Dan Hicks has been a professor of current archeology at the University of Oxford and has been working at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford since 2007. He is best known for his controversial study of the Benin bronzes, Brutal museums (2020), which politicizes museum holders and always shakes the world of conservation. Hicks now brings his radical look at the cultural policy of collection, relying in particular on his experience as Oxford. Each monument will fall is a book of bracing and will energize and exasperate in an equal measure.
What is not is an investigation into public statues and their important place in cultural wars. Despite the title, this is a more discursive exploration of the visible demonstrations of what Hicks describes as “militarist-realism” as in museum titles as well as in the monumental field. Hicks defines this term as “the imperialism of the corporate militarist”. The huge collections of Pitt Rivers – presented at the University of Oxford in 1884 after the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert museum) rejected them – have screened and their colonialist connotations held under severe light. Augustus Pitt Rivers (then named Fox) briefly served in the Crimean War (1854-56), and a Russian Mousquet of Alma is one of the objects. “In this museum, violence persists in its material form”, is Hicks. There are a lot about military issues – an area of discomfort for the author, but here with diligence addressed and an intriguing subject – which highlighted the strangeness of the 19th century, with its offense with imperial expansion, technological advances and belief in the superiority of white man. Hicks diagnoses a case of post-traumatic stress disorder (SSPT) for Pitt Rivers, which “took this trauma, the lasting immediacy of the memory of the atrocity, and repressed it in armaments in different spheres”, such as collection on an impressive scale.
Toxic anthropology
It is not an easy reading. Subtitled “a story to remember and forget”, the story of Hicks – this is not history, although it is highly noted from the footsteps – is more an intellectual autobiography. It begins with a skull cup presented at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1946. The college appointed Hicks to investigate its origin and its origins, and its results provide the launch point of its assault against the victorian patriarchs and their toxic approach to anthropological studies. The donor of this draft object (now cashed in the archives) was Michael Fox-Pitt, the grandson of Augustus, who had been imprisoned during the Second World War as a Nazi sympathizer. The layers of the sinister association – a mille -feuille of wickedness in the mind of Hicks – have passed through. There is something of the Patrick Wright approach to explore the past here: The Rootling, the teasing theme of unpredictable sources. There is also a touch of patricide while the employee of Pitt Rivers puts in the founding motivations of what remains one of the most remarkable museums in the country. Is it time for a scene change?
A strange editorial decision was not to have any illustrations. For a discussion on something as visual and historical of art as monuments, it is more than confusing. Hicks is not a reliable sculpture guide (like a case, the giant bronze statue of Richard Westmacott 1822 from Achille to Hyde Park is not a representation of Wellington) and it is much more comfortable with anthropological questions. The Albert memorial is, apparently, where “militarist realism has reached fantasy on a new scale”. One of the reasons why the statues is important is that they add to the interest of our historic places and are often of high sculptural quality. This is not a consideration with which Hicks is committed.
“Relentless partiality”
There are times in this book when things become difficult. Objectors to the elimination of the Tobias Rustat Memorial of Gibbons de Grimbons (around 1686) in the chapel of Jesus College, Cambridge – of which this criticism was one – are compared to the supporters of Donald Trump who took over the Capitol in 2021. It is this incessant bias that undermines his case and did what could have been a careful case for more status projected. The literary system of having an internal dialogue between the author and his nameless confidant intensifies this. The accusations of cultural war are inevitably directed towards those who question “falsie”. You just have to turn to the United States to see how the administration can react to this division approach, punishing cultural bodies like the National Park Service for perceived political prejudices. The reaction of Oliver Dowden, when the British Secretary of Culture, promoting the sensible and widely accepted position to “preserve and explain”, now seems extraordinarily selected. Hicks is exasperated by “stupidity”: at the moment, he believes that tolerance is exactly what is most necessary.
• Dan Hicks, Each monument will fall, Hutchinson Heinemann, 592pp, not illustrated, £ 25 (HB), published on May 1