The concept of monumentality conjures permanence, or at least an aspiration to durability: the etymology of the word (Latin: monere, to remind) underscores the idea that monuments should survive those who build them so as to remind those who come after, perhaps long after. Yet throughout history the monumental has always also been challenged, confronted, or invaded by ephemerality, both in a negative sense, as when monuments intended to be permanent are destroyed, but also positively, as in the fabrication of deliberately ephemeral public monuments. This panel seeks to explore this second category, the deliberately ephemeral monument, in the specific context of eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Europe. Monuments are defined broadly here to include official, unofficial, or semi‐official examples of infrastructure, urbanism, installation, or urban decors that stake a claim to speak to collective memory in common public spaces. What is particular about ephemeral public monuments in modern times? Such monuments may communicate a distinctly modern anxiety about immutable declarations, or reflect the rhythms of public time implied in Baudelaire’s famous description of modernity as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” They may reflect the discontinuities of an age in which the changeable will of the public displaced the authority of eternal gods; in which mere social reproduction no longer seemed the destiny of humanity; in which the future was widely expected to be very different from the present. Richard Taws has recently suggested that ephemeral and provisional objects can influence historical mythos by their very ephemerality, which shifts the focus of meaning from an imagined posterity to the more proximate reality of their creation. Thinkers as radically different as Georges Bataille and Karsten Harries have been cited in debates about whether ephemeral architectures might offer a solution to the historical problem of meaning in contemporary architecture. Urban ephemerality has been the subject of enormously suggestive research by current scholars working mostly on other temporal and geographical contexts. We are interested in papers that bring the history of modern European ephemeral public monuments and monumentality into conversation with this burgeoning historical and theoretical literature.

Richard Wittman, University of California at Santa Barbara
Taylor Van Doorne, University of California at Santa Barbara

Contact : Richard Wittman, Email : [email protected]