In this essay, I seek to demonstrate how the artist Susan Hiller’s installation, Monument (1980-1981) can be used to explore the theme of identity within public art and heritage. Following an introduction to both the artwork and the memorial (or monument) on which it is based, the theme is further examined in the related contexts of memory, remembrance, and ceremony. Finally, the conclusion calls for corrective action in the conceptualization and development of public space.

1. [1]
Susan Hiller’s Monument: identity in the
contexts of memory, remembrance, and
ceremony
Lee Hutchinson, MA Student
The Nottingham Trent University
MA Museum and Heritage Management
School of Arts, Communication and Culture
December 8, 2004
Introduction
This essay seeks to demonstrate how the artist Susan Hiller’s installation, Monument
(1980-1981) can be used to explore the theme of identity. Following an introduction
to both the artwork and the memorial (or monument) on which it is based, this theme
will further be examined in the related contexts of memory, remembrance, and
ceremony. Finally, a conclusion will be drawn in the light of findings made.

2. [2]
Introduction – Monument (1980 – 1981)
In order to explore this theme, it is essential to understand how Susan Hiller’s
Monument is both constructed and presented. An understanding of the distinction
between ‘monument’ and ‘memorial’ will prove useful at the outset, since the artist is
clearly aware of it herself. Burch provides workable definitions:
memorial (in which the physical shape is… imbued with meanings and
appreciated as such)
and
monument (where little attention or awareness is paid to any commemorative
significance) (Burch, 2002: 364)
Hiller’s Monument consists of forty-one larger than life-size colour
photographs of nineteenth-century plaques, which commemorate lost lives, mounted
on a whitewashed wall. Each one of these represents a year in the life of the artist,
who was forty-one in 1982. (Hiller, 1986: [14]) They are assembled in the shape of a
rhombus. [Fig. 1] In front of the photographs is a park bench, with its back facing the
wall. Upon the bench is a set of headphones and a tape recorder. Visitors are invited
to wear the headphones and listen to the voice of the artist:
Do the dead speak to us? This is my voice, unrolling in your present, my past.
I’m speaking to you from my hereafter, the here-after. I’m an audible, raudive

3. [3]
voice. We could exist forever, inscribed, portrayed as inscriptions, portraits,
representations. I’m representing myself to myself and for you to you. This is
my voice. Now this voice will speak to you about the ideology of memory, the
history of time, the ‘fixing’ of representation… Monument represents
absences. These are representations of those who have gone… Absence is a
metaphor of desire. Representation is a distancing in time and space. It’s a
‘regeneration’ of images and ideas. Time can’t exist without memory.
Memory can’t exist without representation. (Soundtrack of Monument, cited in
Hiller, 1986: [36])
Fig.1 Monument 1980-1981,41 C-type photographs, audiotape, park bench; exists in three
versions, ‘British’ (illustrated) overall size 15' x 22'; ‘Colonial’, overall size 7 ½' x 15’; ‘Other’,
overall size 7' x 14 ½' [source: https://elearn.ntu.ac.uk/02VLP/2004%20Modules/Level%204/
HERI41001_0/01/monument.ppt]

4. [4]
The photographs in Hiller’s Monument were taken of plaques that are still extant in a
covered gallery in Postman’s Park in London. The park’s name derives from the post
office which once formed its southern boundary. The plaques form part of the Watts’
Memorial to Heroic Deeds. (Roberts, 1997: 29)
In order to unpick the numerous layers of Hiller’s work, it is necessary to have
an insight into the origins of the memorial on which it is based; while Monument is
ironic in its presentation, its meaning, as with any object, becomes more readily
accessible once the observer is equipped with supplementary ‘inside’ information.
The Watts Memorial to Heroic Deeds
George Frederic Watts (1817 – 1904) was, in the late nineteenth century, ‘the most
famous painter in Britain’. (Roberts, 1997: 29) The fact that he is little known in the
twenty-first can largely be attributed to the cataclysmic intervention of the First World
War, by the end of which his allegorical and mawkish paintings (by modern
standards) seemed glaringly inappropriate. (Roberts, 1997: 29) Thus, as the tastes of
the nation shifted – from Victorian melodrama to Dadaism and the surreal – Watts
was jettisoned into obscurity. Along with his paintings, so too his greatest project was
forgotten – that of his memorial in Postman’s Park.
Watts was a socialist, a believer in ‘Art for the Good’ (Roberts, 1997: 29). He
conceived his Heroic Deeds project as a means of commemorating unsung heroes –
primarily the labouring classes, whose deeds he felt were paramount in the making of
a nation. In an attempt to seek funds, he proposed to install the memorial in the year
of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee – 1887 – thereby serving two purposes – that of

