Countermonumental strategies : early German Countermonuments and their applied artistic strategies

Monuments are historically concerned with claiming a ground that cannot be challenged – seeking to maintain assumptions of singularity, centralization, legacy and perpetuity. The Countermonumental perspective embraces and employs multiplicities, peripheries, dispersal and impermanence. The emergence and effectiveness of Countermonumental practices in the sculptural arts portends the possibility of a broader response which seeks to exhume dormant pasts and offer alternate historical perspectives in the present experience of the viewer. In this research thesis and its associated artworks, the study of early German Countermonuments has been undertaken in order to recognize their achievements in reactivating the practice of public memorials and to study the strategies developed by their creators. The research culminates in applied artistic experiments which seek to apply Countermonumental Strategies to other fields of visual art such as photography, moving images, performance, digital media and public art. These works contextualize themselves within the concept put forth regarding monuments and memory by Jean-Francois Chevrier – a notion of territorial intimacy “constituted on the frontiers of public space, in the grey or forsaken zones of the sanctioned territory...an occasion for social and political experiment.”