Small Monuments : recording and forgetting in the work of Steve McQueen

The notion of memory is key to understanding the practice of artist and film-maker Steve McQueen. McQueen's work has often been examined as either politically active or focused on body dynamics. Yet the manner in which he resorts to the theme of disappearance and addresses historical events that barely surface in popular Western narratives is comparable to the construction of monuments, wherein body and politics become inalienable from each other. Monuments are understood here as phenomena susceptible to eliciting memory and as material but mutable manifestations of past events. This article argues that certain works by McQueen constitute inquiries into possible ‘sites of memory’, as defined by Pierre Nora, but in this case concerning marginalised and minority histories. Articulated between documentary and fiction, from video installation to cinema, these works do not invent an interior life for the historical figures they depict. As such, they conform to what Saidiya Hartman has called ‘narrative restraint’, understood here as an ethics of both memorialising and film-making