No Time, No Place: The Existential Crisis of the Public Monument

This essay explores the peculiar history of the Stephen Foster monument in Pittsburgh, Pa., erected in 1900, relocated in 1944, and taken down in 2018. Its racist nostalgia for the southern plantation, so bizarrely out of time and place in industrial Pittsburgh, reveals a larger structural issue of the public monument's "context." The monument's aspiration toward universality founders on the specificity of its moment of creation, making it impossible for viewers to locate themselves in time and space when confronting the monument's multiple dreams and disjunctions. The essay closes with a description of this dilemma, written as homage to G. W. Sebald.