Ex Situ: On Moving Monuments-Introduction to <em>Future Anterior</em>

Abstract

Ex Situ:On Moving Monuments—Introduction to Future Anterior Jorge Otero-Pailos and Mechtild Widrich The geographical stability and permanence of monuments has been both a paradigm and a myth, particularly when it comes to monuments constructed for commemorative purposes, but also for buildings or sites turned into monuments by cultural definition and the fluctuation of political regimes. Whether empires rise and fall, taking the built remnants of prior power with them, monuments are expected to remain where they are—as if they had "received orders not to move," to borrow the ironic military-sounding caption artist Barbara Kruger attached to an image of a pin-encrusted woman in 1982. That the myth of immutability has not lost any of its power might be gathered from the recent debate over Confederate monuments that has been brewing over the last decade but boiled over in the summer of 2017 with the shocking news of a far right protest in Charlottesville that turned violent, and even deadly, for a counter-protester. The headlines obscured the fact that millions had lived with the sculptures in question, wittingly or not, for decades. And in the wake of that traumatic spectacle and its fitful afterlife in the mass media, monuments ranging from a Roman column gifted to Chicago by Mussolini to biographical markers of nineteenth-century doctors and politicians have been regarded with a critical eye. The demand that they be moved or even dismantled (a demand advanced, interestingly, also for certain works of studio art in the same period) has been met, from the cultural conservative and political far right of the spectrum, with hypocritical calls to defend the unchanging beauty or historical content of the problematic objects, as if monuments too and not just gun-toting vigilantes must "stand their ground" against forces of change. For academics and urban practitioners observing or participating in these debates, an urgent need seems to be to go beyond the reductive and sweeping imperatives of unselective destruction and conservation to understand the social and aesthetic mechanisms at work in historical consciousness. How can stone sculptures neglected for the better part of a century suddenly appear to their partisans (few of whom take any interest in the history of art) as irreplaceable aesthetic triumphs? How do works of belated reaction and Jim Crow repression come to be identified with the very historical subjects, which they (distortedly) commemorate? And when did the right adopt Richard Serra's stark formula of site-specificity—that "to move [End Page iii] the work is to destroy the work"—anyway? These questions are not merely local ones: from plans to clean up the desperately polluted Ganges as a Hindu nationalist project to the recent name change of the Republic of Macedonia (the name being contested by a Greek province), fundamentalism about the past is overtaking both the built and the natural environment, often in ways that are anything but conservative (or conservationist). The ongoing controversy over Confederate monuments, and with it the political scrutiny of older instances of art in public places, calls for a larger reconsideration of monuments and their treatment beyond any assumed U.S. exceptionalism. Indeed, they and many other monuments, globally speaking, point to highly problematic histories materialized in public space. While we included authors in this issues that move the contemporary debate further by both historicizing and theorizing it, we find it also important to look at examples from other times and geographies, and other controversial contexts. One central example, ex-situ preservation, is born out of an attempt to move valuable historic buildings and monuments out of harm's way, out of a hostile environment and into a more nurturing, safer context, where they may survive. The practice is not unique to historical preservation: wildlife conservators employ ex-situ conservation when a species' natural environment is under pressure, and they might, for instance, breed wild animals in captivity or move them to another similar environment. One could say that ex-situ preservation is one of the origins of modern preservation. Historians celebrate Alexandre Lenoir, as one of the founders of preservation, for creating the Museum of French Monuments, a sort of safe environment, where he moved monuments...