Day 17 Monday June 8th 2009 Punchbag

by Conor Kelly, 9 Jun 2009

‘From Ozymandias to Caeser to Napoleon to Hitler, public art has served as a kind of monumentalising of violence. Public sculpture that is too frank or explicit about this monumentalising is likely to offend the sensibilities of a public committed to the repression of its own complicity in violence.’

-W.J.T. Mitchell

The troubled history of the Casement cross can only inform any future it may have when the catalogue of destructive acts unleashed upon it are taken into account in the overall reading of the work. Irrespective of whether the authors were bigots, homophobes or misanthropes, the consequences of their actions connote them to be part of a (particularly proactive) public.

In his essay, The Violence of Public Art (on Spike Lee’s seminal film Do The Right Thing) W.J.T. Mitchell argues that, ‘the long history of political and religious strife in the West could almost be rewritten as a history of iconoclasm. There is nothing new about the opposition of art to its public.’ He continues, ‘the openness of contemporary art to publicity and public destruction has been interpreted as a kind of artistic aggression and scandalmongering. A more accurate reading would recognise it as a deliberate vulnerability to violence, a strategy for dramatising new relations between the traditionally ‘timeless’ piece of art and the transient generations, the ‘publics,’ that are addressed by it.’

Perhaps the re-installation of the mutilated/truncated sculpture would be susceptible to further attacks and perhaps this is a necessary part of the role it could inherit. The public should be freely allowed (and possibly be encouraged) to perform cathartic acts of vandalism. The sculpture should possibly have a reasonably reflective surface that is easily maintained so these acts will continue to have an audience to bear witness to this process. Embracing this notion would certainly ensure that the public for whom the monument is erected will embrace a wider demographic than just those who sanction its existence. Perhaps the whipping post at the top of the hill above the bay would somehow reflect and protect the memories that reside elsewhere; at the unmarked ‘graveside’ down below in Murlough, in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin and in the wider Glens of Antrim where Casement’s promotion of Irish culture through sport, dance, art and literature have had a lasting effect.

Perhaps – like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. – the monument above Murlough can be, as Mitchell describes, a ‘cunning violation and inversion of monumental conventions for expressing and repressing the violence of the public sphere. The VVM is anti-heroic, antimonumental, a gash or scar, a trace of violence suffered, not of a violence wielded.’