An excerpt from Every Monument Will Fall by Dan Hicks

 

‘The dead can only live with the exact intensity and quality of life imparted to them by the living.’ Joseph Conrad gave that liner to Kyrilo Sidorovich Razumov, a student in St Petersburg, in his 1911 novel Under Western Eyes. And with that thought, written down at the height of the monumental regimes of militarist realism at the end of the first decade of the 20th century, I want to appropriate the preferred verbal formulation of the militarist realists, the future passive exonerative, and try for once to put it to some good. It's possible, of course, to insist that all the monuments must fall, and to do so convincingly. But the formulation I have adopted here replaces the ‘must’ with a ‘will’. The archaeological observation is simple. It's like what I was calling White Taphonomy before. A monument, or a whole regime of monumentality, is only going to survive if it is maintained. For a statue not to fall, you have to keep it standing. The entropy is there already. The question is about what a society chooses to conserve and value. I can't think of any other walk of life, from healthcare to the criminal justice system, where there's the idea that if something is outdated or causing damage, or racist, then nothing can ever be done to fix it. What is it about art, culture, education, heritage, statues in the town squares, and civic museums and universities that make this a problem? Perhaps it's a basic misunderstanding about what these fields are. As if they are fixed and static entities, rather than things that a society chooses, does, creates. 

It's possible for a community, or a nation, or a new generation to choose to stop conserving what it doesn't wish to keep. It happens all the time, in every society on earth, in every culture and human history and prehistory. Humans are relocated, replaced, removed, or just allowed to fall. What's weird is the idea that nothing would ever change, that an ideology of the late 19th century would live on forever through tradition or public art. The question isn’t why would people want to remove a monument that celebrates hatred or racism or violence. The question is why would anyone make the false claim that no monument should ever fall? What exactly are they trying to defend? Perhaps that's now getting a little clearer. Just as restitution and fallism have revealed the histories of the museum and the monument, so decolonisation teaches us about the histories of knowledge, universities and the idea of ‘the subject’.