A Postmodern Proof

The final example presented in this history of hero buildings – Douglas Gordon’s ‘Proof’, made in 1990 on Glasgow Green – was created well outside the temporal boundary of the elongated stretch to which the concept of the ‘long nineteenth century’ is taken here. Beside the question of anachronistic exceptionalism however, there are further aspects to this monument which mark it out as a very different type of commemorative act. In the first place, the monument was not a purpose-built structure, and the memorial component occupied, or was projected across, what was the semi-ruined remains of a functional but disused building of the industrial era. The creation of the monumental elements was not conceived of, nor designed by an architect, but by an artist, and the work was not seen through by a committee of representatives from a community, but by two of the artist’s friends. ¹ There are, nonetheless, a number of ways in which examination of this monument can afford us new critical insights into the tradition of the Scottish hero building as described above. There are elements of ‘Proof’ – the sandstone walls of a nineteenth-century building, its open exposure to a place of civic importance (Glasgow Green), and the displaying of an evidently historically significant message, in words and dates, on its façade – which bring it into dialogue with that monumental tradition. Indeed in its scale and proportion, in its reuse of a utilitarian building for monumental purposes, and its refitting of the ‘interior’ of that building with a palimpsest of commemorative messages, the project ‘Proof’ bears a highly specific, and not unironic, resemblance to that of the Scottish National War Monument. Furthermore, the contention here is that although similar to the Hamilton Mausoleum and McCaig Monument in terms of its ambiguities regarding the ‘hero’ or ‘heroes’ of the monument, it is not an aberration from the tradition as they are, so much as a complete metacritical mutation which commemorates the long-past end of the tradition in addition to any other specifically historical event. As such, the loss of ‘Proof’ in 2012 through an unforeseeable accident which left the owners – like those of the Kilmarnock Burns Monument in 2004 – obliged to bulldoze the remains, provides us with yet another set of paradigms with which to read the history of the tradition.