Susan Hiller’s Monument: identity in the

contexts of memory, remembrance, and

ceremony

Lee Hutchinson, MA Student

The Nottingham Trent University

MA Museum and Heritage Management

School of Arts, Communication and Culture

December 8, 2004

Introduction

This essay seeks to demonstrate how the artist Susan Hiller’s installation, Monument

(1980-1981) can be used to explore the theme of identity. Following an introduction

to both the artwork and the memorial (or monument) on which it is based, this theme

will further be examined in the related contexts of memory, remembrance, and

ceremony. Finally, a conclusion will be drawn in the light of findings made.

[1]

Introduction – Monument (1980 – 1981)

In order to explore this theme, it is essential to understand how Susan Hiller’s

Monument is both constructed and presented. An understanding of the distinction

between ‘monument’ and ‘memorial’ will prove useful at the outset, since the artist is

clearly aware of it herself. Burch provides workable definitions:

memorial (in which the physical shape is… imbued with meanings and

appreciated as such)

and

monument (where little attention or awareness is paid to any commemorative

significance) (Burch, 2002: 364)

Hiller’s Monument consists of forty-one larger than life-size colour

photographs of nineteenth-century plaques, which commemorate lost lives, mounted

on a whitewashed wall. Each one of these represents a year in the life of the artist,

who was forty-one in 1982. (Hiller, 1986: [14]) They are assembled in the shape of a

rhombus. [Fig. 1] In front of the photographs is a park bench, with its back facing the

wall. Upon the bench is a set of headphones and a tape recorder. Visitors are invited

to wear the headphones and listen to the voice of the artist:

Do the dead speak to us? This is my voice, unrolling in your present, my past.

I’m speaking to you from my hereafter, the here-after. I’m an audible, raudive [2]

voice. We could exist forever, inscribed, portrayed as inscriptions, portraits,

representations. I’m representing myself to myself and for you to you. This is

my voice. Now this voice will speak to you about the ideology of memory, the

history of time, the ‘fixing’ of representation… Monument represents

absences. These are representations of those who have gone… Absence is a

metaphor of desire. Representation is a distancing in time and space. It’s a

‘regeneration’ of images and ideas. Time can’t exist without memory.

Memory can’t exist without representation. (Soundtrack of Monument, cited in

Hiller, 1986: [36])

Fig.1 Monument 1980-1981, 41 C-type photographs, audiotape, park bench; exists in three

versions, ‘British’ (illustrated) overall size 15' x 22'; ‘Colonial’, overall size 7 ½' x 15’; ‘Other’,

overall size 7' x 14 ½' [source: https://elearn.ntu.ac.uk/02VLP/2004%20Modules/Level%204/

HERI41001_0/01/monument.ppt]

[3]

The photographs in Hiller’s Monument were taken of plaques that are still extant in a

covered gallery in Postman’s Park in London. The park’s name derives from the post

office which once formed its southern boundary. The plaques form part of the Watts’

Memorial to Heroic Deeds. (Roberts, 1997: 29)

In order to unpick the numerous layers of Hiller’s work, it is necessary to have

an insight into the origins of the memorial on which it is based; while Monument is

ironic in its presentation, its meaning, as with any object, becomes more readily

accessible once the observer is equipped with supplementary ‘inside’ information.

The Watts Memorial to Heroic Deeds

George Frederic Watts (1817 – 1904) was, in the late nineteenth century, ‘the most

famous painter in Britain’. (Roberts, 1997: 29) The fact that he is little known in the

twenty-first can largely be attributed to the cataclysmic intervention of the First World

War, by the end of which his allegorical and mawkish paintings (by modern

standards) seemed glaringly inappropriate. (Roberts, 1997: 29) Thus, as the tastes of

the nation shifted – from Victorian melodrama to Dadaism and the surreal – Watts

was jettisoned into obscurity. Along with his paintings, so too his greatest project was

forgotten – that of his memorial in Postman’s Park.

