Ripensare il monumento. Attraverso e oltre il Novecento.

In the 1930s, Robert Musil famously spoke of the “invisibility” of monuments. Yet the recent global wave of fallen statues reveals that the monument is anything but invisible: it remains a living field where symbolic, political, and identity-related tensions continue to converge. Starting from this premise, this research offers a theoretical and art-historical re-reading of the anti-monument, with the aim of reconstructing its genealogy across and beyond the Twentieth century. Examining the European and North American context, this study constructs a counter-history of the monument’s progressive evolution into the contemporary era, identifying the 1980s as a turning point-decade. The objective of this thesis is to show how anti-monumental practices can today be reconsidered in light of a longer art-historical tradition, revealing the monument’s critical and remedial survival in the transition between the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries. And to stress how this survival in a post-media condition, restores to the monument a renewed potential for impact within the contemporary public sphere. From this perspective, can the monument be understood as a medium? What are the specific features of this language? Moving across art history, visual studies, and memory studies, through an interdisciplinary and comparative approach that intertwines critical and scholarly literature, archival materials, and primary sources, the work unfolds in five chapters which trace the transformation of the monument within contemporary visual culture, exploring whether and how it is still possible to speak of the monument in today’s artistic practices. For this purpose, this research examines three contemporary case studies – Maurizio Cattelan, Sanja Iveković, and Iván Argote – together with an expanded case study on Thomas Hirschhorn.