History is memory tested and imaginatively engaged. History means making the past work, in the present and for the future. Monuments, like history, ideally connect the past to the future through present engagement and hortative content. (…) Memory cannot be debated; history can. Make history, not memory. – Daniel Abramson

Imagine this implausible meeting: on the grass right next to Maya Lin’s ‘Vietnam Veterans Memorial’ in Washington stands the monument’s mobile version – the Dignity Memorial Vietnam Wall, conceived to crisscross America and reach those who cannot or will not travel to the capital and see it in its relation to site and adjoining landmarks. The two are accompanied by Chris Burden’s ‘The Other Vietnam Memorial’, produced for MOMA’s ‘Dislocations’, inscribing onto a vague replica of Lin’s design a few million names picked from a Vietnamese phone book. Could this assemblage (or assembly) be conceived as articulating a single monument of a new kind, one that propagates a plural point of view on the Vietnam war and addresses more than one of the collectivities that war has affected?
Can the monument be detached from glorification or commemoration, from the rhetorical overload that burdens the history of the practice, and remain a monument? Can the monument be reprogrammed as an artistic instrument that does not serve to illustrate doubtful victories, cautionary deaths or abruptly terminated debates, and, if so, what other fundamental operation should be assigned to it? Can the monument incorporate social and political antagonism into a matrix other than the separation between winners and losers in history or politics, one that allows for the continuous recalibration of social forces? Are monuments for terrorism or law, globalization or locality, democracy or secrecy, liberalism or socialism conceivable? What losses, gaps, traumas and reconfigured social relations deserve monumental sites of public negotiation, that would help activate open contention and work to defuse adversity?
This publication, occasioned by the Romanian pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennial, groups theoretical and visual contributions as the first episode in a long-term project that aims to rethink the contemporary monument, its possibility and relevance. It stems from the belief that monuments are ‘impossible necessities’ (Laurent Liefooghe), that, in their infernal difficulty, monuments are problematic knots entangling decisive questions about the modes of history and ideology that constitute or condition communities. While engaging critically these questions, contemporary monumental practice could test the viability of assumptions about the efficacy of engaged art on a scale not available to the profuse socially-conscious projects that decorate galleries and museums around the world, that “subvert power systems” by indiscriminately piling up archives of misery, distributing free cups of tea and painting in bright colors the façades of poorly built housing blocks. The artistic, critical repossession of the monument could bring enlightening arguments in the discussion about the subversive capabilities of political art, perhaps illustrating Thomas Hirschhorn’s enigmatic dictum about “making art politically” in a practice that does not evacuate the possibility of failure and does not dissimulate it in lesser ambitions and diminishing scale.

Modes of public artistic action that perform a plural, contradictory function – this could be the degree zero from which the long-term monument is built. Whether we advocate complicated monuments for complicated social facts, whose singularity derives from their enactment of conflictual consensus, of new forms of social coherence, of strategies meant to integrate what society ignores, forgets or excludes, monuments that link center and margin, that permanently irritate the nerves of the social body, polemic monuments mapping inevitably plural purposes and actions, tensions rather than epiphanies, monuments that behave ideologically inasmuch as they invent new, dynamic totalities, and muster “another army of metaphors, metonyms and mythology” as an adversary for ideologies, we inscribe process in monuments – process either made visible or instigated.
The connection between monument and processuality can be traced back to Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson, for whom the work is founded on an act of dissipation, a removal that locates entropy at its origin (Pamela M. Lee). Robert Smithson imagines displacements or escalations that build upon the pull of gravity, that organize around and orchestrate the loss of energy, far from the still momentum that traditional monuments sought to project. With Matta-Clark, the object is made at the moment of the building’s ruination, in its simultaneous self-effacement as it comes into presence or “rises into ruin”, becoming a “non-ument”. Roughly contemporaneous European practices like those of Jochen Gerz, Valie Export and Anselm Kiefer attempt to extricate the monument from ideological perversion precisely by embodying ideology and by enacting the monument (Mechtild Widrich). The performative resituates the monumental between the private and bodily, the social and political. Both lineages are active today and both indicate the possibility of other – subpolitical – generative mechanisms for the monument.
To a certain extent, the comparatively recent tradition of counter-monuments collapses the distinction above. Counter-monuments proceed from the obsolescence of the monumental and formalize impermanence or disappearance, integrating a tension of exchange between personal memory and collective oblivion. The viewer is provoked to interact and remember by a monument that claims nothing apart from that task, that is built or un-built against the oppressive function of monuments in general, that deploys tactical doubt and articulates a mode of consensus as static irresolution. The political need to commemorate the tragedies of the 20th century has led to projects where forms refuse to coalesce and meanings are deferred, where absence and powerlessness are visually localized, as in the works of Esther Shalev and the second-period Jochen Gerz, Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Horst Hoheisel, and, to a lesser extent, Peter Eisenmann, all designed as counter-proposals whose main task is to deflect the authoritarian impulses of the monumental. In the words of the leading theorist of counter-memory and counter-monumentality, James E. Young, these projects depart from questions such as “How better to remember a destroyed people than by a destroyed monument?”.
The contemporary monument is therefore faced with a two-fold task: it acts as a refutation of the traditional monument, in whose shadow concatenate strategies of dominance, historical fallacies, collective Freudian slips and nationalist deformities, but it also bypasses the vanishing forms and eludes the rhetoric of indecisiveness in counter-monuments. A contemporary monument invents a way out the monument/ counter-monument dichotomy, reorganizing relationships between assertion and refusal, vocal debate and interrogatory silence, evincing conviction, risk and a sort of Greenbergian engagement with the complexity of monumental practice. It makes use of the “characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence”. Imagining the future of monuments will go beyond both the monument as denouement in a fabricated narrative and the monumental site of engulfing silence, the monument in self-sabotage or in denial. It will transform the traditional monument into a socially centrifugal structure where people can address each other across the boundary of difference, it will replace the counter-monument with the monument to counter-action.
Three examples of what counter-action might mean in this context follow.

