More Lasting Than Bronze

After a lengthy conference call with people in America and then a bamboozling email from someone else I took myself to the Burns Monument for a second or two of sanity.

Jonathan Owen’s new work is sited in the Burns Monument, a neo-classical circular temple, built in 1831 to house a statue of Robert Burns by the artist John Flaxman. The portrait was removed 8 years after the monument opened, amid fears that smoke from a nearby gasworks was damaging the statue. Since then the miniature building has lain empty and largely closed to the public. Owen’s work, itself dependent on a process of anti-monumentalising, invites us to reflect on who and how society seeks to immortalise.