Dan Hicks is professor of current archaeology at the University of Oxford and has worked at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum since 2007. He is best known for his polemical study of the Benin Bronzes, The Brutish Museums (2020), which politicised museum holdings and still rocks the curatorial world. Hicks now brings his radical gaze to bear on the cultural politics of collecting, drawing particularly on his Oxford experience. Every Monument Will Fall is a bracing book and will energise and exasperate in equal measure.
What it is not is a survey of public statues and their prominent place in the culture wars. Despite the title, this is a more discursive exploration of the visible manifestations of what Hicks describes as “militarist-realism” as found in museum holdings as well as in the monumental realm. Hicks defines this term as “corporate-militarist imperialism”. The huge Pitt Rivers collections—presented to the University of Oxford in 1884 after the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) rejected them—are sifted through and their colonialist connotations held under a harsh light. Augustus Pitt Rivers (then named Fox) served briefly in the Crimean War (1854-56), and a Russian musket from the Alma is among the objects. “In this museum, violence persists in material form,” Hicks opines. There is a lot on military matters—clearly a zone of discomfort for the author, but here diligently tackled and an intriguing subject—that shed light on the sheer strangeness of the 19th century, with its brew of imperial expansion, technological advances and belief in the superiority of the white man. Hicks diagnoses a case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for Pitt Rivers, who “took that trauma, the lasting immediacy of the memory of atrocity, and repressed it by weaponising it in different spheres”, such as collecting on an awesome scale.
Toxic anthropology
This is not an easy read. Subtitled “A story of remembering and forgetting”, Hicks’s tale—it is not history, despite being heavily footnoted—is more of an intellectual autobiography. It begins with a skull cup presented to Worcester College, Oxford, in 1946. The college appointed Hicks to investigate its provenance and origins, and his findings provide the launch point for his assault on Victorian patriarchs and their toxic approach to anthropological studies. The donor of this dratted object (now boxed up in the archives) was Michael Fox-Pitt, Augustus’s grandson, who had been imprisoned during the Second World War as a Nazi sympathiser. The layers of sinister association—a mille-feuille of malice in Hicks’s mind—are sifted through. There is something of the Patrick Wright approach to exploring the past here: the rootling, the teasing out of a theme from unpredictable sources. There is also a touch of patricide as the Pitt Rivers employee lays into the founding motivations of what remains one of the most remarkable museums in the land. Is it time for a change of scene?
One strange editorial decision was to have no illustrations. For a discussion of something so visual and art historical as monuments, this is more than puzzling. Hicks is not a reliable guide to sculpture (as one instance, Richard Westmacott’s giant 1822 bronze statue of Achilles in Hyde Park is emphatically not a depiction of Wellington) and he is much more at home with anthropological matters. The Albert Memorial is, apparently, where “militarist realism reached for fantasy at a new scale”. One of the reasons why statues matter is that they add to the interest of our historic places and are frequently of high sculptural quality. This is not a consideration with which Hicks engages.
‘Relentless partiality’
There are times in this book when the going gets rough. Objectors to the removal of Grinling Gibbons’s Tobias Rustat memorial (around 1686) in the Jesus College chapel, Cambridge—of whom this reviewer was one—are compared to the Donald Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol in 2021. It is this relentless partiality that undermines his case and makes what might have been a carefully argued case for further statue-toppling into a sustained rant. The literary device of having an internal dialogue between the author and his unnamed confidante intensifies this. Accusations of culture warfare are inevitably directed to those who question “fallism”. You have only to look to the US right now to see how officialdom can react to this divisive approach, punishing cultural bodies like the National Park Service for perceived political bias. Oliver Dowden’s reaction, when UK culture secretary, promoting the sensible and widely accepted stance of “retain and explain”, now seems extraordinarily restrained. Hicks is exasperated by “bothsidesism”: right now it feels that tolerance is exactly what is most needed.
• Dan Hicks, Every Monument Will Fall, Hutchinson Heinemann, 592pp, not illustrated, £25 (hb), published 1 May
