Every Monument Will Fall: A Conversation with Dan Hicks

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Artalog. I hope you enjoyed last week's episode with Nina Orme, where we were talking about remembering a legacy. Today, I want to extend that conversation and explore a little bit more about what it means to remember it within our society. And to do that, I wanted to reach out to Dan Hicks, who is one of my favorite researchers and writers right now, who has written these books that have been incredibly formative to my understanding of culture and remembrance and how art can be used to influence how we think about our history and also our future.

Dan Hicks is a professor of contemporary archaeology at Oxford University and a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. He writes about art, heritage, museums, colonialism and the material culture of the recent past and near present. If you don't know what that is, don't worry, because we get into it in today's episode. Dan's books include the Brutish Museums, the Benin Bronzes, colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, published by Pluto Press in 2020, and Every Monument Will Fall A Story of Remembering and Forgetting, published by Hutchinson Heinemann in 2025. Dan is active on social media and is commenting on basically everything that's at the top of our cultural conscious right now, and you can find him on Blue Sky or Instagram at ProfDanHicks. You can also learn more about Dan at his website, danhicksuk Dan. Welcome to the Artilogue. Thanks so much for chatting with me today.

Hello, lovely to meet you Hi.

Can you tell me about your current job and how you got to where you are?

Sure, absolutely so. I have been for 18 years now at something called the Pitt Rivers Museum, which is a university museum at the University of Oxford, and I'm also in the School of Archaeology, and so it's a joint appointment, a sort of a 19th century model of how to put an academic into a museum and to ensure that it's a research post as well, and so it's a wonderful job and it's in a museum of archaeology and anthropology. My own archaeological work involves being something called the professor of contemporary archaeology, and so I'm interested really in the material culture of the recent past and the near present, and obviously, as a part of that, it's about, if you like, the sort of history of objects in museums.

What way do you want to pursue teaching and research?

Well, I think it's a central part of what archaeology is really, isn't it? I mean, archaeology and anthropology are, you know, sort of subjects that have a public role. They're sort of about knowledge and so, you know, teaching, but also a public facing role, as you see in our museums, is important, and so, yeah, for me, museums are the public spaces for archaeology and anthropology, and I think, therefore, university museums have a really important role to play, not least when it comes to issues over, you know, restitution, or dealing with the histories which are bound up in those institutions which sometimes haven't been the focus of our larger sort of national museums or the Metropolitan Museum or whatever.

What does a typical day in your work look like?

Well, at the moment I'm on research leave and so really my days are involved in writing, but normally it's a mix of sort of teaching supervising masters and sort of doctoral students, the work on the database in the museum, giving talks, all the usual sorts of things that you'd imagine really.

So your new book tells the story of how we got to where we are in a culture war. Can you give a quick summary of this history?

Yes, of course. So Every Monument Will Fall is not only about statues, it's also about ancestral human remains, and so really it's a book about who, in institutions like museums or universities, or indeed out there in the public spaces of towns and cities, who gets remembered and memorialised, who gets remembered and memorialised and, if you like, who doesn't, who ends up with their body or their bones sort of being dehumanised and sort of denamed often as well. So it's really about who we remember, how we think about a memory culture in these institutions, and I think, underlining that really a lot of this is about not really history but memory who is it that we remember and how? And so to shift a memory culture isn't to cancel history. It's actually to decide that we want, as a society or an institution or a group, to remember somebody else.

You begin by asking the reader if they've ever been lied to. Can you elaborate on what some of these institutional myths are and how they affect people?

So really it's about not only who ought to be remembered.

Should it be, in the case of Oxford, cecil Rhodes, who was a famous colonizer and a very rich man?

This in some ways is about the super rich and how their names and their images get memorialised, but in some ways, for many people that is a lie when we want to actually sort of rather remember the wider histories of empire and actually the people that were on the sharp end of empire and sort of survived it, rather than those people who were the sharp end of empire and sort of survived it, rather than those people who were, you know, perpetrators.

And so you might say in some ways that the book is about sort of survival versus endurance. So in some ways these were memories that were built in order to endure, but equally we might sort of turn that around and seek to remember the people who survived. There is roads, but it's also a conversation which is happening across the US, it's happening across the world, and indeed the fallism movement, a bit like the restitution movement, is a sort of movement that has a long history and it's a history of being led from African and indigenous sort of groups over the years from the middle of the 20th century onwards, and so really the book is about trying to listen and to respond to those debates over fallism and restitution, but also the wider decolonisation of knowledge.

