. Monuments and
memorials make history tangible by taking the event, person or place in question and
making it into a concrete form, thus perpetuating its concretized image in peoples’
memories. And while monuments and memorials do aid in keeping the past alive for the
generations to follow, these attempts to turn something so complicated and multifaceted
into a singular, permanent fixture have received a great deal of criticism.
15
Monuments and memorials often seek to tell some kind of collective narrative
while also asserting a consensus of certain values or identities, a source of much criticism
in studies of monuments and memorials. They whittle down an important historic
moment—a moment that could mean many different things to many people—to a single,
finite narrative that is meant to speak to an entire population of people. Indeed, as Young
points out, these projects are often state-sponsored, and thus are asked to take on
idealized forms to project an idealized image of that which they are representing. He
writes, “They suggest themselves as indigenous, even geological outcroppings in a
national landscape; in time, such idealized memory grows as natural to the eye as the
landscape in which it stands.”
16
In other words, a constant, unrelenting visible presence of
15
Many critical analyses of monuments and memorials have been written by such people
as Friedrich Nietzsche, Alois Riegl, Lewis Mumford and Martin Broszats and many
scholars who have followed in their scholastic footsteps, and one would be remiss not to
pay them due respect in a discussion such as this. However for reasons of space and time
constraints, only a broad look at the many existing criticisms will be offered in this paper.
16
Young, 2.
12
such idealizations becomes so ingrained in the landscape and thus in people’s minds that
it becomes some kind of truism, rather than something that can be questioned or
reinterpreted.
Cultural theorist Malcolm Miles goes so far as to say that monuments become “a
device of social control less brutish and costly than armed force.”
17
Such objects, he
writes, are created as a way to project certain state-held values and preserve social order.
People grow conditioned to understanding them in certain ways, and thus the monuments
perpetuate the status quo. For these reasons, curator Ralph Rugoff writes that monuments
must be regarded with some element of suspicion. Democracy, he says, can respond to its
citizens’ changing needs only when there is a “free exchange of speech and opinion” on
all matters. But, he writes:
Monuments, on the other hand, traditionally speak with absolute authority.
They unambiguously assert that this leader was heroic, these fallen
soldiers were patriots, this event should never be forgotten. Built to
endure, they present a particular vision of history as though it were an
inarguable and eternal truth.
18
Because of their static, permanent nature, monuments cannot change their stories. This
absoluteness does not allow for questioning or differences of opinion, standing in direct
opposition of what democracy stands for.
This idea of using a monument or memorial to project a strong and idealized
national identity can be seen in the Washington Monument on the west end of the
National Mall in Washington, D.C. Standing 555 feet tall, this stone obelisk towers over
17
Malcolm Miles, Art Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 58.
18
Ralph Rugoff, “Monuments for the USA,” in Monuments for the USA, ed. Ralph
Rugoff (San Francisco: CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2005), 5.
13
the United States’ capital city as a monument to George Washington and the country he
helped found. In his essay on the this object, “The Self-Made Monument: George
Washington and the Fight to Erect a National Memorial,” Kirk Savage, who has written
extensively on the topic of monuments, discusses the problems and challenges inherent to
the effort to build a national monument. He writes, “If Washington was the founding
father, what kind of nation did he found? Erecting national monument to Washington
ultimately demanded a symbolic construction of America.”
19
But how does one illustrate
American identity in a single monument? And how does a country create a monument to
Washington, who is himself an icon and a symbol of the country he founded, and a man
Savage calls a “historical invention”
20
shaped more by history than he, himself, shaped
history? Writes Savage, “Even in his own time Washington and the nation he led were
largely a product of collective imagination. America was then—and to some extent
remains—an intangible thing, an idea: a voluntary compact of individuals rather than a
family, tribe or race.”
21
The creation of this monument was nearly a century-long battle, with early plans
proposing to build a Romanesque equestrian statue to him, and later plans proposing a
public tomb and a blank tablet upon which Americans can project their own ideas and
images of Washington. Each plan found both fierce support and fierce opposition, as
American citizens struggled to come up with clear and agreeable terms for defining
19
Kirk Savage, “The Self-Made Monument: George Washington and the Fight to Erect a
National Memorial,” in Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy,
ed. Harriet F. Senie and Sally Webster (New York: IconEditions, 1992), 6.
20
Savage, 5.
21
Savage, 5.
14
Washington, his legacy and the collective American identity.
22
And while these larger
national debates raged on, monuments to Washington were erected in other cities, in
campaigns led by local leaders who wanted to create monuments to the historic figure
befitting of their own patriotic values and regional self-images.
23
On the proliferation of
localized monuments that sprung up around the country, Savage writes, “The monuments
to Washington sharpened . . . social tension because his ambiguous standing led
American aspirations in two directions at once: backward to an ideal republic of stability
and harmony; forward to a new era of national expansion.”
24
And with each proposal for
the national monument ultimately amounting to nothing, the idea of being able to distill
Washington, his legacy and all that he symbolizes into one appropriate and universally
revered monument seemed an impossible task.
Eventually, architect Robert Mills won the final bid for building the monument
through his proposal to build a single Doric colonnade. Savage writes, “As Mills himself
was well aware, the Doric order had become emblematic of the republican character of
Washington—strong, simple, unaffected, almost primitive in its straightforward
accomplishment of the task set for it.”
25
While this proposal faced a few hurdles in its
reception and completion, the task of creating a monument to George Washington and his
country was completed in 1884, with Mills’ proposal shifting in form until it eventually
became the stone obelisk that still stands today. It was decades of opposition and
22
Savage, 8-13.
23
Savage, 13, 15.
24
Savage, 15.
25
Savage, 16.
15
competing views culminated into a monument that attempted to reconcile so many views
of America and both its history and future. As such, it stands as a lesson in the difficulties
of capturing the history and values of such a pluralistic society into one all-inclusive
national monument.
As seen through the epic journey towards the creation of the Washington
Monument, constructing and visualizing a national identity through monuments is a
difficult task, and one that may never be done to everyone’s collective satisfaction. In
attempting to concretize an identity or value system, the idea of creating something with
an aim towards permanence can be a crippling thought with which to grapple. The
monument being created must withstand the test of time, speaking to all generations to
follow and lasting both in physical form and emotional or symbolic meaning.
HISTORIC PRESERVATION
Historic preservation is another popular means by which we attempt to concretize
and make the past visible, and as such it must be taken into consideration when studying
permanent attempts at capturing history. As seen through the restoration of Paul Revere’s
house, historic preservation is a powerful way to shape memory and perpetuate certain
ideas of history. A relatively grassroots phenomenon in the United States, historic
preservation has grown to become a popular practice for communities wishing to engage
with their history. The first preservation effort in the United States was fueled by patriotic
sentiment—a woman in South Carolina led a crusade to save the deteriorating Mount
Vernon in 1853, and later, similar such efforts were undertaken to preserve sites that had
16
clear patriotic and historic significance: Andrew Jackson’s home, The Hermitage; the site
of the First Continental Congress; and Valley Forge, among others.
26
In her discussion of how historic preservation shapes collective memory,
sociologist Diane Barthel illuminates the appeal of historic preservation as a practice:
Historic sites anchor collective memories by providing tangible evidence
of the past. People visit them to “get in touch with history” in a very real,
literal sense. They want to see for themselves rather than accepting the
second-hand evidence of history books, other people’s narratives, or
media representations.
27
But more than that, historic preservation is seen by many as an obligation to both past
and future generations. Writes architect and planner Norman Tyler, “It is our duty, as a
society and as a community, to protect and preserve our heritage, which is deep and
rich.”
28
In the wake of increasing urban growth and development, many American cities
are at risk of losing sites and structures of historic and cultural importance. And, as Nora
and Assmann would assert, without these visible reminders of the past, it will be lost and
forgotten.
And while the urge to write off preservationists as people who stand in the way of
growth and development for the sake of preserving a past or outdated version of the
world, Tyler says,
It is important to recognize that preservationists are not against growth and
development. Rather, they see growth as built on the past. “The past is
prologue,” a phrase commonly used to represent this perspective,
26
Diane Barthel, “Historic Preservation: A Comparative Analyses,” Sociological Forum
4 (1989): 92.
27
Diane Barthel, “Getting in Touch with History: The Role of Historic Preservation in
Shaping Collective Memories,” Qualitative Sociology 19 (1996): 345.
28
Norman Tyler, Historic Preservation: An Introduction to Its History, Principles, and
Practice (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), 11.
