Financial Times
The public sculpture debate — 47 potential ways forward
In 1995, Horst Hoheisel responded to a competition to design a “Berlin Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe” with a provocation. Blow up the Brandenburg Gate, he said, and the scorched earth would become a new Holocaust monument. The artist surely thought it unlikely that the triumphal arch and emblem of Prussian power would actually be razed to the ground. But his unfulfilled plan draws attention to how public monuments so often follow the same script: unyielding obelisks and fluted columns, heroic figures on horseback. What if the act of remembering the past could be encapsulated not in the erecting of another monument, but in the absence of one?