So these are conversations that happen not only in our museums or around monuments, but also in the seminar rooms and the libraries, although obviously I guess you're not meant to talk in libraries but you can still have a conversation with what's on the reading list or about actually, who do we teach and why, reading your book, one of the most concerning anecdotes that jumped out to me was, of course, the skull at Worcester College that was being used as a drinking vessel the human skull, as well as the talk about Cecil Rhodes and the politics of having the sculpture or the statues and other monuments so present in Oxford. How do you think having that sort of memory culture in Oxford has affected the wider culture in the city?

Well, in some ways it's about a culture of benevolence or how we remember donors. So there's been a lot of talk in recent years over whether the Sackler name should be removed, and it has been removed. Because of the OxyContin scandal, people actually don't want to go to museums where there's a gallery that's sort of named after a drug dealer, and so the removal of the Sackler name from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, from Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and from a number of the UK sort of national institutions although interestingly not all of them that's an example of who you remember and how and is it possible actually to shift that memory culture. And so it isn't only about money or we're able to take money or to use money without that money having to be a celebration of the people, a sort of art wash of those people's activities over the years, but instead receive money in order to do different things and to remember different things, not least for those subjects where we are concerned with memory, which is surely in part what our museums and what archaeology and so forth are all about.

I do think that there's also an ethical responsibility when these are images which are part of the public sphere, as is the case with Cecil Rhodes. But fundamentally, I'm not really saying here are the reasons why Rhodes should be removed. I'm saying there is one reason, which is that there was a decision by the college that they wanted to make this sort of change and to remove an image, and then they didn't. And they didn't do because of unseen pressure and no one really knows why they didn't. And they didn't do because of unseen pressure and no one really knows why they didn't remove it after having decided that they wanted to and then actually reaffirming that in 2021.

So I say in the book that the unfallen status of images like Rhodes is part of the condition that makes the writing of the book possible. I guess I mean the hope lies in the fact that these movements for restitution or for fallism are things that eventually get there and in most cases, whether it's Edward Colston in Bristol or whether it's the falling of roads in Zambia or in Zimbabwe or South Africa, and they're all images that fell in the later 20th, early 21st century that in those cases normally it has been, if you like, a campaign which has sort of happened for maybe 20, 30, 40, in some cases, 50 years. So these are intergenerational conversations, intergenerational movements. It takes sort of time. It's a hard thing to do for a museum to return a looted object or for an institution to reframe how it remembers and who it remembers. But it is possible, and so that's where the hope in this book really lies.

On that. One concept that you introduce in the book that I found really interesting was the concept of slippage. Can you speak more to that and explain to people who may not know what that is, as it relates to fallism?

Yeah, really it's about what counts as a fall, and so in the book, a public way it's organized is through different ways in which the word fall might be interpreted or what it might mean, and so I move across the dictionary definitions of that word. Fundamentally, a part of that is actually a line from Emily Dickinson, the poet, where she wrote a poem. Her line was crumbling is not an instant act, so the act of falling is not necessarily only that moment of the toppling. And we've all seen the video. We can imagine the video of sort of Edward Colston falling in Bristol or the removing of other monuments that people have wanted to remove over time. But actually it's the campaigning sort of beforehand, and so what happens after and the space it opens up, and so one of the mottos of the book is that sort of sometimes the gap can be the monument, that sometimes actually a removal isn't an erasure, it can be exactly the opposite. It can be an opening up of the space in which sort of memory can operate.

Absolutely, and I've loved seeing people intervene with these statues, for example, edward Colston. When it was pulled down, people changed the plaque on it that said erected by the people of Bristol to rejected by the people of Canada. So I think that's a great point about that personal intervention and the absence being the monument itself. I think that's fantastic.

Absolutely. I mean, let's underline that those examples aren't sort of random. So this isn't about all sort of monuments around the world, every figure of someone. It's about an art movement which I call in the book militarist realism, in which actually it's a fairly tight history between, let's say, the 1870s and the 1920s in which these monuments to empire and to racism and colonization were erected, and it's almost like something, it's a style that you recognise as soon as you see it, whether it's a looted object in a museum, whether it's an image of Victoria, as you mentioned, or Colston, the Atlantic slave trader, and so on, or whether it is, if you like, a reading list or a discipline sort of like archaeology and anthropology that were invented or reinvented or reshaped in those times.

So fundamentally, we can listen to the voices of those who are calling for restitution of the movements for fallism, of the movements for the decolonization of knowledge, and seek to understand this is what the book tries to do. What are they responding to. To understand, this is what the book tries to do. What are they responding to what's shared between museums, monuments and knowledge? And so we have to just say there was a an attempt in the later 19th century, early 20th century, to co-opt sort of culture, if you like, art and culture in order to sort of normalise or to justify forms of extraction, forms of racism, colonialism, which are completely now out of step with our times. The reason art and culture was sort of used in that way is that, of course, these are hard things after they've been erected, after they're there, after the museum object is in the museum, it's really hard actually to sort of undo that work, and so this isn't about trying to undo it, it's about trying to say well, actually, what happens next? What do we do next?

