The Well-Tempered Memorial: Abstraction, Anthropomorphism, Embodiment

This paper addresses some crucial categories in contemporary practices of memorialisation and public sculpture, including the polarities of “abstraction / figuration” and “transitivity / intransitivity” and the questions of anthropomorphism and embodiment. Referring to paradigmatic cases belonging to different media—sculpture, architecture, video installations—and comparing different memorialistic subjects (the Holocaust memorials, the Italian fascist sacraria, the monuments dedicated to the Vietnam war), the chapter investigates the dialectics of presence and absence in the relationship between the present material body of the monument and the absent bodies evoked by the process of memorialisation.