Paula Levine – Seeing the Past in Present Tense

http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~telarts/art410/readings/levine.pdf

“The Situationist strategy of détournement (a French word meaning diversion, embezzlement, or abduction) and the Dada’s and Surrealists’ playful defamiliarization were ways to derail the number state of mind, where routine flows unexamined; where the details and textures along routes from home to work and back again are hardly seen, and nothing is sufficiently strong enough to pull the traveler off track.” Monuments have the power to transport the consciousness to a new state of awareness; able to redefine ones cultural past to the immediate present. Monuments commemorate, reeducate, and give significance to the culture, nation, and region. Alternatively, historical memory can become distorted mitigate importance of the referential event.

Record of public historical memory has existed since 1776. Monuments were erected to honor living European subjects. American history continued the tradition in a new way by commemorating those who had died. “Memorials to heroes and events were meant not to revive old struggles and debates, but to put them to rest (Savage).” The similar objective of American commemoration, according to Savage, was to remember the American past while condoning a progressive present.

‘Artificial memory’ is a special skill, where ideas or concepts are transposed onto an object or space for later recollection. Monuments act in a similar way by imprinting cultural symbolism into a corporeal subject.

Early American monuments were aesthetically similar to European monuments due to many artists studying in Europe returning to America. American commemorative representation took a serious turn in the 1960’s, an era of radical cultural change. Claes Oldenburg, Lipstick and Maya Lin Civil Right’s Memorial in Washington D.C are noted.Oldenburg criticizes the involvement in Vietnam with a massive inflatable lipstick mounted on militaristic Caterpillar tires. Maya Lin’s massive obtuse vectors containing thousands of names etched into massive basalt walls, elegantly encompasses all who witnesses the site.

One of my favorite monuments discussed was the Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev- Gerz,Monument against Fascism, War and Violence—and for Peace and Human Rights 1986. This, currently subterranean, rectangular monument originally stood forty feet tall and was made of aluminum and lead. Over a period of seven years the structure, it was covered with names of visitors of the site and slowly lowered into earth. A fleeting emotion stands in its place. “In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.”