Monday, March 29, 2010

Seeing the Past in Present Tense by Paula Levine

“Monuments and memorials can activate you, awaken and open your present, by reintroducing ideologies that have lapsed or require considering again. They can defy physics, allowing your past to occupy the same place as your present”
This article is trying to convey that monuments are not only a thing in a public space, but they can trigger different emotions and memories with people who visit it or they can tell a story of the area the monument is located in. “Public monuments helped to celebrate and cement this progressive narrative on natural history… memorials to heros and events were meant not to revive old struggles and debates, but to put them to rest.” So not only do monuments preserve a place in history for fallen heros or an heroic event, it shows that something great was accomplished and will bring forth the memory of that said event to the viewer.
I was recently in Washington DC and I came across the Lincoln memorial. I was surprised to notices that I did not only admire the scale and the skill put into making this statue, but it made me think about all the turmoil in the American past and even in the present. I remembered everything I have learned in my past history classes while gazing upon this monument and then compared it to my ethnic studies classes on racism today. I came to think about all of this just by looking at a stone statue of a man. After reading this article I remembered this event happening to me, which allowed me to understand that Levine was talking about on a personal level.

No comments:

Post a Comment