Monuments as Material-Semiotic Devices

The growing evidence and understanding of anthropogenic climate change is arguably the strongest argument for the idea that human activity is pushing the very operating state of Earth systems across irreversible thresholds and tipping points.  The Anthropocene thesis goes far beyond this, situating climate change in a much more comprehensive tale of planetary system chan

In a 1903 essay, Alois Riegl famously distinguished different kinds of semiotic effects and uses of monuments. Commemorative value is the capacity of a monument to ‘keep a moment … present in the consciousness of future generations’; historical value is its power to reveal something about the time it was made, and age-value involves it providing affective pleasure through its disintegration. Riegl also talks about other kinds of value of monuments – use value, relative art value (reflecting changing tastes), and the newness value particularly prized in modern art.xxxi In this project we built on Riegl’s ideas to develop a broader theory of the monument as a material-semiotic ‘device’ – as an edifice, whether made or found, that functions as a cultural device to set up specific relations between times, spaces, objects, bodies and emotions.xxxii  

Elsewhere in the site we explore how this ‘monumental material-semiotic’ is used in geological science to stabilise the deep-time story of the Earth [link to GSSP page]; in their proposed designs the invited artists draw on it in diverse ways to interrogate the idea of the Anthropocene. In the diagram above and the text below, we set out the main concepts and distinctions that inform our thinking.  

  1. Above all, a monument connects together different temporalities.  In materially embodying the memory of past events, monuments establish connections between different moments in time across past, present and future, often through cyclically repeated acts of commemoration (‘remembering-together’).  But monuments also establish relations between different kinds of time. Monuments can be seen as enacting a form of translation between the fluidity of oral memory and the solidity of recorded historyxxxiii – between the ongoing, daily and yearly round of lived experience, speech and action, and the fixed and timeless time (whether of heroes, history or the gods) that transcends living memory.xxxiv 
  2. Monuments also establish synecdochal relations between different spatial registers – between the monument’s specific location and a wider region of the Earth’s surface (regional, national, or global) for which it is made to stand in a privileged way, inviting journeys of pilgrimage and commemoration.  
  3. Monuments are also typically part of a wider ‘monumental system’, in which various structures, spaces, symbols and inscriptions are put in relation with each other, with the wider spatiotemporal patterns of social life, with the canonical narratives and values of cultural memory, and with living human bodies.  Monuments are typically architectural in scale and style and relationship to the body: they dominate and choreograph the felt space around them, implicitly suggesting appropriate ways to act and feel within the space around the monument.  
  1. Monuments also have their own placing in time as arrangements of matter: they have beginnings and endings.  Monuments are ‘founded’, often amidst elaborate ceremonies – but they are also destroyed, sometimes in moments that are equally freighted with significance for the reproduction and transformation of cultural memory – as illustrated for example in the practices of Damnatio Memoriae in Ancient Rome,xxxv or in contemporary Black Lives Matter protests against monuments to participants in and beneficiaries of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.xxxvi Even without an act of physical creation or destruction, the matter that makes up a monument can have monumental status bestowed on it or lose that status. 
  2. Monuments also exhibit huge material-semiotic diversity – a diversity that has been greatly expanded with the late twentieth-century development of “counter-monuments”, especially in reaction against the triumphal deployment of traditional monumental aesthetics by the Nazi regime in Germany (1933-1945).xxxvii  

    Some of this diversity is more about the material pole.  Whereas traditional monuments are typically made – deliberately designed and constructed from raw materials – there have always been found monuments: existing constructions or natural features that are bestowed with monumental significance. Whereas traditional monuments tend to be immobile and centred, fixing cultural memory practices around a single centralised fixed site of remembrance, counter-monuments might variously be mobile, or dispersed across space. Also, whereas the traditional monument endures across timescales greater than the time of everyday human experience, there are now also fleeting monuments, which evaporate or disperse.  

