Monument Wars - Kirk Savage
The Turkish history of monuments does not follow the Western model directly. The Ottoman period is affected mostly by the French model, as a vehicle of modernization and nationalism. However, there is an iconoclastic American vein, in the sense of "a Puritan hostility toward graven images" (Savage, 2009:1) which still continues today. The Kemalist period also follows the French model ideologically (as a vehicle to educate the people) but has more formal/technical similarities to the Russian and German models. However, according to Tekiner (2014), it's characteristic because of the continuity of the monumentalization of the leader cult in the case of Atatürk. [As Kreiser (2002) suggests, it is highly characteristic for Turkey that anti-Kemalists do not fight directly against the representation of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.] . [Although Erdogans' de facto one-party state is similar to the Kemalist one-party state of the 1930s in the sense of trying to avoid differences and multitude in society (fascism) and imagining the state and the society as one (corporatism)]
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"In the United States, the iconoclastic sentiment had strong cultural support from a variety of sources: the Revolutionary critique of monarchy, the Puritan hostility toward graven images, and the Renaissance belief, seemingly verified by the ruins of antiquity, that words always outlived the grandest handiworks of sculpture and architecture."
According to Savage (2009) by the end of the 19th century, Washington D.C. was very competitive in constructing monuments with the major cities of Europe, which changes totally in favor of "iconoclasm" or "living memorial" after WWI. “Washington is a city of statues,” the Washington Post bragged in 1891.
"But the public monument speaks to a deep need for attachment that can be met only in a real place, where the imagined community actually materializes and the existence of the nation is confirmed in a simple but powerful way. The experience is not exactly in the realm of imagination or reason, but grounded in the felt connection of individual to collective body. [...] The monument manufactures its own aura"
"Mumford argued in 1937 that “the notion of a modern monument is a veritable contradiction in terms.” The monument was a dead form, Mumford and many others believed; in its pursuit of timelessness, the public monument simply recycled clichés from the past." p.18
"At the beginning of the twenty-first century, national memorials are now expected to be spaces of experience, journeys of emotional discovery, rather than exemplary objects to be imitated. This reorientation has succeeded in reviving the public monument as an art form and rescuing it from the early death Mumford and others had confidently reported."
"All this means that monuments will still be subject to dispute and change before and after they are built, and the landscape of national memory will never cease to evolve."
"Congressman John Nicholas' (a close ally of Thomas Jefferson) proposal to replace the architectural monument with a people’s book entailed a total break with the past, with the old era of pyramids and cathedrals. That is why his idea had the prescience to foreshadow the “living memorial” movement of the early twentieth century and the “counter monument” phenomenon of the late twentieth century."
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"In the United States, the iconoclastic sentiment had strong cultural support from a variety of sources: the Revolutionary critique of monarchy, the Puritan hostility toward graven images, and the Renaissance belief, seemingly verified by the ruins of antiquity, that words always outlived the grandest handiworks of sculpture and architecture."
According to Savage (2009) by the end of the 19th century, Washington D.C. was very competitive in constructing monuments with the major cities of Europe, which changes totally in favor of "iconoclasm" or "living memorial" after WWI. “Washington is a city of statues,” the Washington Post bragged in 1891.
"But the public monument speaks to a deep need for attachment that can be met only in a real place, where the imagined community actually materializes and the existence of the nation is confirmed in a simple but powerful way. The experience is not exactly in the realm of imagination or reason, but grounded in the felt connection of individual to collective body. [...] The monument manufactures its own aura"
"Mumford argued in 1937 that “the notion of a modern monument is a veritable contradiction in terms.” The monument was a dead form, Mumford and many others believed; in its pursuit of timelessness, the public monument simply recycled clichés from the past." p.18
"At the beginning of the twenty-first century, national memorials are now expected to be spaces of experience, journeys of emotional discovery, rather than exemplary objects to be imitated. This reorientation has succeeded in reviving the public monument as an art form and rescuing it from the early death Mumford and others had confidently reported."
"All this means that monuments will still be subject to dispute and change before and after they are built, and the landscape of national memory will never cease to evolve."
"Congressman John Nicholas' (a close ally of Thomas Jefferson) proposal to replace the architectural monument with a people’s book entailed a total break with the past, with the old era of pyramids and cathedrals. That is why his idea had the prescience to foreshadow the “living memorial” movement of the early twentieth century and the “counter monument” phenomenon of the late twentieth century."
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