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Paul Gough
Representing Peace?
‘Can Peace be Set in Stone?’
from the Times Higher Education Supplement
4th April 2003, pp. 18-19
‘I thought we had quite enough memorials
that seemed to revive the war spirit rather than to consider peace,
which is, after all, the aim and end of every great struggle.‘
So reflected the sculptor Adrian Jones in his
autobiography Memoirs of a Soldier Artist, as he prepared to cast
the symbolic figure of ‘Peace’ for the Uxbridge war
memorial in 1924. For those British and Empire artists working in
the classical style, ‘Peace’ took the conventional form
of a female figure holding aloft an olive branch, palm frond, or
occasionally, a dove. ‘Peace’ however, rarely appeared
as a solo act. Invariably she was a junior partner to the more strident
figure of ‘Victory’, and located at a lower point on
the pedestal arrangement.
In Colchester where the citizens raised £7,500 immediately
after the Great War to erect a 16 ft. (4.9m) war memorial of Portland
stone, the figure of ‘Peace’ rests at ground level and
is overshadowed by an 11 ft. (3.3m) winged figure of ‘Victory’,
in her right hand a sword meant to represent ‘the Cross of
Sacrifice and Sword of Devotion’ and in her left hand a laurel
wreath – the classical emblem of Victory. ‘Peace’,
during the ‘monumental era’ of the 1920’s, was
rarely presented without some level of ambiguity. For example, the
‘Peace’ figure that surmounts the Thornton Memorial,
near Bradford, holds a wreath in each hand, offering us an apparent
choice between olive leaves of peace or victorious laurels. Similarly,
the female figure on the Keighley Memorial in Yorkshire sports a
laurel wreath in one hand, a palm branch in another. She was described
in the press as emblem of a ‘Peace Victory won through Service
and Sacrifice’. The popular inscription Invicta Pax is similarly
ambiguous in that it could mean ‘undefeated in war’,
‘undefeated by death’, or even ‘peace to the undefeated’.
Few, if any, memorials celebrated peace in its own right. As Alex
King has pointed out, British memorial sculpture implied that ‘Peace’
was the consequence of ‘Victory’, not an ideal worth
promoting as a separate or distinct entity. Indeed, in the majority
of cases, only the keenest horticultural eye might be able to tell
the difference between an emblem of peace - the olive - and those
of victory, the laurel.
Amidst such ambiguity, peace lacks a convincing visual form. Whereas
monument building across the British Empire was widely regarded
as an act of official closure, the promotion of peace became the
prerogative of pacifist campaigners who focused their actions on
war memorials and their attendant rituals. In 1921 the Armistice
Day ceremony in London was disrupted by groups of unemployed ex-servicemen
with placards stating ‘The dead are remembered but we are
forgotten’. In following years white peace poppies were distributed
by the Peace Pledge Union; in 1926 the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom organised a Peace Pilgrimage throughout
Britain which focused less on remembrance than on campaigns for
peace legislation and world disarmament. Little of this political
activity, however, impacted on the actual design or location of
war memorials. Occasionally, the pacifist cause might bring about
the re-designation of a memorial site. In Norwich, for example,
when the Great War memorial was moved from the Guildhall to its
current site in 1938, it was relocated to a Garden of Remembrance,
later renamed ‘Garden of Peace’. A bronze plaque underlines
the shift in emphasis by stating: ‘By remembrance let us create
a world of peace’.
There is, of course, a fundamental difference between a war monument
that purports to encapsulate and define memory, and a peace monument
that aims to extend a process, or to further a cause. Inevitably,
the issue of political legitimacy is central to the issue of peace,
as its pursuit has never served the state’s monopoly on violence.
Being associated with internationalism, organisations such as the
Peace Pledge Union, the white poppy movement and such like, represent
a threat to the nation-state which regards an anti-war stance as
anti-nation.
Not until after the Second World War do we find examples of public
artworks that are exclusively intended to promulgate the ideas of
peace. These were often prompted by a fear of the consequences of
nuclear proliferation. A number of the most memorable pieces are
located in such blitzed cities as Dresden, Coventry and Nagasaki.
As a designated ‘peace city’, Hiroshima functions simultaneously
as a reliquary, a funerary site, a civilian battlefield, and as
a locus of political and social debate. Invariably, most ‘peace
memorials’ have taken the form of designed landscapes, preserved
ruins and counter-monuments. If the siting and dedicating of monuments
implies ‘a terminal act’ which closes a period of mourning
or martial activity, there is little to commemorate about the pursuit
of peace. Not only does ‘peace’ lack a rhetorical visual
language, it is essentially a continuous process rather than one
with definable conclusions or endpoint. Because of this, the iconography
of peace activism has largely been developed through the design
of specific landscape spaces.