17
challenges us as a society to base our plans for the growth on our past—to
look at how our society has evolved historically, and to have that past
serve as a guide for the future.
29
In other words, historic preservation exists as a means to create a road map for present
and future Americans. The present is a result of the past just as it is fashioning the future.
So losing the past will in some ways impact the course of what is yet to come.
The benefits of historic preservation extend beyond this idea of making the past
visible that Nora and Assmann champion. Historic preservation projects have the
potential to literally transform a space back to the point in time of desired remembrance.
Another function of historic preservation has been more pedagogical, informing viewers
about important people and events in history and their effects on the country’s
development. It also instills values. As Barthel points out, “The homes of local heroes,
revolutionary leaders, and of presidents were meant to teach civic obedience both to new
generations and to new immigrants arriving throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. They helped construct civic identities.”
30
However, as we saw with Paul Revere’s house, historic preservation efforts
present a host of dilemmas, such as erasure of certain histories, much in the way that
monuments and memorials cull specific moments from history to memorialize, leaving
much out in the process. As part of the preservation process involves selecting the
“historic significance” of the site being observed, certain narratives will necessarily be
left out, for reasons spanning spatial limitations, economic barriers, political agendas and
time constraints. In the case of Paul Revere’s house, economics dictated what part of the
29
Tyler, 13.
30
Barthel, “Historic Preservation: A Comparative Analyses,” 97.
18
house’s history was preserved. Because it was Revere’s great-grandson and other Boston
elites controlling the purse strings, it was Revere’s story that was told in the house, not
the story of Boston’s early immigration and the role it played in shaping the city.
These historic sites, in their construction of civic identities, also assume a
consensus of values, much in the way monuments and memorials do. They assume that
the moments being immortalized are the most important and most significant, while
imparting the most necessary historic lessons on the viewing public. In the United States,
each state has a State Historic Preservation Office to determine what properties are
considered historic sites, and the National Parks Service is tasked with designating what
is a historic site at the national level. As such, these agencies are endowed with a kind of
guardianship over what is historically significant enough to be protected and what is not.
And in order for a building to be listed on the National Register of historic places, “the
standard listing of the nation’s inventory of recognized historic structures”
31
which adds a
layer of protection to historic buildings, a structure must be reviewed and approved by its
state preservation board.
32
While in the past community activists have been able to rally
to protect something of local significance, the ultimate authority lies in the hands of the
government.
And, as with monuments and memorials, the preservation of historic sites can and
has become something more akin to the preservation of idealized visions of American
history. It helps establish and perpetuate the mythology of the nation’s past, preserving
only those moments that cast the nation’s history in the best light and illuminating what
31
Tyler, 45.
32
Tyler, 45-47.
19
Barthel calls the United States’ golden age when the nation was an “agrarian paradise of
equality, social harmony, and civic order.”
33
Colonial Williamsburg comes to mind, as
John D. Rockefeller, in his attempt to preserve the property, initially left out the slave
cabins and the auction block that originally existed in the square.
34
She continues,
“History is not presented as complex and contradictory, but as the nation’s blissful
childhood, which has led, necessarily, toward the more developed, if less ‘pleasant,’
society of today.”
35
In later interpretations of Colonial Williamsburg, the slave quarters have been
added to more accurately depict the colonial capital, however, befitting the shift that
preservation and restoration projects have taken in the past few years. While many early
projects projected America’s “blissful childhood,” as Barthel said, more recent historic
preservation endeavors have attempted a more measured approach, aiming more for
accuracy and fairness than romanticizing the past. This means taking on more difficult
moments in American history. For example, Manzanar, the Japanese-American
internment camp, has been carefully preserved since its national historic site designation
in 1992, despite the fact that it houses the memories of a dark time in United States
history. A historic guard tower has been reconstructed to illustrate the conditions the
prisoners felt. In addition, oral histories are being gathered and year-round public tours of
the site are offered, giving the public a chance to experience a moment in American
history when Japanese-Americans were imprisoned for their ancestry.
33
Barthel, “Historic Preservation: A Comparative Analyses,” 102.
34
Barthel, “Historic Preservation: A Comparative Analyses,” 102.
35
Barthel, “Historic Preservation: A Comparative Analyses,” 102.
20
Another example of a historic preservation effort that commemorates a difficult
time in American history is the site of the Stonewall Uprising in New York City in 1969.
At one point the largest gay establishment in the United States, Stonewall eventually
became the site of a riot that heralded what many call the modern gay and lesbian civil
rights movement. Incidentally, Stonewall became the first gay and lesbian site listed on
the National Register of Historic Places. Manzanar, Stonewall and other sites—including
the Freedom Trail from Selma to Montgomery and the African Burial Ground in New
York—demonstrate how historic preservation efforts can certainly grapple with moments
in history that do not project the idealized image of America.
TEMPORARY PERMANENCE
In sum, monuments and memorials and historic preservation efforts all seek to
make visible what is inherently invisible: history. They stand as the most obvious
examples of Nora’s sites of memory and of the physical objects he and Assmann believe
are necessary for keeping memory and history alive. Writes Nora, “These lieux de
memoire are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial
consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory
because it has abandoned it.”
36
He continues by saying that we as societies create these
sites of memory deliberately because otherwise they would be swept away and forgotten
over time. Further, these monuments create a sense of the ritual that Assmann deems
necessary in creating a “concretion of identity” and establishing a cultural memory.
These monuments often inspire or are accessories to national days of remembering,
where moments in history are ritualistically and continually re-remembered by the entire
36
Nora, 12.
21
country. They also become destinations to which people travel to view them and focus on
the historic moments they represent, renewing the memories in their minds.
But while they meet the requirements set forth by these two theorists, their
unintended consequences might prove to present more of a problem than a solution to
making history visible. In their attempts to represent a consensus in values, these projects
exclude and even suppress certain populations and their narratives. Each of these
permanent historic markers is susceptible to erasing parts of a history, creating a very
singular image out of a very plural story. They also can assume that the same values are
held by all or thrust a certain set of values upon the viewing public.
But just how permanent are these monuments? As James E. Young points out,
Public memory and its meanings depend not just on the forms and figures
in the monument itself, but on the viewer’s response to the monument,
how it is used politically and religiously in the community, who sees it
under what circumstances, how its figures enter other media and are recast
in new surroundings.
37
In other words, these permanent fixtures are permanent in form only; the meanings
derived from them vary among viewers, and their significance to society changes over
time. Young writes, “New generations visit memorials under new circumstances and
invest them with new meanings. The result is an evolution in the memorial’s significance,
generated in the new times and company in which it finds itself.”
38
And in a more literal change to its permanent form, Young writes of the chipping
away of the chunks of mortar that hold monuments together, thus changing their physical
appearance. He writes of the lichens that grow across the surfaces of the monuments and
37
Young, xii-xiii.
38
Young, 3.
22
the grass that grows around the bases, obstructing the lower parts of the monument.
39
This calls to mind basic maintenance and conservation issues necessary to keeping a
permanent structure in its original intended form and how neglect can cause an object to
crumble or fade in time. These all lead to physical changes in a monument that prevent it
from becoming truly and literally immutable and static. So even within the permanent,
there are elements of the temporary. The changes are subtle, but they are there. Here we
see fluidity between history-based projects, in terms of their permanence and
temporariness.
A very visible example of this fluidity between the permanent and the temporary
is seen in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Designed by Maya Lin,
then a young undergraduate architecture student at Yale University, this memorial is a
very physical and permanent remembrance of the Vietnam War and the soldiers who
fought in it, yet it is also in a constant state of evolution. The wall is made of two black
granite walls that are sunk into the ground. Engraved into the stone are the names of the
men and women who served in and were determined to be either killed or missing in
action. The names are listed in chronological order according to the date of casualty or
the date they were reported missing. Names are added as more casualties and deaths are
uncovered. But the names are not the only images seen on the wall; the granite, which is
highly reflective, reflects the image of the visitors back onto the wall. Along the base of
the wall, there runs a pathway for the visitors to walk along as the view the memorial.
Over time, the walkway has been decorated with mementos and sentimental objects left
by visitors: flags, letters to the deceased or missing, flowers, among other such objects.
39
Young, 208.
