display. The deliberate display of architecture is the topic here, treating buildings as objects or artefacts. The choice to make a display is an interesting one and is demonstrative of a desire to communicate, but also grounded in a fraught relationship of colonialism, misunderstandings and objectification.
white, Western superiority, would make their knowledge about the East available. This includes disparate territories such as the Middle East, Indian subcontinent, China and Japan. The attitude of Orientalism is imperialistic and colonial. There is a paternalistic aspect to this: a belief that other cultures have not progressed beyond a certain historical period and that their domination by Western powers is in the interests of the countries in question. As such, Orientalism is also a critique of progress as a dominant narrative, a version of which is used to justify Western dominance, ignoring the alternative ways of being human which are the subject of anthropology’s project. This attitude to progress justifies attempts to subjugate, dominate and otherwise exploit other cultures, for we in the West ‘know better’ and are acting in their best interests: reducing the relationship to that of a parent and child. This is clearly unacceptable, but there are remnants of this attitude even in how we act today; this is what Said is looking to expose with his work: these remnants of imperialist thinking which must be challenged in favour of more complete understanding between cultures.9
This relationship is not one way, however, and Joy Hendry’s work explores one instance of travel in the other direction. In her study of Japanese theme parks, Hendry finds an example of reverse Orientalism and turns her attention to the conception of the West by a culture in the East. This is the result of an interest in the Western world, but a difficulty in travel. The solution is pragmatic and fairly unique: that in the bubble economy of the 1980s, Japan created a large number of theme parks which went beyond the familiar examples of Disneyworld, but which attempted to replicate European cultures in the bounded heterotopia of a tourist attraction.
A distinction is made between the theme park and an amusement park, arranged around rides, rollercoasters and the like. The book’s introduction (2000:19) lists several parks representing countries, including Canada, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Spain. There are also a number of mixed parks with zones representing different countries.
The parks typically include replicas of significant architecture; displays of the culture and history of the country in question are housed in large public buildings such as a town hall, with broadly sketched cultural themes overlaid onto the park. Glücks Königreich, for example, has the works of the Brothers Grimm as a theme, the British parks are often themed after Shakespeare and the Canadian example is focused on the novel Anne of Green Gables.
The German themed park includes restaurants and pubs selling the appropriate food and drink, bookshops with translated German literature and souvenirs either made on site in the traditional craft workshops or imported from the country of origin. The staffing of the parks is by natives of the country in question, and their role is to act as hosts, to put on displays of dance or
crafts, and to often take part in a large daily promenade; all of which follow the theme park formula established by Disney.
Other examples such as Canadian World focus on the recreation of fictional settings such as Avonlea found in Lucy Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. The park is still based on a real-life model – Prince Edward Island – and populated with the details found in the book. The experience of the park includes a variety of locations from the novel and offers opportunities for dressing in costume and having photographs taken as a memento. The popularity of the books in Japan is based on a resonance with the character of Anne-chan as she is known. Her resilience against adversity is valued as an approach to life, and the women who are her biggest fans and for whom the park caters are, according to Hendry, nervous and excited about meeting the Canadian actress playing her.
It is easy to be cynical about these places, perhaps more so in the case of one based on a fictional place; but it is clear that there is something more interesting going on. Indeed, similar situations are documented in detail by Venturi, Scott-Brown and Rauch in their seminal work of architectural theory Learning from Las Vegas (1977). Such themed places are often omitted from mainstream architectural discourse,10 but serve a need and a purpose, and are important manifestations of space and cultural display.
The integration of crafts and performance traditions into the parks is particularly important to note as a practice-based contrast with the object- based museum culture of the West. Many city museums in the UK, for example (and many more in countries with the strongest historic links with Japan such as the Netherlands), will have collections of Japanese artefacts arranged in cabinets and displayed as a group of items from a certain place, or a taxonomy of object types such as arms and armour, pottery and works on paper. The museum tendency is for decontextualization, for display of objects out of space and time – arranged according to an arbitrary scheme. Theme parks by contrast are spaces for performance by people from that region. The performances might be inauthentic to a degree, but they have some basis in convention, tradition, and the reality of the arts and crafts in question.
This opens a question of our position regarding the real and the replica.
Japanese people, when interviewed by Hendry (2000:168), considered their carefully rebuilt replica of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon in Maruyama Shakespeare Park to be more genuine than the actual house in England. This authenticity is based on the use of anachronistic crafts and materials, ensuring that the building was constructed as it would have been in the first place. More interestingly, as the house is not marked by the passage of time, it is understood to be closer to how Shakespeare would have experienced it.
The long list of theme parks visited by Hendry indicates another common thread, however. These parks, taken together, offer a collection. The approach is, however, practice based: the fascinations are with the ways in which life is organized, the craft behind the making of bread, beer or pottery. This practice- based approach avoids certain elements of the objectification process noted by Baudrillard, but perhaps organizes it in a different way rather than avoiding the pitfalls entirely. By taking it out of its original time and context, this approach runs the risk of objectifying a practice rather than an artefact. The interest is with historical places, cleansed of contemporary influence. This is troubling, as it has an attitude of denying the present: that the interest in other cultures is muddied by the co-existence of the present and the past. Whilst being based in practices and performances, then, the result is uncomfortable and at ill-at-ease with reality. This is also not how the Germans, Spanish, Canadians or British choose to represent themselves. This is how the Japanese choose to represent them.
