The New New Monuments*
The New New Monuments*
Over the past few years, countless monuments have fallen, yet people keep erecting new ones. At the site of the devastated WTC, a memorial and an enormous freedom tower are going up; in Europe, museums are reserving large spaces for huge artworks; in the centre of London, a plinth that had been empty for 150 years has been occupied by experimental contemporary art for the last decade. Will Bradley explores the meaning of this renewed interest in monuments.‘Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.‘ – Robert Smithson [1]Every cloud has a silver lining. The destruction of the iconic twin towers of the World Trade Center was a blessing not only for the enemies of freedom, massing in their dark, unmapped caves, but for developers and architects tired of having to line up and wait for peripheral urban real estate to be prised from the grasping fingers of the working classes and their state proxies. The initial architectural competition for the site, run by the newly created custodians, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, was presented as an informal trawl for ideas rather than a definitive search, and so many other similar initiatives quickly sprang up. For a while, it seemed that every newspaper in the US and Europe had a feature on the proposed new designs, and that every working architect with an ounce of ambition had put forward a plan.It goes without saying that almost every proposal involved towers, one, or two, or four, often as tall as or taller than Yamasaki’s featureless originals. This outpouring of socially-sanctioned hubris was matched only by the very public conflict between the real powers at work, the site’s developers, and the chosen architect, Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind’s predictably strident skyscraper was shorn of its sculptural pretensions and redesigned by David Childs, but retained its name, the Freedom Tower, and its symbolic height of 1776 feet. The Freedom Tower will now be joined by three others, designed by the firms of Norman Foster, Fumihiko Maki and Richard Rogers, overlooking Michael Arad’s memorial park that fills the footprints of the original twin towers with two rectangular ponds. The most surprising thing about the whole development, after several years of controversy, is how unsurprising it is. With the exception perhaps of the extreme height of the towers, it could slot right in to any of the world’s rich megacities. The bombastic name of the Freedom Tower, and its reference to the year of US independence, now seem like afterthoughts, bolted on ornaments, and they seem almost entirely unnecessary, because the complex itself is already the perfect monument. The 9/11 attacks appear as the alchemical moment at which the symbolism of the old World Trade Center was reversed, destroyed and reborn, the moment when the idea that a generic office/retail/hotel complex and a transcendent monument to freedom could be one and the same was transformed from a cruel slander into a beautiful self-evident truth.
What’s to be done?
Our freedom, which of course means capitalism and a form of democracy and a regime of rights legally tuned to its demands, is natural and eternal, so business as usual, only bigger, and shinier, is the best monument we have. And if the victory of freedom is all around us, if it is, in fact, embodied in us and is the very fabric of our lives, what other kind of monument could there possibly be? Anything else risks showing the struggle, breaking the surface, admitting the ghost, however faded, of real politics and internal conflict. After 1990, statues of Lenin were taken down across Eastern Europe; the nineteen-metre tall monument in Berlin’s Leninplatz was publicly beheaded before being demounted, sawn up and buried in a forest outside Koepenick. When, in 2002, a marble statue of Margaret Thatcher, due to be placed in the House of Commons, was beheaded by a man called Paul Kelleher, it took two juries to convict him of criminal damage. The first jury’s political sympathies led them to a hung verdict, even though Kelleher freely admitted to battering the monument first with a cricket bat, and then with a steel pole lifted from a crowd barrier.