As a communal and collective act gardening became the favoured rhetoric
of peace, resulting in the 1970s in a network of local, national
and international peace gardens and peace parks. They served various
functions: in Central America they were created as ‘cordons
sanitaire’ to help promote trans-national co-operation, in
the Middle East ‘peace parks’ have been created as de-militarised
buffer zones between warring factions. In central Africa they have
been created to erase recent military turmoil and to protect bio-diversity.
A network of peace gardens created throughout London in the 1970s
are now regarded as the apotheosis of GLC policy on anti-nuclear
proliferation. Planting as a form of protest has a recognisable
historiography; even in the formal regimen of the Imperial War Graves
Cemeteries there are occasional examples of ‘rogue’
planting. The central character of Julian Barnes’ short story
Evermore, the redoubtable ‘Miss Moss’ makes regular
visits to the former Western Front to dig out the ‘offending
French grass’ and plant sods of English turf around her brother’s
headstone. But it was always to no avail: the following year ‘the
French grass was back again’.
Perhaps the most recent, and infamous, act of guerilla gardening
took place during the May Day marches through central London. Protesting
against globalism, capitalism and war, marchers not only attempted
to reclaim official spaces of state, but to stain it with irreverent
markers, of which the most memorable is the green ‘mohican’
placed on the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square. It was not
the disfiguration of a state icon that was held to be most heinous,
rather that it should be done with dug turf, a material normally
associated with manicured lawn, horticultural order, and the ‘green
coverlet’ of official commemoration. Compare this action with
the state-condoned act of mass tribute during the grieving for Princess
Diana, with its floral aneurysm bursting out of St James Palace
– a triumph of cellophane wrapping and cloying sentiment.
In Northern Ireland, many of the monumental schemes that explore
the imagery of peace and reconciliation have also taken the form
of temporarily landscaped spaces, or open-ended cultural interventions
developed in collaboration with community and local groups. A ‘national
memorial to peace’ was suggested within days of the Irish
Republican Army’s (IRA) ceasefire in August 1994, but five
months later the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin argued
the need for utilitarian memorials rather than symbolic monuments,
the latter having been the focus of much dispute since partition.
Wary of plinth-based icons, nearly all of the emblems of peace in
the province have taken the form of artist-led interventions, installations,
environmental schemes and community collaborations. The few sculptural
or memorial schemes have been deliberately transient in nature.
In 1995, for example, an artist erected a plywood peace dove on
an empty plinth in north Belfast. Although the dove was soon burnt
and destroyed, further doves were sited for short periods in other
politically significant sites. During the following Easter, another
artist chalked the name of the 3,000 individuals killed in the Troubles
on the pavement of the Royal Avenue in Belfast. More recently, a
‘peace maze’ has been designed and planted in the Province,
further evidence of the way in which peace motifs closely echo the
delicate state of the current peace agreement.
Where ‘peace monuments’ exist, they are often presented
as fluid, open-ended artworks that require active co-operation from
the public. A peace cairn in County Donegal, Eire, for example,
consists of a mound of hand-sized stones individually contributed
by pilgrims wishing to create a ‘permanent monument to peace’
which is, in fact, in a constant state of change. Such a ‘monument’
seems to suggest that if ‘peace’ cannot be represented
because it lacks the necessary rhetorical language, it might be
promoted by continuous public involvement. A peace cairn symbolises,
at one level, the laying down of ‘arms’ but also the
need for a commitment to maintenance and persistent effort.
Peace is most often represented aesthetically and polemically as
transient, dialectic and fluid. It is rarely state-sponsored and
eschews the plinth and the plaza. It has also reclaimed the temporal,
as well as the spatial. Web artists Annie Lovejoy and Mac Dunlop
have extended the domain of peace into the fourth dimension; their
web project The Numbers and the Names refers to the global impact
of September 11th. Words drawn from Dunlop’s poems float on
a colourless screen, creating an orbital movement circling a void.
The words appear in an order generated according to an inverse reading
of the viewers’ IP address and, significantly, those of previous
visitors to the web site. By using the mouse, the orbit of words
– celebrated, wind, bomb, missing - can be slowed down or
re-orbited, but they cannot be stopped altogether. As a virtual
monument, The Numbers collates a record of mourners rather than
a conventional listing of the dead; it is endlessly iterative and
inclusive in a way that extends our understanding of the memorial
act. In its refreshing simplicity, the anti-rhetoric of peace has
moved some way from angel’s wings and ambiguous laurel wreaths.
Professor Paul Gough is Dean of the Faculty of Art, Media and Design,
UWE, Bristol. His paper ‘Creating communities of peace, protest
and intervention’ was be given at the Association of Art Historians
Annual Conference at UCL, London in mid April, 2003. His work is
currently on show in the permanent collection of the Imperial War
Museum, London.
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