Watts was a socialist, a believer in ‘Art for the Good’ (Roberts, 1997: 29). He

conceived his Heroic Deeds project as a means of commemorating unsung heroes –

primarily the labouring classes, whose deeds he felt were paramount in the making of

a nation. In an attempt to seek funds, he proposed to install the memorial in the year

of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee – 1887 – thereby serving two purposes – that of [4]

preserving the memories of his folk heroes and commemorating the fiftieth

anniversary of the queen’s accession to the throne (it also served an unmentioned

third – that of memorializing his own life); but his efforts were in vain: the funds

could not be found. (Roberts, 1997: 29)

Not to be deterred, Watts took it upon himself to build the memorial. On 30th July

1900, Postman’s Park was opened to the public and the memorial unveiled.

Fig.2 21st-century photograph of Postman’s Park and the Watts Memorial to Heroic Deeds

[source: www.thejoyofshards.co.uk/london/tiles/ppark/index.shtml]

At first, it consisted of thirteen plaques; Watts died in 1904, but his wife

continued with the work, contributing another thirty-four. Five more were unveiled in

1930. Since then, only one more has appeared and there is still space for at least

another ninety (Blunt, 1989: 218-219) although it is not likely that any further plaques

will be installed. In the present day, the memorial is largely greeted with indifference.

[5]

Hiller herself observed, when photographing the plaques, that visitors to the

park were blithely unaware of the stories that surrounded them:

…what struck me was that they had been sat in front of these perfectly visible

objects for years and years, and the objects had been… invisible. (Hiller, cited

in Bradley, F. et al 1996: 77)

The plaques, however, evoke astonishing memories of a bygone era [see Fig. 3] Take,

for example:

THOMAS GRIFFIN / FITTERS LABOURER / APRIL·12·1899 / IN A /

BOILER EXPLOSION AT A / BATTERSEA SUGAR REFINERY / WAS

FATALLY SCALDED IN / RETURNING TO SEARCH / FOR HIS MATE

SARAH SMITH PANTOMIME ARTIST / AT PRINCE’S THEATRE / DIED OF

TERRIBLE INJURIES RECEIVED / WHEN ATTEMPTING IN HER

INFLAMMABLE DRESS / TO EXTINGUISH THE FLAMES / WHICH

HAD / ENVELOPED HER COMPANION / JANUARY·24·1863

ARTHUR STRANGE / CARMAN OF LONDON AND / MARK

TOMLINSON / ON A DESPERATE VENTURE / TO SAVE TWO GIRLS

FROM A / QUICKSAND IN LINCOLNSHIRE / WERE THEMSELVES

ENGULFED / AUG 25 1902[6]

Fig.3 Detail from Watts Memorial to Heroic Deeds [source:

http://www.thejoyofshards.co.uk/london/tiles/ppark/index.shtml]

Yet Hiller is unimpressed, finding the plaques androcentric, reminiscent of an

oppressive patriarchy and the Christian ‘heroic’ (Hiller, cited in Rawson, 2003: 4-5) –

a harsh indictment perhaps, given that the inscriptions commemorate the valorous

deeds and tragic deaths of both sexes; in the context of the times in which it was

created, the inclusion of the labouring class, among them women and children, is

noteworthy and reflective of a conscious commitment to inclusivity (however

misguided) on the part of George and Mary Watts. It is worth noting that Hiller’s

Monument is equally selective, consisting almost entirely of male-centred plaques,

indicative perhaps of a censorious and manipulative design stemming from an over-

eagerness on her own part to expose the perceived failings of her predecessors.

[7]

Memory

Nonetheless, Hiller’s point seems to be that no matter how heroic the deed, no matter

how well-meaning the memorial, in the fullness of time all will be forgotten and

rendered futile: living memory will fade and social tastes, attitudes and values, rather

than remaining fixed (as the inscriptions on the wall) will shift and continue to shift in

unpredictable ways.

Inevitably, the progress of time will lead to the alienation of identity and the

loss is cyclical and wholesale. As if to emphasize this point, Hiller deliberately places

the park bench in front of Monument with its back to the plaques. [Fig. 4] When the

visitor sits on the bench, the inscriptions are out of view – just as they are in

Postman’s Park. Though the experience of Monument mirrors the experience of being

seated in the park, Hiller’s contrivance imbues the bench with a greater significance:

in the neutral space of the gallery, its juxtaposition with the memorial amplifies the

relationship between past and present, and in a momentous revelation both the inanity

of fixed representation and the evanescence of memory become glaringly apparent –

thereby validating Hiller’s point – that memory is unable to exist without

representation, yet representation ultimately retains little or no meaning at all.

