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Reviews
Paul Gough’s Faux Cenotaph:
the contestation of rhetorical
public space When Henri
Lefebvre said that the Monument acted
as a ‘consensus’, offering ‘a collective mirror
more faithful than any personal one,’ and asserted that ‘everyone
partook, and partook fully - albeit, naturally, under the conditions
of a generally accepted Power and a generally accepted Wisdom’
, he overstated the case. Although the Monument appears to represent
consensus, it may more properly be described as appropriating consensus,
as it may be argued that most members of society do not see themselves
in this ‘collective mirror’, rather they see a spatial
and material expression of power. Therefore, if, as Christine
Boyer has posited, memorials and monuments
should be seen as sites of rhetoric , then the official monument
or memorial may be calculated to be the ‘last word’,
an emphatic statement of history according to the dominant ideology
of its time. The essence of this kind of monument might be said
to be silence: each monument standing as a polemical monologue that
speaks in order to impose silence in the beholder, and, importantly,
to maintain that position, in perpetuity, through the maintenance
of Lefebvre’s ‘generally accepted Power’.
Paul Gough had this version of the public
monument in mind when his Faux Cenotaph
[2001] was sited in a public thoroughfare in the Watershed Media
Centre in Bristol, and when, simultaneously, across the docks in
the Architecture Centre, he opened a parallel show of large drawings
of monuments. His intention was to offset these works against each
other, and in doing so he consciously referenced the commemorative
landscape of Gallipoli, where Sir Frank
Burnett’s imperial neo-classical
monuments are contested by Turkish figurative memorials; each commemorative
work oblivious to the claims of the other, and each speaking a history,
that, in Gough’s words, ‘vies for the higher ground
and for the moral ascendancy’.
Gough has described the piece at the Watershed
as a ‘false cenotaph’, and a ‘faux monument’.
It had been constructed, perhaps, more as a work about commemoration
than a commemoration in itself. However, due to the particular circumstances
of its timing, coinciding as it did with the bombing of Afghanistan
by America and its allies following the Twin Towers terrorist act
in New York on September 11th 2001, it took on an unanticipated
function. It became a temporary version of what the Germans call
a ‘Denkmalen’:
a monument that stands as a warning, causing us to meditate on the
mistakes of the past, and hopefully to mend our ways. It also became
a locus for the expression of protest. Through informal intervention
on the part of the audience it became what I have described elsewhere
as a ‘guerrilla-memorial’: a rejoinder to both the object
and the genre of the monumental memorial.
During the course of the 6-week show the Faux Cenotaph was written
on, added to, subtracted from and eventually dismantled by its viewers.
This monument, far from silencing the viewer with its rhetoric,
seemed to incite intense, almost endless, ‘speaking’
from its audience. Inscriptions were regularly added to the piece
over the period of the exhibition, epithets which included: ‘Trading
in their memory’; ‘glorious’;
‘Enduring Freedom’,
and at the very end for a few hours only: ‘BIG
FUCKING BLUE’. Even the comments
book became a part of its function as a collective, informal, denkmalen,
or guerrilla-memorial, containing phrases condemning the bombings
in Afghanistan, and the US war on terrorism, containing phrases
such as, ‘this can’t go on’, and, ‘stop
the bombing’.
The historian Mat Matsuda
suggests that commemoration is an act of evaluation, judgement,
and of utterance. Gough’s work, originally intended to illustrate
the notion of monument as monologue, now, due in some part to an
extraordinary coincidence of timing, found itself engaged in the
‘polemics of commemoration and anti-commemoration’ ,
a situation common to many public artworks in times of extremis.
The Faux Cenotaph,
situated in a public place, was unlike many public monuments in
that it seemed to invite intervention or participation. Perhaps
because of its obviously temporary and contingent nature and its
subsequent inability to claim ‘perpetuity’ or ‘authority’,
it became a conduit for public comment on a contemporary and momentous
political situation.
The forms used by these guerrilla interventionists were sophisticated
and knowingly applied: the typography mimicked the graphic conventions
of the billboard, and engaged in wordplay linking commemoration
with commerce. Each intervention made an opportunity for the next.
The word, ‘FREEDOM’,
became ‘F(-) EEDOM’
as another member of the public adapted and expanded the text. Gough
also noticed that the inscriptions ‘played games with the
high diction of official commemoration, what Samuel
Hynes has called the ‘big words’
of civic remembrance’. These words: glorious, valiant, suffering,
sacrifice, memory, peace, etc., more usually carved reverently in
foot-high capitals in stone, were now represented in photocopies;
serving as both parody and simulacra,
their meaning subverted by medium and context.
