"While Robert Musil's century-old adage that "there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument" still rings true in some ways, many monuments today feel more visible than ever. Statues of Cecil Rhodes and Robert E. Lee have collapsed under the pressures of public protest, exposing monuments for what they really are: flashpoints where histories are negotiated and mythologies are formed."
"art historian Cat Dawson identifies the roots of contemporary artists' confrontation of monumentality by locating its watershed moment. Kara Walker's "A Subtlety" (2014), a 75-foot (~22.9-meter) sugar sculpture, temporarily occupied one of the now-demolished buildings at the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn and radically subverted the genre. Walker drew upon conventions of monumentality and subverted them to foreground histories of gendered and racialized violence, consumption, and extraction that bind the past to the present."
A watershed moment began in 2014 with Kara Walker's "A Subtlety", a 75-foot sugar sculpture in the Domino Sugar Refinery that repurposed monumental conventions to foreground gendered and racialized violence, consumption, and extraction. The period from 2014 through at least 2023 can be characterized as a "monument boom" in which contemporary artists trouble the genre of monuments. Artists push beyond uplifting silenced narratives to unravel the processes that produce historical exclusions. Strategies include ephemeral materials, site-specific interventions, and anti-monumental gestures that destabilize myths, provoke public debate, and reconfigure civic memory and space.
Read at Hyperallergic
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