Final session 'Dark Horses and Hollow Men'

Hi,
hope you have manged to make some more of the puzzling aphorisms of Walter Benjamin's 'Theses on history'. I would love to have a lot more time to go through these with you, they are so dense but illuminating we could tackle just one or two per session and take a term to get through them all, bending our minds all the time into new shapes regarding History.

Nevertheless, I WILL try to look at a few at the start of Thursday's session just to keep you interested. I hope also that the other handouts - on Surrealism, W.G. Sebald, and J.D. Salinger- have also been used and not merely become studio detritus. They are all very rich in ideas an wonderful means of expressing them.

What is and is not a monument? What is and is not historic? And who is and is not a hero?
The title I am using this week is my own and it arises form a deep interest I briefly took a few years ago in the extraordinariness of anachronism (related to Breton's love of the recently outmoded mentioned by Benjamin) i.e. the continued presence of urban monuments which seem (as is their raison d'etre) to persist most strangely amid the ever-more rapidly changing city environment. I have a large amount of images collected on this theme so hopefully this final session will be a bit more visual.

'Dark Horses' are what you of course often see in the militarist monuments, but in English this is a phrase that refers to someone with a quietly clever strategy of moving to the top almost unnoticed -it is slightly shifty, derogatory and unsavoury, and yet, simultaneously admiring. 'Hollow Men' could also refer to the process of bronze castiing from which the city's monuments are largely made but it is also the title of a classic modernist poem by T.S. Eliot that you might want to take a look at online or in the library before the session.

What I also want to do with this session is trace the path of the Hero, from Baudelaire's use of the heroic to instigate modern art, through James Joyce's appropriation of classicism in 'Ulysses', to Robert Smithson's Kodak-snapped 'MONUMENTS OF PASSAIC' (certainly worth re-reading), through to Carl Andre's 'rugs' (on which the people finally occupy sculpture's plynth) and finishing with Marc Quinn and Anthony Gormley's (and now the RAF's) use of Trafalgar Square's so-called Fourth Plynth.

Thus, in this final session of the Option the monument and the Hero operate as vehicles for the historic (if not History itself) to enthuse and inspire modernist, postmodernist and contemporary artists alike.
What is and is not a monument? What is and is not historic? And who is and is not a hero?