Despite my resistance to the retrogressive trap of nostalgia, I cannot help but to feel a longing for certain historical moments which could never materialise under today's realities. Herbert Ganado's memoirs Rajt Malta Tinbidel always succeed in plunging me into this mental state because of the narrative language of the author which is characterised by a sincere enthusiasm and the insightful recording of history in the making.
My most recent yearning for the past was incited by an image which appeared in an article on the restoration of Vince Apap's Triton Fountain (Wednesday 6 April, 2016). A photograph of crowds gathering round the new fountain in 1959 which portrayed a spectacular event. This was clearly a major happening of national importance, which undoubtedly had great significance to the country.
The photograph reminded me of another milestone inauguration of a monument. When Antonio Sciortino's Christ the King was created in 1917 to commemorate the 1913 XXIV International Eucharistic Congress, the unveiling event was packed with thousands of people! There was an incredible urge to see Sciortino's memorial, the commissioning of which was a serious national affair. This was a national cultural celebration of an artwork which people crowded to see. It seems, from photographic documents, that art and history were very much a part of everyone's life.
In fact, Ganado reminisces that his favourite memory of 1927 was the unveiling of Sciortino's Great Siege Monument which stands right across from the law courts. Sciortino's Valletta monuments, and also those of Apap, bear a visible sense of pride. The memory of historic events and individuals is manifested in their creative works of these artists.
The relationship between art and memory is fundamentally inalienable. There is a symbiotic emerging-from-the-other which gives birth to their being, circumscribing a history and its particular perceptual condition. Consequently, when a nation's social, political and artistic history is momentous to its present prosperity, one should expect its direct reflection in art to be an equally powerful remembrance and evocation of time. This is fitting for art in general, however public monuments owe a greater responsibility to memory purely due to their role as tangible records of cognitive immateriality.
However, when considering recent monuments, I do worry whether these have any meaning to society today. It is not the role of monuments which I doubt but the way in which they are being treated by artists and patrons. There is a palpable lack of interest and understanding on the subject, on the aesthetic and formal principles of monuments and their socio-cultural role, which is, to say the least, distressing. Some of the country's most important monuments seem to have been forgotten, their former glow now dimmed by indifference.
This neglect was taken a step further with the case of the Manwel Dimech monument in Castille Square which was recently recklessly placed on a pedestal, going against the wishes of Dom Mintoff himself. Mintoff asked sculptor Anton Agius to refrain from integrating a pedestal into the overall design of the monument to underline Dimech's social role. This was a deliberate aesthetic decision based on the philosophical and political work of Dimech who fought arduously for the intellectual progress of the Maltese at a time of ecclesiastic and colonial tension.
Apart from the aesthetic purpose of the work, the proportions were calculated for the monument to be seen on a very low stand. The added pedestal has completely distorted the viewer's relationship with the memory of Dimech as intended with this monument- formally and ideologically. This act showed a worrying disregard for Maltese history and art history, with the victim being one of the best, if not the best, monuments of the post-war era.
On describing the designs for the monuments to Guido de Marco, Censu Tabone and the original idea for that of Mintoff, Dr. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci has rightly stated that "the works must not only show assimilation with what the statesmen looked like but this assimilation must be transcended so as to reflect their spirit, ideas, struggles and the politicians they were in the widest sense of the word." (The Malta Independent, 11 December 2013). Several others have lambasted the plans for these monuments in the media.
The sense of cultural pride and dignity which is explicit in Sciortino's and Apap's monuments, and, in a bizarre way, even in those of Agius, is absent from recent projects which supposedly conform to the same function. Sciortino, as Schembri Bonaci's research on the artist has shown, was highly knowledgeable on monumental art; its history, aesthetic implications, architectural considerations and collective cultural role. Whether these are known or even noticed today is rather doubtful.
Aside for the unforgivable ruining of Agius's seminal homage to Dimech, the monuments which have been produced in the past few years are forgettable as artworks, and they command no spatial presence, undermining their function as monumental forms in public spaces. Except for their resemblance to a person's physicality, they bear no essence of why their memory should be retained. Some of those which are veritable containers of memory have been subject to neglect. Thus leading to Malta's historical dementia, or the obscuring of a cultural memory.