    Other kinds of monumental diversity are more about the semiotic pole, in terms of which emotions, affect or communicative practices the monuments call forth in the human bodies drawn into their orbit. Traditional monuments may commemorate moments of victory or defeat; they may also seek to call forth emotions of pride or shame. More broadly, monuments may seem designed to cathartically console visitors – or may seek to provoke them into speech or action. Traditional monuments favour what Roland Barthes calls a ‘readerly’ semiotic, positioning the viewer as a passive recipient of settled meanings, whereas counter-monuments might use a more ‘writerly’, open semiotic, inviting visitors to develop their own meanings and responses.xxxviii  
     
    Traditional monuments tend to favour the first term in these various polarities, and counter-monuments the second.  In this they can also be mapped roughly onto the first contrast made at above – traditional monuments foregrounding the solidity of timeless time, passed down the generations unaltered, and counter-monuments the fluid creativity of lived human experience and communication. 

    Hope, Care, Commoning

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam luctus diam felis, at faucibus lacus eleifend eget. Sed condimentum tincidunt dolor. Vivamus lobortis ex nec massa iaculis, at rhoncus orci molestie. Etiam quis porttitor libero. Nullam vitae purus id nunc consequat faucibus sed facilisis elit. In dignissim consectetur porttitor. Duis pharetra, sem luctus blandit sodales, erat risus placerat odio, sit amet venenatis mauris justo viverra quam.

    Praesent id placerat lorem. Nulla volutpat nunc sed facilisis fermentum. Etiam quis turpis nec magna volutpat congue in vitae erat. Nam nec lacinia purus. Morbi faucibus dui posuere urna aliquam vulputate. Praesent semper et metus et varius. Donec orci dui, malesuada in sollicitudin sit amet, luctus nec mi.

    Vestibulum elementum velit dictum convallis molestie. Praesent auctor ut nunc eu viverra. Quisque aliquet tellus sem, nec vulputate ligula tincidunt eget. Etiam rutrum felis sit amet nisi suscipit vestibulum. Praesent commodo est eget ante faucibus malesuada. Praesent interdum pulvinar lorem in porttitor. Aenean ullamcorper ultricies nisl, eget ultrices magna pellentesque sit amet. Proin iaculis tortor at pellentesque imperdiet. Duis ultricies diam pretium ultrices tincidunt. Nam velit nulla, tincidunt et nisi vitae, tincidunt tincidunt erat. Integer ut interdum arcu, sit amet tincidunt mi. Fusce nec odio lacus.

    Human, Agency, Extinction

    The Anthropocene is both the apotheosis of the human and a reminder that humans are part of a larger nonlinear system that confounds attempts at control  

    The monument can be seen as a cultural form that connects together different temporalities – mediating between past, present and future, but also between radically different temporal registers. In particular, monuments mediate between the human time of everyday lived experience and communication, and an ‘inhuman’, ‘timeless’ time that transcends living memory, whether perceived as the time of the gods, or of culture heroes, or more recently as an abstract human history.  Various historians have theorized this distinction as one between ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ shared memory (Vansina 1985), ‘human time’ and ‘monumental time’ (Foxhall 1995) or more recently ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ memory (Assman 2008).  cultural memory. In their combination of material durability, or as Heidegger puts it ‘firm towering’ (Heidegger 1971: 42), with specific embedded symbolic meanings, monuments can be seen as enacting a form of ‘memory transduction’ (Szerszynski 2019) between the solidity of recorded history and the fluidity of oral memory – between the fixed and timeless time of heroes, history and the gods, and the daily and yearly round of lived experience, speech and action.  

    As such, monuments can themselves be seen as a powerful material-semiotic technology.  In 1903 Alois Riegl famously distinguished different kinds of semiotic effects and uses of monuments – or as he put it, different kinds of ‘value’. Commemorative value is the capacity of a monument to ‘keep a moment perpetually alive and present in the consciousness of future generations’; historical value, the power to reveal something about the time it was made, and age-value involves it providing affective pleasure through witnessing its disintegration. Riegl also talks about other kinds of value of monuments – use value, relative art value (reflecting changing tastes), and the newness value particularly prized in modern art (Riegl 1996). 

    As well as referencing different temporalities, monuments also have their own placing in time as arrangements of matter: they have beginnings and endings.  Monuments are ‘founded’, often amidst elaborate ceremonies – but they are also destroyed, sometimes in moments that are equally freighted with significance for the reproduction and transformation of cultural memory – as illustrated for example in the practices of Damnatio Memoriae in Ancient Rome (Varner 2004), or in contemporary Black Lives Matter protests against monuments to participants in and beneficiaries of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Frank and Ristic 2020). 

