MONUMENTS AND MEMORY Made and Unmade

Description

How do some monuments become so socially powerful that people seek to destroy them? After ignoring monuments for years, why must we now commemorate public trauma, but not triumph, with a monument? To explore these and other questions, Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin assembled essays from leading scholars about how monuments have functioned throughout the world and how globalization has challenged Western notions of the “monument.”
Examining how monuments preserve memory, these essays demonstrate how phenomena as diverse as ancient drum towers in China and ritual whale-killings in the Pacific Northwest serve to represent and negotiate time. Connecting that history to the present with an epilogue on the World Trade Center, Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade is pertinent not only for art historians but for anyone interested in the turbulent history of monuments—a history that is still very much with us today.

Contributors: Stephen Bann, Jonathan Bordo, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jas Elsner, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Robert S. Nelson, Margaret Olin, Ruth B. Phillips, Mitchell Schwarzer, Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Richard Wittman and Wu Hung.

CONTENTS

Travel

• Stephen Bann: Scaling the Cathedral: Bourges in John Bargrave’s Travel Journal for 1645
• Lillian Lan-ying Tseng: Retrieving the Past, Inventing the Memorable: Huang Yi’s Visit to the Song-Luo Monuments
• Robert S. Nelson: Tourists, Terrorists, and Metaphysical Theater at Hagia Sophia
• Mitchell Schwarzer:The Moving Landscape

Time

• Wu Hung: Monumentality of Time: Giant Clocks, the Drum Tower, the Clock Tower
• Margaret Olin:The Winter Garden and Virtual Heaven
• Jonathan Bordo: The Keeping Place (Arising from an Incident on the Land)
• Julia Bryan-Wilson:Building a Marker of Nuclear Warning

Destruction – Reconstruction

• Jas Elsner: Iconoclasm and the Preservation of Memory
• Tapati Guha-Thakurta: Archaeology and the Monument: An Embattled Site of History and Memory in Contemporary India
• Richard K. Wittman: Local Memory and National Aesthetics: Jean Pagès’s Early-Eighteenth-Century Description of the “Incomparable” Cathedral of Amiens
• Ruth B. Phillips: Settler Monuments, Indigenous Memory: Dis-membering and Re-membering Canadian Art History

Epilogue

• The Rhetoric of Monuments: The World Trade Center

345 pages, b&w ills / 15 x 23 cm / English