Reflecting on Monumental Cares: I will discuss two case studies by Emilio Rojas and Ana Lupaş from my new book, Monumental Cares, which considers the monument debates of the past decade in light of phenomena that strike us as monumental or overwhelming, such as climate crisis, migration, and local and global political tensions. How can a hero or figurehead, a date or event, be made to stand for, much less accurately represent, such processes? We have to start from the ground up, I argue, paying attention to how sites, as well as artifacts and the audiences that inhabit them operate on multiple, overlapping levels of mediation. A multi-directional theory of site brings together objects, their photographic reproduction, and a geographically informed sense of audience(s)—local, regional, global. What to do with monumental markers, particularly when these are the products of terror, requiring removal, modification, or other forms or recontextualization? The new approach to site found in some recent eco-performance allows us to see anew post-war avant-garde practices as they enter the radically alien world of museums like the Tate. Attending to history and practice in this site-directed way, I will show, helps us see the significance of history to the fashioning of a working, democratic public sphere.
Mechtild Widrich researches and writes on art in public space, in particular monuments and monument activism, performative and participatory practices, and the theory of the public sphere. She is Professor in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and currently Faculty Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Advanced Study. Widrich is the author of Performative Monuments (2014) and Monumental Cares (2023), both with Manchester University Press. She is the (co)editor of Future Anterior, special issue Ex Situ: On Moving Monuments (2020); Participation in Art and Architecture (2015, paperback 2022); Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory (2013, paperback 2015), Krzysztof Wodiczko, A 9/11 Memorial (2009); and translator (with Andrei Pop) of Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen [1853; Aesthetics of Ugliness] (2015, paperback 2017). Her writings have appeared in Art Journal, Grey Room, Texte zur Kunst, ArtMargins, Log, TDR, JSAH, and numerous books and catalogues in Europe and the US.