As recent events have unfolded, a debate has sprung up around how statues contribute to popular memory of events. Generally, more conservative people defend most statues staying up, since history must be remembered, whereas more progressive people wish to take them down, because to them these statues reinforce history.⠀ One point which both sides seem to have forgotten – although this is moreso an issue for the conservative argument – is that how we remember history is not to do with statues. We can only contextualise statues because of our education; would the Churchill and Wolfe statues in Westerham, for example, make any sense to the average person, had they not been taught about them in school?⠀ This is how we remember things, how we learn. A statue of James Wolfe teaches me nothing actual about 18th Century warfare, or even of his conduct within it during the Seven Years’ War. It is a fundamentally contemporary expression of the spatial politic; one cannot evade the gaze of a statue in a public place. It situates itself, the history its viewer knows of it, on high and reifies itself, posed in glorious apotheosis. This public recontextualization of the past isn’t historical – it’s political.
Oliver
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