Acts of Deposition: Afterlives and Social Lives

[Opening paragraph] Historically and geographically, contested monuments are consistently unstable things. They may be physically on the move, as material objects deposed from plinths and broken, removed, and relocated or destroyed, or conceptually mobile, as symbols with meanings remade in discursive space. Their contested situations may generate and disseminate new images. Understanding the monumentality of certain contested sculptures, as Edwin Coomasaru contends, requires that we see monuments as “an aesthetic form of social antagonism”. This image from a satirical pamphlet published in 1641 could be seen to exemplify such antagonism in the portrayal of Charing Cross, on the left, clutched by fearful clerics, and on the right, Cheapside Cross, attacked as an idol by Nonconformist Protestants (fig. 7). This image is testament to the long history of collective conflicts over monuments.