It is, perhaps, no coincidence that this six week long act of continual,
sophisticated intervention with a public artwork took place in Bristol.
The city has a long tradition of critical engagement with public
monuments and memorial events. In 1997 the city hosted the International
Festival of the Sea, in which Bristol’s maritime past was
celebrated and acted out on the city’s docks, while the fact
that the merchants of Bristol had African slaves as their ships
most significant cargo was not officially acknowledged other than
in a very subtle and powerful artwork/intervention, by the locally-based
artist Annie Lovejoy,
called Stirring @ the International Festival
of the Sea. Although others have described
this work as an ‘intervention’ , Lovejoy describes it
as a ‘negotiation’. The key element of the piece was
sugar. This commodity had been the main import in Bristol’s
Triangular Trade. It had been bought from the profit of the sale
of African slaves, and had been produced by slaves on plantations
owned by Bristolian merchants. In Lovejoy’s piece spoon-sized
packets of sugar were distributed to cafés around the festival
site. The packets alluded to the Triangular Trade within the icon
of the red triangle; a list of traded goods that included slaves;
and an eighteenth century typographic rendering of the word ‘Bristol’.
Also visibly present at the Festival of the Sea were the Bristol
Chapter of the Guerrilla Girls.
Their intervention with the festival was simple. Crudely photocopied
posters depicting an eighteenth century plan of slaves packed into
the hold of a ship were fly posted around the Festival and on signposts
leading to it.
As Felix Driver
and Raphael Samuel
wondered how we could ‘write histories which acknowledge that
places are not so much singular points, but constellations’
and asked how we may ‘reconcile radically different senses
of place’ , the visual and performic historical text that
was the Festival was being challenged in its appropriation of the
meaning and history of a particular place (Bristol in this instance)
by the visual text of the fly-postered artwork.
In the interventions with Paul Gough’s work at the Watershed
we see the notion of public commemorative sites as possible sites
of exchange come into play. It is significant that whilst Gough’s
publicly situated Faux Cenotaph
was the locus for furious intervention and ideological assertion,
his companion piece on the same theme at the Architecture Centre,
just yards away across the river, remained completely untouched
during this same period. The fact that the ‘monument’
was situated in a public thoroughfare made it a public artwork in
a way that the gallery -situated piece was not. The fact that it
impersonated that particularly democratic form of memorial, the
Cenotaph, which, unlike earlier monuments mourned the common soldier
rather than celebrated the leadership of generals, and which is
classless, rank-less and inclusive, meant that Gough’s cenotaph,
faux or not, offered
the possibility of reciprocation and inclusion. It is not, perhaps,
too far a move from laying a wreath at the foot of such a monument,
to, given the right circumstances, writing your contribution on
it.
The Faux Cenotaph
gives us insight into the key differences between a public artwork
and a public monument. This lies in a perception of the supposed
inviolability of the monument as opposed to the contestability of
an artwork. Casimer Perier
summed up a common sentiment when he observed:
Monuments are like history: they are inviolable like it; they must
conserve all the nation’s memories, and not fall to the blows
of time.
Because of its simulant nature, the Faux
Cenotaph does not, indeed cannot, maintain
rhetorical power, i.e., the power to silence. Its temporary character,
the fragility of its components and its consequent lack of civic
or national authority, might be seen to open, rather than close,
debate. Gough’s Faux Cenotaph
is a simulacrum, it gives the appearance of being something, without
containing that which is most potent in the original: in this case
a sense of legitimate civic authority. It is not, and cannot be,
the voice of ‘power’. Its actual affect comes from its
function as art rather than as a civic or national monument. In
this it is, in itself, an example of the continued contestation
of rhetorical public space.
Sally Morgan
April 2003
References:
Lefebvre, H. ‘The Production of Space
(Extracts)’ in Leach, N. (ed), 'Rethinking
Architecture', London & New York,
Routledge, 1997 p139
Boyer, M. C. 'The City of Collective Memory:
Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments',
Cambridge Massachusetts & London England, MIT Press, 1996, p343
Matsuda, M.K. 'The Memory of the Modern',
New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996 p6.
Nash, C. ‘Historical Geographies of
Modernity’, 'Modern
Historical Geographies', Edinburgh, Prentice
Hall/Pearson Education, 2000, p34
Driver, F. & Samuel, R. ‘Rethinking
the Idea of Place’, History Workshop
Journal 39, pvi
Michalski, S. 'Public Monuments: Art in Political
Bondage 1870-1997', London, Reaktion,
1998, p78
Perier, C., cited in Matsuda p33
Sally Morgan is Professor of Fine Arts
at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand.
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