    Monuments are also placed in space: indeed, they are typically placed as part of a wider ‘monumental system’, in which various spaces, structures, symbols and inscriptions are put in relation with each other, with the wider spatiotemporal patterns of social life, with the canonical narratives and values of cultural memory – and with living human bodies (Szerszynski 2017).  Monuments are typically architectural in scale and style and relationship to the human body: they dominate and choreograph the felt space around them, and the dynamics of bodies and affect within that space. Monuments also form and perform synecdochic relations between their specific location and a wider region of the Earth’s surface – whether local, regional, national or global – for which it is made to stand, and do so in a privileged way, inviting journeys of pilgrimage just to be in the vicinity of the monument, perhaps on a particular date and time, in order to ‘remember’ in a heightened way. 

    Within such general shared features, however, monuments also exhibit huge material-semiotic diversity – especially since the late-twentieth century rise of ‘counter-monuments’ that resist the ‘firm towering’ of traditional monuments, with its now fascist associations (Young 1992).  While this diversity cannot cleanly be decomposed into material and semiotic dimensions, let us start with diversity that is more about the material pole: whereas traditional monuments of typically deliberately designed and constructed from raw materials, there are also ‘found’ monuments: existing constructions or natural features that are bestowed with monumental significance. Also, whereas the traditional monument ‘endures’, there are now also fleeting monuments, that evaporate or disperse; whereas traditional monuments are ‘immobile’ and ‘centred’, fixing cultural memory around a single centralised fixed site of remembrance , counter-monuments might variously be ‘mobile’ or ‘dispersed’ across space. 

    Turning to monumental features that are more about the semiotic pole, monuments typically demand of human bodies drawn into their orbit specific emotions or ‘affect’. The ‘com-memoration’ they call forth is literally ‘together remembering’, but this remembering (which also anticipates future acts of remembering) is also expected to have a certain emotional tone. 

    Contemplations of human extinction place a stratigraphic emphasis on discerning enduring signals, and envisioning an imagined subject acquainted with the Anthropocene Earth (Szerszynski 2012: 179) in a distant future. The lingering echoes of the industrial era—machines and edifices now obsolete, traces of activities silenced—carry undertones of melancholy, contemplating a world without our presence (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2016). The material artefacts of our current age are an inorganic equivalent of ‘dead men walking’—nascent mineral layers or fossils in the making.

    Nicholas Mangan’s runway and David Claerbout’s Olympia, once functional, now gracefully succumb to decay, adopting an Ozymandian fate. These instances obliterate distinctions between natural and intentional geological monuments, implicitly referencing the concept of ‘age value’ (Riegl, 1996). These art works and proposals underscore how monumental structures can shed their significance or, conversely, gain it—shaped by the ebb and flow of a dynamic global economy, shifting political ideologies, and the relentless processes of decay leading them back to nature.

    In the work of Autogena & Portway, a more pointed morality tale unfolds. Humans, possibly adhering to Haff’s (2014) six rules of the technosphere, are portrayed as having only a semblance of agency, navigating a world dominated by simulated choices. Nicholas Chambaud’s narrative takes a different trajectory, exploring the profanity of heat not being utilized, as if the technosphere has been estranged from human use. This hints at a messianic future bereft of both humans and a saviour (Agamben, 2007).

    The question remains whether a collective sentiment towards the earth’s fate evokes melancholia or a hopeful mourning. Sheela Gowda’s anthropocene portraits and Fujiko Nakaya’s fleeting cloud or fog sculptures serve as enigmatic pieces in this zone: a complex of human agency, the ephemerality of monumental constructs, and the profound implications of an Anthropocene future.

    Data, Information, Cartography

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam luctus diam felis, at faucibus lacus eleifend eget. Sed condimentum tincidunt dolor. Vivamus lobortis ex nec massa iaculis, at rhoncus orci molestie. Etiam quis porttitor libero. Nullam vitae purus id nunc consequat faucibus sed facilisis elit. In dignissim consectetur porttitor. Duis pharetra, sem luctus blandit sodales, erat risus placerat odio, sit amet venenatis mauris justo viverra quam.

