“A Questionnaire on Monuments,” OCTOBER 165 (Summer 2018)

Photo by Andrea Morales

On the evening of December 20, 2017, several Confederate monuments were swiftly removed from Memphis following the sale of two city parks to a nonprofit called Memphis Greenspace. The next day, Van Turner, Jr., director and president of Memphis Greenspace as well as Shelby County commissioner, held a press conference in which he delivered the following statement: Memphis Greenspace had “found a solution to remove a barrier to entry to these parks so that activation of the parks could begin. And this is only the beginning. There are other parks that need to be liberated from mediocrity and returned to the people as a unifying asset.”8 I begin with this statement because I find it formidably strange, its collage of corporate cant, activist watchwords, and urban-planning jargon at once shrewd and unsettling. It suggests that public space must both be free(d) and configured as property, unrestricted and yet binding. And it does so through inexplicit expressions—“barrier to entry,” “liberated from mediocrity,” “unifying asset,” the “activation” of space—that rub orthogonal shoulders in the cramped space of a couple sentences. These are words forged under duress, one name for which might be monumentality.

I mean by this that monuments exert a force over signification in public space, legitimizing some representations while driving others underground, where they might show themselves only in the buckling surface of statements like Turner’s.

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