Monument

Abstract

The condensed representations of space, time and social relations that we call monuments tend to make their presence-or absence-most palpable at moments of radical political upheaval. Monuments surely have proven to have lives beyond the desires of their creators, and even beyond those of their destroyers. More formal features of the monument may be discerned from its service to the seemingly eternal entity called the nation. Precisely in this role of representing the nation, monuments display their power to link memory, identity and utopia in the cosmological manner characteristic of the great world religions, by symbolically coming to terms with a fundamental question on which modern thought has no sure handle. Struggles over monuments are ultimately struggles over the world we want, mediated by representational problems pertaining to their aesthetic form and content.