23
Unveiled in 1982, this monument received a great deal of criticism, most notably
for its striking difference from all other monuments along the National Mall. Rather than
projecting from out of the earth, visible to all from a great distance, the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial is built directly into the landscape, and from some angles behind the
monument, it is impossible to tell that anything is there at all. And rather than using the
traditional white stone or marble of most other monuments on the Mall, Lin’s design
called for a deep black granite.
40
Because of its stark, modernist appearance and its lack of figural representations
of the veterans (a common feature of most other memorials along the Mall), the memorial
was received by some with much outrage. Further, given Lin’s gender, young age and
ethnicity (Chinese-American), she was cast as an outsider, not familiar enough with the
war to properly commemorate it. Many felt Lin did not sufficiently grapple with the
issues of the Vietnam War, saying she could not possibly understand it and the veteran’s
position in the country given her outsider status. Many others felt it did not pay due
respect to the Veterans, saying it is too passive and abstract to capture the atrocities of the
war and the valor of the men and women who fought in it. In fact, a figurative sculpture
by realist sculptor Frederick Hart was commissioned to stand near the memorial,
featuring three male soldiers standing in full military regalia and armed with guns and
40
Marita Sturken, “The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans
Memorial,” Representations 35 (1991): 120.
24
ammunition.
41
Writes Marita Sturken, “The battle over what kind of style best represents
the war was, quite obviously, a battle over the representation of the war itself.”
42
Much like the Washington Monument, debate raged throughout the country as to
how best represent a war so steeped in political controversy. Some argued in favor for
Hart’s sculpture; others, like Sturken, believed Lin’s memorial was suited for the task, as
making visible the list of names of those killed in the war created a powerful and lasting
image and humanized the war in ways a figurative sculpture of hypothetical soldiers
could not. She writes,
. . . (T)hese names, by virtue of their multiplicity, situate the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial within the multiple strands of cultural memory
spawned by the individual names. . . . The memorial is not simply a flat,
black, abstract wall; it is a wall inscribed with names. When the ‘public’
visits this memorial, they do not go to see long walls cut into the earth but
to see the names of those whose lives were lost in the war.
43
Indeed, the inscription of the names in chronological order tells a narrative of the
Vietnam War. Sturken points out,
As the number of names listed alphabetically within a casualty day swells,
the intensity of the fighting is told. As one walks along the wall, one can
conceivably walk through the history of the war; Lin and others have
referred to it as a “journey.”
44
And while the monument is a permanent fixture in Washington, D.C., it is actually in
constant flux; it is a work in progress and will never look totally the same each time a
person goes to visit it. Names are still being added to the wall and will continue to be
41
Sturken, 124-125.
42
Sturken, 126.
43
Sturken, 121.
44
Sturken, 128.
25
added, as the statistics on each death are varied and more deaths are uncovered with some
regularity.
45
Another element of temporariness offered by the memorial stems from its
highly reflective nature. As the visitors to the wall come and go, so, too, do their
reflections, shifting and altering the appearance of the wall in time. The gifts or offerings
people leave along the wall in memoriam of the fallen soldiers are another changing
feature of the memorial. However, in a twist of permanence, the gifts are collected each
day by the park staff that oversees the maintenance of the memorial site and kept in an
archive, which is maintained by the National Park Service. In an otherwise permanent
monument such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, there are many temporary aspects
encountered upon each visit, and even some of the temporary aspects, such as the
offerings left along the wall, are turned into something permanent—an archive.
Another temporary aspect of the wall is a series of traveling projects it has
inspired, where smaller replicas of it travel across the country, giving people who might
not have the opportunity to visit Washington, D.C., a chance to see a version of it. The
Moving Wall is one such traveling wall, and was founded by John Devitt in 1984 after he
attended the dedication of the Lin’s memorial and felt compelled to share the experience
of the wall with all those who are unable to see it. The half-sized replica now travels
across the country from April to November of each year.
46
Another mobile wall is the
Vietnam Traveling Memorial Wall, a three-fifths scale version of the memorial created
by the Vietnam and All Veterans of Brevard organization in Brevard County, Florida,
sends a team of volunteers out to travel around the country with the wall much in the way
45
Sturken, 129.
46
The Moving Wall, “About the Moving Wall,” The Moving Wall,
http://www.themovingwall.org/#aboutmw (accessed January 4, 2010).
26
the Moving Wall does.
47
The Wall That Heals, a half-scale replica of the memorial, was
introduced by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund in 1996. It, too, travels across the
country but also offers a Traveling Museum and Information Center for visitors interested
in learning more.
48
Lin’s permanent memorial to the wall inspired the creation of these temporary
walls. And though temporary, these walls have the potential to have a lasting impact. The
walls’ arrival in a town is often the impetus for communities to organize related events in
conjunction with the walls’ visit, including reunion events for the community’s veterans,
lectures and exhibitions, among other events. They create opportunities for communities
to get together around the common purpose of viewing the wall and sharing their
experiences with the war and its aftereffects with others.
The Vietnam Veterans War Memorial was intended to be a permanent reminder
of the war it sought to memorialize. But permanence truly is fleeting, as demonstrated
through the alterations made to the memorial over time. Further, as many monuments
built prior to this one have demonstrated, the meanings of monuments such as the one
crafted by Lin will change in due time. Neither physical form nor essence stays the same
forever. But neither is temporariness truly temporary, as we will see in the following two
chapters, beginning with the sign projects undertaken by the collective REPOhistory.
47
The Traveling Wall, “About Our Wall,” The Traveling Wall,
http://www.travelingwall.us/ourwall.htm (accessed January 4, 2010).
48
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, “The Wall That Heals,” Vietnam Veterans
Memorial Fund, http://www.vvmf.org/index.cfm?SectionID=3 (accessed January 4,
2010).
27
CHAPTER 2: REPOHISTORY
In the summer of 1992, the streets of Manhattan were peppered with new signs
that were quite unlike the usual ones that direct traffic, outline parking restrictions or
label the streets. These signs featured drawings of falling bodies and lengthy text-based
narratives and illustrations of early slave markets in the city, and they were meant to
introduce the people of New York to the alternative histories buried in their
neighborhoods.
Lower Manhattan Sign Project was the work of REPOhistory, a New York-based
collective of artists, writers, performers, teachers and writers who sought to create site-
specific public art projects that explored history and its relationship to contemporary
society. Formed in 1989, the group lived on for eleven years, during which time it
produced six different public projects and a gallery installation and hosted a number of
smaller events around the country, all in the spirit of making art more accessible to the
general public while also addressing various hot-button issues, from the history of
abortion rights to the history of race and urban renewal. In his essay for Art Journal,
“REPOhistory’s Circulation: The Migration of Public Art to the Internet,” Jim Costanzo,
an original member of the collective, explains the focus of the group’s work:
The founding members originally met with the purpose of creating site-
specific, public-based art projects that engage with issues of class, race,
gender and sexuality. These works are informed by multicultural readings
of lost, forgotten or suppressed narratives that are designed to cognitively
remap the public sphere with the goal of using history to comment on
contemporary social issues from progressive perspectives.
49
49
Jim Costanzo, “REPOhstory’s Circulation: The Migration of Public Art to the
Internet,” Art Journal 59 (2000): 32.
28
Lucy Lippard echoes this sentiment, writing in “Anti-Amnesia,” her 1992 essay for Z
Magazine, that the main goal of the collective was to repossess history by asking the key
question “ ‘Whose History is Remembered? Who Will We Forget?’ ”
50
By unearthing lost, forgotten or suppressed histories and making them visible
using the language of street signs, REPOhistory not only created works expressing strong
social commentary, but they also invited viewers to look to the past and view their city in
a new light, beyond the history popularly taught in schools or celebrated in the city’s
more traditional monuments or historic markers. The artists recontextualized history
through their temporary, site-specific public artworks, intervening in a city-space and
drawing attention to forgotten or buried histories. Many of the signs the artists installed
were not intended to be permanent pieces of art, but during their lifespan, they created
visual reminders of the past while introducing viewers to the variety of histories that live
in a community.
Lower Manhattan Sign Project was the collective’s inaugural project. It was
inspired by the quincentennial celebration of Columbus’ discovery of America, during
which time the country was preparing a large-scale commemoration of Columbus’
legacy. The artists involved in REPOhistory saw this moment as an opportunity to
present alternative views of history, and so they decided to work with the theme of
colonialism and racism in their signs, focusing specifically on lost histories exhibiting
these themes in lower Manhattan.