[2]Still, the contemporary art world does not seem to be afraid of producing monumental works. Two of Europe’s most prestigious, state flagship art spaces, the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and the Monumenta programme at the Grand Palais in Paris, are dedicated to the project. The Bilbao Guggenheim is emblematic of the numerous new museum and kunsthalle buildings that have clothed themselves in contemporary art’s spectacular ascendancy. Isa Genzken’s eight-metre tall Rose II (2008), installed outside the Art Basel exhibition hall this year and available in an edition of three, indicates how the major art fairs have also symbolically expanded into the public space around them.In the UK, the most visible, initially controversial, and yet ultimately unquestioned example of monumental contemporary art is, of course, Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North (1994). As cities around the former USSR were dismantling monuments to Lenin, Britain was raising a giant steel statue of a middle-aged English artist. Gormley has not stopped there, however; he is about to give us another public work, one that sums up the conditions that make contemporary art the ideal subject and site for the production of the new new monuments.Gormley’s One and Other is the latest work to be commissioned for the ‘fourth plinth’ in Trafalgar Square. [3] This granite plinth, designed in 1841 and empty for 150 years afterwards has, since 1998, been the site of temporary commissions of public art. The commissions are chosen by committee but have somehow earned the spot the newspaper title of the ‘People’s Plinth’, after the model of the ‘People’s Princess’. Gormley has successfully proposed that the plinth be ‘occupied 24 hours a day by members of the public who have volunteered to stand on it for an hour at a time’, and his street theatre version of reality TV is the problem of the contemporary monument literally made flesh. The artist sees it as a portrait of the nation, an act of ‘collective creativity’; the participants will be ‘removed from common ground’, and become both ‘representation and representative’. six ‘curators will guard the work. There is not space here to do justice to the many disconcerting implications of Gormley’s proposal. The work offers itself unselfconsciously as an embodiment of the nexus between the contemporary art world and third way ideology. Its central proposal – that the realm of art is a special, magical, transformative place that has the power to elevate anyone, but not everyone – parallels the myths of the lottery or reality TV, which is to say that it is powered by the central rhetorical aporia of modern capitalist democracy, opportunity for all. One and Other is a monument to the nation as a coincidence of individuals, atomised, interchangeable, the lucky few raised up to the new moral good of fleeting micro-celebrity. It’s the physical realisation of the exploitation of individual cultural capital that powers online userfarms like MySpace or Facebook (lately and brilliantly neologised as loser-generated content [4]), without even the deterritorialised communication that those platforms allow. Still, from another perspective, One and Other is close to perfect. It is the image of what contemporary art has to offer contemporary politics. The challenge, for a regime looking for a way to produce inclusive new monuments, to avoid publicly writing the terms of oppression in marble and granite, is to find an apparently ahistorical unifying principle that can be uncomplicatedly celebrated. Our eternal but newly-defended freedom is, of course, that principle, and the kind of confusion between democracy, participation and cooption that Gormley’s work embodies is the comforting fuzzy mitten over the saluting hand that makes the bigger picture difficult to see.The concepts that become dominant ideological tropes – liberty, democracy, or freedom of expression for example – are often not initially proposed by the ruling power, but in opposition to it. The governing system must then defuse their radical potential, co-opt and reflect them as part of the natural order. One and Other is the paradigmatic artwork of this process, openness and participation ritually performed in the centre of the capital city, in the full media spotlight, with full security, to no end other than the meaningless celebration of these now-hollow concepts whose empty clanging will resound round Trafalgar Square; a square that, less than twenty years ago, saw the torching of the South African embassy in an open and participatory riot that symbolised the end of Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax and her political career, if not the end of the political philosophy she represented.
