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Barely per week goes by with out disputes arising over contested heritage, from torn-down statues and monuments to slave merchants and colonisers, from the elimination of imperial British buildings and the reclaiming of mosques in Hindu-nationalist India to the fetishising of pastiche “new Pimlicos” in defiance of up to date structure within the UK.
Robert Bevan’s e book makes an attempt to grapple with our constructed surroundings, notably its historic edifices and monuments, and the truths and untruths embodied in them. He’s properly positioned to take us by way of our cities and their meanings: an structure critic, he’s additionally a member of the Worldwide Council on Monuments and Websites (Icomos) and the Blue Defend, which focuses on heritage in disaster. And disaster feels an apt phrase to explain the place we’re along with his subject—citing Eric Hobsbawm, Bevan suggests this period could also be one in all “everlasting disaster”. As a lot as it’s a globe-trotting information to contested websites, doubtful historic restorations and harrowing heritage destruction, Monumental Lies is a rogues gallery of dangerous actors amongst latest and current governments, related think-tanks and public figures.
It’s revealed by Verso, the imprint of New Left Books, so inevitably Bevan approaches his topic from that political territory, surveying the ruinous attitudes and insurance policies of a bunch of populist and right-wing governments. However a e book on cultural patrimony and historic structure from Bevan’s perspective is important. “It is likely one of the nice cultural tragedies of the previous half century that the Left has ceded the heritage narrative to conservatives,” he writes.
However Monumental Lies will not be an indulgent diatribe towards heritage reactionaries and upholders of the varnished established order. It’s a looking and wide-ranging survey of the tangible world that argues for the primacy of historic materialism and the proof supplied by the constructed surroundings, versus what he describes as “the extra unreliable and problematic thought of reminiscence”. As a lot because it takes towards delusional nationalist narratives and bad-faith “retain and clarify” insurance policies in relation to contested monuments, it cautions towards the systematic sweeping away of shrines to evil-doers, and questions the reliance on well-meaning myths and notions of collective symbols in commemoration.
Bevan places misinform the charming story that Warsaw was reconstructed after the work of Bernardo Bellotto
Whereas avoiding the false equivalence and both-sides-ism that he rightly suggests permit governments to take advantage of the post-truth surroundings, Bevan nonetheless manages so as to add nuance and acknowledge complexity when addressing topics usually characterised by the shrillest debate. However a few of his greatest writing considerations much less instantly topical territory. He’s good, as an example, on how heritage reconstruction in main cities like Dresden and Warsaw, although seemingly benign, will be instrumentalised for myth-building. He places the misinform the charming story that Warsaw was reconstructed after the work of Bernardo Bellotto; moderately, he convincingly argues, it accorded with Soviet-regime politics. An analogous narrative-building by way of reconstruction continues there and elsewhere in post-communist Europe by “ideologies hostile to distinction and which prioritise easy, mythic pasts over messily advanced presents”.
Incorporating the scars
He criticises the way in which that the reconstruction of the Mostar Bridge, that emblem of ravages of the Bosnian conflict, has been made a Unesco World Heritage Web site, though it’s only partially reconstructed from the outdated stones. He additionally particulars the facsimile of Crematorium I at Auschwitz, not within the place the place the unique stood, and with no clear signage to point this reality, and the way in which that Holocaust deniers have leapt on particulars of the facsimile to make their disgraceful factors. What Bevan argues for, moderately than fakes and fudges, is a constructed surroundings that comes with “the scars” of “previous traumas”, and in doing so acknowledges the human value that accompanies ruins. In doing so, it will accord with the 1964 Venice Constitution for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Websites, during which tangible materials as proof was the important thing tenet, and inauthentic reconstruction “tantamount to fakery”, he writes. Among the many buildings he praises for his or her honesty on this respect are the collaged reconstructions of Munich’s Alte Pinakothek by Hans Döllgast, and David Chipperfield’s work on Berlin’s Neues Museum. Relatively than retain and clarify, he suggests, let’s retain and rework.
The identical applies to the statues and monuments which have ignited such fierce debate. Right here, Bevan requires “subversive transformation”. As greatest observe he cites Arnold Holzknecht and Michele Bernardi’s intervention in a fascist frieze in Bolzano in northern Italy. The frieze stays, however embedded in it are the LED-lit phrases of Hannah Arendt: “No One Has the Proper to Obey”. He makes use of German phrases to make his level: an Ehrenmal, a monument meant to commemorate, has change into a Mahnmal, its options intact however scarred. Bevan’s “subversive transformation” would permit us to “layer our monuments and our metropolis” and switch locations of undeserving honour into “websites of disgrace”, altering their which means with out obliterating the proof they supply from the general public realm.
• Robert Bevan, Monumental Lies: Tradition Wars and the Fact concerning the Previous, Verso, 384pp, £20 (hb), revealed 11 October 2022
• Ben Luke is a contributing editor and podcast host at The Artwork Newspaper
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