Fig. 4 Monument 1980-1981, ‘British’

version; person seated on park bench

[Source: www.iniva.org/

archive/resource/155]

[8]

This irreconcilable division between past/present and the subsequent failure of

memory/identity in the fixing of representations is explored by Burch in an essay

concerning a series of commemorative plaques in Nottingham (Burch, 2001). Burch

tells how seven sculpted portraits of poets local to Nottingham were erected in the city

between 1902 and 1903 according to the last wishes of William Stephenson Holbrook

(1826-1900). He explains that this celebration of local worthies

sought to define Nottingham as an ‘imagined community’ posited within the

nation. (Burch, 2001: 155)

The narrative of the commemoration was intended to provide a ‘communal identity’

(Burch, 2001: 155) and yet it was conceived in the mind of a single individual. A

similarly egocentric motivation is evident in the Watts Memorial, in which the

narrative seeks to create an identity not only for a community of unsung Christian

heroes, imagined and personally selected by Watts, but for the creator of the memorial

himself. A comparison can again be drawn with the Holbrook bequest; Burch

explains that Holbrook:

sought to guard his evanescent individuality from future neglect by

interweaving his own identity within a collective narrative. (Burch, 2001:155)

Holbrook could not have predicted that his painstaking efforts would be in vain. And

the same can be said of Watts and a whole host of Victorian benefactors, eagerly

engaged in commemorative projects upon the death of the queen and the turn of the

new century (Burch, 2001: 165). Who, in 1900, for example, could have foreseen the [9]

advent of the First World War, in which millions would lose their lives, and in which

social structures would change forever? And it is precisely this handicap – this

inability to predict the future – that renders futile the urge for fixed identity in the

‘eternity’ of collective memory. Identity retains its meaning only in the immediate,

and even that is in a continual state of flux. As Heraclitus (c.535-475 BC) an ancient

Greek philosopher pertinently observed:

You cannot step into the same river twice (Heraclitus, cited in Graham, 2002)

or, as Hiller herself concludes:

Identity is a collaboration. The self is multiple. (Hiller, 1986: [10])

It comes as no surprise then, that a hundred years after its installation, the

Watts Memorial to Heroic Deeds is largely ignored and overlooked. Nor is it a

surprise that six of the seven poets in the Holbrook bequest are all but forgotten (the

present exception being George Gordon Byron). One may surmise with near certainty

that of all the statues and sculpted portraits of the nineteenth century the large

majority will mean little or nothing to the layperson of the twenty-first.

As for Hiller’s Monument (1980-1981), the artist produced three separate

versions for three separate communities: ‘British’, ‘Colonial’, and ‘Other’; with each

community, there is a reduction in the size of the installation, from the largest

appearing in ‘British’, to the smallest in ‘Other’: a sardonic reflection on the implicit

racism and supremacism inherent in the dominant voice of British Empire.

[10]

Hiller’s central message though, and her only obvious piece of advice, can be

found in an eye-catching plaque (or more accurately photograph) at the centre of the

installation. A scrawling piece of graffiti declares: ‘Strive to be your own hero.’ This

statement, striking with the vibrancy of a recent punk past, an emphatic subversion of

the dominant voice of empire, is possibly the most powerful comment of the work,

suggesting that as human beings we would better serve ourselves by seeking to grasp

an inner, individuated strength, a strength that thrives without the need for external

recognition or accolade for well-intended deeds, a strength that equips us with an

automatic sense of self-worth and equal entitlement to roles traditionally held by a

culturally nepotistic elite.