5. [5]
preserving the memories of his folk heroes and commemorating the fiftieth
anniversary of the queen’s accession to the throne (it also served an unmentioned
third – that of memorializing his own life); but his efforts were in vain: the funds
could not be found. (Roberts, 1997: 29)
Not to be deterred, Watts took it upon himself to build the memorial. On 30th July
1900, Postman’s Park was opened to the public and the memorial unveiled.
Fig.2 21st-century photograph of Postman’s Park and the Watts Memorial to Heroic Deeds
[source: www.thejoyofshards.co.uk/london/tiles/ppark/index.shtml]
At first, it consisted of thirteen plaques; Watts died in 1904, but his wife
continued with the work, contributing another thirty-four. Five more were unveiled in
1930. Since then, only one more has appeared and there is still space for at least
another ninety (Blunt, 1989: 218-219) although it is not likely that any further plaques
will be installed. In the present day, the memorial is largely greeted with indifference.

6. [6]
Hiller herself observed, when photographing the plaques, that visitors to the
park were blithely unaware of the stories that surrounded them:
…what struck me was that they had been sat in front of these perfectly visible
objects for years and years, and the objects had been… invisible. (Hiller, cited
in Bradley, F. et al 1996: 77)
The plaques, however, evoke astonishing memories of a bygone era [see Fig. 3] Take,
for example:
THOMAS GRIFFIN / FITTERS LABOURER / APRIL·12·1899 / IN A /
BOILER EXPLOSION AT A / BATTERSEA SUGAR REFINERY / WAS
FATALLY SCALDED IN / RETURNING TO SEARCH / FOR HIS MATE
SARAH SMITH PANTOMIMEARTIST / AT PRINCE’S THEATRE / DIED OF
TERRIBLE INJURIES RECEIVED / WHEN ATTEMPTING IN HER
INFLAMMABLE DRESS / TO EXTINGUISH THE FLAMES / WHICH
HAD / ENVELOPED HER COMPANION / JANUARY·24·1863
ARTHUR STRANGE / CARMAN OF LONDON AND / MARK
TOMLINSON / ON A DESPERATE VENTURE / TO SAVE TWO GIRLS
FROM A / QUICKSAND IN LINCOLNSHIRE / WERE THEMSELVES
ENGULFED / AUG 25 1902

7. [7]
Fig.3 Detail from Watts Memorial to Heroic Deeds [source:
http://www.thejoyofshards.co.uk/london/tiles/ppark/index.shtml]
Yet Hiller is unimpressed, finding the plaques androcentric, reminiscent of an
oppressive patriarchy and the Christian ‘heroic’ (Hiller, cited in Rawson, 2003: 4-5) –
a harsh indictment perhaps, given that the inscriptions commemorate the valorous
deeds and tragic deaths of both sexes; in the context of the times in which it was
created, the inclusion of the labouring class, among them women and children, is
noteworthy and reflective of a conscious commitment to inclusivity (however
misguided) on the part of George and Mary Watts. It is worth noting that Hiller’s
Monument is equally selective, consisting almost entirely of male-centred plaques,
indicative perhaps of a censorious and manipulative design stemming from an over-
eagerness on her own part to expose the perceived failings of her predecessors.

