Kehinde

A man strides a steed victorious, the whole thing sits on a tall marble plinth. A familiar trope of
heroic equestrian sculpture in almost every aspect, beautifully executed, but nothing surprising.
Traditional, even conservative monument. But when you look again, you notice that the person
sitting on the horse is not a Renaissance general or another kind of military figure in honorific
clothing, but an ordinary African-American man with dreadlocks, ripped jeans, and high-top
Nikes. Kehinde plays with a canonical tropes of monumental sculpture, one that is intended to
elevated the person represented at the top of the pile to a kind of eternal hero and turns it on
its head. The effect is startling both because of the surprise it creates (defies expectations, first
“delay” in perception) but also, once you have had time to think about it a little more, because
it does something very special in terms of promoting a progressive ideal (the black everyman
occupying the position of the hero) through a clever hijacking of history (the equestrian statue
becomes a Trojan horse to convey a set of very different ideas from what equestrian statues
are typically used for). Kehinde is playful about this and he talks about it, he talks about the
equestrian genre as a fiction, but as a fiction he is willing to exploit to express his vision. The
important point in all of this is that K recognizes the power and limitations of history in the
production of monuments. In other words, he realizes that the best way to get his point across
is neither to fully celebrate the equestrian genre nor to be fully iconoclastic. He just changes
some things around without completely obliterating the tradition he is working in as an artist.
Most importantly, K does not regard history as something objective and fixed, something to be
either embraced or destroyed, but as a fluid, active construct. Moreover, K sees himself as part
of history’s production…

History is that which transforms documents into monuments

Foucault and history—When F says this, it is important to understand what he means by
history. To F, history is not something objective and fixed, but something fluid, partly objective
and partly subjective narrative. It could certainly be said that history creates monuments, but
it’s just as true to say that monuments create history. History and monuments are enmeshed in
a process of mutual creation and destruction. It would be misguided to frame them in any
linear relationship of cause and effect. But what this means in other words, is that monuments
and history are part of a conceptual framework in which discourse and craft interact. So
another way to say what F said is that a monument is craft plus discourse, which it perfect for
FP.
So this is all good. But when we are not so sophisticated like F or K, and understand history in a
binary way, then is when all the problems start. What does this mean? Well, if we understand
history as something fixed and if we used monuments as a way to eternalize that history, to
crystallize that “cause” in a tangible “effect” then the monument becomes dogma. What do I
mean by that? Take the example that inspired K. The Confederate generals. So how does that
one work? Well, here we see that an established trope, the equestrian statue, is used verbatim
to reinforce established power vectors (the symbols of certain beliefs). Here the monument
becomes an instrument of reinforcement, sovereignty, control. It is saying: these were great
guys and they did great things, this monument here is the proof and we will remember forever.
Which is great if you’re into those ideas but terrible if you are not or feel oppressed by those
idea. But because the monument is understood in a limiting binary way, ta ta ta.

The danger and potential of monuments

Binary understanding—So the monument is very powerful but also very dangerous and that
couldn’t be more obvious today. It is powerful because it has this ability to communicate and
represent ideas in tangible physical form but is also dangerous because it can and often does
become a colonizing instrument. In other words, often monuments are not something for
discussion and critical inquiry and so on, but they become dogmatic objects that cannot be
questioned and so people either cherish them and want to preserve them forever (if they are
into the idea), or destroy them (if they are not into the idea the monument represents).
Vinegar: beyond binaries—So the idea here, which I am pretty sure is what V says in his
editorials, is let’s move beyond binary approaches already if the monument is to survive. But
the monument should survive because it can do some powerful interesting things. At the same
time, as V et. Al say, the idea here is not really to define a new type of monument as much as
laying the ground for a critical inquiry in terms of asking, What can monuments do? By looking
at both the good things monuments can do but also understanding their inevitable limitations
(for example but see editorial, but for example their fraught relationships with power).

Architecture
PV/KE—monuments are stones in the water
Duck and Decorated Shed (I am a monument)

The studio
What is the studio approach to this question of, what can monuments do (in architecture)? The
only requirement is that the projects engage both side of the debate, urbanization and
monument, past and future, preservation and iconoclasm, historicism and progress
(projection), construction and demolition, and so on. After studying the discourse around a
debate of their choice in the first few weeks, students will be asked to position themselves and
begin situating their work/thesis within that debate.