Abstract
For thousands of years, human beings have been creating monuments to people, to places, and to events as performances of the human need for both ritual and aesthetics. However, monuments are not fixed symbols that stand in isolation from the cultures that bring them into material being, unmovable in time and space, metal and stone. Rather, monuments are embodiments and enactments of lifeworlds, values, and ways of living. In this chapter, we are concerned with the performance or the movement of monuments—how bodies perform and give substance to monuments, how monuments are relational, how monuments create audiences, and our audiencing of monuments is itself an enactment of pastness, futurity, and love.
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Notes
- 1.
The poem from which this is excerpted was performed by Anne Harris in April 2016 at the American Education Research Association as part of a group performance collective led by Joe Norris in Washington, DC at the Martin Luther King monument and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt monument.
- 2.
Etymological definitions of the words rehearse, hearse, and harrow from etymonline.com. “rehearse (v.) … ‘to give an account of…’ to go over again, repeat,’ literally ‘to rake over, turn over (soil, ground), from re- ‘again’ … + hercier to drag, trail (on the ground), be dragged along the ground; rake, harrow (land); rip, tear, wound repeat, rehearse;’ from herse ‘a harrow’ … Meaning to ‘to say over again, repeat what has already been said or written’ … in the sense of ‘practice a play, part, etc.’.” “hearse (n.), ‘flat framework for candles, hung over a coffin … formerly herce ‘large rake for breaking up soil, harrow; … also ‘large chandelier in a church’ … ‘harrow,’ a rustic word, from Oscan hirpus ‘wolf,’ supposedly an allusion to its teeth.” “harrowing (v.1)… ‘to drag a harrow over, break or tear with a harrow … In the figurative sense of ‘wound the feelings, distress greatly’.”
- 3.
The film takes place between 8:10 pm and 2:30 am on July 25th and 26th, 1964, during which the floodlights on the building come on and flicker, frame by frame, from sunset to sunrise. Each time Warhol and his collaborators Jonas Mekas and John Palmer changed the film reels, they turned on the lights, their faces reflected momentarily in the Time and Life Building windows (Gopnik, 2014).
- 4.
In the preface to Erin Manning’s (2013) Always More than One, Brian Massumi describes Manning’s concept of spacetime as the inseparability of space and time; spacetime brings “seriation and contingency together in the unfolding of the event” (p. xvi). Manning writes that the movement of bodies and the bodying forth of thought—the immanence of movement moving and thought becoming movement—creates the possibility in which “spacetime itself begins to vibrate with movement expression” (p. 101). We are arguing here that menopause might be a spacetime in which bodies become works of art that “exceed their form” and create the “capacity to dislodge the you that you thought you were” (pp. 101–102) and further, that this spacetime is queer time –a space that that opens up a “rich and riotous future” out of the structures and strictures of “family time”—the normative time of reproduction (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3).
- 5.
In the wake of the 2016 presidential election Judith Butler (2016) writes: “For a world that is increasingly mischaracterized as post-racial and post-feminist, we are now seeing how misogyny and racism overrides judgment and a commitment to democratic and inclusive goals—they are sadistic, resentful, and destructive passions driving our country” (par. 3). She continues: “Who are they, these people who voted for him, but who are we, who did not see their power, who did not anticipate this at all, who could not fathom that people would vote for a man with racist and xenophobic discourse, a history of sexual offenses, the exploitation of workers, disdain for the constitution, migrants, and a reckless plan for increased militarization? Perhaps we are shielded from the truth by our own isolated form of left and liberal thinking? Or perhaps we believed in human nature in some naive ways. Under what conditions does unleashed hatred and reckless militarization compel the majority vote?” (par. 4).
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Harris, A., Holman Jones, S. (2018). I Am a Monument. In: Holman Jones, S., Pruyn, M. (eds) Creative Selves / Creative Cultures. Creativity, Education and the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47527-1_8
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