1
Introduction

To commemorate is to take a stand.

-Sanford Levinson, 1998

We are in the midst of a "memory boom." As described by Marita Sturken, this international "embrace of cultural memory" is manifested in the ever increasing number of memory projects (a wide range of memorials, monuments, and museums) over the last few decades. Writing in her most recent book, Terrorism in American History, Sturken affirms: "The memory boom has been global in all senses of the word; aesthetic and strategic influences have traveled transnationally." Though minimalist and modernist Euro-American forms may have proliferated around the world, memory projects in countries such as South Africa, Rwanda, Vietnam, and Cambodia are providing more culturally diverse approaches to commemoration. As Sturken contends, "who is remembered, who is grieved, who is designated as worthy of public and collective memorialization - tells us a great deal about the values of a nation." While this "memory boom" offers paths for advocacy and the recognition of people and events that might otherwise be ignored, it is too often accompanied by "dark" memorial tourism and overt commercialism, evidenced in a spate of museum shops, souvenirs, and guided tourist experiences (Sturken 2022, pp. 11-12, 14, 16, 267). Within this context it became apparent to us that the conception, design, commission, and installation of memorials requires sensitive and informed practices that transcend superficial treatments. Museum and curatorial studies scholar Gaynor Kavanagh aptly asserts that memory work "forces difficult questions" as "memories implicitly mean working with emotions, with the past, present and future. It is not easy . Ethical responsibilities are not lightly avoided here" (Kavanagh 2002, p. 111).

This current memorial boom, coinciding with an international reckoning regarding existing monuments and the values they celebrate, begs a multi-pronged question: Should such artworks be removed, relocated, replaced, or recontextualized? These pressing issues directly prompted Memorials Now. We have found that the act of "writing memorials" reveals our shared commemorative landscape as more fraught than we had ever imagined. How, then, to proceed in writing about these kinds of works to advance the current state of research, and also identify and support emerging best practices in the commissioning, creating, and siting of them, as well as for their removal? Looking ahead, would it be possible to build memorials that can be meaningfully adapted as social change occurs? Our efforts to answer these questions have led us to four primary areas of concern here: reckoning with the past; tracing an evolution from heroes to victims that has led to a conflation of the two; creating a more inclusive commemorative landscape; and providing alternative memorial forms. Thus this book is organized into four interrelated parts, each examining its overarching theme through three distinctive though often overlapping perspectives. We examine Critical Issues that are foundational to the given theme; offer pertinent Case Studies to elucidate those theoretical aspects with examples in applied practice; and suggest Future Directions that reinvigorate the memorial landscape by pointing to promising paths forward. This approach, we believe, will help avoid the repetition of mistakes, while considering how to best extend and replicate impactful accomplishments in the field. To these ends, the structure of Memorials Now was conceived with readers and also educators in mind. Our intention is to enhance the book's utility through key themes that can be explored for individual interest, or as part of course curriculum, by identifying primary issues, examples, and possible paths forward related each theme. All four parts are interconnected and function in tandem with each other so that one could read or teach across the entire text; for example, educators and students might add their own critical analysis, local examples, and future trends to those provided here. Yet while we imagine, and hope, that the whole book will be of benefit to a broad variety of people, we recognize that it is useful to be able to work with its individual parts and chapters and thus have designed it accordingly.

A primary aim of Memorials Now is to interrogate established memorial conventions and rhetoric, especially when these are rooted in westernized suppositions about "high" art, "elevated" ideals, and "noble" agendas. As characterized by art historian and critic Deborah Root, "many people have been unwilling to recognize that aesthetics are dependent on very explicit sets of power relations." Too often art has been used to "gild ugly social and historical facts with the patina of taste and beauty" (Root 1998, pp. 18-19, 141). Simultaneously we need to scrutinize public institutions and organizations instead of assuming these always, and only, operate for the public good. David Fleming, founding president of the Social Justice Alliance for Museums (SJAM), offers astute warnings for museums that we should also apply to memorial culture, in particular to be vigilant in recognizing how democratic functions can be suppressed by the self-interests of groups or individuals. Though he believes institutions can help us advocate for social change, he also acknowledges how these "have long been mechanisms for reinforcing the status quo" and upholding established systems of social control (Fleming 2002, pp. 217-218). Thus we also encourage the reexamination of concepts now common in the field of public art as related to memorials more particularly. For example, perhaps it is more accurate to discuss a memorial as being "site appropriate" given the traumatic event or personal loss it may mark, rather than "site specific."

The conception of memorialization predates our contemporary understandings of what constitutes public art. But if we consider that a form such as a triumphal arch is an ancient type of public art we can then realize that human beings have long been concerned with "satisfying aesthetic needs, instilling morals, teaching lessons, codifying history, swaying opinions, or securing allegiance" (Knight 2014, p. 312). The impulse to commemorate is even more instinctive; it is less a desire and more a human necessity to remember our loved and lost, to mark significant and somber events, and to acknowledge and try to heal trauma. In public art the attention is often upon the artist or the art but with memorials, especially in the past, the creator or work was typically secondary to the person, place, or event remembered. In some cases the artist is not known, or even of much concern. The patron, however, was typically of great import, as the memorial's existence could serve sociocultural and political agendas that extended beyond straightforward commemoration; making visible narratives of power, shoring up belief systems, demonstrating military might and social clout - in short, memorials were frequently used to assert authority.

Our seriousness about fostering critical dialogues on commemorative culture is reflected in our decision to italicize the titles of memorials and monuments throughout this book. We first addressed this point jointly in our editors' statement for "Memorials 2 - The Culture of Remembrance," a special issue of Public Art Dialogue (the name of both the journal and international organization we co-founded in 2008), in which we noted that memorials were rarely "italicized or underlined when written about as are other works of art" (Knight and Senie 2013). We returned to this point a few years later, in 2016, in our A Companion to Public Art. As we explicated in that volume, the choice to italicize memorials challenged standard conventions in the field as "italics denote an art specific status" that has long been denied to many memorials and to their creators as artists. As we wrote then, and still believe now, memorials are works of "ART," "conceived and designed to communicate.with audiences through a visual language, and likely one that builds upon preexisting artistic conventions and practices" (Knight and Senie 2016b, pp. 15-16). Not italicizing memorials' titles can avoid a number of issues, particularly analysis of their aesthetics, concentrating instead only on their subjects and implicit messages. In Memorials Now we assert that what a memorial looks like tells us much about what it is meant to say, and to whom. If we hope to accurately assess the efficacy of memorials, then we must consider all aspects of their form and function. Of course, in some cases a good concept for memorialization can still result in poor execution. These are tricky scenarios, as the subject matter is usually sensitive given the frequently traumatic nature of the circumstances. To consider such a work as "bad art" might seem a critique of the impetus to memorialize the people and events remembered. But in our view the aim is to consider how well a design does its job of commemoration, not to offend the memorialized, but instead to advocate for a useful, just, inclusive, and artistically enriching memorial landscape.

And, as noted above, we have now come to reckon with many of our...