Juan Muñoz: Untitled (Monument)
20 February - 19 April 1992
Jubilee Gardens, London SE1
Photograph Lisa Harty
Originally commemorating the formal end of fighting in the First World War (on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918) the Cenotaph in Whitehall encompassed the remembrance of the dead from subsequent wars.
The Cenotaph, designed by Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens and completed in 1920, was a stepped and canted obelisk with minimal ornamentation, whose largest angled planes, if projected vertically, would meet at a single point exactly one mile above the base.
Juan Muñoz said of the Cenotaph, "It is one of the most outstanding pieces of modern geometry I can think of. It hasn't been damaged by the passage of time”. On the opposite side of the Thames, between the South Bank arts complex and County Hall in the Jubilee Gardens, Muñoz built a sculpture, 4.5 metres high, of granite slabs, with three bronze flagpoles and three bronze flags. Muñoz contributed with this "sculpture designed as a monument", a monument to nothing, to the exhibition Doubletake, which explored the theme of collective memory through significant bodies of work.
Untitled (Monument), Muñoz's work with Gavin Bryars Pieces for Radio and Stephan Balkenhol's Head of a Man / Figure on a Buoy were all commissioned by Artangel in association with the Southbank Centre as part of the exhibition Doubletake: Collective Memory and Current Art at the Hayward Gallery, 20 February - 19 April 1992.
