In this essay which recently appeared in Oxford Art Journal, Nausikaä El-Mecky discusses The Everyday Life of Memorials by Andrew Shanken alongside Monumental Cares by Mechtild Widrich. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full piece. An excerpt appears below:

“In recent years, monuments – oversized yet somehow also inconspicuous – have become extraordinarily visible. The very right to exist of certain monuments has been questioned: paradoxically, their visibility has threatened to lead to their impending obliteration. As ferocious debates and protests broke out all over the world, monuments became both magnetic and repulsive: protesters would gather by them, to mourn or to attack; monuments were thrown into harbours and ‘protected’ by far-right vigilantes; some city councils boxed in statues to shield them from vandalism, others entrusted municipal workers in high-vis gear to tow away disgraced memorials. As the chains of grassroots activists and state powers tightened around the bronze bodies of monumental figures, they also pulled at people’s heartstrings: monuments which had previously inspired little interest were now ardently defended as essential, historical, or beautiful. Activists, officials, and the general public have been pushing and prodding at monuments in wildly diverging directions. Meanwhile, as numerous authors have argued, recent events are part of a much longer history of flare-ups around monuments.1 In between those dramatic moments when seemingly all of society appears to position itself for or against them, the statues appear to fall into a slumber once more, retreating to our peripheral vision. This oscillating state between focal point and faded backdrop is illustrated through a wide range of unusual and pertinent examples in Shanken and Widrich’s books. I found that both works also address another kind of fluctuation, which perhaps is both more surprising and more important: namely that monuments are always, intrinsically, unstable. My focus in this review will be the myriad ways in which Monumental Cares and The Everyday Life uncover and deal with the instability of monuments.”