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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.