{"id":1591,"date":"2018-02-01T17:40:37","date_gmt":"2018-02-01T14:40:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maarav.org.il\/english\/?p=1591"},"modified":"2018-04-11T17:46:25","modified_gmt":"2018-04-11T14:46:25","slug":"monuments-move-us-julia-keren-turbahn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/maarav.org.il\/english\/2018\/02\/01\/monuments-move-us-julia-keren-turbahn\/","title":{"rendered":"Monuments that Move Us \/ Julia Keren Turbahn"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument. They are no doubt erected to be seen \u2013 indeed to attract attention. But at the same time they are impregnated with something that repels attention […] One cannot say they \u2018de-notice\u2019 us, they elude our perceptive faculties […]. Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a>, wrote the author Robert Musil in his essay \u201cMonuments\u201d. <\/em>Even though he refers to stereotypical statues of the 19th century one can identify this problematic issue in our current culture of remembrance. Monuments transcend time, and yet remain silent in space. They are so quiet and unobtrusive that they are inconspicuously able to attach themselves to the city. We, as observer, are one day surprised to realize and question, of whom and what this monument actually wants to remind us. We begin to question its right to exist in this space. We can currently see exactly this problem in the United States at the removal of Confederate monuments in many states. Furthermore in the media the people who stand before the monument and their interaction with it are questioned: Is it for example appropriate to take smiling selfies at a Holocaust memorial?<\/p>\n

After an introduction to the definition of a monument within the context of our culture of remembrance, as well as an elaboration of the abovementioned topical issues, I would like to demonstrate how the relationship of the body and the monument in the face of the development of our culture of remembrance can and should be constantly updated, questioned and reinvented in order to make us more sensitive to the (in)visibility of monuments. I will do so by taking different artistic positions into account. In this way, this text follows the current of thought which I developed in collaboration with the artist Tal Alperstein in our project monumentalise<\/em> which will be addressed at the end of this text.<\/p>\n\"\"\n

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About the invisibility of stone<\/strong><\/p>\n

The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs mentioned the importance of the social dimensions of memory after the Second World War. He speaks of a \u201ccollective memory\u201d that is constructed through socialization and communication. Under the auspices of commemorative memory is to be understood the collective and subjective perception of historical relationships.[2]<\/sup><\/a> A monument is erected in order to commemorate a specific person or historical moment.[3]<\/sup><\/a> The cultural theorist Jan Assmann notes, that monuments are a form of our public commemorative memory, a part of our cultural memory, that not only manifests itself in remembering persons but also in things, texts, pictures and actions.[4]<\/sup><\/a> The art historian Alois Riegl distinguishes between “intentional monuments”, that is, those which were set up in order to commemorate (the memorials) and the “historical monuments” which were erected for a different purpose and only acquired a commemorative value over time such as for example famous buildings or works of art.[5]<\/a> Temples, statues and monuments can be seen as a form of demonstration, as part of the visual media to a commemorative culture. Through them, the cultural memory of the respective society is organized and articulated in the public space and fixed points in the cultural memory are expressed. Next to their deictic function, of not letting a certain person of event be forgotten, monuments can also, through their content, give, by means of their specific construction and positioning in the public space, clarification about which collective worldview and perception were important at the time of their construction.[6]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Robert Musil continues in his text: \u201cEvery day you have to walk around them, or use their pedestal as a haven of rest, you employ them as a compass or a distance marker; when you happen upon the well-known square, you sense them as you would a tree, as part of the street scenery, and you would be momentarily stunned were they to be missing one morning: But you never look at them, and do not generally have the slightest notion of whom they are supposed to represent […] They repel the very thing they are supposed to attract.\u201d[7]<\/sup><\/a> The author not only describes the invisibility of monuments in the public space, but also posits that rather than reminding us of something, monuments can in fact have a distancing effect, and in so doing can become a \u2018monument to forgetting\u2019. According to Musil monuments become a certain backdrop to our everyday life. If one follows this line of thought, one must wonder, if when visiting a monument as a tourist, because a point of focus is laid on the visual aspect of the monument, the actual content and story of the monument loses its significance. Is the touristic consumerism being pushed into the foreground while the openness to content and understanding pushed to the background?[8]<\/sup><\/a> Furthermore, is it possible to see Musil\u2019s thought as a critique of the format of monument? In the 21st century, do we need a new form for the monument in order to counteract the distancing effect, of which Musil previously spoke, so that monuments can once again support memory and not forgetting?<\/p>\n

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About the need for flexibility- moving stones and thoughts<\/strong><\/p>\n

