... this blog is an ongoing investigation into modes of suspension that started as a research project in Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College in 2011 ...

Thursday 9 June 2011

Monuments/ Defacement

"I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require the expenditure of so much strength." (Franz Kafka, diary entry, 1914)

In Lenin in Ruins Mark Lewis quotes Robert Musil to the effect that we never pay much attention to monuments in our city as we pass them by. Quite possibly we don't notice them at all. Why then, we must as all the fuss that suddenly arises concerning monuments during and after the toppling of the regime? Toppling of course gives the game away as if the regime itself is a monument and, what is more, as if there exists a sort of death wish deep within the monument, something in the monumentality of the monument that cries out to be stopped, besmirched, desecrated - in a word, defaced. This is the law of the base at the heart of religion and things sacred. Like Flaubert's concept of the act of writing, to erect a statue is to take revenge on reality. And reality in turn exacts its due. Mark Lewis suggests that the lies, or repressed history, of the regime are installed in the statue as a hidden flaw, an invisible fault line awaiting the resurgence of the truth of the past; and it is this, he suggests, that accounts for the fury of defacement and the effervescent magical effect thereof that yields more. But this hopeful suggestion itself suffers, so it seems to me, from the same monumental faith in truth and history, not to mention in memory, that sustains the self-portrayal of the regime. It lacks the defacement quality necessary to any worthwhile theory of defacement. It fails to see the law of the base, the attraction no less than the repulsion of ruins, and the ecstasy therein. How charming, therefore, the contributions to the defacing art provided to the New Yorker by several artists asked in 1993 what to do with the monuments of the recently toppled USSR. One inverts the statues, burying the tops of the figures in the ground, leaving the base in the air, on which vegetables arch as cabbages and carrots are planted. Another artist suggests simply to take the base away, or at least that part of it on which the Worker and Peasant are about to place their feet, leaving them both magically suspended in the air, unsure of what the next step shall bring. One step forward… Of course these stirring examples of defacement are somewhat weakened by the fact that they only occur after the regime has, as we say, fallen, emerging from the vantage point of the security provided by another strong state. (from Michael Taussig, Defacement)

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