arthistoricum.net

The toppling of monuments is a practice with immense visual power, and one that has been employed for thousands of years without losing any of its original charge. Time and time again, usually in the context of political or religious conflict, monuments are damaged, destroyed or pulled down in order to effect a visible break with the past, or at least to demand such a break. So it was in June 2020, when, in the wake of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests unleashed by racially-motivated police violence, monuments and statues of kings, generals and other figures of state who had been among the driving forces of colonialism and/or slavery during their lifetimes were attacked. What was unusual and interesting about these acts was the fact that the objects being destroyed had originated in the relatively distant past – and yet were now the specific and immediate focus of demonstrators’ emotions, and this on a global scale. In the following essay, the treatment of monuments during the BLM protests is examined using methods drawn from art history and conservation theory, before being contextualized within the research on iconoclasm through comparison with historical instances of the destruction of images.