Headless: is defacing the way to go? 20 July 2020
How best to deal with problematic memorialisation and commemoration from the past? In South Africa, it has spawned a counter-memorialisation project on a major scale in which new memorials sit alongside and challenge old. Recently, in many parts of the world it has been through destruction and removal. There is another way, in which the word defacing is given a new meaning, around a form of mindful political intervention which immediately imposes new meaning.
The remaining sculpted image of Cecil Rhodes at UCT’s Rhodes Memorial has been defaced, carefully defaced so that what is left is the remnants of the man plus a very pointed reminder of present-day feeling. What sits in the niche in the memorial has been irrevocably changed.
This is not destruction and removal; nor is it counter-memorialisation; it is something which leaves the early memorial there but not intact. It is not an erasure but something which confounds as well as compounds presence, whilst also remaking the representational form into something new. Is defacing perhaps the way to go, in reworking public memorialisation with different ways of defacing it, so that the old representational form is a new representational form at one and the same time.
