Deleting monuments

Budapest, Hungary: The Memento Park

Recently in the Netherlands, and especially at the Leiden University, a discussion was going on, whether it was allowed to remove a painting because you don’t agree with the representation. Briefly, a painting showing smoking professors of the university board had been removed because some people didn’t agree with its contents: It was not acceptable that a university board existed of only old men who, moreover, were smoking. In other words, the painting was not in agreement with the present values. Note that the painting had been made in 1976 and that it showed the actual board of the Leiden University in that year. Although the painting has been hung back in the meantime, the question remains: Must a piece of art be removed, if you don’t agree anymore with its representation? But actually, the problem is wider than only about art, for also monuments are often under discussion, because people don’t agree any longer with what they express. For instance, in the USA statues of slave holders are under discussion, in the UK the question was raised whether a statue of Cecil Rhodes, a representative of colonialism in Southern Africa, should be removed from the University of Oxford, and in the Netherlands there was a controversy about a statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the founder of Batavia (Jakarta) and former governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, who harshly ruled this colony. And at the moment in the Baltic States monuments are destroyed that had been placed there in Soviet times.
Often there are good reasons to remove a controversial monument – in this blog it includes also a piece of art –or to change its context, but often there is also much against doing so. So let’s see why a monument should be removed:

- The monument is considered to represent a former oppressor or it is not in agreement with the views of the present regime. That’s why Soviet monuments are removed in the Baltic states, but also why in Hong Kong recently monuments have been removed that commemorate the killings on the Tian An Men Square in Beijing in 1989. However, already when the Soviet monuments were placed, many people detested them.
- The view what the monument represents has changed during the years. So, the view on Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Cecil Rhodes and slaveholders have changed through the years and nowadays nobody would make monuments for them anymore. However, also when these monuments were made, they were often already controversial.
- The monument as such is not under discussion but the maker is. I discussed such a case already three years ago in my blog on “degenerate art”: a painting in the room of the former German chancellor Angela Merkel was removed, since the painter appeared to have been a Nazi.

Undoubtedly, there are more reasons that a monument might be removed, but I think that these points make clear that removing a monument, because the idea it represents has changed, is not just a matter of correcting a false point of view. If that were the case, there would be nothing against destroying a “false” monument. However, by destroying a false monument not only a supposedly false point of view is corrected, but also a little bit of a once accepted view on the state of affairs in the world is destroyed, so a part of history. The idea that humans are historically developing beings is denied by cutting off a part of the past. For that’s what actually happens when a monument is removed. One does as if not seeing, is not being; as if it never existed; as if we are not like that. Moreover, a chance to learn from the past is destroyed, with the possibility that mistakes of the past will be repeated again in future. On the other hand, some monuments were already controversial at the moment they were placed, and this makes the question even more complicated, for why should we maintain what was already controversial from the beginning? Another complicating factor is that a monument in my sense can also be a piece of art or have artistic value.
Here I shall not elaborate these points, but I want to propose some possible solutions:

- Monuments can be removed and then destroyed. Sometimes this is the best solution, but in a sense it is destroying history, as I just explained.
- Monuments can be moved to a more appropriate place. This can be a less striking place (so not any longer on a central square but in a park), a museum or other appropriate place. For instance, in Budapest, monuments from Soviet times have been collected somewhere outside the town in an open-air museum where everybody can see them: The Memento Park.
- Monuments can be adapted in some way or a plaquette can be added describing the context of its origin and what’s wrong with it. There are many ways to re-interpret the original representation of a monument.
- A monument can be transformed into a new monument, a “counter-monument”. This is what happened with a monument of the former dictator Alfred Stroessner of Paraguay. The old monument is used as material for a new monument or it is fit in a new monument, while parts of the old monument are still visible.

Removing monuments, including pieces of arts, is re-interpreting and rewriting history. This can be a tricky affair, for what to do with the old monument? Destroy it? But that’s destroying a part of your history with all its dangerous sides. But as I have shown, there are several solutions that do right to both the past and the present. Anyway, monuments are fundamentally political, but society changes and what is “innocent” today may be “unacceptable” tomorrow. However, today re-interpreted monuments may tomorrow again be unacceptable.