Ruptured structures: Race and representation in contemporary antimonuments

Abstract

Monuments have historically been erected in western culture to project dominant narratives and political regimes and eliding brutal histories of subjugation on which those regimes have come into, and maintained, power. But over the last decade, several American artists have produced monumentally scaled projects that surface (rather than submerge) those histories. This article argues that these works – referred to herein as antimonuments and discussed through installations by Kara Walker, Mark Bradford and Kehinde Wiley – deploy formal tropes of traditional monumentality to expose the degree to which the rhetorical success of such structures is conditioned on the erasure of otherness, an effect laid especially bare in Confederate monuments that laudatorily memorialize, in a way peculiar to the monumental, the practice of enslavement on the very ground where that practice was enacted, and yet persists long after it was extinguished. By explicating the imbrications of the contemporary moment in genealogies traceable to the transatlantic slave trade, these contemporary anitmonuments intervene on what Fred calls the ‘ongoing, irregularly disrupted avoidance of looking at oneself’ that characterizes whiteness and which is reified through historical, particularly Confederate monuments. I attend to the material, formal and historical origins of these objects to suggest that these contemporary projects instantiate the ‘habitation and recitation’ (: 257) of questions regarding the relationship between representation, marginality and access to power, and to give form to the various ways in which the present moment is inescapably shaped by the transatlantic slave trade and its afterlives.