The strange monumentality of some artworks or something

Abstract

This article investigates the idea that sometimes artworks become strange monuments: occasionally to themselves. It begins with an overview of how various artworks have taken on aspects of monumentality, setting up a number of coordinates for thought – energy, appropriation, fiction, resurrection and so on. It then turns to the contested status of Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993), paying attention to the ways in which its potential to endure as a conventional public monument was denied, leaving behind a strange set of digital monuments in its afterlife. It goes on to contrast the tomb-like preservation of Roger Hiorns’ Seizure ([2008] 2013) at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park with the rhetoric surrounding its initial staging in Southwark. This logic of preservation is compared with how Thomas Hirschhorn has revisited his early monument works, and his claims regarding their eternal life.