A topical example for the importance of the debate about the message monuments transmit within the public sphere is the removal of Confederate monuments in many cities of the United States.[9]<\/a> Holland Cotters, art critic to the New York Times writes: \u201cWe Need to Move, Not Destroy\u201c[10]<\/a>. Moving a monument as well as moving forward in our intellectual debate in our culture of remembrance. He does not want the monuments to be destroyed, for in so doing one avoids the symbolic reminder of our history of inequality. His suggestion is to find a new place for the monument: \u201cto change that context, break its spell, rouse these things up from the slumber of false nostalgia, and wake ourselves up. Plus, if you move them, you can put something in their place, introduce new stories.\u201d[11]<\/a> To Cotter, an appropriate alternative place of location for the monuments would be a museum, although here it is important that this does not become a \u2018hall of fame\u2019 but also a \u2018hall of shame.\u2019: \u201cFor this to happen, though, museums will have to relinquish their pretense of ideological neutrality. They will have to become truth-telling institutions.\u201d[12]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The fact that we not only need to question the sculpture, the materiality of the monument but also our positioning toward the object, is demonstrated by the website yolocaust.de,<\/em> which the satirist, Shahak Shapira, created in 2017. On this website we can see tourists visiting the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The people pictured on this website are juggling with bright balls, are taking selfies or are jumping over the grand stone platforms of the memorial. If one moves the mouse over the picture, the background of these images is transformed into images of Nazi concentration camps. This website has received a massive response, which vacillates between receptivity and criticism for tastelessness. Two and a half million people visited the page until the twelve people who are seen in the pictures demanded the content to be taken down- content which Shapira found on Facebook, Instagram, Tinder and Grindr. Shapira conceded to this demand but attached the following statement: \u201cI didn\u2019t mean to dictate to anyone; I wanted people to talk about whether it\u2019s right or wrong to behave like this at such a place.\u201d[13]<\/sup><\/a> A less provocative, yet similar approach to this theme can be found on the website tindercaust.blogspot.de<\/em><\/a>, which consists of a collection of Tinder profile pictures in which the users are positioned in front of the Holocaust memorial. The question that these project raises, among others, is how one interacts with a monument. Peter Eisenmann, the architect of the memorial reacted to Shapira\u2019s Website as follows: \u201c[P]utting those bodies there, in the pictures, that\u2019s a little too much if you ask me [\u2026] [T]here are no dead people under my memorial. My idea was to allow as many people of different generations, in their own ways, to deal or not to deal with being in that place. And if they want to lark around, I think that\u2019s fine.\u201d For Eisenmann the monument is a \u2018daily occurrence\u2019 and not a \u2018holy ground\u2019.[14]<\/sup><\/a> Eisenmann here mentions an important aspect of our commemorative memory: each generation has its own form, own rituals for remembrance. Where do we draw the line, however, between acceptable behavior toward remembrance and tastelessness? Uwe Neum\u00e4rker, the director of the Foundation for the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, agrees with Eisemann\u2019s standpoint about the selfie-problem. He sees them as a way of appropriating the world. Not only by young people but also by older people. Even on cemeteries and concentration camp memorials the selfies are a form to express: \u2018I was here’.[15]<\/sup><\/a> Hence it is to ask: Can our selfie-culture become an established means of memorializing and can it be seen as a ritual for remembrance next to the previous, normative ritual of internalization and silence?<\/p>\n