8. [8]
Memory
Nonetheless, Hiller’s point seems to be that no matter how heroic the deed, no matter
how well-meaning the memorial, in the fullness of time all will be forgotten and
rendered futile: living memory will fade and social tastes, attitudes and values, rather
than remaining fixed (as the inscriptions on the wall) will shift and continue to shift in
unpredictable ways.
Inevitably, the progress of time will lead to the alienation of identity and the
loss is cyclical and wholesale. As if to emphasize this point, Hiller deliberately places
the park bench in front of Monument with its back to the plaques. [Fig. 4] When the
visitor sits on the bench, the inscriptions are out of view – just as they are in
Postman’s Park. Though the experience of Monument mirrors the experience of being
seated in the park, Hiller’s contrivance imbues the bench with a greater significance:
in the neutral space of the gallery, its juxtaposition with the memorial amplifies the
relationship between past and present, and in a momentous revelation both the inanity
of fixed representation and the evanescence of memory become glaringly apparent –
thereby validating Hiller’s point – that memory is unable to exist without
representation, yet representation ultimately retains little or no meaning at all.
Fig. 4 Monument 1980-1981,‘British’
version; person seated on park bench
[Source: www.iniva.org/
archive/resource/155]

9. [9]
This irreconcilable division between past/present and the subsequent failure of
memory/identity in the fixing of representations is explored by Burch in an essay
concerning a series of commemorative plaques in Nottingham (Burch, 2001). Burch
tells how seven sculpted portraits of poets local to Nottingham were erected in the city
between 1902 and 1903 according to the last wishes of William Stephenson Holbrook
(1826-1900). He explains that this celebration of local worthies
sought to define Nottingham as an ‘imagined community’ posited within the
nation. (Burch, 2001: 155)
The narrative of the commemoration was intended to provide a ‘communal identity’
(Burch, 2001: 155) and yet it was conceived in the mind of a single individual. A
similarly egocentric motivation is evident in the Watts Memorial, in which the
narrative seeks to create an identity not only for a community of unsung Christian
heroes, imagined and personally selected by Watts, but for the creator of the memorial
himself. A comparison can again be drawn with the Holbrook bequest; Burch
explains that Holbrook:
sought to guard his evanescent individuality from future neglect by
interweaving his own identity within a collective narrative. (Burch, 2001:155)
Holbrook could not have predicted that his painstaking efforts would be in vain. And
the same can be said of Watts and a whole host of Victorian benefactors, eagerly
engaged in commemorative projects upon the death of the queen and the turn of the
new century (Burch, 2001: 165). Who, in 1900, for example, could have foreseen the

10. [10]
advent of the First World War, in which millions would lose their lives, and in which
social structures would change forever? And it is precisely this handicap – this
inability to predict the future – that renders futile the urge for fixed identity in the
‘eternity’ of collective memory. Identity retains its meaning only in the immediate,
and even that is in a continual state of flux. As Heraclitus (c.535-475 BC) an ancient
Greek philosopher pertinently observed:
You cannot step into the same river twice (Heraclitus, cited in Graham, 2002)
or, as Hiller herself concludes:
Identity is a collaboration. The self is multiple. (Hiller, 1986: [10])
It comes as no surprise then, that a hundred years after its installation, the
Watts Memorial to Heroic Deeds is largely ignored and overlooked. Nor is it a
surprise that six of the seven poets in the Holbrook bequest are all but forgotten (the
present exception being George Gordon Byron). One may surmise with near certainty
that of all the statues and sculpted portraits of the nineteenth century the large
majority will mean little or nothing to the layperson of the twenty-first.
As for Hiller’s Monument (1980-1981), the artist produced three separate
versions for three separate communities: ‘British’, ‘Colonial’, and ‘Other’; with each
community, there is a reduction in the size of the installation, from the largest
appearing in ‘British’, to the smallest in ‘Other’: a sardonic reflection on the implicit
racism and supremacism inherent in the dominant voice of British Empire.

