Deborah Cherry

The Afterlives of Monuments

This initial essay proposes that monuments have afterlives. The study of the afterlives of monuments encompasses how, where, when and why monuments have been re-modelled, re-used, re-sited, re-made, cast aside, destroyed or abandoned to accommodate changing political and social climates; how they survive through re-invention and transformations. Afterlives accrue through material alteration and they accumulate in representation. The diverse ways in which monuments survive, it is argued, depends on definitions and listings of monuments, practices of monument-making past and present and recent debates over history and memory. The concept is proposed to capture afterlives that co-exist as well as those occur sequentially, and to suggest a model of greater complexity and plurality than a linear or quasi-biographical trajectory. Conflicts over monuments especially over their survival, it is suggested, are as much concerned with projections of a future, as with reconstructions of the past or mnemonic recollection. Monuments — ancient, modern and contemporary — have taken centre stage as different and competing South-Asian communities claim a stake in the making of national, religious, cultural and local histories and identities. In their varied afterlives, monuments emerge as extraordinarily mobile, marked by material change, put to new uses and interpretations, and travelling through image-banks, archives, collections and exhibitions. Their afterlives, like monuments themselves, are multi-media.

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (1829-1862)

This chapter offers a sustained critical examination of Elizabeth Siddall’s signficance as a practising artist within the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Her access to training, her exhibition record, patrons and collectors are considered, as are the range and subject matter of her artworks. In the mid-1850s Siddall developed a distinctive artistic style characterized by compositional layering, enclosed space, attenuated figures and jewel-like colours in which the furniture, dress and bulky folds of the drapery, as well as the execution in watercolour, all consciously rework pre-modern visual languages. The chapter argues that Siddall is a pioneering and inventive artist. Her scenes of dramatic encounter, sorcery and the supernatural inspired by reading Scottish ballads are ahead of the group. Her watercolours and drawings foregound women’s agency, women’s lives, experieneces and dilemmas. Her artistic technique is highly experimental in the use of colour blocks of brilliant colour. She was an early pioneer of artistic dress, wearing loose unstructured gowns she designed herself. In her Self-portrait of 1853, she regards her beholders with a steady, unwavering regard, challenging those who so frequently looked at her, regarding her only as model, muse and mistress of another artist.

FEMINIST INTERVENTIONS: FEMINIST IMPERATIVES

Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, 184 pp., 97 ills, £12.95 cloth, £5.95 paper