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About the body \u2013 how to perform memory<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jochen Gerz is an artist for whom the format and the interaction with monuments in the public space has, since the beginning of his artistic work, been a guiding question. An example of this is the memorial Platz des Unsichtbaren Mahnmals (Place of the Invisible Memorial)<\/em>, which is located in the forecourt of a castle in Saarbr\u00fccken. Its basis is an initiative between the artist and students. Together they secretly began to engrave the names of Jewish graveyards on the backside of cobblestones in the castle\u2019s forecourt- which had been a control center during the Nazi time. In the end, Gerz\u2019s idea was encouraged by the city of Saarbr\u00fccken and 2146 stones were engraved with a text and accompanied by a public memorial, constructed in 1993. Today only a sign reminds the visitor of the \u2018invisible\u2019 monument. In this way the square functions not only as a monument but also doubly problematizes the issue of avoidance of history. Firstly, it addresses the mental act of evasion, and secondly the form of \u2018visual avoidance\u2019 that is represented by making the monument invisible. The overturned stones thus act as a trace of a performative act.[16]<\/sup><\/a> In Hamburg there is the Memorial against Fascism, which Gerz, in collaboration with his wife, Esther Shalev-Gerz, constructed. The twelve meter high lead column functions as a place where visitors can engrave and write commentaries directly onto the surface of the monument with a metal pencil provided.[17]<\/sup><\/a> Over the course of seven years this column was then lowered in eight phases so that the visitors could have a new space to write. This act metaphorically symbolized the \u201cburial of memory\u201d.[18]<\/sup><\/a> Today the column has been completely sunken, as a visitor one sees only the lead plate on the pavement before which lies an explanation with the inscription: \u201cDenn nichts kann auf Dauer an unserer Stelle sich gegen das Unrecht erheben,\u201c which can be translated to: \u2018For nothing can permanently stand up to injustice in our place\u201d meaning in the long run it is the human being itself, who must stand up against injustice.[19]<\/sup><\/a> These two examples demonstrate how Gerz redefines the format of a memorial and raises the possibility of co-authorship and shared responsibility of the viewer to the memorial by spurring the visitor into interaction with the memorial itself. Thus, the focus is not only on the object itself, but also on the act of remembering as a performative ritual, as well as the interaction between viewer and sculpture. Gerz\u2018s formats can be seen in an interactive context: Memorial and visitor are moved. Gerz himself formulates the importance of physicalized remembrance: \u201cBecause the places of remembrance are people, not monuments. I ask you, where we stand at the end of our century and here something new arises: do not underestimate the quality of the viewer, do not forget the people of today.\u201c[20]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The American art historian Mechthild Widrich defines the term of \u2018performative monuments\u2019 as: \u201can emergent genre of interactive actions, rests on a new notion of agency in public space, in which political responsibility is performed by historically aware individuals in acts of commemoration\u201c[21]<\/a>. Widrich argues that the performance art of the 1960s[22]<\/sup><\/a> was an important impetus for a new form of remembrance that arose in the 1980s in Europe. According to Widrich, the format of a live performance should, despite its ephemerality and immateriality, be seen not as an antipode to the monumental, but as something that reimagines the relationship of the body to the monument, in that it actively pulls the person in.[23]<\/sup><\/a> Widrich understands not only official execution of ritualized remembrance in the public space as involvement, but includes all forms that are part of the act of remembrance as active involvement. For example, interviews or historical texts could, according to Widrich, be an example of active involvement. In this way, the activation of remembrance is not limited to visitors who are physically present in front of a memorial. [24]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

How \u2018heavy\u2019 commemorating can be Christian Jankowski visualises in his work Heavy Weight History<\/em> using a sense of humour that is typical to his work.[25]<\/sup><\/a> Jankowski invited a group of professional weightlifters to lift a row of massive public sculptures in Warsaw. Dressed in patriotic colors, the weightlifters attempt to lift the monuments, which are made of bronze and brick. Metaphorically, this can be read as carrying the burden of history on their shoulders.[26]<\/sup><\/a> The Romanian artist Alexandra Pirici lets performers not only interact with the monuments but also complements and replaces the fixed materiality of the monument with the flexibility of the human body. The idea behind it was to reduce, de-monumentalize, update the monuments, intervene in their history and symbolism or to alienate them.[27]<\/sup><\/a> In her work Monument to Work<\/em> Pirici conceptualizes the act of remembrance through a performative work in which the physical disposition of the working body is recontextualized and the existing possibilities of remembrance and memory are investigated.[28]<\/sup><\/a> Pirici asked factory workers to demonstrate their routine activities, and then used this movement material as the basis for her performative monument which is located in public space.[29]<\/sup><\/a> Pirici has been re-interpreting memorials since 2011 by incorporating the human body and already garnered international attention at the Venice Biennale in 2013 when, together with choreographer Manuel Pelmu\u015f, she asked dancers to physically reset previous iconic works of past Biennales in her work An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale. <\/em>Related to Pirici\u2019s idea of transforming existing movement material into a form of performative sculpture the Israeli artist Yael Bartana uses an already existing performative ritual and translates it into a collective performance in the public sphere that then for her functions as a transformed \u2018social sculpture\u2019.[30]<\/sup><\/a> Hereby the artist does not criticise the materiality of the monument but questions socially learned routines and rituals of commemoration. In her work Two minutes of Standstill<\/em> which was part of the Impulse Theater Biennale 2013, she calls for a symbolic interruption of the everyday life asking the people to collectively stand still in public places for two minutes referring to the the Yom Ha Shoah<\/em>, the Israeli day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust. The question for Bartana is: what does it mean to grow up with this collective ritual? As the sirens sound, the entire land of Israel stands still for two minutes. Bartana argues that the act of remembrance is often presented and experienced as a \u2018predetermined routine\u2019[31]<\/sup><\/a>. The artist claims that, long before one has contextualized or intellectualized the participation in the ritual of Yom Ha Shoah<\/em>, one has been forced into a physical experience. For Bartana the project Two minutes of Standstill<\/em> is, above all, a direct request to change the present and initiate a debate about how active remembrance is and should be in the future.[32]<\/a> On the project\u2019s website zweiminutenstillstand.de<\/em> is written, in large letters on a red background, \u201eHalte an und denke\u201c, which can be translated to \u2018Stop and think\u2019: Remembering as a collective performance to arrest the visitor in a double sense, on a physical and mental level.[33]<\/a> The art theorist Christina von Braun writes about the quality of silently standing still: \u201cMaybe silence and stillstand are the only common language we have. They offer everyone a possibility: the one who wants to speak, like the one who finds no words for the feelings, the grief, the joy. Silence is the most difficult language of all – and the only one we can all share. Standstill is the most difficult movement – and the only one to which we are all capable. Both are registered in us – our thinking as well as our bodies – in an indelible way. Therefore, two minutes standstill contain the promise of eternity. That’s not very little.\u201d[34]<\/sup><\/a> In June 2013, by physically standing still, pausing within the public space, the dancer and choreographer Erdem G\u00fcnd\u00fcz became a certain symbol of a performative monument for still and peaceful protest.[35]<\/a> His image circulated throughout worldwide media channels as he stood immutable in the middle of the clearance of Istanbul\u2019s Gezi Park only to be spurred into movement in order to avoid physical violence at the hand of the police forces. The \u2018Body-Monument\u2019 was ephemeral and yet it especially circulated in digital media. With the hashtag #duranadam<\/em> (in Turkish standing man) people posted pictures of themselves standing still at various places all over the world in order to show solidarity with G\u00fcnd\u00fcz. Being united in standstill: A movement that, as Christina von Braun puts it, can be understood by all and reproduced locally.[36]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\"\"\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0About infinitely moving on<\/strong><\/p>\n

