Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226571580 ISBN 13: 9780226571584

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2004

Synopsis

How do some monuments become so socially powerful that people seek to destroy them? After ignoring monuments for years, why must we now commemorate public trauma, but not triumph, with a monument? To explore these and other questions, Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin assembled essays from leading scholars about how monuments have functioned throughout the world and how globalization has challenged Western notions of the "monument."

Examining how monuments preserve memory, these essays demonstrate how phenomena as diverse as ancient drum towers in China and ritual whale-killings in the Pacific Northwest serve to represent and negotiate time. Connecting that history to the present with an epilogue on the World Trade Center, Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade is pertinent not only for art historians but for anyone interested in the turbulent history of monuments—a history that is still very much with us today.

Contributors:
Stephen Bann, Jonathan Bordo, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jas Elsner, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Robert S. Nelson, Margaret Olin, Ruth B. Phillips, Mitchell Schwarzer, Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Richard Wittman, Wu Hung

About this title

About the Author:

Robert S. Nelson is a Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the History of Culture, and chair of the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago. He is the editor of Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw and coeditor of Critical Terms for Art History, second edition, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

Margaret Olin is a professor of art history, theory, and criticism, and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art.

Review:

"Nelson and Olin have collected an extraordinarily eclectic range of papers—on everything from early modern travel journals to the markers of nuclear waste sites, from nationalist conflicts in India to Roland Barthes and the temporality of photography.”

(Charles Barbour Canadian Literature)

“Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade is a provocative collection of essays that explore the social meaning and cultural function of images. As many of the authors testify, monuments do not reflect their past so much as they work to create memory in the present. Particularly valuable and timely is Nelson’s and Olin’s inclusion of studies that analyze the significance of monuments, sometimes destroyed, in different cultures."

(Michael Ann Holly, author of The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects)

“Nelson and Olin have brought together a rich group of essays of exceedingly high quality. There are many books on monuments and memory, but no other book probes the notion of the monument in the exhaustive way this book does. None has a comparable chronological, global, and imaginative range, or its intellectual and methodological diversity.” (Michele H. Bogart, author of Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0226571580
• ISBN 13: 9780226571584
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 353
• Editor: Nelson Robert S., Olin Margaret