Script for a Nonsite: Robert Smithson's "The Monument"

2002

In producing the historic monument through attention to a neatly defined prescription of privileged concerns, architectural scholarship yields an effluvium of discarded issues proscribed by the conventions of scholarly tradition. This study proposes that a 'monument' arises from the unstable dialectic between spatial practices and history. By privileging the monument as document of history, scholarship elides the spatial practices and the experiences of architecture's occupants. This study explores the implications of instating these experiences and spatial practices to the 'scene' of agitation they curl themselves up and around their top string. Left in peace they languorously hang, sagging toward the ground under their own weight. In the opposite gallery an ample copper tea urn reflects and assembles all activity. The spaces of the mosque move with the infinite echolalia of multiple fans, whose fragile forms strung across the iwan resemble frenzied dragonflies captured and hung by malevolent children.

Public Art Dialogue , 2023

Toppled Monuments Archive (2020–ongoing; TMA) is a web-based, artist-run archive that documents the political and cultural movements and associated ephemera around defaced, removed, relocated or destroyed monuments. This interview with artist, writer, and founder of TMA, Jillian McManemin, examines the frameworks and polemics underpinning the project. The project’s core purpose is to document monument-centered activism in public space, but TMA also encapsulates the online dimensions and, at times, dilemmas for contemporary activism and archiving practices. The online format for TMA has enabled a global community of contributors to form, at the same as it demonstrates, the paradoxes of censorship and risk in online media spaces. Aware too of the current inclination to erect new monuments, the discussion considers the way monuments function, behave, and influence society and the polemics and responses they generate. The multiple geographic and political contexts informing the archive are addressed, as is the project’s collectivist ethos and method of content generation. McManemin’s forthcoming book Sculpture Kills is also discussed, with its intersecting themes of subjecthood, objecthood, and contemporary sculptures that have caused fatal accidents.

Off-Site, 2006

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 2015

The Afterlives of Monuments, 2013

Monuments have afterlives. Monuments have been re-modelled, re-used, re-sited, re-made, cast aside, destroyed or abandoned to accommodate changing political and social climates; they have survive through re-invention and transformation. The diverse ways in which monuments survive, it is argued, depends on definitions and listings of monuments, practices of monument-making past and present and recent debates over history and memory. The concept is proposed to capture afterlives that co-exist as well as those occur sequentially, and to suggest a model of greater complexity and plurality than a linear or quasi-biographical trajectory. Conflicts over monuments especially over their survival, it is suggested, are as much concerned with projections of a future, as with reconstructions of the past or mnemonic recollection. Monuments — ancient, modern and contemporary — have taken centre stage as different and competing South-Asian communities claim a stake in the making of national, religious, cultural and local histories and identities. In their varied afterlives, monuments emerge as extraordinarily mobile, marked by material change, put to new uses and interpretations, and travelling through image-banks, archives, collections and exhibitions. Their afterlives, like monuments themselves, are multi-media.

Twenty four graphic novels contained here are created by eight architecture design teams gathered at Lawrence Technological University in the summer of 2014. They carry analysis and propositions for inhabitation of extraordinary post-industrial landscape between Detroit and Flint, Michigan. This masterclass re-interpretated unrealized visions of radical Western architecture from 1960’ and 1970’ amalgamated with archeology of socialist monuments from Eastern Europe built about the same time These projects are seeking contemporary aspects of inhabiting futures from the past. They are charged with ideologies that inspired them as symbols of the future and their ever dislocation of the everyday into forthcoming times. The projects drew future into the present and explored new typologies of inhabitation and their emerging monumentality.

Post-cinema, 2020

Contributing to the cinema death topic while focusing on national film institutes, Giovanna Fossati and Annie van den Oever observe that, while it can be said that processes of digitalization (which raise the question as to whether the notion of film is still relevant in this new technological context) have deeply affected the world of film and cinema, some of the film institutes remain-an index of the cinema persistence. Digitalization concerns reproduction and creation. The exchange of views between Fossati and Van den Oever provides a useful perspective on the issue of digital archiving. It also deeply enriches the idea of post-cinema, more precisely, the idea of "a new post-cinematic ecology."

