ARTH 402
Monuments and The Art of Memorial Spring 2025
Division I

The urge to commemorate is a timeless human impulse. Individuals, heroic acts, and historic events have been marked by mounds, architecture, images, words, and ephemera for over 5000 years. The value of the subject or focus of a commemoration changes over time. Entropy, iconoclasm, and vandalism have been seen as either positive or negative modes of destruction. Recent events have brought into high relief monuments long taken for granted as markers of the American urban landscape. Calls for the removal of monuments that have elevated individuals implicated in colonialism and racism have led to a powerful surge in alternative monument-making, and brought commemorative images back into public consciousness. Over the course of the seminar students will document and explore the concepts behind monuments and memorials in the Western tradition from their origins in the ancient Mediterranean (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Imperial Rome), and chart their reception, interpretation, destruction, and/or influence in later periods. We will also analyze the abstraction and inversion of monumental form, seen in the counter monuments of the late twentieth century such as Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) or Gunter Demnig’s Stumbling Stones project (Stolpersteine, 1992-the present), the world’s largest decentralized memorial for the victims of Nazi terror. Our consideration of historical monuments will be paired with ongoing contemporary discussions of action around the removal of memorials, and the call for creative alternatives. During the second half of the semester seminar participants will research a memorial trend or a specific monument, and investigate and parse its context and reception over time. A short presentation and a substantial paper, written in stages, will be the end result of the research project.