Remembrance

And yet, despite Hiller’s brilliant exposition of the fundamental flaws of fixed

representation, Monument contains an inevitable paradox. In representing the plaques

of the Watts memorial, it regenerates the very ideas that Watts himself intended to be

conveyed in the original. As Brett explains:

Hiller fragments and dissolves the spatial boundaries… in order to redefine the

relationship between actual and imaginative space. (Brett, 1991: 137-138)

In reproducing the text contained on the walls of the memorial, shifting the reference

points of time and space and pasting them onto the blank wall of the present, Hiller

propels these objects into current conscience. Monument not only supersedes Watts’ [11]

original, but gives it a fresh validity; by ‘resurrecting’ the lives of those

commemorated, Hiller extends Watts’s motivations, not only preserving but re-

enforcing the representations of the dead. As she says (referring to one of the names

on the plaques):

Amelia Kennedy in the body nineteen years… as a representation 109 years.

(Hiller, 1986: [10])

She has breathed new life into the portraits which ironically have endured longer than

the memories of the lives of the individuals themselves.

In a final act of self-defence, perhaps, Hiller takes a significant step to ensure

that Monument is a conscious testament, a ‘registration’ (Hiller, 1986: [10]) to her

own life – in the symbolic representation of forty-one photographs and the recording

of her own voice on the tape. It is therefore not only an ironic monument to the limits

of human ambition and the ultimate triumph of oblivion, but a functional memorial to

a living person – a living piece of heritage. When the visitor sits on the bench and

listens to the tape, he or she becomes an active participant in the ritual of

commemoration – in just the same way that a visitor to the Cenotaph on

Remembrance Sunday, for example, will participate in events in the present while

attempting to resurrect events from the past. As Einzig observes (Einzig, 1991: 63),

in Hiller’s work there is no ‘objective reality’ – a view shared by the artist:

…you see the bench… and then if you choose to involve yourself further you

sit down…. at that point of course… you become a performer… a live body

[12]

in front of this wall which discusses dead bodies. And that’s the way that piece

works. (Hiller, cited in Rawson, 2003: 5)

Ceremony

The component of performance, often public and often central to acts of

remembrance, manifests with varying degrees of theatricality. Why, if grief is

ingenuous and heartfelt, there should be a need for performance – a contrived and

public presentation of drama – is an interesting question to explore. Take, for

example, those who commemorate the life of King Charles I (1600-1649) by laying

wreaths on each anniversary of his death at the foot of his statue in Charing Cross.

[Fig. 5] To many, this act may seem absurd – in the same way that it might be

ludicrous to remember, for example, ‘those who fell at the battle of Thermopylae in

the 5th century BC’ on Remembrance Sunday. Yet for the performers of this ritual, in

this case the Royal Stuart Society, the ceremony is imbued with ostensible meaning.

In the light of Hiller’s Monument, it becomes apparent that the act of

remembrance rarely stems from an altruistic aspiration to resurrect the dead; a surface

appearance of compassion may belie an egocentric inclination to seek to negate a

seemingly insufferable sense of absence. Might it be then that the urge to remember

is driven by an unconscious fear of the loss of self, and in instances where an

individual has no direct or obvious means of dispelling that fear, he or she will find

the appropriate comfort – whether that be the comfort of connecting with the familiar

– such as the memory of a recently deceased family member – or, in extreme cases,

the comfort of fabricating a link with the unfamiliar – in the act, for example, of [13]

‘remembering’ a monarch who died over three-hundred years ago? But if this is the

case, the need for ceremony remains unexplained.

If, as Cosgrove suggests, ritual and ceremony are often used to ‘legitimate the

institutions of the state’ (Cosgrove, cited in Burch, forthcoming 2005: 3) or indeed

any politicized organization, then in the case of the Royal Stuart Society the ceremony

may well be the only means of legitimating the Society’s very existence. A view put

forward by Cannadine would support this hypothesis, contending that elites often

consolidate their ‘ideological dominance by exploiting pageantry and propaganda’.

