At the entrance to City Park in New Orleans, Louisiana, a monument to Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard rose twenty-seven feet over the citizens of New Orleans until 2017, when the sculpture was removed from its pedestal. Following the removal, Mayor Mitch Landrieu asked: “why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame… all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.” This landscape of empty pedestals was confronted by Paula Wilson that fall. Rather than erect a material monument that would directly replace the fallen General Beauregard, Wilson turned to her own body. Before the sun rose early one morning, she climbed atop the empty pedestal and began dancing in a performance titled “Living Monument.” This paper analyzes Wilson’s performance and its documentation as radical acts of refusing the logics of monumentality. In examining this work, I consider how performance as a mode of memorialization completely destabilizes the monumental presentation of a static history, thus offering a new grammar by which to think through modes of revolution and redress in the symbolic landscape.

中文翻译：

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基座上的影响和纪念

在路易斯安那州新奥尔良城市公园的入口处，一座联邦将军 PGT Beauregard 的纪念碑矗立在新奥尔良市民上方 27 英尺的高度，直到 2017 年，该雕塑被从基座上移走。拆除后，市长米奇·兰德里乌 (Mitch Landrieu) 问道：“为什么没有奴隶船纪念碑，为什么公共土地上没有显着的标记来纪念私刑或奴隶区？没有什么值得纪念我们生命中这一漫长的篇章；痛苦、牺牲、耻辱……这一切都发生在新奥尔良的土地上。”那年秋天，保拉·威尔逊（Paula Wilson）面对了这片空荡荡的基座景观。威尔逊没有竖立一座物质纪念碑来直接取代倒下的博勒加德将军，而是转向了她自己的身体。一天清晨，太阳升起之前，她爬上空荡荡的基座，开始跳舞，表演名为“活的纪念碑”。本文将威尔逊的表演及其记录分析为拒绝纪念性逻辑的激进行为。在审视这部作品时，我考虑了作为一种纪念模式的表演如何完全动摇了静态历史的纪念性呈现，从而提供了一种新的语法来思考象征景观中的革命和补救模式。