51
The group assembled a collection of signs—more
than a dozen, in all—detailing a number of historic moments in the neighborhood. One
50
Lucy Lippard, “Anti-Amnesia,” REPOhistory, http://www.repohistory.org/work.html
(accessed December 1, 2009).
51
Lippard.
29
sign marked the site of the Slave Market in New York, once the second largest slave
market in the country, located across the street from the first outdoor stock market
(which, incidentally, is marked by a permanent historic placard). Another sign, featuring
an illustration of a man falling from the sky was placed in front of the New York Stock
Exchange. The free-falling man depicted the legend that stockbrokers jumped out of the
windows of their Wall Street offices after the stock market crash of 1929. The
accompanying text on the sign—“Advantages of an Unregulated Free Market
Economy,”—challenges the myths of the free market economy, reminding viewers that
the market crash and the economic depressions of the 1930s and 1980s were a result of
government deregulation and fraud. Another sign memorializes the first Chinese
community in New York City, formed by Chinese traders and seamen in the 1830s, and
yet another sign marks the site where Frances Wright, who fought for women’s rights and
the abolishment of slavery in the nineteenth century, delivered an important public
address in 1819. This sign gives Wright’s biography, briefly, and quotes excerpts from
her speeches. And a sign across from Beekman Hospital chronicles New York’s cholera
epidemic of 1849, when the city, rather than building or buying new healthcare facilities,
simply turned public schools into hospitals. The sign likens the treatment of this epidemic
to the AIDS crisis, calling attention to the consequences of poorly constructed public
health policies and those who are most affected by them, demonstrated through history.
52
Each of these signs marks a historic person or event that otherwise received very
little public recognition, if any at all. And while the messages conveyed seem simple and
clear, this project was not completed without a great deal of meditation on the concept of
52
REPOhistory, “Lower Manhattan Sign Project,” REPOhistory,
http://www.repohistory.org/work.html (accessed November 20, 2009).
30
memory and the different ways of looking at history. Lippard outlines the labor that went
into the conception of this piece in “Anti-Amnesia,” writing that several ideas were
tossed around before the collective ultimately decided to take on a project that looked at
lost histories of lower Manhattan, the birthplace of the city, that fit their theme.
53
The
artists involved in the project undertook a measured study of existing plaques, literature,
archives and guides, and they held many discussions about how history and memories
can and should be represented. Lippard writes of one meeting in which she was involved:
In one early meeting, we discussed different ways of looking at history; as
monumental truth or palimpsest, a labyrinth of memory; as documented
facts or as oral and written narratives by participants; as a linear
progression or a chaos of catastrophes; as simulacrum of the past or as
runaway simulations, parodies; as mass spectacles for the passive viewer
or as participatory ritual; as inevitable and “natural,” or as an open text
allowing for magic realism; as traditional documentary or as questions
about the role of the maker.
54
The artists also discussed tactics. They approached the creation of the signs not as objects
that were meant to last forever, but they instead planned to place the signs along the
streets and leave them there until they were taken down, by the city or vandals or other
passersby. The original plan was for the project to be executed guerilla-style, but as the
scope of the project grew, they realized that too much work was involved for it to be a
“hit-and-run.”
55
Instead, the artists got the community involved, and volunteers
coordinated with the city to have this project turn into a bigger community event. And by
the time the opening day rolled around, the unveiling of the project turned into a full-
53
Lippard.
54
Lippard.
55
Lippard.
31
scale neighborhood celebration, complete with a parade with papier-mâché sculptures
and a walking tour of each of the signs with storytelling and performances at each stop.
56
This project set the stage for REPOhistory’s ensuing projects. With this
experience under their belts, the collective went on to make more lost histories visible
through similar sign projects, including Queer Spaces, the project discussed at the
beginning of this paper. Entering Buttermilk Bottom was another history-marking project
the group created in Atlanta in 1995-96, which memorialized a community that was
destroyed in the city’s urban renewal process while also dealing with issues of racial
segregation. The group erected signs, street markers and an installation that showcased
the history of the community, all to tell the story of the community’s tumultuous past.
Some signs featured images of former residents of the neighborhood, while others
marked the perimeter of the neighborhood before it was marred by the city’s urban
renewal endeavors. Others featured historic photographs, drawings and stories about the
jobs held by early residents who shaped the neighborhood, or used photos to contrast the
neighborhood then versus how the neighborhood became as a result from the renewal.
Another sign mapped out the actual processes the city went through to move the families
from the neighborhood. In conjunction with these signs and installations, REPOhistory
also facilitated a reunion of former residents of Buttermilk Bottom, which became an
annual event.
57
This project entered a second phase in the form of Voices of Renewal, which also
took place in Atlanta, this time in the city’s Old Fourth Ward. The group worked with
56
Lippard.
57
REPOhistory, “Entering Buttermilk Bottom,” REPOhistory,
http://www.repohistory.org/work.html (accessed November 20, 2009).
32
residents of the neighborhood to create six public history markers, but unlike many of
their other projects, these were to be installed permanently on the private property of the
residents or business owners whose histories were featured. This project was more
permanent than the signs created for Lower Manhattan Sign Project, as they would
remain sited in their original location for as long as the residents and businesses
continued to inhabit the sites.
58
Another project, Out From Under the King George Hotel, took REPOhistory to
Houston, Texas, where the artists engaged with the history of the abandoned King
George Hotel. The building was located across the street from a homeless shelter, and the
Non-Profit Housing Corporation of Greater Houston was working to renovate the
building as a halfway house for the homeless. The artists created a document explaining
the site’s many layers of history that was distributed throughout the city and was
eventually used by the Housing Corporation for fundraising purposes.
59
Later, working in collaboration with legal scholars, REPOhistory created yet
another project, Civic Disturbances. This one involved the creation of two sets of twenty
street signs; one group was posted around New York’s legal community in Lower
Manhattan, and the other group was placed at site-specific locations throughout the city.
58
REPOhistory, “Voices of Renewal,” REPOhistory,
http://www.repohistory.org/work.html (accessed November 20, 2009).
59
REPOhistory, “Out from Under King George Hotel,” REPOhistory,
http://www.repohistory.org/work.html (accessed November 20, 2009).
33
The signs marked landmark legal cases that secured basic rights for the people of New
York City.
60
From the beginning, REPOhistory has branded its work as political in nature.
Indeed, uncovering lost or subjugated histories is inherently political. It works actively to
undo what the political forces at work did unfavorably—whether it’s the National Parks
Services’ meager recognition of the gay and lesbian history of New York or the city of
Atlanta’s displacement of the residents of a poor or blighted neighborhood. And with this
political mission, REPOhistory armed itself with interventionist tactics to disseminate its
messages and call attention to parts of the past which have been forgotten by many and
unknown by many more.
In The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday
Life, the catalog accompanying MASS MoCA’s 2004-05 exhibition The Interventionists:
Art in the Social Sphere, curator Nato Thompson writes that though many would be led to
think that so-called political art fell in popularity since its hay day in the 1980s, when the
likes of Barbara Kruger, Hans Haacke and Jenny Holzer produced some of their most
seminal work, political art actually was in full-force in the 1990s, though not as squarely
in the center stage as it had been in the previous decade. He writes:
The most telling point of departure for this is “off the radar” art practice is
its increasing emphasis on the tactics of intervention. Instead of
representing politics (whether through language or through visual
imagery), many political artists of the 1990s enter physically, that is, they
place their work into the heart of the political situation itself.
61
60
REPOhistory, “Civic Disturbances,” REPOhistory,
http://www.repohistory.org/work.html (accessed November 20, 2009).
61
Nato Thompson, “Trespassing Relevance,” in The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for
the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, ed. Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette
(North Adams, MA: MASS MoCA Publications, 2004), 13.
34
As such, Thompson points out that political work of the 1990s was typically found
outside museums, galleries and studios, physically entering the space of the political
situation being addressed. This allowed for greater visibility of the projects while
providing a greater impact by blatantly juxtaposing them with the issue being explored.
Thompson further argues that political art in the 1990s also focused less on
representation is it did on presentation. Artists began digging deeper into the issues under
exploration, like Krzysztof Wodizczko did with his homeless vehicles or William Pope.L
did in his Black Factory piece, which literally destroyed objects associated with
blackness to dismantle preconceived notions or prejudices associated with race. They
favored more exploratory tactics, presenting the issue rather than using more overt,
symbolically charged “images of violence and exploitation that so often, rightfully, move
people to political action.”