(Cannadine 1983: 104) What is more, when pomp and ceremony surround the death

of a monarch, it may be regarded as

… a requiem, not only for the monarch himself, but for a country as a great

power. (Cannadine 1983: 105)

It would seem then that the motivation of the Royal Stuarts in their act of

remembering King Charles I is likely to be political, the present-day ‘mourners’ not

performing their theatrical and austere display of commemoration in order to assuage

any emotive or personal sense of grieving, but rather to make a political comment on

the state of the nation’s constitution. It would appear (though the author cannot claim

to comprehend the motivation entirely) that they are aggrieved at the notion of

democratic governance by parliament and would in fact rather be ruled by an autocrat

who believes in the ‘divine right of kings’. A visitor to Charing Cross on 30th January

1988 described the scene:

[14]

A chaplain said prayers, soldiers from the Royal Horse Artillery sounded their

trumpets and the link with Scotland was confirmed by the presence of a piper.

(Blackwood, 1989: 23)

Evidently for some, perhaps for those harbouring the most intimate memories of the

centuries-dead Stuarts, the event was charged with an emotional intensity the like of

which had not been felt since the previous year’s act of remembrance.

Fig. 5 The ceremony of remembrance. On 30th January each year, the anniversary of the death of

King Charles I, the Royal Stuart Society lays wreaths at the foot of his statue in Charing Cross.

[source: Blackwood, 1989:23]

However, before all forms of ceremony are dismissed as disingenuous or

absurd, it is worth recalling the diverse range of ceremonious acts. While some are

carried out with the hope of resurrecting past events or sustaining the status quo,

others are conducted with quite the reverse intention: in remembering world-wide

[15]

conflicts, for example, and the lives of those who fell, whether done privately in

solitude or ritually en masse, the past is regenerated with the intention of ensuring that

the tragedies of that past are never repeated. Though this hope may seem somewhat

forlorn, there is no doubt that the attitudes of the dominant powers have shifted over

previous decades – from the dispassionate and imperious to the PR-conscious and

placatory. This is evident, for example, in NATO’s continued efforts to ensure that

their ‘laser-smart bombs’ hit targets with ‘pinpoint accuracy’, their strategies designed

to keep ‘collateral damage’ to a bare minimum. Of course, these ‘benign’ intentions

are frequently undermined by the failure of ‘laser-smart bombs’ to hit their targets and

the resulting deaths of thousands of civilians, but nonetheless the shift in attitude, no

matter how slight or cynical, is a significant move away from the jingoistic and

unashamedly imperialist attitudes of the past; and ceremonious remembrance has at

least played its part in coercing a political necessity for these less openly belligerent

attitudes.

As George V said while visiting the First World War cemeteries of Flanders:

We can truly say that the whole circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves

of our dead… and, in the course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked

myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth

through the years to come, than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to

the desolation of war. (King George V, 1922; cited at CWGC [online])

The conciliatory and transformative potential of remembrance is irrefutable.

[16]

Conclusion

To conclude then, Hiller’s Monument raises many contentious issues – issues that are

not on the margins, but at the core of Britain’s built heritage. It is clear, as Hiller

states, that ‘Memory can’t exist without representation’ (Soundtrack of Monument,

cited in Hiller, 1986: [36]) yet representation, when fixed, does not retain identity,

meaning or purpose in the ‘fullness of time’, the ‘fullness of time’ arrived at when the

past has passed from living memory – within only a few generations.

The streets and public spaces of the United Kingdom are replete with statues,

portraits and inscriptions pertaining to an obsolete mode of expression. Their

purpose, which was to regiment communities according to the parameters of the

Establishment in which they were cast, no longer applies. These are not memorials,

but monuments, whose identities and place are vacuous in present-day consciousness.

In the light of this, there is an argument for corrective and preventive action in

the conceptualization and development of public space – a regeneration that would

require the restructuring of space through tangible public art; and, in order for that art

to be tangible and accessible to a multiplicity of cultures, it must necessarily be

collectively devised, transient and eclectic. If equality and social inclusion are the

virtuous cornerstones of democracy, then anything less would be undemocratic.

[17]

Bibliography

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statues. Oxford: Savoy Press

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London: Columbus Books

Bradley, F. et al (1996) Susan Hiller. London: Tate Gallery

Brett, G. (1991) ‘Susan Hiller’s Shadowland’ in Art in America (79) April, pp. 136-

143 & 187

Burch, S. (2001) ‘The Holbrook bequest for commemorative plaques: tradition,

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[18]

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Wednesday 15 October: 29

[19]