11. [11]
Hiller’s central message though, and her only obvious piece of advice, can be
found in an eye-catching plaque (or more accurately photograph) at the centre of the
installation. A scrawling piece of graffiti declares: ‘Strive to be your own hero.’ This
statement, striking with the vibrancy of a recent punk past, an emphatic subversion of
the dominant voice of empire, is possibly the most powerful comment of the work,
suggesting that as human beings we would better serve ourselves by seeking to grasp
an inner, individuated strength, a strength that thrives without the need for external
recognition or accolade for well-intended deeds, a strength that equips us with an
automatic sense of self-worth and equal entitlement to roles traditionally held by a
culturally nepotistic elite.
Remembrance
And yet, despite Hiller’s brilliant exposition of the fundamental flaws of fixed
representation, Monument contains an inevitable paradox. In representing the plaques
of the Watts memorial, it regenerates the very ideas that Watts himself intended to be
conveyed in the original. As Brett explains:
Hiller fragments and dissolves the spatial boundaries… in order to redefine the
relationship between actual and imaginative space. (Brett, 1991: 137-138)
In reproducing the text contained on the walls of the memorial, shifting the reference
points of time and space and pasting them onto the blank wall of the present, Hiller
propels these objects into current conscience. Monument not only supersedes Watts’

12. [12]
original, but gives it a fresh validity; by ‘resurrecting’ the lives of those
commemorated, Hiller extends Watts’s motivations, not only preserving but re-
enforcing the representations of the dead. As she says (referring to one of the names
on the plaques):
Amelia Kennedy in the body nineteen years… as a representation 109 years.
(Hiller, 1986: [10])
She has breathed new life into the portraits which ironically have endured longer than
the memories of the lives of the individuals themselves.
In a final act of self-defence, perhaps, Hiller takes a significant step to ensure
that Monument is a conscious testament, a ‘registration’ (Hiller, 1986: [10]) to her
own life – in the symbolic representation of forty-one photographs and the recording
of her own voice on the tape. It is therefore not only an ironic monument to the limits
of human ambition and the ultimate triumph of oblivion, but a functional memorial to
a living person – a living piece of heritage. When the visitor sits on the bench and
listens to the tape, he or she becomes an active participant in the ritual of
commemoration – in just the same way that a visitor to the Cenotaph on
Remembrance Sunday, for example, will participate in events in the present while
attempting to resurrect events from the past. As Einzig observes (Einzig, 1991: 63),
in Hiller’s work there is no ‘objective reality’ – a view shared by the artist:
…you see the bench… and then if you choose to involve yourself further you
sit down…. at that point of course… you become a performer… a live body

13. [13]
in front of this wall which discusses dead bodies. And that’s the way that piece
works. (Hiller, cited in Rawson, 2003: 5)
Ceremony
The component of performance, often public and often central to acts of
remembrance, manifests with varying degrees of theatricality. Why, if grief is
ingenuous and heartfelt, there should be a need for performance – a contrived and
public presentation of drama – is an interesting question to explore. Take, for
example, those who commemorate the life of King Charles I (1600-1649) by laying
wreaths on each anniversary of his death at the foot of his statue in Charing Cross.
[Fig. 5] To many, this act may seem absurd – in the same way that it might be
ludicrous to remember, for example, ‘those who fell at the battle of Thermopylae in
the 5th century BC’ on Remembrance Sunday. Yet for the performers of this ritual, in
this case the Royal Stuart Society, the ceremony is imbued with ostensible meaning.
In the light of Hiller’s Monument, it becomes apparent that the act of
remembrance rarely stems from an altruistic aspiration to resurrect the dead; a surface
appearance of compassion may belie an egocentric inclination to seek to negate a
seemingly insufferable sense of absence. Might it be then that the urge to remember
is driven by an unconscious fear of the loss of self, and in instances where an
individual has no direct or obvious means of dispelling that fear, he or she will find
the appropriate comfort – whether that be the comfort of connecting with the familiar
– such as the memory of a recently deceased family member – or, in extreme cases,
the comfort of fabricating a link with the unfamiliar – in the act, for example, of