62
Thompson writes that such charged images, including
“depressing refugee photographs, or possibly graphic statements attacking the viewer for
ignorant complicity,” no longer carried the same weight.
63
These heavy-handed
representational methods of the 1980s no longer communicated messages with the same
power as they once did. And so political artists of the 1990s operated less with
symbolism and more with making political issues visible in often very playful, hands-on
ways. And many of them did this using interventionist techniques, whereby they
physically enter the political situation under investigation, placing their work squarely
62
Thompson, 14.
63
Thompson, 14.
35
within it. Thompson writes, “Their projects are made to operate within and upon systems
of power and trade using the technique of art.”
64
REPOhistory’s street signs blatantly inserted themselves at the very location of
political inquiry: the physical sites of lost or forgotten histories. They made visible what
had for so long remained invisible, not representing the problem but presenting it. Their
signs use the language of street signs to demonstrate that while many other community
histories are actively sanctioned and remembered by governing bodies, so many more are
not.
And while its projects have clearly taken on the political aspects of buried and
subjugated histories, have REPOhistory’s street signs functioned as sites of memory, as
theorized by Nora and Assmann? I would argue that indeed, they have created suitable
sites of memory, though Nora and Assmann would both take issue with their
impermanence. These projects have created tangible, physical reminders of history,
making it visible and either jogging people’s fading memories of these past events or
educating them on entirely new ones.
And though REPOhistory’s projects did not always live on for eternity in the
public sphere, one could postulate that if the histories the collective recovered were made
into permanent, visible historic markers, the same kinds of omissions and shortcomings
we see in monuments, memorials and historic preservation efforts would emerge. The
group sought to engage with the histories of minority populations and historically
repressed or disadvantages populations. But the histories of minorities are also plural,
though the temptation to lump them together as if any population, minority or otherwise,
64
Thompson, 13.
36
shares one common memory has been difficult to overcome for many history-based
projects undertaken over the years. While certain populations share minority status, their
histories are just as varied and unique as those histories shared by larger segments of the
population, and attempting to capture their histories in one tangible form meant to speak
to everyone it represents will present the same problems faced by all permanent historic
markers: erasure of certain elements of a history, the essentialization of populations, and
the assumptions of shared values and memories.
Further, had the signs been made permanent, might they also begin to blend in
with the landscape? Their arrival on the streets created an element of surprise. They were
something new to look at, offering images and texts unlike those of traditional street
signs, which made them very eye-catching. Clearly not projects created or sanctioned by
the city, they were attention-grabbing, drawing viewers in and providing a brief,
unexpected history lesson. But if they remained there permanently, it can be conjectured
that eventually they would blend in to the streetscape much in the way parking restriction
signs do, becoming another overlooked element in the urban environment, thus removing
all impact the project was intended to carry.
But just as the signs’ temporariness allowed them to puncture the streetscape and
offer lessons, so to speak, about alternative histories otherwise unrecognized by
governing civic bodies or historic preservation organizations, so, too, does their
temporariness present problems. Once they were no longer visible to the public, what,
ultimately, did they leave behind? While some of the signs still remain in place today, a
much larger percentage have been removed by various means and forces. Archives of
REPOhistory’s projects exist in the libraries at New York University, but access to this
37
collection is far from easy for the general public, as it requires special permission to
view.
65
Further, REPOhistory’s media footprint is faint, with some newspaper and
magazine articles written in small, local papers, but as these were printed before the rise
of Internet technology, many of them exist only in microfiche form or non-digital
archives. Lucy Lippard writes, “The general print media has been good to the [Lower
Manhattan] Sign Project, while the art press has for the most part ignored it.”
66
Perhaps
the projects went relatively unnoticed because the signs were so temporary, lasting for an
undetermined and uncontrolled set of time.
With this in mind, it would be easy to write off REPOhistory’s work as just
another buried history, much like the histories the artists explored. However, subtle
effects of the collective’s projects resonated long after the signs were first installed. For
example, the project created in Buttermilk Bottom inspired an annual reunion of former
residents of the neighborhood. REPOhistory, whether intentional or not, stirred the
residents to action. Through their reunions, they reclaimed their neighborhood’s history,
keeping it alive, despite the city’s attempts to eradicate it. In this sense, something
endured out of something inherently temporary.
REPOhistory’s project with the King George Hotel created an unexpected
fundraising opportunity with the Housing Corporation of Greater Houston. A copy of the
document the artists created to distribute throughout the city was later framed and hung in
65
Gregory Sholette, “Master of Public Art Studies Lecture Forum presents: Patricia
Phillips and Gregory Sholette” (lecture, University of Southern California, Los Angeles,
February 26, 2009.
66
Lippard.
38
the lobby of the renovated hotel.
67
While many of the documents that were created for
this project and distributed throughout the city did not last forever, the effects of the
project had a lasting impact, in that their work helped to raise funds to rehabilitate the
dilapidated hotel and turn it into a halfway house for the homeless.
And while difficult to document or quantify, the discourse the signs surely
inspired must not be overlooked. Simply by putting the signs out there, no matter the
length of time they existed, memories were jogged, lessons were learned and buried
histories were unearthed.
67
REPOhistory, “Out from Under King George Hotel.”
39
CHAPTER 3: MARK DION’S TATE THAMES DIG
While REPOhistory’s street signs brought the buried histories of a community to
the fore, Mark Dion’s 1999 project Tate Thames Dig took a much more literal approach
to digging up the past. In a project that was both performative and process-based in
execution, Dion staged an actual excavation to physically unearth objects buried beneath
the city’s soil and then presented the objects in the Tate Gallery as a means to create a
profile of the city and its history. Dion, an American artist, is deeply interested in the
natural world, taxonomy and the systems of classification, and these interests are
reflected in much of his work. Tate Thames Dig is no exception. And through this
project, Dion took on an ambitious hands-on examination of the city’s history, working
with the community to collect the detritus of London and use the findings to present the
city’s history.
Dion’s Tate Thames Dig was born out of an invitation from the Tate Gallery. In
the summer of 1999, the Tate Gallery initiated a series of temporary art projects as a way
to both celebrate and introduce the coming of the new Tate Modern to the city. These
projects were designed to introduce the new museum and the neighborhood to each other,
sparking dialogues with neighborhood residents and exploring the Tate’s newest home,
both in terms of its history and culture. Dion was among those artists invited to partake in
this series.
68
He focused his attention on the River Thames, along which the new Tate
Gallery was to stand, and assumed the posture of an archaeologist who, by profession,
excavates a site to unearth artifacts that aid in the understanding of the site’s history.
68
Iwona Blazwick, “Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig,” Oxford Art Journal 24 (2001): 105.
40
The River Thames was a rich site to explore. Its proximity to the new Tate
Modern made it a relevant area of focus, per the Tate’s mission with its project, but more
important, it was also a major site of London’s early growth and prosperity. As such,
there was much to be discovered buried along the riverbanks, all of which created a rich
profile of the city and its history. Dion’s excavations took place at two different points
along the river: The first was along Millbank, the site of Tate Britain, and the second was
on the opposite side of the river in Bankside, where the new Tate was being established.
Both of these locations have a rich history within the city and have played a role in its
formation for many years. For centuries, Millbank was considered a barren and
dangerous part of the city, and in the nineteenth century, it became the home of Europe’s
largest prison for convicts who were being sent to Australia and New Zealand. Bankside,
on the other hand, is one of the oldest settlements in Britain and was once a major center
of industry. It also housed many of the city’s early public theaters, and it remains today a
rich cultural district.
69
Dion’s project consisted of three phases: the archaeological dig, the cleaning and
classification of the objects that were unearthed, and the display of the objects within the
Tate Gallery. To commence phase one, the excavation, Dion assembled a team of
volunteers affiliated with local community groups. Throughout the summer, he and his
team scoured the banks of the river at both sites, gathering thousands of objects that had
been thrown into the river throughout the course of several centuries. The amateur
archaeologists—donning protective gear similar to what is typically worn by
professionals in such excavations—dug up an eclectic assortment of artifacts, ephemera
69
Blazwick, 105, 107.
41
and general miscellany, as well as the expected assortment of litter. In Millbank, they
found nails, likely from London’s early shipyards; credit cards; the dismembered limbs of
dolls; and bottles and cans. Meanwhile along Bankside, they turned up fragments of clay
pipes and pottery; eighteenth and nineteenth century metal works; and cattle teeth and
other animal bones.
