Sunday, May 30, 2010
Negative Monuments
I've been a-thinking about how it can be a little difficult to memorialize someone who is not seen as a hero or to show someone as something other than one dimensional. There are many aspects to a person and those aspects are not always all good. I think my question is this: What is the purpose of a memorial? Can it be something that doesn't celebrate a person's life but rather shows the wrongs committed by that person as a kind of warning? If we were to do that would it be disrespectful to their memory or would it be accurate? How important is truth in memorials or are we only looking for impact?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Many very important questions here, none of which I can answer straight - I think they cut to the heart of important heritage debates and so you'll find various opinions.
ReplyDeleteAgain, I'd like to direct you to some German monuments - not to people but to events - look at the various strategies that have been used to remember their painful past, some utterly excellent and some less successful:
The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Denkmal) - hideous, impact, little else
The Stumble Stones (Stopersteine) - interactive, annoying, wonderful
I think in general "truth" is a slippery concept, and we need to remember that a memorial is different from a museum - we cannot tell a whole story; perhaps only give a glimpse. This means that there is neccessarily some simplification whenever a monument/ memorial is constructed.
Although memorials are generally meant to glorify, i think that there is plenty of scope to use memorials, as you put it, as a warning. This does not neccessarily mean we are being disrespectful to the person's memory [also, are there not some people who's memory we should not respect??]. Perhaps too much simplification - whether looking at only good or only bad - is disrespectful, and we should strive to capture complexity.
So now the question is, what strategies can we use to bring out the complexities of a person?