Mouillaud, Maurice

“Vanishing Monuments” by Jochen Gerz: a dialectic between the visible and the invisible - 2014.


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This new article presents an overview of Jochen Gerz’s “Vanishing Monuments,” dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust, which are in fact “counter-monuments” as they are gradually hidden from sight in the process of their creation. Unlike commemorative monuments, which are “positive” tributes, Gerz has invented a monument not to fullness but to the void. Gerz was faced with a dilemma: how to make a work of art with an absolute “negative”—the negation of a people. This involves making and un-making at the same time; accompanying the flow of time by building a monument “by default.” Its disappearance is not due to the external action of time and denial but is its very principle. Maurice Mouilaud’s reflections center on the limit, or the separation, between the visible and the invisible—the invisible being the other side of visible—and on the impossibility of there being a proper place for such a monument.