    Praesent id placerat lorem. Nulla volutpat nunc sed facilisis fermentum. Etiam quis turpis nec magna volutpat congue in vitae erat. Nam nec lacinia purus. Morbi faucibus dui posuere urna aliquam vulputate. Praesent semper et metus et varius. Donec orci dui, malesuada in sollicitudin sit amet, luctus nec mi.

    Vestibulum elementum velit dictum convallis molestie. Praesent auctor ut nunc eu viverra. Quisque aliquet tellus sem, nec vulputate ligula tincidunt eget. Etiam rutrum felis sit amet nisi suscipit vestibulum. Praesent commodo est eget ante faucibus malesuada. Praesent interdum pulvinar lorem in porttitor. Aenean ullamcorper ultricies nisl, eget ultrices magna pellentesque sit amet. Proin iaculis tortor at pellentesque imperdiet. Duis ultricies diam pretium ultrices tincidunt. Nam velit nulla, tincidunt et nisi vitae, tincidunt tincidunt erat. Integer ut interdum arcu, sit amet tincidunt mi. Fusce nec odio lacus.

    Exploitation, Violence, Incarceration

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam luctus diam felis, at faucibus lacus eleifend eget. Sed condimentum tincidunt dolor. Vivamus lobortis ex nec massa iaculis, at rhoncus orci molestie. Etiam quis porttitor libero. Nullam vitae purus id nunc consequat faucibus sed facilisis elit. In dignissim consectetur porttitor. Duis pharetra, sem luctus blandit sodales, erat risus placerat odio, sit amet venenatis mauris justo viverra quam.

    Praesent id placerat lorem. Nulla volutpat nunc sed facilisis fermentum. Etiam quis turpis nec magna volutpat congue in vitae erat. Nam nec lacinia purus. Morbi faucibus dui posuere urna aliquam vulputate. Praesent semper et metus et varius. Donec orci dui, malesuada in sollicitudin sit amet, luctus nec mi.

    Vestibulum elementum velit dictum convallis molestie. Praesent auctor ut nunc eu viverra. Quisque aliquet tellus sem, nec vulputate ligula tincidunt eget. Etiam rutrum felis sit amet nisi suscipit vestibulum. Praesent commodo est eget ante faucibus malesuada. Praesent interdum pulvinar lorem in porttitor. Aenean ullamcorper ultricies nisl, eget ultrices magna pellentesque sit amet. Proin iaculis tortor at pellentesque imperdiet. Duis ultricies diam pretium ultrices tincidunt. Nam velit nulla, tincidunt et nisi vitae, tincidunt tincidunt erat. Integer ut interdum arcu, sit amet tincidunt mi. Fusce nec odio lacus.

    Atmosphere, Climate, Oceans

    The growing evidence and understanding of anthropogenic climate change is arguably the strongest argument for the idea that human activity is pushing the very operating state of Earth systems across irreversible thresholds and tipping points.  The Anthropocene thesis goes far beyond this, situating climate change in a much more comprehensive tale of planetary system change – but climate change still remains a crucial part of the picture.  Human activity is increasing the concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which absorb the outward long-wave radiation of heat from the Earth’s surface.  This is causing a decade-by-decade increase in average global temperature, changing weather patterns, increasing likelihood of extreme weather events such as powerful storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts. Warming also expands the ocean and melts ice stored on landmasses, with a resulting rise in sea level. The fact that it is the global north who bear most historic responsibility for this process, and the global south that suffer the worst consequences and have the least resources to support adaptation, raises profound questions of equity and justice.

    The ice-core proposed GSSPs reference this, as do many of the monument designs. Etienne Chambaud’s geothermal plant, set to the temperature of a human fever references anthropogenic global warming – and perhaps the wider idea that the more general energy capture and utilization by humans was a major deep-time event, a revolution in Earth history.[i] Adam Lowe’s 3D-printed projection of the Earth’s solid surface with its rhythmic ingress and egress of water puts contemporary concerns about sea-level rise due to melting ice and thermally expanding oceans in a deep-time context, without blunting the force of contemporary concerns, as whole landmasses disappear under the water.  Tomás Saraceno proposed to repurpose one of his aerial ‘solar sculptures’ as a monument to the Anthropocene – a mobile monument that would drift around the globe in response to the currents of the air, alert people to the inequalities and injustices inherent in anthropogenic climate change – but also show the possibility of a radically different way of inhabiting the atmosphere.


