Beneath and before: Continuums of Publicness in Public Art

Burkes article emphasizes how monuments help characterize public space and the powerful effect they have on shaping one’s ideology and viewpoint towards the piece’s historical significance. She explains how heroic and historic monuments are meant to centralize and impose specific explicit messages and even eliminate previous histories. New monuments however have the opposite effect where they are designed to provoke historical incompleteness and evoke incomplete contradictions that each piece signifies. The three pieces that are mainly portrayed are The Marker of Change, CRAB park boulder and Standing with Courage, which are all located in Vancouver.
These pieces that were created in Vancouver are meant to portray both the literal and ideological absences in social memory. These monuments are located in an area where sexualized and racialized violence is normalized. It is unfortunate to know that the media recognizes this area as being infested with Aboriginals, drug addicts, and sex trade workers, which in turn gives the neighborhood a negative portrayal. As Burk explains, history and social ideologies are altered by various perspectives that the media attributes to, but the truth is that the area is just occupied by poor individuals. With this focus she explains how various types of monuments alter’s ones perception of the historical importance’s one landmark may bestow.
Just how Jewish families were superimposed in Germany, the monument The Marker of Change helped illustrate the violence women receive at the hands of man. Although this monument couldn’t be placed in Montreal where the killings occurred, I am glad that these women were honored in another region of Canada. It is disgusting to know that the media focused more coverage on the serial killer rather than the victims and portraying them through the killer’s eyes as “damn feminists”. The benches made of granite as representations of caskets of the 14 women killed served, portrays a strong message on that landmark even though it is occupied by the homeless and used for public speeches. Art offers such a deep impact where even sometimes the social responses it receives leads to acts of violence. For instance, the destruction of the Buddhist statues by the Taliban. Even though these monuments were created long past ideologies and altered conceptions, their presence evoked anger and rebellion. In contrast, this article bestows that space can have such deep impacts on individuals when certain situations in the past are honored with monumental placings and offer such strong symbolic meaning.