This is the problem that is heightened when there is an unequal power relation between the various parties concerned. These European nations and their people can easily redress the balance and have an influence over how they are represented, but the issue is crucial when it comes to marginalized groups who are subjected to the gaze of the collector and the museum.11
Monuments have a common purpose of cultural display.12 Where in Chapter 3, we were considering the subtleties of cultural display in the home, where we do not deliberately construct and place this on view for others to make sense of. Monuments are circumstances where we do deliberately make a display. The collection The Art of Forgetting edited by Adrian Forty and Suzanne Küchler deals with several examples of this building and sculptural typology. Tracing a history for the monument in the West from the Renaissance (of course, this history extends into antiquity), Forty and Küchler discuss the processes of sedimenting human memory in material objects (1999:2). This transfer of memory from human minds into solid things is a curious process, but one which extends the duration of those memories, granting them a kind of persistence if not permanence. This explains the shock when a monument is deliberately destroyed in war (an act recently included in the United Nations (UN) definition of a war crime), as it is an attempt to erase the culture of a people.
This means that monuments can function not only as a symbol of an event worthy of remembrance in perpetuity, but that in representing it, some of the actual living memory can be invested into the stone. The monument effectively enables us to forget an event and allow life to go on, symbolizing the event and activated at particular memorial times of year, but not to burden everyday life with the facts of something terrible. It this manner, the Cenotaph in London functions as a focal point during the remembrance services every November, but is effectively dormant the rest of the time.
Memorials are most often erected to mark military campaigns and political figures, extending to civic events more recently. The postwar period in the twentieth century wrestled with the complexity of the Holocaust: clearly an event in need of commemoration and memorialization, but one which continues to intersect with contemporary politics. Finding structures which could make sense of such terrible events was particularly difficult, and Forty and Küchler address several examples, arguing that a genre of anti-memorial emerges. The temporality of the monument typology is one parameter for these designs. Where the conventional monument attempts to arrest time, there is an address to the passage of time in Christian Boltanski and Jochen Gerz’s approaches to Holocaust memorials, with monuments which lower themselves gradually into the ground or paving stones which have undersides bearing the names of Jewish cemeteries: ‘the memorial is invisible, only known about’ (Forty & Küchler, 1999:6–7).
There are other examples of these memorials by artists and architects which also engage with time and hiddenness: at the time of its construction it was noted that Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin (Figure 4.1) was
FIGURE 4.1 Author’s photograph of the Jewish Museum, Berlin by Daniel Libeskind.
more effective and emotionally affective before the artefacts were installed in the display cases. The absence represented by the jagged geometry of the structure spoke volumes, particularly with its plan form symbolically extrapolated from the absent Jewish quarters of Berlin. From here, Forty and Küchler develop a position towards forgetting that monuments are a form of necessary amnesia (1999:16). Libeskind denies the building memorial status, instead discussing its role as a placeholder for a forgotten name or unwritten music.
Strategies employed by monuments as machines for forgetting include:
Separation:
The monument expresses a division between what is to be remembered and what can be forgotten.
Tension between remembering and forgetting:
This is often the source of drama in a memorial: when a memorial is active, it can act as an accusation to the mourners that they are not holding the memorialized individuals in their mind at all times.
Exclusion:
By leaving a scar or remnant of war damage, it remains apparent and excluded from the temporality and development of the city at large. This was proposed by Lebbeus Woods for the former Yugoslavia, where he proposed damaged buildings be repaired with visible scars.13
Iconoclasm:
The actual destruction of monuments of previous undesired eras, such as the examples from the former Soviet Union filmed by Laura Mulvey and Mark Lewis as Disgraced Monuments and discussed by Forty & Küchler (1999:10). The process of destroying and repurposing statues of Lenin after the fall of the Soviet Union shows alternative strategies for iconoclasm.
(Adapted from Forty & Küchler, 1999:8)
A useful example might be the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. This space operates like an iconoclastically destroyed monument, being periodically occupied by a work by a contemporary artist. The plinth, however, was never occupied. The intention had been to place a statue on it, but the funds for the construction of the square ran out before the planned military equestrian statue. The problem of what to place on the plinth became all the more fraught as public opinion on the celebration of generals and admirals fell out of favour towards more civic topics. Indeed, the very idea of public statues of ‘great’
figures is very complicated and contested, ensuring that filling this void was
difficult. By establishing a programme of contemporary public art which could occupy the space for a limited period of time, the ‘fourth plinth’ avoids some of the issues of permanent monuments. Certain of the proposals, however, do still fulfil the function of monumentality and remembrance, if in a different manner to the conventional military narrative. Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle occupied the plinth in 2010 before a public appeal funded its acquisition and permanent home at the UK National Maritime Museum in Greenwich; it memorializes global trade and colonialism by presenting a model of Nelson’s ship Victory with masts created from canvas influenced by Indonesian Batik.
Other exhibits on the plinth included an egalitarian project by Anthony Gormley who literally gave a platform to some 100 contributors in One &
Other. More interesting, however, is the work by Marc Quinn of Alison Lapper Pregnant in which the conventional language of the naturalistic representation of human form is applied to a non-traditional subject: a pregnant woman with physical disabilities. The white marble statue stood in stark contrast to the strongly militaristic male occupants of the other plinths, positioning her as being every bit as heroic and worthy of celebration.
Complicating the narrative around monumentality has its roots in postcolonial understandings of the world whereby the assumptions made by earlier generations of Western colonialists can still be found in our institutions.
Decolonization is a process, one of giving voice to those denied it, of recognizing the persistence of ideologies which deny agency to non-Western societies and individuals in forming our worldviews. It is a process of making aware and redressing balances, and a project we are only just beginning.