Doing Art in Public

This chapter examines a global history of monumental art and urban design, including perspectives on public memory, national symbolism and emerging artistic approaches to memorialisation. These include ‘counter-memorial’ and ‘anti-memorial’ approaches and their role in the preservation of cultural memory, embracing the perspectives of diverse scholars, designers and artists, explored via a range of historical and contemporary projects. Architectural vocabularies, spatial contexts and issues of figuration and abstraction are considered, and the chapter concludes with a brief examination of First Nations visibility and recognition in monuments and museums.