2016

Film curatorship, according to a recent definition is “[t]he art of interpreting the aesthetics, history, and technology of cinema through the selective collection, preservation, and documentation of films and their exhibition in archival presentations.” (Cherchi Usai, Francis, Horwath, Loebenstein 2008, 231). Although comprehensive and welladvised, two comments can be made about this definition. One is that its domain is delimited to considerations directly related to cinema. At one point in the reproduced discussions between its authors that led up to the definition’s final formulation the term “historical traditions” was advanced. Yet it was left unaddressed and then tacitly dropped. Yet that single occurrence is a reminder that the history of cinema is inseparable from other histories. Therefore, the definition, although adequate for practical purposes, remains loose. I use the word “loose” in the sense intended by logician Olaf Helmer and philosopher Nicholas Rescher in their p...

2014

'Mechtild Widrich's astonishing and original book connects performance histories, feminist theory and speech act theory to elucidate the "event character" of public art by contemporary artists. With her bracing formulation of the "performative monument" and her probing analysis of photographic documentation of live acts, Widrich advances a powerful argument about the stakes of spectatorship, temporality and collective memory.' Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, University of California, Berkeley ----------------------------------------------- 'Rigorously researched and argued, this important book will become required reading not only on the history and theory of performance art but also on the history of the "performative" itself as it has transformed public art and commemoration. With ideals of participation and engagement now commonplace in these arenas, Performative monuments shows us in vivid detail how these new ideals emerged and how problematic they have become. Ultimately, this book offers a hopeful message that art can perform its own investigation of the social world and lead us to engage in new and better practices of collective responsibility.' Kirk Savage, Professor, History of Art & Architecture, University of Pittsburgh -- . --------------------------------------------- "A slide projection of a Balkan capital city with the government buildings painted out; a Trojan horse made of scrap wood looming above the Venice lagoon; a lead column signed as resistance against neo-fascist tendencies; a tunnel made of stone and glass to commemorate the victims of National Socialism. All these interventions in the art-historical tradition of memorials and monuments were in fact made by performance artists. How does this fit into the common story that sets the seemingly transient live art of the 1960s, with its anarchic street actions, in opposition to official monument culture? I argue that performance, once reputed as an antipode to the monument in its ephemerality and messy embodiment, in fact holds the key to its contemporary revival. This transformation could only take place, however, through the exploration of problems internal to performance: how to document or otherwise visually symbolize ephemeral, undocumented, even impossible actions. In solving this problem through the self-conscious use of documentary photography, film, and diagrammatic collage, performance artists found themselves referring to the past: not just their own and that of their actions, but of their political and cultural context, which, more than the act itself, proves elusive for later audiences. Performance, made durable and rhetorically powerful through photographic documents, thus gave rise to a kind of monument that was self-reflexive, taking account of its conditions of possibility and involving the audience in conventional transactions with binding social force. For the first time, there is the possibility of the ‘democratisation’ of history in these monuments through the delegation of authority from artist and state to the public, but with democratisation comes the danger of subjective self-indulgence and reassuring spectacle. Connecting speech act and photography theory with media and memory studies, my book is an original contribution to the current debate on performance and art in public space, re-evaluating both the supposed one-time encounter of performance art and its loss to documentation, and the assumption that contemporary commemoration has democratically turned ‘against itself’ through countermonuments that refuse authority."

Post-cinema Book Subtitle: Cinema in the Post-art Era, 2020

Contributing to the cinema death topic while focusing on national film institutes, Giovanna Fossati and Annie van den Oever observe that, while it can be said that processes of digitalization (which raise the question as to whether the notion of film is still relevant in this new technological context) have deeply affected the world of film and cinema, some of the film institutes remain-an index of the cinema persistence. Digitalization concerns reproduction and creation. The exchange of views between Fossati and Van den Oever provides a useful perspective on the issue of digital archiving. It also deeply enriches the idea of post-cinema, more precisely, the idea of "a new post-cinematic ecology."