Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
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SERIES EDITORS
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Performative monuments
The rematerialisation of public art
Mechtild Widrich
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Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: what is a performative monument?
1
2
3
4
page ix
xiii
1
Documents
13
Audiences
53
Sites
102
Monuments
144
Relations
194
Select bibliography
Index
203
218
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Introduction:
what is a performative monument?
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Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument, 2002 (snack bar), documenta 11, Kassel,
2002
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they enter libraries and archives, and are cited by historians. This element of
permanence, or at least extended duration, brings back with it some of the
function and authority of the classic monument. At the very least, it tells us
how to see monuments, Kassel, and Hirschhorns intervention there, whose
print discourse defines it, if not for eternity, for long enough.
Must the Bataille Monument be read as an ephemeral performance or as
a lasting monument? These seemingly contradictory genres are in fact intertwined; work like Hirschhorns is unthinkable apart from a historical process
of rapprochement dating back to the 1960s at least. In the chapters that follow, I
will show how the live art of that era, with its anarchic but carefully planned and
documented street actions, provided the impetus for new ways of addressing
the past in 1980s Europe and beyond. Performance, the supposed antipode to
the monument in its temporality and embodiment, in fact held the key to its
revival as democratic community-builder. Under the force of performance,
made durable and rhetorically powerful through photographic documents,
the monument became a practice that involved audiences explicitly in actions
with binding social force. This book thus rethinks both the supposed one-time
encounter of performance art and the orthodoxy that commemorative art of
the post-war period turned against itself by divesting its countermonuments
of any marks of authority. Without authority, public art can claim no agency.
How it can have this without being authoritarian is the question.
To begin answering the question, I draw attention to a remarkable and
puzzling historical fact about post-war European art: young, oppositional
performance artists of the 1960s and 1970s became the foremost monument
designers of the 1980s and 1990s (and remain so, to some extent, in the early
twenty-first century). A majority of the artists I discuss are women: it is
women who posed some of the most unsettling questions about the historical
depth of supposedly immediate experience in performance art, and it is the
same women who most dramatically manifest the historical, commemorative direction of contemporary performance. This means a shift not simply
in gender, but in focus: away from the implicitly male authority of the hero,
whether architect or action painter, to the challenging analysis of historical
consciousness and of the built environment. And yet, some of the most prominent architects of the new monuments are men. But their own background as
performers, in the relevant cases, attuned these male artists to issues neglected
in the sculpture, painting, and architecture of their time. The shift is one from
making history, experiencing it first hand, to reconstructing it, experiencing
it at a remove: through the body, by thinking about it and past events, and in
general by drawing connections between body, site, and time.
Performance is itself a form of public art. As such, it encounters social
forces, and causes social reactions, that, in their visibility and documentation,
acquire monumental authority. My larger claim is that performance artists, in
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working in public space, came not just to resemble monuments in their performances but to be interested in just those problems of political representation
and its relation to the spectator that drove Musils questions about monuments.
They thus reoriented public art around an intersection of performance and the
monument, of which Hirschhorn is only a recent manifestation. There are many
varieties of this engagement, which in its paradigmatic form I call the performative monument. Their common denominator, audience participation, is an
inheritance of performance art. Some are ephemeral objects in a literal sense
like the Bataille Monument, dismantled after documenta closed. This might
suggest ephemerality as their practice, and main affinity to performance, but
this suggestion is deceptive. For instance, the cars used for the shuttle service
of the Bataille Monument were auctioned on eBay signed by the artist, no
less (Figure 2). Does that mean that a part of Hirschhorns monument persists
in some collectors home, or, unsettling thought, plies the streets of Europe? I
should say not: there is no medium-specific law of ephemerality of objects in
play, endangering the precariousness of Hirschhorns temporary monument.
What I see, rather, is the paradoxical situation that the temporal limitation of
the monument has given it a retrospective interest issuing in such actions as
the auction. In any case, an interest in a past event, not in a present artefact,
motivated the sale and other extensions of the Bataille Monument. And that,
however marginally, makes that summers event in Kassel not the tree stump,
not the car into a performative monument.
Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument, 2002 (car service), documenta 11, Kassel,
2002
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What is crucial to the performative monument, then, cannot be impermanence as such, but the temporal interaction with an audience that itself
is no eternal public, but a succession of interacting subjects. Ephemerality of
objects is one strategy among others in making concrete this temporality of
the work. Could a monument consisting of two 75 meter-long granite walls
function as a performative monument? It does. Visitors to Maya Lins Vietnam
Veterans Memorial in Washington trace the names engraved into the stone on
pieces of paper to take home (Figure 3). Indeed, the volunteers organized by
the National Park Service hand out pencil and tracing paper, cementing what
was at first a spontaneous and personal (if foreseeable) mode of interaction.
The behaviour of visitors to Lins memorial may not add up to a new
practice as such the Renaissance knew similar funerary rituals, and German
architect and theorist Gottfried Semper declared the pomp of victory processions the origin of monumental objects.11 What is new in Lins work is that
interaction with the audience has become so much part of the work that most
printed photographs of the monument show some sort of engaged visitor,
touching the stone and being reflected in the polished granite; most are busy
tracing, though of course one seldom sees photos of the Park Service volunteers.12 Yet the photographs invariably reproduce a persons action before the
monument. In this sense the monument is also always a performance. In being
photographed, the private ritual becomes a public act of commemoration for
a wider public to see: it is part and parcel of the monuments success story.