70
The second phase, the sorting and cleaning of the objects, took on the most
performative phase of Dion’s project. To go about this phase, he set up a series of tents
on the lawn outside the Tate in Milbank. Under these tents, the objects were sifted
through and meticulously cleaned by Dion and his team of amateur archaeologists. It was
all done in plain view of the public, allowing passersby and museum visitors to observe
their work and Dion’s artistic process. Writes Iwona Blazwick in her essay on Dion’s
piece, “His tents were both functional and yet somehow exotic, evocative of distant ruins
and buried treasures, or of murders and criminal investigations.”
71
In this sense, Dion
created a spectacle.
It is important to note that nothing that was unearthed from the river was
discarded in this second phase. Dion kept each object, no matter how disfigured,
unrecognizable, ubiquitous or modern it was. Everything was subject to Dion’s curatorial
eye as he moved on to the third phase, that of the installation and exhibition of his piece.
For his project’s display in the Tate Gallery, Dion assembled his finds in a large,
double-sided mahogany cabinet, which had the air of an old-fashioned Wunderkammer or
curiosity cabinet. The objects were all painstakingly arranged in neat rows along the
70
Blazwick, 108.
71
Blazwick, 108.
42
shelves, but there was no discernable order to their arrangement. They were not
organized according to historic period, function or medium, nor were they arranged by
color or size or in a way to create humorous juxtapositions. Nor were there any
explanatory texts explaining what any of the objects were.
72
Writes Blazwick, “Concepts
of linearity and hierarchy implicit in categorizations [were] radically destabilized.”
73
Next to the cabinet, there were photographs of the processes that went into this
final iteration of the project, including the excavation and the cleaning processes, as well
as charts mapping tidal flows and a row of chests filled with debris collected from the
dig.
74
These all served to inform the viewing public about the various elements that went
into his project that would otherwise remain untold. It showed that Dion’s Tate Thames
Dig cannot and should not be understood as a single, static object in a gallery, but rather
as a series of steps taken by a collection of people who were undergoing a long-term and
ongoing investigation. Dion made visible the otherwise invisible aspects of his work.
This cabinet was not the end game; it was one part of a much larger project.
Each of the objects uncovered created a profile of the city and its past when
placed together in the cabinet. Hidden under the soil of the river were items used
throughout the city’s history, and each of these objects suggests something about the
city’s industry, culture and the people who lived there. And while uncovering the city’s
history was Dion’s major aim, Tate Thames Dig was also an exercise in understanding
the classification systems professionals and institutions use to read and display objects.
72
Blazwick, 108-111.
73
Blazwick, 111.
74
Blazwick, 112.
43
Examining the larger body of Dion’s work reveals that he is an artist who actively
questions the role of specialists, be they archaeologists, biologists, historians or art
curators. As such, Dion also actively questions the production of knowledge in his art.
75
In Tate Thames Dig, Dion engaged both with roles of specialists, as seen in his espousing
of the processes and methodologies used by archaeologists and historians, and with
methods of classification, as seen in his display of the objects, each of which remained
largely unclassified.
Dion also engaged with the role of museums as producers of knowledge. Through
much his art, Dion investigates how cultural institutions like art museums shape or
influence the way we think about the world, namely through their methods of
classification or their choices in how objects are displayed.
76
Dion says in a conversation
with Joanna Marsh, “I have a lot of profoundly basic questions for museums, and the
more I know about museums the less I can answer the question of what are these things
for.”
77
And he raises some of his questions with the final display of Tate Thames Dig,
while also working counter to the ways in which museums typically operate by omitting
explanatory texts from his exhibition. Further, by placing the objects in a cabinet as he
did with Tate Thames Dig, he directly references a popular exhibition technique used in
museums: that of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century curiosity cabinets, or
Wunderkammer, which throughout history have served as a means to display objects
75
Flora Vilches, “The Art of Archaeology,” Journal of Social Archaeology 7 (2007):
200.
76
Joanna Marsh, “Fieldwork: A Conversation with Mark Dion,” American Art 23 (2009):
33.
77
Marsh, 47.
44
meant for others to look at. Of these cabinets, he tells Marsh, “It is one of the techniques
and technologies of the museum that is really successful.”
78
These cabinets, he asserts,
create the best situation for viewers to simply look at and study the actual objects in
question, rather than looking at photographs, videos or other representations of the
objects. He continues, “So I find those cabinets compelling in that they allow you to
present things, and to present them in a context.”
79
In the case of Tate Thames Dig, the
cabinet provides a neutral space where viewers can view the objects within a museum
and ruminate on their simple existence while also thinking about what they communicate
about the city and its history.
And while this project wove through many layers of critique, institutional and
otherwise, it is its engagement with history that is the focus of this paper. Dion’s
interaction with history extends past his staged archaeological digs and reaches into an
exploration of what these digs can tell us about a place and a time that we can no longer
physically access and how we can apply this knowledge to the present. Tate Thames Dig
used physical artifacts from London’s history to create a profile of the city, both in terms
of its past and its present. Archaeologist Flora Vilches in her 2007 essay, “The Art of
Archaeology: Mark Dion and His Dig Projects,” writes, “Dion fully understands that it is
not so much about working with the past as it is about working with the present. Or, that
the present can also be treated under the scope of material matters.”
80
In other words,
Dion uses the past as a way to inform us about the present or to encourage us to examine
78
Marsh, 44.
79
Marsh, 44.
80
Vilches, 202-203.
45
the present a little more closely. Through this project, he showed how the city’s history
is, in fact, still very literally with us, in the form of lost and discarded artifacts buried
underneath the ground present-day Londoners walk on.
But would Nora and Assmann view Tate Thames Dig as a suitable site of
memory? Ultimately, they would most likely view Dion’s piece as too open-ended. It
does not concretize the memory of one specific past event or moment; rather, it very
broadly acknowledges that there is a rich history present in the city, and it can be partially
understood by the artifacts that remain buried beneath the surface. However, I believe
that the open-endedness is the project’s main strength. It does not purport there to be one
steadfast and true history that can be applied across the board. Tate Thames Dig showed
that history requires a process of discovery and interpretation, and that those processes
can be taken on by anyone, not just the professionals who deal with notions of history.
And as with REPOhistory’s signs, the temporariness may give Nora and Assmann
pause. This piece is not forever in the public’s line of site. The cabinet and the objects
within it still exist and to this day are a part of the Tate’s permanent collection, though
this tangible, physical part of the project is rarely on display for public viewing. Many
other aspects of the project were extremely temporal, namely the process-driven dig and
the sorting and cleaning of the objects, which took place largely out of the public’s sight.
While some people may have witnessed moments in the dig or briefly looked in on the
overall sorting process, the presence of the process ultimately disappeared once the
process had been completed, save for a few photographs taken.
However, the performative, hands-on nature of Dion’s project speaks to
Assmann’s emphasis on the notion of the importance of ritual. While Assmann speaks of
46
ritual as a continual process undertaken throughout time, there was certainly an element
of ritual in the dig and the cleaning and sorting. Assmann regards rituals as being an
active, kinesthetic way to perpetuate a memory in peoples’ minds. And certainly with
Dion and his volunteers physically engaged with the earth and the uncovered objects,
aspects of ritual were present. It is a process that only happened once, and will most
likely not be repeated on a continuous basis, but the sentiment is there.
Though the actual cabinet with the team’s findings is no longer on display at the
Tate, Dion’s history project still left a lasting impact. In fact, it was the very temporary
nature of this project that allowed Dion and his team to so rigorously interrogate the
city’s history. Rather than combing through texts or oral histories to passively uncover
information needed to make a commemorative sculpture, Dion and his team got their
hands dirty in the city’s soil, creating a very physical interaction between the amateur
archaeologists and physical, historic objects they were working to uncover. This
performance incited a very palpable connection between past and present in a way that
cannot be achieved simply by looking at an object.
Further, Dion’s dig was able to uncover not just one history of London, but many
histories of London. In his conversation with Joanna March, Dion says of his greater
body of work:
I don’t want to tell about the evolution of a technology, the importance of
when the British mastered porcelain, or when certain keys and locks were
developed, or when the influence of one society was manifested in
another. I want to tell a variety of different stories, which talk about roads
not taken.
81
81
Marsh, 46.
