Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art by Mechtild Widrich (review)

Abstract

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Reviewed by:

• Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art by Mechtild Widrich
• Rebecca Jackson

MONUMENTAL CARES: SITES OF HISTORY AND CONTEMPORARY ART. By Mechtild Widrich. Rethinking Art’s Histories Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023; pp. 228.

Mechtild Widrich, professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, demonstrates in her scholarship the major overlap between performance studies and art history. Her first book, Performative Monuments (2014), expands traditional conceptions of monuments, theorizing that they work as speech-acts engendering community building, especially following historical atrocities. Her second book, Monumental Cares, is an appraisal of the materialization of public history through and by a multidirectional (as opposed to site-specific) approach that addresses how “real and digital sites overlap and connect in subtle, capillary ways” (34). Widrich’s conceptualization of art geographies (how the physical environment, culture, history, and social dynamics of a place influence the creation, interpretation, and representation of performance art) coupled with her discussion about transparency and opacity (via screens and mirrors) demonstrate how bodies (engaged in performance art) activate cultural memory as well as acts of commemoration and activism in twenty-first-century performance artworks. She is especially concerned with how we express public care and how we care about our monuments. Wid-rich’s work resides in the multidisciplinary realm of public history, performance, and contemporary art, and thus, she often infers co-performance without using that specific term. Instead, Widrich uses words like “co-produce” and “co-presence” to describe something that a performance scholar would label as “co-performance”—especially in alignment with Dwight Conquergood and D. Soyini Madison’s pioneering work on co-performance and critical ethnography. [End Page 261]

Monumental Cares contends that sites of contemporary art are also performances of history, activism, and commemoration and that these performances, as well as their documentation and ephemera, are the materials of history—the materialization of public memory and social justice. In crafting her thesis, Widrich engages with social justice activism, political art, performance studies, architectural studies, public history, and memory work under the umbrella of art history, theory and criticism. A brief introduction and a conclusion bookend six chapters that alternate between Widrich’s theories and her case-study analyses. The odd-numbered chapters, then, are quite dense with Widrich’s conceptions for how history materializes in public performance/contemporary art, and the even-numbered chapters are more easily digestible in her theoretical analyses of her well-chosen examples.

Widrich begins chapter 1 by arguing that acts of commemoration should carefully consider “the complex site-directedness of much recent public art” (55). She sets the stage to contend that site-specificity is relational and therefore should be viewed and understood from a multidirectional standpoint. Relational-site-specificity becomes a methodology for performing identity. Commemoration relies on embodied acts and material culture to strengthen historical narratives or memories of the past resurrected in the present. Our embodiment of public memory through acts of commemoration helps shape our cultural identities in the present. Wid-rich employs a theory of multidirectionality to explore how commemorative acts can be reexamined through mediation and interpreted in an expanded consideration of site discourse. Additionally, she urges the reader to contemplate how people come to a site, whether physically or mediated, a process she describes as a “shuttling between the physical and the digital public sphere” (33-34). “[A]ttending to this kind of layered directionality,” Widrich writes, “will allow us to understand how physical and virtual sites are entangled in our conception of time and space, materializing history on the ground, online, in reception and scholarship” (44). She is concerned with how bodies come to sites and how co-performing with these sites materializes public history.

Public history practices like museum curation, monument building (and visiting), representation in film and television shows, and commemorative acts create and sustain dominant narratives of history that also solidify cultural memories of the past in the present. Adopting a method of multidirectionality forces us to examine how people come to a site and how to “grapple with inclusions and exclusions, restrictions and opportunities, bodily representation and its material alternatives” so that we may glean...