Abstract

James Young has coined the term “counter-monuments” to refer to a handful of memorial sites in postwar Germany that utilize strategies of disappearance and erasure in order to subvert the ossifying tendencies of the conventional monument. According to Young, in positing an activated spectator, these process-oriented sites sabotage the top-down trajectory of official histories and in turn instigate a more fluid relationship to the past. However, an in-depth reading of the reception of Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s Monument against Fascism (1986) calls into question not only the relevance of this influential concept to the site, but also its viability as a whole. By taking into consideration the actual discourse that was prompted by the Harburg monument, the work’s appropriation of the visual language of iconoclasm, and the historical baggage of the motif of the “unrepresentable” from which it draws, this essay will claim that such sites ultimately serve to reaffirm an already remembered past at the same time that they preserve the artist’s position of authority. From this perspective, the concept of the “counter-monument” falls back on a troubling formalism whereby the site itself once again becomes the origin of meaning.

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