47
Dion understands the potential of his work to examine history from many different
vantage points. His work is not just about elevating one part of history into public
consciousness. Instead, through Tate Thames Dig he created an opportunity for people to
see multiple objects from history telling multiple stories. But he didn’t stop there. With
his purposeful omission of identifying tags or explanatory markers next to the objects in
the museum installation, Dion invited viewers to come to their own conclusions about the
region’s history while also challenging their own ideas about their knowledge of the past.
Rather than being passive viewers, as they would be with a traditional sculptural
monument or restored historic home, they became engaged viewers and producers of
their own knowledge, via the “facts” he provided them in the form of the uncovered
artifacts.
By literally excavating the earth beneath London’s surface to uncover lost objects
and then displaying the objects for the public to see, Dion created a very physical
presence of history. In three meticulously set-up and executed stages, he brought a sense
of history to the present while also showing how within the present, there is always the
past. And though we cannot see it, it is all around us, and quite literally so, as it is buried
beneath the ground we walk on.
48
CHAPTER 4: SAM DURANT’S PROPOSAL FOR WHITE AND INDIAN DEAD
MONUMENT TRANSPOSITIONS, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Throughout the United States, there are a number of monuments and memorials
that deal with the country’s colonization, a time in which European settlers came into
contact with the Native Americans who lived on the land before them, inciting years of
battling for a claim to the land. This time in American history is a contentious one with
multiple sides, however an overwhelming majority of the monuments that stand in
remembrance of this time honor the white men who conquered and massacred the native
people, rather than the Native Americans who fell victim to these attacks.
In his project Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions,
Washington, D.C., Los Angeles-based artist Sam Durant proposed an alternative way to
understand America’s early colonization, using the existing forms and the languages of
monuments, specifically those that deal with the massacres that occurred during the
colonization of North America. In doing so, he questioned the way the United States
remembers this part of its history, but more broadly, he also questioned the way
monuments and memorials function to tell the story of the past and how they urge people
to regard it.
Durant’s Proposal looked critically at the range of standing monuments that deal
with the conquest and massacre of Native Americans during North America’s
colonization. In this work, he proposed to move a carefully chosen selection of these
existing monuments from their various locations throughout the United States and place
them on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., calling attention not only to the plight of
Native Americans in this country but to how we are asked to remember their history. In a
49
conversation the artist had with John LeKay, published in Winter 2006 issue of Heyoka
Magazine, he discusses his attempt to balance this coverage of history:
The monuments that relate to the formation of the country are the ones
used in my proposal, the massacre monuments that commemorate deaths
in the conflicts between the Indigenous people and settlers, from their
arrival on the continent to the beginning of the twentieth century.
82
He selected thirty existing monuments, each of which met the specific criteria he set up:
They commemorate massacres that involve groups, not individuals, of whites and
Indians, and they are not figurative monuments but rather are in the shape of a vertical
shaft, much like the obelisk of the Washington Monument.
83
These monuments were
chosen after two years of intense research. Of his selection, twenty-five of the
monuments were dedicated to dead white settlers and five to Native Americans. In his
conversation with artist John LeKay he says, “I can’t claim that it is inclusive of every
monument in existence but I’m confident that it is pretty close and is certainly a
representative selection.”
84
Exhibited at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York in the fall of 2005, Proposal
introduced to the public Durant’s idea for his addition to the National Mall. The exhibit
had multiple components to it: a scaled model of his work as it would fit on the National
82
John LeKay, “Sam Durant,” Heyoka Magazine 3 (Winter 2006),
http://heyokamagazine.com/HEYOKA.3.SCULPT.SAM%20DURANT.htm (accessed
December 18, 2009).
83
Paula Cooper Gallery, “Sam Durant: Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument
Transpositions, Washington, D.C.,” Paula Cooper Gallery,
http://www.paulacoopergallery.com/exhibitions/43 (accessed December 18, 2009).
84
LeKay.
50
Mall, replicas of the monuments he sought to include, arranged as they would be in their
final iteration in Washington, D.C., and pencil drawings detailing these monuments.
In the scaled model he created, Durant showed that he would separate the
monuments to the white and Native American people, placing the twenty-five
monuments to the fallen white settlers on either side of the reflecting pool between the
Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, and placing the five monuments to
the fallen Native Americans on the lawn directly in front of the Washington Monument.
85
Durant also used the gallery space to install scaled-down replicas of the 30
monuments he selected. He placed the 25 monuments to the dead white settlers in grid
fashion within the main gallery space, and the five monuments to the dead Native
Americans were installed in the front space, surrounding his scaled model of the National
Mall.
86
Each monument was stripped of any identifying detail and painted gray. There are
no identifying markers or plaques to label what each obelisk memorialized. Writes Jerry
Saltz in his review of the installation for the Village Voice,
By presenting these monuments as uniform and nameless, Durant renders
them mute, separates them from time and place, creating an uncanny
forest of implacable signs. … The gallery becomes a graveyard of lost
memories.
87
The thirty pencil drawings of each monument that Durant made lined the walls of the
front space of Paula Cooper Gallery. These provided the details of the monuments that
the scaled-down replicas did not reveal.
85
Paula Cooper Gallery.
86
Paula Cooper Gallery.
87
Jerry Saltz, “Blood Monument,” The Village Voice. October 11, 2005.
51
Durant’s piece operates on multiple levels, the most obvious being his desire to
recontextualize Native American history so that it receives the visibility and
consideration that the dead white settlers have received for so long. But furthermore,
Proposal invites people to question the role of monuments and how they reinforce
history, which, in this case, is an idealized history in which the conquering white male is
treated as a heroic figure. He tries to reveal another way of looking at history—one that
shines a light on all the violence and bloodshed that went into the formation of this
country and calls attention to the Native American’s role in this era, which historically
has been a repressed story.
But Proposal is not meant to be understood solely in relation to the history of
North America’s colonization. It can also be applied to the present day, namely the
political climate of the twenty-first century, in light of the war in Iraq. Durant said in his
conversation with John LeKay that his piece “has served to make the point that America
is based on violence and conquest—not on democracy as we are taught to believe (and is
repeated every minute of the day in the corporate media). So it makes a certain historical
point which could be used to understand current situations.”
88
In this sense, Durant uses
history as a way to shine a light on the present state of the country. Just as the conquering
of indigenous people was a part of America’s early history, the attempt to conquer the
people of Iraq is becoming the next chapter in American history.
Durant approached his project feeling that the monuments dealing with this time
in history seem to exist mostly to justify the violence inflicted on the Native Americans
and their eventual conquest by white settlers. As such, he challenges viewers to
88
LeKay.
52
reconsider the vast scope of monuments and memorials in the United States and the
agendas they seek to further, much in the way he believes the monuments depicting
heroic white settlers further the country’s mission to justify its violent, bloody and
oppressive past. Durant considers his Proposal to be an anti-monument, as it runs counter
to the image the United States government would want to present about the country’s
history. Through this piece, he challenges popular versions of history using the very
monumental form that serves to perpetuate these ideas.
89
In so doing, he challenges the
role of monuments and the messages they convey. By calling attention to the vast
difference in numbers of monuments to white settlers killed in the colonization era and
Native Americans killed, he also questions how we as a country choose what moments
and what parts of history we wish to eternalize.
Ultimately, Durant’s Proposal never existed outside its form as it was exhibited in
Paula Cooper Gallery. Today, it exists solely in photographs and in texts written about it.
So, then, does it satisfy Nora and Assmann’s requirements to be considered a site of
memory? While its impermanence would be just as problematic to the thinkers as
REPOhistory’s signs or Dion’s dig and subsequent gallery installation, its use of the
monumental form certainly creates a tangible, physical reminder in a very traditional
sense. He created a palpable reminder of the past, emphasizing ideas that are normally
de-emphasized, in this case the plight of Native Americans and the ways in which
monuments serve to shape and re-shape history in peoples’ minds.
And despite the project’s impermanence, Durant’s Proposal certainly created a
site of memory. Nora argues that we must create these history-based objects, because
89
LeKay.
53
without them we would forget moments of history.
90
Durant’s piece engages with this
idea more so than the previous two projects discussed, as he demonstrates the lack of
memory sites for the Native Americans’ story and in so doing, he creates a kind of site of
memory for them. His project attempts to take a step toward correcting the imbalance of
the existing memorials and in the process he creates an object that keeps a memory or a
part of history alive: the Native American’s side of the country’s colonization story.
