Abstract

This thesis will ask the question: "Can monuments ever really be repositories of memory; how is the monumental form being used to represent the difficulties of remembrance?" My study will seek to bring the concept of the monument and the concept of the ruin closer together, and posit that monuments end up functioning as a prosthetic memory device that, in their very mode of remembrance, always include a forgetting. Beginning with a photo essay documenting my own flânerie around the monumental ruins of Montreal, this paper will trace out the problematic relationship between memory and forgetting, as a marker that is a displacement of memory. This paper is my attempt to rub together different conceptions of the monument-in-ruin to work out a full range of counter-monumental possibilities. From Earthworks-oriented artists to post-Holocaust memorializing efforts, monument-makers draw attention to the ephemeral and residual nature of the monumental form, and by extension, memory itself. I will look at a diverse sample of counter-monuments in order to comment more generally on how the ideas championed by monument/ruin builders are being grafted onto the landscape itself. Finally, I will suggest that building the monument-in-ruin does not guarantee a remembrance; rather, monuments depend on the people who notice them.