| Summary: | <p>Monuments and monumental markers have played a significant role in Western culture for centuries, but only comparatively recently has this tradition faced serious critical review. <em>If This is a Monument: Artistic Responses to a Cultural Form</em> reflects on radical monument critique as voiced from within modern and contemporary art.</p>
<p>The thesis consists of four case studies framed by two more reflective chapters. Chapter One traces the ancient origins of the monument as an upright, permanent marker of both place and name and introduces cornerstones of 20th-century theoretical critiques of the monument as a cultural form. Chapter Two examines how writers from Charles Baudelaire to Robert Musil reflected on the ghostly qualities of the urban monument at the turn of the 20th century, while Surrealist artists launched repeated attacks on the monument in the journals of the 1920s and 1930s, employing the verbal and photographic weapons newly available to them. Chapter Three provides a close examination of a neglected New York exhibition of 1967 which brings into focus the relation of the monument to piles of matter, proposed scale-expansions of small objects, and horizontality. Chapter Four revisits the ancient concept of the colossus which has become subject to both parodies and re-invention in the 21st century. Chapter Five discusses the political potential of monumental impermanence in a study of a project conceived in London by the artist Mike Nelson but never – perhaps symptomatically – completed.</p>
<p>Finally, a Coda devoted to loss and communal mourning explores the psychological dynamics of the raising (or not) of public monuments, demonstrating the allure of the monument as a material marker as well as, paradoxically, its survival as a cultural form.</p>
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