monumentality

monuments/counter-monuments

“Museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries, fraternal orders-these are the boundary stones of another age, illusions of eternity. It is the nostalgic dimension of these devotional institutions that makes them seem beleaguered and cold-they mark the rituals of a society without ritual; integral particularities in a society that levels particularity; signs of distinction and of group membership in a society that tends to recognize individualsonly as identical and equal.” [Nora Pierre, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire”, Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring, 1989), p. 12]

It is in this basis, and especially under the burden of the proclaimed “end of history”  that the foregroundign of social and political histories, from personal memories to rememorisation of social and political history has been institutionalised and organised by artists in ways that have challenged them or offered alternatives.

• counter-memory

• institutional or hegemonic memory

• traces, indexicality, autobiography

• intersubjective relationships and re-enactments as monuments

• postmemory

• in-between memory

• universalising history

• counter-history

• elastic relationship between history and artifice

• reconstruction vs revisionism (and beyond?)

• allusive vs explicit (and beyond?)

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