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When Monuments Fall: The Significance of Decommemorating

2021; Irish American Cultural Institute; Volume: 56; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/eir.2021.0001

1550-5162

Guy Beiner,

Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

When Monuments Fall:The Significance of Decommemorating Guy Beiner (bio) "The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too." mikhail bakunin "the reaction in germany" (1842)1 Unlike a tree in a lonely forest, when a monument falls in an urban space, people notice. The resonance of the tumble and its reverberations, however, are open to interpretation and require clarification. Much has been written about the nature and purpose of commemoration, whereas instances of "decommemorating"—i.e., assaults on memorials that result in defacement, destruction, or removal—are readily dismissed as spontaneous outbursts of mindless vandalism. Yet there is more to decommemorating than meets the eye. Moreover, the implicit dichotomy that associates commemorating with memory and decommemorating with forgetting warrants reconsideration. This can be shown through a general discussion and demonstrated with examples from modern Irish history.2 The terminology is deceptive: memorialization through the construction of monuments is commonly equated with memory, even though the transitive verb "memorialize" (which over the course of the [End Page 33] long nineteenth century came to signify commemoration) is not simply a synonym of "memorize" (to commit to memory). The relationship between memorial and memory is less than straightforward—and the two may even be antithetical. Monuments purport to be memory cast in stone, and herein lies the paradox. As demonstrated by the British pioneer of cognitive psychology F. C. Bartlett, remembering is essentially an "effort after meaning"; hence, the act of remembering entails "not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless, and fragmentary traces," but "an imaginative reconstruction."3 On the other hand, the static representation of memory crafted by a sculptor—although designed to endure—may soon appear to be outdated. Indeed, a monument is inherently anachronistic, locked in the mentalité of the time of its creation, as the world continues to move on. It is a fossilized depiction of memory as it was once conceived, waiting to be reanimated. As the American historian Kirk Savage suggests, we assume that "monuments remain powerful because they are built to last long after the particular voices of their makers have ceased, long after the events of their creation have been forgotten."4 However, the continued effectiveness of a monument as an aide-mémoire is dependent on it being recharged with new meanings and reacquiring relevance. Yet by their very materiality monuments are doomed to decay. This truism was visually portrayed in the frontispiece of François Perrier's Segmenta nobilium signorum et statuarum (1638), an early modern collection of drawings of Roman statues that was highly influential in shaping neoclassical aesthetics of European monuments. Perrier opened his book with an image of Time—depicted as a winged old man with a scythe—devouring an already-broken statue, the famed Torso Belvedere at the Vatican (figure 1). Even as he labored to restore the prestige of ancient statues, Perrier exposed the inevitable futility in the hubristic expectation that a monument would endure ad perpetuam rei memoriam. In the early years of the twentieth century the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl, writing on "The Modern Cult of Monuments," commented on the necessity for continuous conservation: [End Page 34] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Time gnawing at a statue. François Perrier, Segmenta nobilium signorum e[t] statuar¯u[m], quæ temporis dentem inuidium euasere Urbis æternæ ruinis erepta, typis æneis ab se commissa perptuæ uenerationis monumentum (Rome: n.p., 1638), frontispiece. [End Page 35] From the outset, that is from the erection of the monument itself, the purpose of deliberate commemorative value is to keep a moment from becoming history, to keep it perpetually alive and present in the consciousness of future generations. … Deliberate commemorative value simply makes a claim for immortality, an eternal present, an unceasing state of becoming. … A memorial column, for instance, with its inscription effaced, would cease to be a deliberate monument. Thus the fundamental requirement of deliberate monuments is restoration.5 For Riegl—who wrote in the heyday of fin-de-siècle Vienna with its impressive parade of statues and monumental architecture along the Ringstrasse—maintaining the materiality of monuments ensured that memory would endure.6 Conversely, in Matière et mémoire...