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memorial art and art in the public interest. The subject of this book, in other
words, is not given with either one art discourse be it memorials, performance, or photography or historical milieu. My approach is more conceptual, thinking through the notion of a temporally extended audience. Such a
delayed audience can, but need not, comprise a community, just as its acts of
commemoration need not be acts of memory. An act of commemoration does
not relive the past but is itself a present fact of public conduct. The insistence
on real presence and experience is thus radically ambiguous, pointing to the
past while carrying its political and aesthetic effects into the future.
To show how this functions in practice, I have to identify several distinct
possible relationships between performance and the monument, and explore
them in historical contexts where their engagement with political questions
can emerge. In Chapter 1, Documents, I first connect performance with
history through the recent phenomenon of re-performance, reconstructing
the different temporal layers of the audience of one act.
The second chapter, Audiences, turns to the Austrian avant-garde since
the 1960s, whose contradictory, elaborate staging of visceral acts already play
their part in the first chapter. The Viennese Actionists and VALIE EXPORT in
particular stage a confrontation with patriarchal society through closely photographed events allegorizing a state of radical mediation. On this principle
EXPORT went on to examine authoritarian patterns in state architecture by
photographing a body in space. She now designs memorials that take up these
strategies of bodily mediation: the realized Transparent Cube and her proposal
for the Holocaust Monument Vienna (won by Rachel Whiteread) show how
glass can mediate spectator bodies in a performance of history.
In the move from photography to architecture, the performance shifts
from artist to spectator. To see how spectators can enter the complex set of
circumstances in which they become collaborators in public art, in Chapter
3 I examine art in the former Yugoslavia. I start with early works by Marina
Abramovi wherein she politically marks the city through acts of erasure and
projection. Abramovis confrontation with Belgrade in her early slide work
Freeing the Horizon is comparable to EXPORTs work in Vienna, but brings
to light contexts of censorship and indoctrination in which to view her work
is construed as itself a political act. To explain this, I sharpen the theoretical
tools of site, insisting on its temporal specificity. Abramovi used her body as
a political marker of nationhood and region to be read in a global context,
undertaking grandiose theatrical productions and memorials. These works,
of which I discuss recent examples in Salzburg and Basel, paradoxically invite
spectators to reflect on their relative insignificance and inability to participate
in the making of history.
The mobilization of spectators as performers leads me to the means by
which artists and theorists in Germany dealt with their national past, and the
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5
6
7
8
9
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11
12
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contents, bears the Latin title Monumenta Photographica Austriae, and, in German,
Geschichts- und Kunstdenkmale sterreichs.
Ibid., 508.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument fr documenta 11 Kassel 2002, statement dated February 2002, reprinted in Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Maschine
(Berlin: Merve, 2003), 42. See also the catalogue on the occasion of Hirschhorns
contribution to the 2011 Venice Biennale: Thomas Hirschhorn (ed.), Establishing
a Critical Corpus. With essays by Claire Bishop, Hal Foster, Sebastian Egenhofer,
and others (Zurich: Ringier Kunstverlag, 2011).
Martin Scholz, Mehr ist mehr; weniger ist weniger. Martin Scholz ber das
Bataille Monument, Hessische/Niederschsische Allgemeine (15 June 2002).
Notice of this is impaired by Hirschhorns occasional claims that he is a formalist
sculptor. Benjamin Buchloh, for instance, builds a historical arc from Hirschhorn
to the classical avant-garde, Fluxus, and post-minimalist sculpture in Cargo and
Cult. The Displays of Thomas Hirschhorn, Artforum, 40:3 (November 2001),
10915. Against this, it may be noted that the precariousness of Hirschhorns
work has more to do with the actual relationships he enters into in assembling his
monuments than with visual commitments: see Sebastian Egenhofer, Produktionssthetik (Zrich: Diaphanes, 2010), 133. Hirschhorn himself cites Joseph Beuys as
his precursor. On the view that Hirschhorns, and Beuys, medium consists of social
relations as such (Nicolas Bourriauds esthtique relationelle), see my conclusion.
Triumphal arches, Semper argued, needed to be executed in more solid material
than processional architecture only, so that memory of the victory could be passed
on to later generations. Sempers role in the debate on monumentality in architecture is well explained in kos Moravnszky, Monumentalitt, in Architekturtheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine kritische Anthologie, edited by kos Moravnszky and
Katalin M. Gyngy (Vienna/New York: Springer, 2002), 366.
See Geraldine A. Johnson, Sculpture, Photography, and the Politics of Public Space.
Serras Tilted Arc and Lins Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in Geraldine A. Johnson
(ed.), Sculpture and Photography. Envisioning the Third Dimension (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 213ff. Kirk Savage calls Lins project the nations
first therapeutic memorial in The Conscience of the Nation, Monument Wars.
Washington D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial
Landscape (Berkeley/London/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009),
chapter 6.
See Sigfried Giedion, Jos Luis Sert, and Fernand Lgers 1943 Nine Points on
Monumentality. Of this manifesto, Giedion recalls that all had been asked by the
American Abstract Artists Group (AAA) to write on the topic, and decided to pool
their resources. Sigfried Giedion, Architecture, You and Me. A Diary of a Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 22. See also Peter Meyer,
berlegungen zum Problem der Monumentalitt [1938] in Moravnszky, Architekturtheorie, 42733. The debate in architectural circles persisted for a decade:
in 1948, the Architectural Review held a symposium under the title In Search
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