After ‘Psyop’, their collection of airborne American propaganda parachuted over Afghanistan and Iraq – leaflets stating in various ways (sometimes misguided, aimlessly vindictive or contemptuously indifferent to cultural difference) that good will inevitably crush (Taliban or terrorist) evil, and describing the gruesome warfare on the ground like a cross between a video game and a moral parable -, Christoph Büchel and Giovanni Carmine compiled ‘CEAU’, a collection of over 300 paintings and graphic works produced in communist Romania, all featuring the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. There are “mystical apparitions of the leader”, “the leader as political thinker”, “industrial achievements”, “agricultural apotheoses” or “the leader among kings and poets”, as these ad-hoc categories intersperse into a narrative of political brutality and ideological propaganda engendering their sublime subject, a monstrously polymorphous portrait that succeeded in colonizing the collective imaginary of pre-1989 Romania and whose avatars still haunt it. This representational proliferation, that could function as a crash course in art history from Simone Martini to Jasper Johns were it not something entirely different, makes visible the mechanism interweaving absolute control, submission and enthusiastic servitude. Yet Ceauşescu’s infinite performance, his ubiquity and omnipotence, were never supposed to unfold in juxtapositions such as the one the book produces. The artists’ project reverses the work of propaganda, in the sense of tracing the anatomy of this infinite body, pinning down its ramifications, and finally orchestrating its implosion: viewed side by side, the multiplying apparitions annihilate each other, the sublime body tries to be as big as the projection of dominance on which it relies, yet deflates into an amputated comparison. The monumental effect of the two books by Büchel and Carmine stems from their use of counter-surveillance and a poignantly politicized idea of the archive.
Phillipe Meste’s ongoing project, the ‘Spermcube’, embodies a Stakhanovism of secrets and secretions, obscenity and retreats, overstatements of violence and overwhelming anonymity. The ‘Spermcube’ is a ton of frozen sperm, displayed like a Minimalist cube, plus a financial enterprise, composed of artist, donors and shareholders. The piece is truly universal, it convincingly suggests the world or is perhaps the world’s largest synecdoche. It resembles a world whose every fold is examined and controlled by a surveillance camera, as well as the complementary, formidable drive to divulge intimacy, with which contemporary society seems possessed. It might be construed to incarnate a kind of equality composed of undifferentiated bodies and their powerless impulses, or it could monumentalize the political failure of communitarian and emancipatory ideals. Maybe the ‘Spermcube’ is a giant pacifier for late capitalism, maybe it describes the ideal collective subject of a world regulated by preemptive strikes, a submissive mass of soldiers with inapt bodies, ready for military use. A monument by which no angels fly, to the massified and exhausted, or, on the contrary, the image of an infinitely complex network of transfers and communication, a new mechanism of action and counteraction that, for now, defies our grasp and flouts our historical understanding. There could be the image of standard humanity, monotonous, vulnerable and compliant, but the reverse reading is always possible: the cube encapsulates strategic relations within an invisible community, asymmetric and unstable, tactical games between liberties, furtively outlining illegitimate subjectivities that construct themselves in opposition to biopolitical control. To exhibit, instead of procreating, opposes here the calculated uniformity of daily life and the biometrics of normality.
For ‘Planets of Comparison’, Plamen Dejanoff has bought seven houses in Veliko Tarnovo, the quaint capital of medieval Bulgaria. He proposes to remodel them with the help of top architects and convert them into spaces for exhibiting contemporary art, to be used by prestigious international museums under specific agreements. The participating museums will obtain a branch or outpost, for either their collections or their project spaces, situated in the very epicenter of the Balkans. But they will have to recalibrate their positions, negotiate with audiences and each other, far from the safety of known territory and unproblematic positions, in relation to a new public and potentially startling sets of problems. The project aims to create a non-institution, the specter pursued by institutional critique and its monument, through this act of simultaneous displacement and accumulation. In ‘Planets of Comparison’, a transformed “technology of the museum” meets a new “technology of the East”, as the project rearranges ideas of center and periphery and establishes a meeting place where East-West dialogue is not automatically the main question. It brings the West to the East in an act which is neither import, nor export, neither colonization, nor self-colonization (or at least by which it ceases to be clear who is colonizing who and why), but an artistic act. It dislocates or disorients the East and subjects it to the economic possibilities of globalization. Artists preoccupied by globalization reflect on the expanding circulation of communications and commerce, on the homogenizing drive that engulfs all, on the particular threatened and reemerging, on the destiny of traditions and highways, on expanding brands and social systems. But a handful among them do more: they build geographical machines, simulators for re-programming borders and the rules of border-crossing. They create new stages for action and present life-size versions of globalization instead of its images.