Press coverage

Life & Times, 28 February 1992

Frieze, Issue 2, November-December 1991:
"His sketches show a loosely rendered, unadorned version of the Cenotaph, and three flags shrouding their poles. In the drawings the flags look a little like Giacometti figures standing in a row against their stone backdrop. According to Muñoz’s notes the sculpture will be ‘disguised as a monument; a monument to nothing'. 'How great it would be,' he said, 'if someone mistook this sculpture for a memorial of some kind, and placed a wreath beneath it.'" (Adrian Searle - read full article)

Life & Times, 28 February 1992:
“Stirring immediate memories of the Lutyens Cenotaph across the river, Juan Muñoz’s monument on the South Bank seems at first to have been there since the first world war. Closer inspection discloses that the cement in the artificial stone is fresh and that the three bronze flags ranged salong the front carry no specific references. But the war memorial associations remain unmistakable, along with an elegiac air which chimes with the plaque commemorating the Marchioness riverboat disaster nearby. In his succinct ability to encompass past as well as present tragedies, Muñoz proves an ideal contributor to the Hayward Gallery’s latest exhibition. For the organisers – Lynne Cooke, Bice Curiger and Greg Hinty – have brought together an international array of 23 artists to “dig deep into the common memories of our culture”.” (Richard Cork)

City Limits, February – March 1992:
“An anonymous memorial for Jubilee Gardens on the South Bank - a monument not to some particular tragedy or triumph but to the act of memory itself. The bronze and artificial stone sculpture, which is a replica of The Whitehall Cenotaph (which literally means empty space) designed by Ed Lutyens in 1919…Not to be missed!” (Peter Fleissig)

Royal Academy Magazine, Spring 1992:
"The exhibition shows 23 artists, the majority of whom have never shown their work in London before. A number of artists are exhibiting their work not in the gallery but in more public spaces: Jeff Koons is making a poster for the Underground, Stephan Balkenhol is installing two sculptures by Blackfriars and Waterloo bridges, and Juan Muñoz is placing a huge sculpture by Jubilee Gardens. The exhibition promises to be a provocative experience." (Andrew Wilson)

The Guardian, 28 November 2002:
"The monument's purpose was unfixed, though there were those who imagined, erroneously, that it commemorated the tragic sinking of a Thames pleasure cruiser, which was much on people's minds at the time. This sculpture - if it is a sculpture, though we might see it more as an image of a monument than a monument itself - stood at a tangent to time. It stood - quite literally - apart from its context as a work in an exhibition, as well as from all the other monuments that occupy public spaces in our cities. And one day, it vanished." (Adrian Searle - read full article)

Contemporary Visual Arts of South Australia broadsheet, vol 32 no 2, 2003:
"Untitled (Monument) was an anonymous sculpture, Muñoz’s intention being that it be one which people would pass by as if it had always been there, a monument to the idea of memory itself. Both the artist and commissioner Artangel were responding to the novelist Robert Musil’s comment about monuments and the city – that attention “slips away from them like water slips off a duck’s back”. As quietly as it appeared in February 1992, it remained until its equally quiet disappearance the following April." (Alan Cruickshank - Download and read full article)