The works of Gerz, Bartana, Jankwoski, Pirici and G\u00fcnduz demonstrate how an artistic interaction, especially one that uses the body, can point to the existing forms and rituals of surrounding a monument as well as the materiality of the monument itself. Moreover they imply that newer formats can perhaps more effectively counteract the \u00a0aforementioned distancing effect against which Musil warns us. The questions in which way time, location and the human body stand in relationship to memory is also central questions to the project monumentalise<\/em>. monumentalise<\/em> is the result of a collaboration between Alperstein and I within the frame of the project en\/COUNTERs that enabled an artistic exchange between Israeli and German artists. Through the reconstruction of the form of a monument with human bodies we developed choreographic scores. These scores were translated into illustrations by the artist Dan Allon, in order to explain the construction of physical monuments. Similar to an Ikea furniture piece, this step by step guides demonstrate how the monument itself can be reconstructed with human bodies.[37]<\/sup><\/a> On this website we also encourage the visitor to rebuild a monument, at a place of their choosing and to share a picture of it with us. These \u2018Physicalized- Monuments\u2019 can be built up at any time whatsoever. They do, however require a certain amount of physical effort and concentration in order to build what one could call an ephemeral \u2018Community of Remembrance\u2019. The selection of the \u2018reconstructed\u2019 monuments is based on the places we worked during the project development. Seemingly \u2018invisible\u2019 monuments are made visible again– they are experienced through the body and brought to new locations. How long a specific monument stands is dependent upon the endurance of the body. In one video work that is part of the project, the performers stand at the Rabin Square in Tel Aviv for thirty minutes. Their muscles begin to shake until they can\u2019t stand any longer and free themselves from the position. The monument disappears from the square, the experience, however, of collectively holding a position is imprinted into the body and mind. Although the reproduction of monuments inevitably presents certain content-related aspects of a culture of remembrance that can be critically questioned, the project focuses on the investigation of the ‘how’ of remembering. We do not suggest a new monument format, rather a sensibility to the format of the monument that triggers a reflection on the act of remembrance. In so doing we literally hope to set older formats of the culture of remembrance in motion, activating a movement in society physically and intellectually. How can we stop the inevitable habits of remembrance and critically examine them? Perhaps not only through physical stillness but also through movement, not only bound to one place but by mobility? , \u201c[P]ersonal involvement is necessary if we want memory to be relevant in the political future\u201c Mechthild Widrich writes. [38]<\/a><\/sup> In our media-driven society we can find numerous channels for remembrance, thus monumentalise<\/em> does not limit itself to the live performative act but also shares the instructions, pictures and videos of the act online. And yet, in my opinion, the physical engagement and physicalized memory plays a tremendous role in the future preservation of our commemorative culture. Especially as we ask ourselves about the importance of the materiality, temporality and location of our monuments, it is important to also think about the viewer. And as we think about the viewer we must think about the activation of the human body so that monuments, in whatsoever form, can remain an important aspect of our commemorative memory.<\/p>\n

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