Monumental Cares

A finalist for the Association for the Study of the Arts Book Prize 2024!

'The book is a provocative volume that is academically rigorous, and it will enrich the public debate on commemoration with its sophisticated reflections on notions of temporality and authenticity of historical markers, siting, and public participation, at a moment when monuments have been at the forefront of political activism.'
Tijana Vujosevic, Art Margins

‘Against the notion that monuments are things of the past, Widrich shows them to be generative of a contemporary art movement that is reclaiming historic places as laboratories for new artistic experiments centred around an ethic of care. She illuminates how artists are expanding what it means to care for monuments beyond the conservation of historic materials, to include looking after their capacity to conjure the collective imagination and direct it towards possible futures. At a time when collective action seems thwarted by the intractable forces of climate change and political injustice, Widrich reveals the capacity of art to jolt the collective nerve into more ambitious forms of care. A tour de force.’
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Professor and Director of Historic Preservation, Columbia University

‘Monumental cares is a well-crafted intellectual accomplishment, inviting readers to think with care and nuance about monuments as instructions about what the public sphere is or could be. Mechtild Widrich turns to the ethics of care to open up the fundamental question of what monuments in shared public space are about. There are very few books that so compellingly make the argument that monuments are not of the past, but about how we collectively care for changing the present and the future.’
Elke Krasny, Professor for Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, co-editor of Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet

'Mechtild Widrich brings to the fore key questions of contemporary approaches to monumentality, and shakes these further. Moving with agility across a wide range of detailed case studies, this book makes a compelling case for a layered perspective that sees the monumental in its complex and interrelational potential: as history materialised through art in multidirectional interactions with time, space and their mediation. It is a book that refuses simplistic solutions, reminding us of the vital role of the public sphere in confronting and commemorating our shared histories and of the importance of an ethics of care in doing so.'
Jacek Ludwig Scarso, Reader in Art and Performance, London Metropolitan University

'Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art presents a significant intervention in the art history of public art that makes site-specificity its key term. The book is also a bold contribution to contemporary debates about monument activism.
Throughout Monumental Cares, Widrich confronts the difficulties posed by public art that grapples with political violence, touching on polarizing contemporary concerns about migration, climate change, and state sanctioned as well as ongoing everyday violence against people across the globe. Ultimately, the book is a plaidoyer for the careful maintenance of public space through monuments and markers that help audiences—past, present, and future—to navigate the multiplicity of sites that articulate shared and multidirectional histories. Monumental Cares also makes the case for the importance of multidirectional art history, opening the field, it is to be hoped, for more to follow.'
CAA Reviews, Caroline Schopp

'The book addresses those debates but its project is also broader, looking at the power of images and artworks to address violence. The book is also centrally concerned with the kinds of public sphere to which the reception of images and artworks give rise, especially in combination with myriad forms of digital mediation.'
21 Inquiries, Adair Rounthwaite