14. [14]
‘remembering’ a monarch who died over three-hundred years ago? But if this is the
case, the need for ceremony remains unexplained.
If, as Cosgrove suggests, ritual and ceremony are often used to ‘legitimate the
institutions of the state’ (Cosgrove, cited in Burch, forthcoming 2005: 3) or indeed
any politicized organization, then in the case of the Royal Stuart Society the ceremony
may well be the only means of legitimating the Society’s very existence. A view put
forward by Cannadine would support this hypothesis, contending that elites often
consolidate their ‘ideological dominance by exploiting pageantry and propaganda’.
(Cannadine 1983: 104) What is more, when pomp and ceremony surround the death
of a monarch, it may be regarded as
… a requiem, not only for the monarch himself, but for a country as a great
power. (Cannadine 1983: 105)
It would seem then that the motivation of the Royal Stuarts in their act of
remembering King Charles I is likely to be political, the present-day ‘mourners’ not
performing their theatrical and austere display of commemoration in order to assuage
any emotive or personal sense of grieving, but rather to make a political comment on
the state of the nation’s constitution. It would appear (though the author cannot claim
to comprehend the motivation entirely) that they are aggrieved at the notion of
democratic governance by parliament and would in fact rather be ruled by an autocrat
who believes in the ‘divine right of kings’. A visitor to Charing Cross on 30th January
1988 described the scene:

15. [15]
A chaplain said prayers, soldiers from the Royal Horse Artillery sounded their
trumpets and the link with Scotland was confirmed by the presence of a piper.
(Blackwood, 1989: 23)
Evidently for some, perhaps for those harbouring the most intimate memories of the
centuries-dead Stuarts, the event was charged with an emotional intensity the like of
which had not been felt since the previous year’s act of remembrance.
Fig. 5 The ceremony of remembrance. On 30th January each year, the anniversary of the death of
King Charles I, the Royal Stuart Society lays wreaths at the foot of his statue in Charing Cross.
[source: Blackwood, 1989:23]
However, before all forms of ceremony are dismissed as disingenuous or
absurd, it is worth recalling the diverse range of ceremonious acts. While some are
carried out with the hope of resurrecting past events or sustaining the status quo,
others are conducted with quite the reverse intention: in remembering world-wide

16. [16]
conflicts, for example, and the lives of those who fell, whether done privately in
solitude or ritually en masse, the past is regenerated with the intention of ensuring that
the tragedies of that past are never repeated. Though this hope may seem somewhat
forlorn, there is no doubt that the attitudes of the dominant powers have shifted over
previous decades – from the dispassionate and imperious to the PR-conscious and
placatory. This is evident, for example, in NATO’s continued efforts to ensure that
their ‘laser-smart bombs’ hit targets with ‘pinpoint accuracy’, their strategies designed
to keep ‘collateral damage’ to a bare minimum. Of course, these ‘benign’ intentions
are frequently undermined by the failure of ‘laser-smart bombs’ to hit their targets and
the resulting deaths of thousands of civilians, but nonetheless the shift in attitude, no
matter how slight or cynical, is a significant move away from the jingoistic and
unashamedly imperialist attitudes of the past; and ceremonious remembrance has at
least played its part in coercing a political necessity for these less openly belligerent
attitudes.
As George V said while visiting the First World War cemeteries of Flanders:
We can truly say that the whole circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves
of our dead… and, in the course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked
myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth
through the years to come, than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to
the desolation of war. (King George V, 1922; cited at CWGC [online])
The conciliatory and transformative potential of remembrance is irrefutable.

17. [17]
Conclusion
To conclude then, Hiller’s Monument raises many contentious issues – issues that are
not on the margins, but at the core of Britain’s built heritage. It is clear, as Hiller
states, that ‘Memory can’t exist without representation’ (Soundtrack of Monument,
cited in Hiller, 1986: [36]) yet representation, when fixed, does not retain identity,
meaning or purpose in the ‘fullness of time’, the ‘fullness of time’ arrived at when the
past has passed from living memory – within only a few generations.
The streets and public spaces of the United Kingdom are replete with statues,
portraits and inscriptions pertaining to an obsolete mode of expression. Their
purpose, which was to regiment communities according to the parameters of the
Establishment in which they were cast, no longer applies. These are not memorials,
but monuments, whose identities and place are vacuous in present-day consciousness.
In the light of this, there is an argument for corrective and preventive action in
the conceptualization and development of public space – a regeneration that would
require the restructuring of space through tangible public art; and, in order for that art
to be tangible and accessible to a multiplicity of cultures, it must necessarily be
collectively devised, transient and eclectic. If equality and social inclusion are the
virtuous cornerstones of democracy, then anything less would be undemocratic.

18. [18]
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