Institute of Contemporary Arts

Historic Monuments

Date: 20 May 2007

Reg Butler’s photomontage showing his winning proposal for a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner on its proposed site in West Berlin.

Another show, another get-in. The building smells strongly of paint, and once again I'm amazed at the plasticity of the lower gallery: walls, windows and rooms come and go as if they were made of some kind of gallery lego. We sneak downstairs to see the installation crew putting it all together: prints lie against walls, plastic sheeting covers the floors, paint is applied to large curious stars.

The show is Memorial to the Iraq War, which consists of proposals by international artists for memorials to the ongoing war in Iraq. Memorials are in the news: the removal of the Soviet war memorial in Tallinn caused rioting and deaths, and provoked a cyber-war, but it's still curious in a way to propose memorials to a war which may only just be beginning; and to propose a memorial to the war itself, rather than the fallen. The British culture of war memorials is very personal: in villages and railway stations you encounter grim roll call after roll call of the names of the dead. In Iraq, the Americans come home in body bags day by day, and the British week by week, but the true obscenity is in the bigger numbers of civilian Iraqi dead.

The mode of proposals is also rather curious - most of what's on show are of course 'works' in their own right, but carry the ghost of larger works within them. The exhibition has its most obvious antecedent in the 'Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner', an international sculpture competition held by the ICA in 1951, shortly after its inception, which called for proposals for a monument to prisoners of conscience, to be realised at a prominent site in West Berlin, right on the faultline between East and West, close to what would later become the Berlin Wall.

The competition attracted thousands of entries, but many leading European sculptors including Arp and Giacometti failed to enter, and the competition was boycotted by the Soviet Block. The overtones were clear: political prisoners were not a problem of the 'free' world. ICA founder Herbert Read was also uneasy about the involvement of American 'big business' in raising funds for the project, fearing that it would be 'the beginning of the end for any ideals I ever had' of a truly subversive and anarchic ICA.

A fascinating article by Robert Burstow in the Oxford Art Journal traces the history of the involvement of the CIA in funding the competition, and channelling money from American millionaire Jock Whitney. It's often alleged that post-war American Abstract Expressionism was funded by the CIA as a means to promote and export avant-garde art to Europe that was formally radical but politically immune to the associations with Communism that the European avant-garde had garnered. In fact, it seems Intelligence's taste was a little more eclectic and extended even to European modernist sculpture of the type that predominated in the Monument proposals. But poor press and public reaction to the winning sculpture, a loss of nerve by the American backers at Butler's 'ultra-modernism' and the thawing of the cold war after the death of Stalin put paid to the plans to realise the winning sculpture as a propaganda weapon of the Cold War.

Fast forward 56 years. Some would have us believe that the world is in the grip of a political and military struggle the equal of the cold war, and even those who oppose the very idea of the War on Terror see the battle as one against American imperialism. And yet the idea of such a close (if secret) relationship between the ICA and the American secret state is now unthinkable. There is not one pro-war artist in the show. I find it hard even to conceive of a piece of pro-war art.

Has the ICA defied the principles of institutional ossification and become more subversive and anarchic at sixty years old than Read dreamed it could be at four? Is this in fact a very different kind of war, being fought elsewhere, and elsehow? Or are we dealing with a situation to which the capacity of contemporary art to respond at all is extremely limited? As contributing artist Liam Gillick says :

Everywhere we see routine obscenity. For artists, the combination of piety and pragmatism from politicians on all sides is not worth showing back to them. Documenting the increasing piles of body parts is pointless pornography.

Whatever the case, I wouldn't put money on any of these proposals being realised outside the gallery any sooner than Reg Butler's.