Have it your way
Gormley is something of a soft target, of course, and it is unlikely that many contemporary artists would feel close either to Gormley’s work or the project of the People’s Plinth, but it can be argued that similar processes underlie other large-scale public manifestations of contemporary art. To take a somewhat different example, the most recent Berlin Biennial found space, amongst many diverse practices, for a revived modernist monumentality that recalled Robert Smithson’s thoughts on ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’ [5]. Ahmet Öğüt’s Ground Control (2007), an expanse of tarmac laid on the ground floor space of Kunst-Werke, followed precisely the strategy of metaphorical minimalism that Smithson ascribes to Sol LeWitt, while Paola Pivi’s If you like it, thank you. If you don’t like it, I am sorry. Enjoy anyway, 2007 simply asserted the artist’s vision as its primary justification. In contrast, the collection of artists’ projects sited in the Biennial’s outdoor Skulpturenpark carefully avoided claims of traditional artistic autonomy. Nonetheless, Katerina Šedá’s work Over and Over (2008) succeeded, perhaps more than any other on show, in capturing the spirit of the new new monuments.Šedá made a symbolic reconstruction of the walls and fences that have sprung up in her Czech hometown Líšeň as a consequence of post-communist privatisation, and brought a group of forty Líšeň residents to Berlin to augment these structures with improvised ladders and junk-pile steps that could be used to climb over them. The work chimed with both the anti-romantic beauty of the wasteland setting and the recent history of a site in the historical shadow of the Berlin Wall. In its suggestion than art can overcome the boundaries between people, it also functioned as an assertion of a kind of artistic autonomy perhaps more attuned to the current situation.Artists, in the current mythology, are specialists in freedom; that is what, more than anything else, defines them. Artists leap over society’s walls and fences. They are specialists in the bourgeois freedom, the capitalist freedom that formed them, in all of its nuances and contradictions. Art’s modernist uselessness is a freedom from the demand of social productivity, and the value theories of economics grind and shudder when asked to process the contemporary art market. Artists are nomadic, having passed through identity politics and come out as citizens of the world, and they travel freely and endlessly to make exhibitions about border controls and the travails of illegal migrants. The nineties ascendancy of the artist as collector, designer, DJ, remixer, pop culture fetishist, bricoleur and ultimately curator can be summed up in the idea of the expert consumer, the archetypal specialist in contemporary freedom; as they tell you at Burger King, you should ‘have it your way’.This version of the artist’s role is closely related to the recent success of the biennial form itself. Artforum’s review of the Berlin Biennial noted the contradictory coexistence of ‘a prevalent mode of referentialism in contemporary art, an artistic model that integrates pointers to particular works of preceding generations of artists, a vast array of historical episodes, theoretical writings, or aesthetic codes outside the field of art proper’ with the current interest in ‘modernism’s formal languages and … the concomitant aspiration to artistic autonomy’ [6]. It is this kind of contradiction between different discourses or definitions of art that serves to give the biennial form its critical content, to ground it in the complex history of conflicts from which art is produced. Correctly invoking the figure of the artist as a heroic constant, however, makes it possible to create an imaginary continuity, to link otherwise incompatible events and discourses via the biennial form itself, to re-narrate almost any historical shift so as to say that nothing happened except that artists continued to respond to the world.In this way, the mushrooming international art biennials [7] themselves are able to function as monuments to the ideology of freedom more subtly and perhaps more effectively than the 1776 foot-high Freedom Tower. Their changing manifestations only temporarily embody the foreignness of power, while retaining the promise of transformation; always incomplete, they promise ultimately to encompass all acceptable positions without conflict or contradiction. Particular works need not conform to a specific ethic or gravitate to any formal centre, because art in this definition automatically implies, even demands, pluralism. In its contemporary monumental form, art has no responsibility save to the myths of freedom: to be apparently limitless but in fact tightly bounded, always speaking of agency but ultimately impotent, always imagining a community but powered by the competition of the market, and continually mistaking the individual for the universal. Seen in this light, Anthony Gormley’s One and Other is neither an experiment in democracy nor a sudden, bleak takeover of a democratic space by one man’s lame idea, but a concise summary of the ongoing, quasi-public celebration of freedom to which contemporary art is ideally suited.In 2002, the New York-based architect Lebbeus Woods was one of the many who put forward a proposal for the World Trade Center site.[ 8] Rather than an office or hotel complex, he suggested the ongoing construction of a tower whose function would be its own vertical extension, a building functionally dedicated to the process of building. Woods’s proposal also summarises the celebration of freedom, but conjures from it a deadpan satirical image that takes the logic of the situation to its not-too distant absurd conclusion. As a tower that would never stop growing it would always be the tallest building in the world, the perfect response to an ideological need. Freedom should be everywhere, and also just out of reach, fragile and threatened; its future completion, just like the future completion of the biennials of art, would be the responsibility of a new generation expected to mistake continuity for change and reprocess the ruptures of the past as nothing more than detours in the larger project of adaptive stasis.*Robert Smithson identified ‘a new kind of monumentality’ in the sculpture of minimalists as Dan Flavin, Robert Morris and Donald Judd. The title of this article ‘New New Monuments’ is a terminology invented by the author to describe the current tendency among artists to be interested in the meaning of monuments and monumentality.
Will Bradley
