The Anthropocene is both the apotheosis of the human and a reminder that humans are part of a larger nonlinear system that confounds attempts at control
The monument can be seen as a cultural form that connects together different temporalities – mediating between past, present and future, but also between radically different temporal registers. In particular, monuments mediate between the human time of everyday lived experience and communication, and an ‘inhuman’, ‘timeless’ time that transcends living memory, whether perceived as the time of the gods, or of culture heroes, or more recently as an abstract human history. Various historians have theorized this distinction as one between ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ shared memory (Vansina 1985), ‘human time’ and ‘monumental time’ (Foxhall 1995) or more recently ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ memory (Assman 2008). cultural memory. In their combination of material durability, or as Heidegger puts it ‘firm towering’ (Heidegger 1971: 42), with specific embedded symbolic meanings, monuments can be seen as enacting a form of ‘memory transduction’ (Szerszynski 2019) between the solidity of recorded history and the fluidity of oral memory – between the fixed and timeless time of heroes, history and the gods, and the daily and yearly round of lived experience, speech and action.
As such, monuments can themselves be seen as a powerful material-semiotic technology. In 1903 Alois Riegl famously distinguished different kinds of semiotic effects and uses of monuments – or as he put it, different kinds of ‘value’. Commemorative value is the capacity of a monument to ‘keep a moment perpetually alive and present in the consciousness of future generations’; historical value, the power to reveal something about the time it was made, and age-value involves it providing affective pleasure through witnessing its disintegration. Riegl also talks about other kinds of value of monuments – use value, relative art value (reflecting changing tastes), and the newness value particularly prized in modern art (Riegl 1996).
As well as referencing different temporalities, monuments also have their own placing in time as arrangements of matter: they have beginnings and endings. Monuments are ‘founded’, often amidst elaborate ceremonies – but they are also destroyed, sometimes in moments that are equally freighted with significance for the reproduction and transformation of cultural memory – as illustrated for example in the practices of Damnatio Memoriae in Ancient Rome (Varner 2004), or in contemporary Black Lives Matter protests against monuments to participants in and beneficiaries of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Frank and Ristic 2020).
Monuments are also placed in space: indeed, they are typically placed as part of a wider ‘monumental system’, in which various spaces, structures, symbols and inscriptions are put in relation with each other, with the wider spatiotemporal patterns of social life, with the canonical narratives and values of cultural memory – and with living human bodies (Szerszynski 2017). Monuments are typically architectural in scale and style and relationship to the human body: they dominate and choreograph the felt space around them, and the dynamics of bodies and affect within that space. Monuments also form and perform synecdochic relations between their specific location and a wider region of the Earth’s surface – whether local, regional, national or global – for which it is made to stand, and do so in a privileged way, inviting journeys of pilgrimage just to be in the vicinity of the monument, perhaps on a particular date and time, in order to ‘remember’ in a heightened way.
Within such general shared features, however, monuments also exhibit huge material-semiotic diversity – especially since the late-twentieth century rise of ‘counter-monuments’ that resist the ‘firm towering’ of traditional monuments, with its now fascist associations (Young 1992). While this diversity cannot cleanly be decomposed into material and semiotic dimensions, let us start with diversity that is more about the material pole: whereas traditional monuments of typically deliberately designed and constructed from raw materials, there are also ‘found’ monuments: existing constructions or natural features that are bestowed with monumental significance. Also, whereas the traditional monument ‘endures’, there are now also fleeting monuments, that evaporate or disperse; whereas traditional monuments are ‘immobile’ and ‘centred’, fixing cultural memory around a single centralised fixed site of remembrance , counter-monuments might variously be ‘mobile’ or ‘dispersed’ across space.
Turning to monumental features that are more about the semiotic pole, monuments typically demand of human bodies drawn into their orbit specific emotions or ‘affect’. The ‘com-memoration’ they call forth is literally ‘together remembering’, but this remembering (which also anticipates future acts of remembering) is also expected to have a certain emotional tone.
Contemplations of human extinction place a stratigraphic emphasis on discerning enduring signals, and envisioning an imagined subject acquainted with the Anthropocene Earth (Szerszynski 2012: 179) in a distant future. The lingering echoes of the industrial era—machines and edifices now obsolete, traces of activities silenced—carry undertones of melancholy, contemplating a world without our presence (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2016). The material artefacts of our current age are an inorganic equivalent of ‘dead men walking’—nascent mineral layers or fossils in the making.
Nicholas Mangan’s runway and David Claerbout’s Olympia, once functional, now gracefully succumb to decay, adopting an Ozymandian fate. These instances obliterate distinctions between natural and intentional geological monuments, implicitly referencing the concept of ‘age value’ (Riegl, 1996). These art works and proposals underscore how monumental structures can shed their significance or, conversely, gain it—shaped by the ebb and flow of a dynamic global economy, shifting political ideologies, and the relentless processes of decay leading them back to nature.
In the work of Autogena & Portway, a more pointed morality tale unfolds. Humans, possibly adhering to Haff’s (2014) six rules of the technosphere, are portrayed as having only a semblance of agency, navigating a world dominated by simulated choices. Nicholas Chambaud’s narrative takes a different trajectory, exploring the profanity of heat not being utilized, as if the technosphere has been estranged from human use. This hints at a messianic future bereft of both humans and a saviour (Agamben, 2007).
The question remains whether a collective sentiment towards the earth’s fate evokes melancholia or a hopeful mourning. Sheela Gowda’s anthropocene portraits and Fujiko Nakaya’s fleeting cloud or fog sculptures serve as enigmatic pieces in this zone: a complex of human agency, the ephemerality of monumental constructs, and the profound implications of an Anthropocene future.
