Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 46

While, closer to home, the World War I memorial on Edinburgh’s Royal
Mile, is accompanied by a sign advising visitors to ‘Please Respect the War
Memorial’.
If the Romans have given us the word for monument, then they also
understood that a monument was not necessarily a guarantee of memory.
Over two millennia ago, the poet Horace opened his Ode 3.30 with the claim
that, with something as apparently ephemeral as a poem, he had ‘built a
monument more lasting than bronze’. Implicit in Horace’s poem is a knowing
sense that it is neither material nor environment that determine whether a
monument will last: the longevity of a monument is directly dependent on
the reception it receives.
The Romans regularly engaged in what modern scholars have termed
damnatio memoriae; a set of actions deliberately intended to eradicate the
memory of those who had fallen from favour, including erasing names
from inscriptions, destroying statues and even demolishing an individual’s
house (Note �). As long as humans have erected monuments, they have been
assaulted, convenient proxies for the individual and ideas commemorated
therein. The recent campaigns to remove statues of Cecil Rhodes in Cape
Town and Oxford, are but the la test manifestations in a centuries-old trend.
But the fate of the vast majority of historic monuments in our cities is
perhaps most accurately captured in Jonathan Owen’s Eraser Drawings
(statues), (����-�). With painstaking precision, and using nothing more than
an eraser, Owen re-worked a series of photographic reproductions taken
from books on public statues, to render the figures invisible. Literally reforming
the statues into the background forms they were obscuring (a park,
a ����s office block, a tree), Owen enacts the fate of many a monument,
as over time, they blend into the background, becoming invisible to the
contemporary eye.
Deconstructing the Monument
Owen’s first publicly sited project has been specifically devised for the
Burns Monument. Designed by the architect, Thomas Hamilton, to house a
full-length portrait of Robert Burns by John Flaxman, the circular temple
is modelled on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, and was
completed in ����. Just a few years later, however, the statue of Burns was
removed to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (where it remains to this
day), amidst fears that smoke from a nearby gasworks would damage the
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