In his short, strange retelling of the myth of Oedipus, Henri Lefebvre emphasises the hero’s encounter with the Sphinx and his solving of the eternal riddle. Oedipus responds to the creature’s question: ‘Sphinx, I know the being which has sometimes four feet, sometimes two, sometimes three: it is man. It is I. And man is that, and is not that, oh cruel one. Your riddle shows man as you see him, according to your own nature, triple-natured man, more beast than man, with the paws of a beast. Your riddle gives you away, oh winged virgin, girl-goddess with the claws of a wild animal. Now I know who you are, and you are mine.’ [1] Oedipus and the Sphinx stand in mutual recognition, mirror versions of one another. It is this shared affinity that Oedipus acknowledges later, after the fulfillment of his tragic prophecy. ‘Suddenly Oedipus realised that he had become the Sphinx, that he had always been the Sphinx, an enigma among men and among beasts, a monstrous riddle rather than the one by whom the riddle would be answered.’ [2]
Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession, 2024, photo: Sophie Pölzl
An unusual effect happens when entering the downstairs gallery at Secession. Ali Cherri’s sculpture Sphinx (2024) sits in the centre of the room, facing the entrance and partially reflected in the glass doors running parallel on each side. The image is tripled, intensified, and echoed like a shimmering mirage, a seshepankh. [3] This mutable, shape-shifting quality is appropriate, given the assemblage of different parts that constitute the figure, from its regal, humanoid bearing to its leonine body and ornately rendered wings (of course, in looking at these multiple Sphinxes, one’s own reflection cannot be avoided). Moulded in sand and clay, the creature’s muscular forelegs have been abruptly severed and replaced with a pair of patinated bronze limbs, their sharpened claws firmly clenching the earthen base below. The wings stretch rigidly, held back at a perpendicular angle and poised to take flight, while its tail curls languidly. The figure’s eyes are closed, its expression almost disdainful to the presence of passing observers. Cherri researched monumental depictions of dictators, politicians, and military figures to achieve this particular aspect; strongmen, after all, cultivate an enigmatic, otherworldly bearing, as if graciously deigning to rule over mortal men. Yet there is, inherent within the structure, an Ozymandian impermanence, marked by hubris and inevitability. The moisture that maintains the earth will, eventually, seep into the bronze. Cherri explains: ‘These two materials, bronze and mud, represent opposing directionalities of history-making. When they meet, what happens? I began thinking about processes like erosion, corrosion, and decay. The weakest material, mud, has the potential to slowly wear away at this solid, monolithic history, changing its colour, weakening its structure, and potentially toppling it.’ [4]
Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession, 2024, photo: Sophie Pölzl
The deterioration of the structure finds its complement in the adjacent cabinets, populated with empty, individually designed and spotlit wooden plinths (which, set behind glass and against plywood-panelled interiors, are difficult to discern as a whole). Toppled Monuments 1–6 (2024) quietly acknowledges their missing statues through the label’s list of locations: Kharkiv, Aleppo, Baghdad, Bristol, Vienna, Richmond. As the exhibition’s curator Jeanette Pacher explains, Cherri isn’t especially interested in encouraging visitors to guess the subjects; instead, it is enough to know that they’ve been dismantled, vandalised, or overturned. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to play along, recalling iconic footage of the unseating of Saddam Hussein or Edward Colston (with the latter ignominiously dumped into Bristol Harbour). It’s also striking to discover that the monument to the late-nineteenth-century Viennese mayor – and notorious antisemite – Karl Lueger has been defaced so often that the city solicited artists to find ways of addressing the controversy (the winning proposal, by Klemens Wihlidal, will tilt the statue 3.5 degrees to the right).
Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession, 2024, photo: Sophie Pölzl
Amid all the rancour over the toppling of contentious statues, it is important to remember that the argument itself is the point. Monuments of historic leaders deflect any consideration of their history: they impel only genuflection or ignorance. As Toufic states, ‘The memorial is either a symptom of the nostalgia for what is evil […] in which case it has to be fought (indeed, do not revolutions start with the destruction of many memorials?); or else, as it should be, mainly a reminder that we have not yet done the work in thought, art, film, video, music and literature to deserve that to which the memorial refers.’ [5] The toppling of these statues, literally and metaphorically bringing majestic figures down to earth, offers this reminder. Cherri’s podiums are open, unoccupied spaces, instilled with the promise of societal transformation while disavowing the need for such grandiose icons. Given the decentralised leadership of the masses behind the Arab Uprising, Black Lives Matter, or Rhodes Must Fall movements, an empty plinth might be a fitting gesture, best capturing – and preserving – the revolutionary moment where authority was seized and dispersed within the multitude. As Robert Bevan notes, ‘Nietzsche, identifying in monuments “the stamp of the will to power”, could easily have written the same regarding their demolition as their building.’ [6]
Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession, 2024, photo: Sophie Pölzl
The surprisingly unstable nature of the monument is further demonstrated in Tree of Life (2024). Positioned in the museum foyer, this austere vertical bronze sculpture comprises bent branches and stylised leaves, and draws on the multiple associations of the titular symbol: variations of the object appear in the Bible, the Quran, the Kabbalah, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. [7] The work itself is based on a Mesopotamian relief in the collection of the Louvre, while Cherri created the piece as part of a dialogic exhibition with the Swiss modernist Alberto Giacometti (who often visited the Louvre to sketch the Egyptian antiquities). If the ‘tree of life’ indicates a common root among diverse populations, it also contains the potential for sectarianism, with claims of any object’s (tacitly apolitical) universality dictated by the political powers at hand. Cherri notes that ‘when objects are placed in major museums like the Louvre or the British Museum, they become part of an ideology of universalism, with these institutions presenting themselves as stewards of humanity’s heritage.’ [8] This apparently benevolent gesture ultimately serves the interests of the custodians. In such cases, the monument exists merely as an empty receptacle, ready to be filled with meaning by its current guardian. As Ernesto Laclau has written, ‘the universal has no necessary body and no necessary content; different groups, instead, compete between themselves to temporarily give to their particularisms a function of universal representation.’ [9]
Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession, 2024, photo: Sophie Pölzl
Everything, eventually, gives way. A Monument to Subtle Rot (2024) is a slide projection that occupies a corridor space between galleries. With each steady click of the mechanism, there unfolds a sequence of typed sentences, grainy photographs of toppled monuments, and faint fields of patchy pink and blue. Each slide has been hand-printed, bearing scratches, dust, hairs, and fingerprints, imbuing the work with a sense of residual decay. Fragments of the Palestinian writer Karim Kattan’s text ‘This Is the Place I Told You About’ reveal an elusive story from the perspective of the statue, as if speaking directly to its observer: ‘Look closely. I am grown here. I decay here.’ ‘I used to be a mountain; a boot planted on solid ground, and the almighty foot within that boot, delicate but ruthless.’ ‘I am still sturdy below, look. Still strong, here. See?’ The figure is caught, mid-fall, momentarily suspended. Held aloft by a crane. Collapsed face-first in the dirt. A slide judders into place: ‘I am made myself at long last. A monument.’
Chris Clarke is a critic and curator based in Cork and Vienna.
Notes
[1] Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1995), 52.
[2] Ibid. 53.
[3] ‘How utterly beside the point was Napoleon when he said at the start of his conquest of Egypt, “From the summit of these monuments, forty centuries look upon us”, and not because the Sphinx, and by implication the statues in the nearby pyramids, do not look (the Sphinx is not an inanimate representation of the king but, as a result of certain rituals, a seshepankh, a living statue); but because they look beyond us even when seemingly looking in our direction.’ Jalal Toufic, ‘Oedipus in Egypt’, Forthcoming (Berlin: e-flux journal / Sternberg Press, 2014), 158.
[4] Ali Cherri, ‘“Do We Still Need Monuments?” Ali Cherri in Conversation with Emma Dean and Jeanette Pacher’, Ali Cherri: How I Am Monument, exh. cat. (Vienna: Secession, 2024), 9.
[5] Jalal Toufic, ‘To Pray or Not to Pray’, in Undeserving Lebanon (Beirut: Forthcoming Books, 2007), 17.
[6] Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 13.
[7] While clearly pointing towards an archetypal universality, there is an inevitable undercurrent of specificity: the artist often draws on his childhood in Beirut during the 1975–90 Lebanese Civil War, which included shifting factions of Maronite Christians, Lebanese Muslims, Palestinian insurgents, Phalangists, Pan-Arabists, and Druze as well as the 1982 Israeli Second Invasion of Lebanon (the current conflict, ongoing since 2024, marks the fourth Israeli invasion of Lebanon, with previous incursions also taking place in 1978 and 2006).
[8] Ali Cherri, ‘“Do We Still Need Monuments?”’, 7–8.
[9] Ernesto Laclau, ‘Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity’, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 35. For Laclau, the root of this impulse lay in nineteenth-century Europe, where ‘universalism had constructed its identity precisely through […] the universalisation of its own particularism,’ with imperialist expansion representing ‘part of an all-embracing and epochal struggle between universality and particularisms’ (p. 24). This Eurocentrism ‘was the result of a discourse which did not differentiate between the universal values that the West was advocating and the concrete social agents that were incarnating them’ (p. 34).
