Toppling Things as Memorial Contestation
Spectacle and Affect of Monument Removal
Published on 9. January 2025
Book
Hardback
380 pages
978-90-04-71263-8 (ISBN)
Description
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, monuments became a focal point: protestors toppled or spray-painted them, even danced on them. These politically, visually, and emotionally potent events may have looked instantaneous, yet frequently sprang from years of activism, as well as protracted political and academic debate. Toppling Things challenges stereotypical notions monument topplings as riotous, spontaneous, or irrational. Bringing together the ideas and emotions, the uncertainty and convictions, of artists, activists, and academics, the volume rejects a neatly tied-up, distant narrative. As it sheds light on the global, personal, immediate, and historical processes around the fall of a monument, the volume engages directly with the complexity of toppling activism and monument removal as a form of lived experience.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Leiden
Netherlands
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 241 mm
Width: 162 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
699 gr
ISBN-13
978-90-04-71263-8 (9789004712638)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Tomas Macsotay is a Senior Lecturer at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, holding a PhD on eighteenth-century sculpture (Amsterdam, 2008). His six books and edited collections include, The Hurt(ful) Body. Performing and Beholding Pain (2017) and Recepcion de Richard Wagner y Vanguardia en las Artes Espanolas (2024).
Nausikaa? El-Mecky is tenure-track professor in Art History & Visual Culture at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Since her PhD (Cambridge 2013) she has been developing her self-defined field of "dangerous images," e.g., in the monograph The Creation of Dangerous Images in Iconoclasm, (Routledge, forthcoming).
Nausikaa? El-Mecky is tenure-track professor in Art History & Visual Culture at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Since her PhD (Cambridge 2013) she has been developing her self-defined field of "dangerous images," e.g., in the monograph The Creation of Dangerous Images in Iconoclasm, (Routledge, forthcoming).
Content
Thamyris Mission Statement
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Introduction
?Tomas Macsotay and Nausikaae El-Mecky
PART 1: Overhauling: an Anatomy of Memorial Contestations
1 Local Origins of a Global Series: the 1990s Wave of Anti-colonial Iconoclasm
?Nikolas Orr
2 Commemoration and (Re)Conciliation: Memorial Culture under Apologetic Settler Colonialism in Canada
?Seraphine Appel
3 Contemporary Iconoclasm and Affect
?Ernst van Alphen
4 Traumatic Monuments: Decolonial Iconoclasms and "Southern" Memories
?Rhea Dehn Tutosaus and Miriam Oesterreich
5 To Remove, or Not To Remove, That Is the Question: the Troubled Legacy of Chiang Kai-shek Statues and Memorials in Democratized Taiwan
?Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang
PART 2: Facing: Making a Difference in Memorial Activism
6 A Space of Freedom: Richmond's Robert E. Lee Memorial and the Future of America
?David Ehrenpreis
7 Conversations on Black Lives Matter
?Tami Sawyer with Stacy Boldrick; Keith Magee with Richard Clay
8 Activist Statement: Down with J. P. Coen
?Romy Rondeltap
9 Colonial Reckoning: Reexamining the Slave Past in Catalonia
?Gerard Llorens Decesaris and Adria Enriquez Alvaro
PART 3: Waking: Imaginings of a Post-Monument
10 Dissolution of the Monuments
?Paul Grace
11 The Agency of the Void: When a Monument Falls, Absence Transforms into Powerful Presence
?Nausikaae El-Mecky
12 Toppling Things: Artistic Approaches and Media Strategies in Dealing with Monuments-Alexandra Pirici, Morehshin Allahyari, Julius von Bismarck & Julian Charriere
?Ursula Stroebele
13 Taking a Knee: Permanence, Ritual and the Respect Insurrection
?Tomas Macsotay
14 Artist/Activist Statement: In Search of an Aesthetic of Care: Recording BLM Protests and Documenting One's Life in a Time of Reckoning
?Ruth Somalo
PART 4: Prolonged Engagements: Artistic Testimonies
15 Flesh & Stone: Archives, Bodies and "Deep Time" in Ada Pinkston's LandMarked
?Cory Wayman
16 Empty Pedestals or The Aesthetics of Truth
?Ada Pinkston
17 Artist Statement: On Disgraced Monuments, their Resignification and the Recovery of Emptied Sites
?Krzysztof Wodiczko
18 Epilogue: 2020 Revisited
?Tomas Macsotay and Nausikaae El-Mecky
Index
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Introduction
?Tomas Macsotay and Nausikaae El-Mecky
PART 1: Overhauling: an Anatomy of Memorial Contestations
1 Local Origins of a Global Series: the 1990s Wave of Anti-colonial Iconoclasm
?Nikolas Orr
2 Commemoration and (Re)Conciliation: Memorial Culture under Apologetic Settler Colonialism in Canada
?Seraphine Appel
3 Contemporary Iconoclasm and Affect
?Ernst van Alphen
4 Traumatic Monuments: Decolonial Iconoclasms and "Southern" Memories
?Rhea Dehn Tutosaus and Miriam Oesterreich
5 To Remove, or Not To Remove, That Is the Question: the Troubled Legacy of Chiang Kai-shek Statues and Memorials in Democratized Taiwan
?Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang
PART 2: Facing: Making a Difference in Memorial Activism
6 A Space of Freedom: Richmond's Robert E. Lee Memorial and the Future of America
?David Ehrenpreis
7 Conversations on Black Lives Matter
?Tami Sawyer with Stacy Boldrick; Keith Magee with Richard Clay
8 Activist Statement: Down with J. P. Coen
?Romy Rondeltap
9 Colonial Reckoning: Reexamining the Slave Past in Catalonia
?Gerard Llorens Decesaris and Adria Enriquez Alvaro
PART 3: Waking: Imaginings of a Post-Monument
10 Dissolution of the Monuments
?Paul Grace
11 The Agency of the Void: When a Monument Falls, Absence Transforms into Powerful Presence
?Nausikaae El-Mecky
12 Toppling Things: Artistic Approaches and Media Strategies in Dealing with Monuments-Alexandra Pirici, Morehshin Allahyari, Julius von Bismarck & Julian Charriere
?Ursula Stroebele
13 Taking a Knee: Permanence, Ritual and the Respect Insurrection
?Tomas Macsotay
14 Artist/Activist Statement: In Search of an Aesthetic of Care: Recording BLM Protests and Documenting One's Life in a Time of Reckoning
?Ruth Somalo
PART 4: Prolonged Engagements: Artistic Testimonies
15 Flesh & Stone: Archives, Bodies and "Deep Time" in Ada Pinkston's LandMarked
?Cory Wayman
16 Empty Pedestals or The Aesthetics of Truth
?Ada Pinkston
17 Artist Statement: On Disgraced Monuments, their Resignification and the Recovery of Emptied Sites
?Krzysztof Wodiczko
18 Epilogue: 2020 Revisited
?Tomas Macsotay and Nausikaae El-Mecky
Index