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Adam Stoneman\u00a0<\/strong>discusses how public monuments and statues mask the arbitrariness of power. Above: the\u00a0Edward Colston Statue (photo: Bristol City Council)<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n \u201cGreat monuments are erected like dams, opposing the logic and majesty of authority to all disturbing element; it is in the form of cathedral or palace that Church or State speaks to the multitudes and imposes silence upon them.\u201d <\/em>–\u00a0<\/em>George Bataille<\/p>\n Over 55 statues have been toppled, removed or slated for removal in the United States and 12 in the UK since the protests over the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis began in May. Pedestals are still littered with protest signs and covered in graffiti: Portland stone, cooling from the heat of battle.<\/p>\n Upon these empty plinths there are proposals to erect new monuments to figures worthy of commemoration such as Charles Hamilton Houston<\/a>, Paul Stephenson<\/a>,or even Missy Elliott<\/a>. But before the bronze is cast, it is worth reflecting not only on what we want to memorialise as a society, but how.<\/p>\n There is reason to be wary of repeating the anachronistic aesthetics of the \u2018heroic figurative statuary\u2019, as David Olusoga terms it<\/a>, with a new cast of historical characters. Monuments signify majesty and authority, casting subjects into the canon of History, beyond contestation or reproach. They disavow history, and bestow a sense of permanence \u2014 carved into the rock to appear as a natural feature, Mount Rushmore, Trump recently declared<\/a>, \u2018will stand forever as an eternal tribute\u2019. As Henri Lefebvre wrote, monuments \u2018mask the will to power and the arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and collective thought.\u2019<\/p>\n Upon its plinth, the statue of Edward Colston claimed its place immemorial in British History. Residing now in Bristol Museum, after a brief spell at the bottom of Bristol docks, it can be properly understood as a historical object \u2014 with a relatively recent and controversial history, erected as it was a century and a half after Colston\u2019s death.<\/p>\n Laura Mulvey and Mark Lewis\u2019s film Disgraced Monuments<\/em>, made for Channel 4 Television in 1994, examines the fall of the USSR through the toppling of Soviet monuments. The aesthetic of monumentalism deployed by the Tsar was reappropriated by Stalin as a ready-made language that could promote loyalty for the Soviet state, with statues and busts in every town square and public building. \u2018The cult of the Tsar returns\u2019, notes Mulvey, with Stalin\u2019s cult of personality embodied in monuments; \u2018He was a Gorgon Medusa, everything in sight immortalised in stone\u2019. But by leaving the aesthetic regime of monumentality intact, the statues, which represented the authority of the state, eventually fell victim to the forces of popular revolt. In a park above the Kremlin, a statue of Lenin is replaced by a monument to Alexander II, returning to the very spot from which it had been displaced 70 years before.<\/p>\n There is a memorable interview in the film with a sculptor who works in a small Moscow factory, which until recently had made busts of Stalin, Lenin and Marx. Since perestroika the public contracts have dried up and now he produces kitsch figurines of classical sculptures \u2014 \u201cwhatever people will buy\u201d. Resnais and Marker\u2019s film <\/a>Statues Also Die<\/em><\/a> also explores this move to commodified production of tourist statuettes in an African context.<\/p>\n To find an alternative vocabulary of commemoration, one that is adequate for dealing with Britain\u2019s legacy of empire, slavery and racism, we must look instead at the practice of memorialisation in the global south and formerly colonised nations, to reconsider memorials to empire from those who suffered under it.<\/p>\n Cradock Four Memorial, Eastern Cape, South Africa<\/em><\/p>\n In a remembrance garden in the town of Cradock in South Africa, four vertical slabs of concrete<\/a> bear witness to four anti-apartheid activists murdered by secret police in 1985. Conventions of Western monumentalism are shunned in the use of plain and everyday material; these were four ordinary people, two school teachers, a railway worker and a childhood friend who was with the group by chance, shot down in cold blood. The monument is stark and insistent, it does not demand reverence or veneration but stands upright in indignant rage at a brutal injustice.<\/p>\n![\"AS2\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/AS2.jpg\")
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