    [i] Timothy M. Lenton, Peter-Paul Pichler and Helga Weisz (2016) ‘Revolutions in energy input and material cycling in Earth history and human history,’ Earth System Dynamics, 7(2), pp. 353-70.

    Ruins, Waste, Technofossils

    The geological and specifically stratigraphic logic of the Anthropocene concept means that its formal assessment as a possible new unit in the official geological timeline of the Earth often focuses less on human activity itself, and more on the traces that this activity will leave behind. The sort of future geological ‘signals’ sent to imagined future geological subjects that the Anthropocene Working Group have been looking for include the chemostratigraphic (altered chemical composition of land and atmosphere – including minerals that are new to the Earth or at least to its surface,[1] the biostratigraphic (evidence of accelerating biological and ecological change) and the lithostratigraphic (changes in rock formation, either by altering existing sedimentary processes or laying down wholly novel strata). [2] A later paper by the Anthropocene Working Group brings attention to the way that human production of manufactured goods and consumption and movement of natural resources combine to produce a ‘diachronous signal of technofossils and human bioturbation across the planet’.[3]

    [1] Jan Zalasiewicz, Ryszard Kryza and Mark Williams (2014) ‘The mineral signature of the Anthropocene in its deep-time context,’ Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 395(1), pp. 109-17.

    [2] Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Richard Fortey, et al. (2011) ‘Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 369(1938), pp. 1036-55. 

    [3] Mark Williams, Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Waters, et al. (2016) ‘The Anthropocene: a conspicuous stratigraphical signal of anthropogenic changes in production and consumption across the biosphere,’ Earth’s Future, 4(3), pp. 34-53.  

    Amy Balkin’s polluted soils and Fabien Giraud’s post-Fukushima irradiated land echo the chemostratigraphic nature of many sites that were considered for the Anthropocene GSSP.  Nicholas Mangan’s airport runway andDavid Claerbout’s slowly decaying Olympia stadium are striking examples of the sort of larger anthropogenic geological formations and ‘trace fossils’ that human activity will leave in the Earth. The idea of anthropogenic strata and novel minerals as lithic markers of the Anthropocene is referenced by the asphalt layer in Mark Dion’s proposed monuments, and the plastic minerals that Yesenia Thibault-Picazo invites people to make with her devices – strata and mineral formations that Pascale Martine Tayou suggests may be peppered with dimly understood fragments of disposable consumer goods. In different ways, these designs explored the future ‘haunting’ of the Earth by anthropogenic materials and entities, both precious and useless, that are no longer animated as part of the anthroposphere, but have a ghostly afterlife – a ‘timeprint’.[4] 

    [4] Barbara Adam and Chris Groves (2007) Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics, Leiden: Brill. 

    Extraction, Transport, Infrastructure

    A pivotal aspect of Anthropocene science, particularly during the late twentieth-century Great Acceleration (Steffen et al., 2007), revolves around the escalating extraction and movement of materials. This encompasses the heightened transport of various masses, including biomass, construction materials, and industrial minerals (Schaffartzik et al., 2014). Viewing mining as a form of artificial erosion (Zalasiewicz et al., 2014: 113), it illustrates Earth overcoming resistance to solid motion (Haff, 2012). This phenomenon positions anthropogenic movement on par with natural processes in terms of mass moved per unit time, signifying a substantial shift in the Earth’s dynamics (Haff, 2010).

    Several artistic designs delve into the extraction process of war materials from their original context within more-than-human nature. Gusmão & Paiva focus on forestry, while Lara Almarcegui and Nicholas Mangan explore mineral mining. Other artists shift their attention towards the transportation aspect of this thematic exploration, with Thomas Bayrle depicting roads and Mangan portraying an airport runway.

    This overarching theme paints a vivid picture of a posthuman metabolism, wherein nature undergoes a transformative process in and around both human and non-human entities (Garratt, Haff 2010). The artworks become a reflective lens through which the complex interplay between human activities, material extraction, and the altered landscapes of the Anthropocene unfolds.