Financial Obelisks: on the return of the monumental

A new age of monument-making is on its way. In this short article I will try to explain the geo-political, social and symbolic reasons for the (coming) renaissance of monuments as a means for political domination.

 

 

Preface: Eiffel Towers

 

When the first design of the Eiffel Tower was produced in 1884, France had just emerged from one of its bleakest periods. After the defeat against Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and the wave of civil revolts that originated from the Paris Commune of 1871, the French Nation needed to prove itself again as a believable power in the eyes of the world. The times were fluid and dangerous, and the European balance of forces was being reassessed. France had to show itself as a reliable, stable, united political and economic entity – and the 1889 Exposition Universelle provided a perfect opportunity for such a display of solidity and power.

 

In October 2008, when the Mayor of London Boris Johnson and Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell agreed that ‘something extra’ was needed to celebrate the Olympics, the country had just begun to sink into the whirlpool of economic recession. When Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit project was selected on 31st March 2010, the country had just admitted to the world to have entered its first double-dip recession since 1975, when Britain had to beg the IMF for rescue funding. The international credibility of the old Kingdom and of its Capital City-State was in peril, and immediate measures were required to show that stability, as well as power, was still part of the character of mighty Albion. What better way of achieving this, than investing on a monumental, non-functional artefact, such as Kapoor’s reinterpretation of the Eiffel Tower?

 

 

From the golden age of neoliberalism...

 

During the golden age of the neoliberal dream, when the bipolarism of the Cold War suddenly started melting into Fukuyama’s End of History, the arts started to progressively removed themselves from the ethics and aesthetics of monumentality. Speeding along the highways of new digital technologies, new micropolitics and new performative identities, artists stepped away en masse from the heavy features of monumental art. The unglamorous task of seriously dealing with monument-making was left to architects, and they also tried to disguise their assignment under the functionalist facade of their buildings. These architects were building ‘landmark architectures’, not just monuments, they were building fully-manned, electrified office blocks, not just empty towers pointlessly aiming towards the sky. Or at least, that was the pretence.

 

A few exceptions remained. On the one hand there were those, like Koons or Hirst, who eventually slipped back into the temptation of leaving a trail of monuments. Their work, however, had more to do with an attempt at self-monumentalising (under the disguise of ironic posturing), rather than interpreting a precise political need and expressing it in a monumental form. On the other, there were those, like the Royal Families of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, who thinned the camouflaging layer of functionalism to the bare minimum, commissioning Babel towers that almost bordered with the perfect gratuity of pure monuments.^[1] [1]

 

Monument-making, however, finds its true justification only in the absence of any believable functional use. Its function lies not in the use of the monument as an object or a space, but as a symbolic element of a political language. In its ridiculous implausibility, in its disconnection from the surrounding environment, in its absolute self-referentiality, a monument expresses the nakedness of its being a pure message. Think of the choice of the name Holy Roman Empire for the Frankish kingdom of which Charlemagne was crowned Emperor in 800 AD. Clearly, almost 400 years after the dissolution of the Roman Empire, nothing remained of the Roman legacy in a kingdom ruled by Barbarians. Yet the adjective ‘Roman’ (and subsequently, from 1157, ‘Holy’) had no other function but that of a linguistic monument: an implausible, disconnected, self-referential, linguistic mastodon, whose only aim was to assert the stability and power of one of the many warring kingdoms of the European bloodbath of the early Middle Ages.

 

 

...to the new feudal era

 

What are the functions of monuments today (and tomorrow)? Whose new power are they meant to reflect?

 

The current global condition is slowly moving towards a similar geopolitical scenario to that of the early Middle Ages. After the brief Empire of the Western nations, the power balance has become increasingly unstable. Not only nation states but also a multitude of corporations and financial conglomerates, struggle for power on a global scale. After the collapse of the global economy as we knew it in 2008, banks and financial institutions have brutally come to the forefront as explicit players for power. With a dramatic coup de theatre, almost simulating their own death as they asserted their might, they emerged from the shadow in which they had long operated, to present themselves as competitors for legitimate, mainstream power not only over the resources of the world, but also over its populations.

 

This – ongoing – shift from back to front stage of financial institutions modifies the necessities of their communicative strategies. As they move the focus of their desire from the dark room of the puppeteer to the bright lights of the throne room, the naked body of their numerical entities requires new, adequate clothes to present itself to the world.

The world has new kings, long live the kings!

 

 

Financial monuments

 

Proceeding once again along the well-trodden paths of the feudal Middle Ages, the metropolises and landscapes of the globe await the becoming-concrete, becoming-glass-and-steel of the new verbum. In the face of the crumbling (though not yet demise) of the old regime of State and traditional capitalism, financial institutions find themselves in need of justifying semiotically the breadth of their ambition.

 

If the so-called “99%” of the world population shouts their rage at the violence of financial institutions, then these same institutions have to crush the opposition to the legitimacy of their claim to power under the weight of unequivocal, perfect monuments. If they want the dwellers of the lands of their property to bow in front of the new kings, financial institutions need to build their own, pure totems. They need to provide new monumental objects of veneration to the (soon) cheering subjects of the future.

 

In their quest for traditional, mainstream power, financial institutions have thus to progress from the shyness of ‘landmark architecture’ towards uncompromising monumentality. Capitalism and especially financial capitalism might have transcended the traditional forms in which power is exerted, yet, their subjects still cling onto the traditional requirements for the display of their submission and for the satisfaction of their desire for submission. It is not for the vanity of the king that monuments are erected, but for the vile adoration of his subjects.

 

 

Competing towers

 

Between the 12th and 13th century, over 180 towers were erected in the Italian city of Bologna. Behind such a fanatic building spree, there was the need for the richest local families to display their power and might, as they competed against each other in the papal/imperial investiture controversy, . Despite their immediate military character, the towers of Bologna didn’t have any plausible military use – also due to their suffocating proximity to each other – but were true, pure monuments in themselves.

 

While today’s battlefield for power stretches much wider then the narrow borders of a medieval town, the dynamics at play have remained the same. Even within global finance, a number of competing institutions struggle for power over their field. Different banks, investment funds, conglomerates, and so on, compete with each other, while the investiture controversy no longer bothers Popes and Emperors, but state cabinets and company boardrooms.

 

Whereas banks and financial groups used to content themselves with the bourgeois pleasures of liberal patronage and collecting (and obviously, reselling) art, now that their scope and ambitions have expanded, they are bound to refine their relationship with the arts as part of strategy that exceeds the low-ceilings of accountancy.

 

The age that is about to dawn – and possibly, also, soon vanish – will no longer be that of office blocks and ‘landscape signatures’, but the turgid time of obelisks and arches, towers and statues. As the consumption-based economy of late capitalism sinks like a heavy red sun under the horizon, the cold moon of non-utilitarian objects will shine in tomorrow’s sky. Dropping the warm appearance of its democratic clothes, power will once again reveal itself in the lunar brightness of its true nature. Power will soon shine, in our metropolises and over our mountains, as an enormous, unutterable alphabet of words that are not meant for humans to repeat, but to worship.

 

This will be the age of the thousand warring Pharaohs, the thousand Hammurabi, the convulse spring of many a Holy Roman Empire, each shouting through their monuments the legitimacy of their claim to power over lands and people. And, as it always happens when new monuments are built, new legions of slaves and worshippers will be summoned from every neighborhood to erect them. After all, who built Thebes of the 7 gates? In the books you will read the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?