Of course, this piece was visible in its entirety for just a few weeks within the
confines of a New York gallery, but Durant’s Proposal is especially potent precisely
because realistically it never could exist permanently in a public square. For one, the
logistics of moving existing monuments from their original intended location to the
National Mall would be a colossal task, from gaining all necessary permissions to their
physical relocation. But the controversial nature of this piece—controversial because it
seeks to subvert the current dominant narrative surrounding America’s colonization—
would most certainly incite outrage and protest. In this sense, the temporariness of the
piece is a boon. Durant never intended the piece to exist in the public permanently
therefore he was allowed more freedom in the scope and vigor of his investigation, taking
on issues that may not otherwise be permissible in something so public and sanctified as
the National Mall. Further, he allowed his viewers to imagine a different historic
landscape, one that gives a voice to all voices, even those whose story may not be a
desirable part of the American story. He allowed, however briefly, for new possibilities in
constructing historic narratives to exist.
90
Nora, 12.
54
But the piece may live on more heartily in the questions it raised, both about
colonial history, specifically, and the way we choose to remember history, broadly.
Durant’s Proposal gave a voice to the often-unheard voice of Native Americans. But he
invited people to ask why these voices have been so silenced. Durant turns the language
of monuments against itself to expose the shortcomings and imbalances of these
permanent history-based projects. In using actual monuments to call attention to the lack
of existing permanent structures dedicated to Native Americans, he questioned the way
history is constructed and perpetuated via permanent monuments, and he exposed the
way these pieces are often exclusionary and incomplete in the stories they tell.
55
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION
Without REPOhistory’s signs, would New Yorkers remember the site of the first
slave market? Would they be mindful of the city’s first gay rights demonstration?
Without Mark Dion’s dig, would Londoners recall the industrial activity that occurred in
the city prior to the Tate’s arrival? According to Nora and Assmann, without tangible,
physical objects serving as reminders, the past would be swept away. Monuments,
memorials and historic preservation projects have served this purpose for many years,
concretizing the past and perpetuating collective memory. And though REPOhistory’s
signs, Mark Dion’s dig and Sam Durant’s memorial proposal were not permanent
fixtures, the objects created by the artists did serve as reminders of the past and, as we
saw, left lasting impacts. Temporary in nature, the objects still contained elements of the
permanent. But it goes in both directions: objects that are permanent contain elements of
the permanent. Neither permanence nor temporariness is ever absolute.
Public art has the potential to engage both with the permanent and the temporary
as well as the gray areas in between, though there are advantages and pitfalls with both
approaches. Permanent projects guarantee a lasting image of a part of history, but these
images leave out so much of the story and assume so much more. Temporary projects fill
in the blanks left by their permanent counterparts, but their lifespan limits the amount of
people who can see it, and in time, the memories of the projects will fade, just as the
memories of the historic moments they are commemorating fade. But neither is ever
completely permanent or completely temporary. Even the permanent projects fade in
time, just as the temporary projects linger in memories, archives and residual aftereffects.
This is an important point to remember when creating a history-based project, regardless
56
of whether it is permanent or temporary. Neither permanence or temporariness is the
perfect solution to commemorating history, but it is when the two are put together that
they can achieve something truly potent.
The Washington Monument still stands as an emblem to the nation’s character
and its founder more than a century after it was erected. However the history behind its
creation reveals that the stakes are extremely high when making an object that is meant to
last in perpetuity, and many voices must be reconciled in order to make something that
speaks to everyone. The object must be able to carry its meaning into the future, enduring
cultural shifts and generational differences so that its meaning is not lost and its
symbolism does not fade.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, though a contentious addition to the National
Mall in its early days, is meant to be a permanent commemoration of the veterans of the
Vietnam War, but it is still very much a work in progress. New names are added to the
wall over time, and the traveling walls it inspired continue to enter peoples’ lives and
create new ways of interacting with both the monument and the history it memorializes.
Meanwhile, the mementos and offerings left alongside the wall are swept away each day,
guaranteeing a constant change to the wall’s appearance; but the offerings are then stored
away in an archive, guaranteeing an element of permanence to something that otherwise
appears to be so fleeting. And as it is a relatively new wall dedicated to a relatively recent
war, much remains to be seen how future generations will come to regard it and the war it
seeks to remember.
Both of these projects have stood and will likely continue to stand as monuments
to American history and American identity. Both iconic by their own right, they project a
57
national identity, and in viewing these pieces, that identity as well as the values they
represent and the history they commemorate are reinforced. But their meanings shift in
time, and while the monuments cannot physically transform along with society, the ideas
society projects upon them keeps them in a constant state of metamorphoses.
Meanwhile, the temporary projects taken on by the artists discussed in this paper
have filled in the gaps that the permanent projects have left, giving a voice to the
identities that were previously unheard and sharing new parts of history that may have
forever remain untold.
The sign projects created by the artists involved in REPOhistory excavated the
lost or suppressed histories of a neighborhood and made them visible to the community.
The signs called attention to moments in history that otherwise would have remained
buried and eventually would have been forgotten forever. Some also gave a voice to
populations whose voices have remained stifled for many years. Because they were
temporary, they were able to probe deeper into controversial or suppressed histories than
would have been allowed if these pieces were made to last for an eternity. And while for
the most part the signs exist only in archives and photographs, their effects have lingered
and people who otherwise would have never known the lost histories they revealed now
carry the lessons with them.
Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig quite literally excavated the buried histories of
London, as he approached his project like an archaeologist and set out to recover that
which was lost and thusly invisible. His gallery exhibition displayed objects buried in the
soil along the River Thames, calling attention to the fact that history is always present,
not just in a psychic sense but also in a very physical sense. He showed that history is
58
always underfoot. Dion also encouraged viewers of his exhibition to examine the
uncovered objects free from any explanatory markers or pedagogical placards so that they
could critically assess the history of the region on their own terms. Rather than passively
read and observe, they were invited to actively engage in the archaeological exploration
and draw their own conclusions about the region’s history based on what was unearthed.
The dig and the cleaning processes were temporal and performance-based, but the display
cabinet still lives on in the Tate Gallery, though it’s not always on display. The temporal
elements of this project live on in the display they gave rise to.
And finally, Sam Durant’s Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument
Transpositions, Washington, D.C. drew attention to the lack of permanent markers in the
United States devoted to the history of Native Americans, especially in terms of the
violence inflicted upon them by the European settlers seeking to colonize America. In
doing so, he also called attention to the imperfections of monuments in terms of their
attempt to permanently memorialize moments in history. He demonstrated that these
permanent pieces do not always tell the whole story and indeed erase the less desirable
parts of history that many would much rather forget. Though it remains to be seen, this
project carried the potential to inspire future generations of historians, artists and
monument-makers to rethink the way we try to permanently remember history. Like
REPOhistory’s signs and Dion’s Tate Thames Dig, this project exists today mainly in
photographs, but as with the others, its effects are lasting in the messages it imparted.
Each of these three projects demonstrate the potential of temporary projects to fill
in the gaps left by their more permanent counterparts, but they also each exhibit
shortcomings that remind us why the more permanent monuments and memorials and
59
historic preservation efforts are necessary. They also demonstrate how, though temporary
in intention and physical form, they have permanent components to them, such as actions
they inspire or changes they provoke.
In the quest to remember history, one must always be mindful that as time
changes, so, too, do the ways we regard the past. Permanent history-based projects may
not be able to change physically with time, other than through deterioration, but peoples’
reception to them changes, making them not so permanent, and instead demonstrates that
they are living objects. Likewise, temporary history-based projects disappear from the
public eye after a point, but they can still resonate with audiences long after they
disappear, imbuing an element of permanence in them, too. It is in recognizing this
fluidity between the permanent and the temporary where rich explorations of history can
flourish.
60
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
Monuments, memorials and other historic markers are meant to function as a permanent emblem to a community’s history and collective memory, but what happens when a project engaging with history is meant to be temporary? This thesis attempts to answer that question, first by critically analyzing permanent historic markers like monuments and preservation efforts and then by examining temporarily sited projects. The theories set forth by memory scholars Pierre Nora, Jan Assmann and James E. Young are central to this investigation. This thesis seeks to understand what is gained or lost when history-based projects exist in public for a limited amount of time, ultimately finding that neither permanence nor temporariness is ever absolute. Three case studies facilitate a closer reading of temporary history-based projects: the work produced by REPOhistory, Mark Dion’s “Tate Thames Dig” and Sam Durant’s “Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington, D.C.”
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Temporary or permanent? Considering time, memory and history in public art projects
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Publication Date
04/16/2010
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