Using Monuments

This thesis examines monuments as cultural objects, and repositions them as points of intersection between psychoanalysis, society, art, remembrance and politics. Building on psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott's work on object use, this thesis maps the disruptive nature of monuments, and their propagation of difficult or irresolvable questions.

The first chapter is a research trip diary which details a journey through Poland, Austria and Germany in search of Holocaust monuments. It is a piece of critical self-reflexion, a point from which the subsequent chapters stem, forming the point of interaction with the monuments as physical objects.

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Chapter two examines the elusive presence of Rachel Whiteread's Memorial to the Austrian Jewish Victims of the Shoah. Using Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's formulations on cryptonymy, this chapter explores the possibility that Whiteread's work is a false archive that disguises a hidden centre. This, it is suggested, could parallel a similar characteristic within Holocaust discourse