Because the museum is not one way street and equally, ultimately and this is what the title of the book is all about every monument will fall if we let it. So we're always making the decisions over what we keep and what we don't. So the book is not called all the monuments must fall, although that is a position that some people have on monuments. Actually, it's about underlining that there's always a society in sort of how it sort of manages its heritage or its built environment or its museums. We're always making decisions about what is in an exhibition or a permanent display or a temporary exhibition, but also, you know, what's on the reading list or what, who is represented in the sort of monuments. And so when we talk about Victoria or Colston, let's not talk about her or him. We have to talk about it because the pronouns are really important. It turns out it isn't about the rights and wrongs of these people, it's about actually, you know, whether we want that monument that is going to remember them, rather than a different sort of a memory culture instead.

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that you said has got me thinking about art washing and how we remember things and what we do with these looted objects in museums. I was wondering if you could talk about the V&A storehouse in East London now, because that's how we connected over the problems that you have with this museum. Can you elaborate on those a little bit?

Sure, yeah. So there's. An enormous amount of money has been put into this large storage facility on the basis of open storage. It's in East London, on the Olympic site, the former Olympic site, and it's the sort of thing that only a big national would be able to afford to do. But it just seems to me so out of step the celebration of yet another V&A museum.

You know, the book in part is about the first version of the V&A, what then was called the South Kensington Museum, where Augustus Pitt Rivers you know the man after whom the museum in which I work is named he first exhibited his objects there and indeed he first, even earlier than that, in the 1870s, his objects were in East London, at the East London sort of museum, which was a sort of outpost of the South Kensington Museum.

So in some ways those histories are repeated with V&A East, although in a very different way. But it's happening at a time at which the V&A have really, you know, doubled down at the trustee level, at the leadership level, on sort of saying well, no, I mean, we're not going to give back things, we're not going to say the law should be changed in order to see restitution in the way that we see in our university museums or we see elsewhere, for our national museums, rather than that we're going to have open storage as if that sort of solves it. So absolutely, I mean, there is wonderful work that's being done by the people that work in the museums, you know, and you know there's obviously a lot. You know all of us love the V&A question, as long as you know the elephant in the room you know sort of remains that when are they going to return the looted objects? That that really, you know, becomes really difficult.

So yeah that was, that was the nature, and you can look it up on my Instagram If listeners want to hear more as we wrap up, I just want to refocus on your career quickly.

What have been some career highlights for you?

Well, I think it was in some ways, I would have to say, initially the the publication of my last book, the uh, the British Museums, which was the book that sort of reached a bit like this book. It sort of reached a different audience from the one that I was used to doing. I mean, you know, academics are used to doing the APBO, not least in museums, where you do the really boring work of the creation and the listing and the databases and so on. Normally you're used to things being read by a very small number of people and in that book, in writing, the British museums, I really tried to show or to use what I've learned over all those years for a wider audience. And it's the same really, for Every Monument Will Fall. I mean, it's a book that seeks to sort of look at how we write about these histories, who gets named and who doesn't, how do we think about them, and so there really it's the writing, I think, really fundamentally, which are the highlights for me.

What have been some harder moments and how did you overcome them in your career?

I don't want to say that they're hard because it's a part of the job, but obviously there's always sort of pushback when you are, you know, talking about topics that some people feel very sensitive about. When I write about in my last book, you know, when I sort of wrote about how we ought to dismantle the infrastructures of sort of cultural whiteness, you know, some people, not least some of the directors of the National Museums, really objected at the time. And yet many of those arguments that are, for example, that we ought to know what is in the collections in the first place and be transparent about what's there, at a time at which you know we, even now, you know, are told that maybe four or five million of the eight or nine million objects in the British Museum are actually on a database in the first place. So that's a vast I mean it's number one that's a vast ballpark, you know, a million here or there. But also simply the fact that I'm saying that I don't think it really is controversial. I think actually most people are really amazed not only about how much is hidden away in the warehouses rather than on display, but actually how little is understood for museums that say that their main role is to look after culture for other people. How can you be looking after something if you don't even have a list of what you've got? And, of course, at that point it was reported that allegedly there was an idea that the British Museum might even have been stealing from itself and things were appearing on eBay and so on. The reason at the heart of that, what that story was all about, was the lack of sort of documentation or over transparency or, you know, objects on databases in the first place.

So, yeah, I think these are not hard moments that personally for me. They're hard for the people from whom these objects were taken and they're hard for people whose ancestors are in the museums. You know how near are you right this moment, from somebody's ancestor in a cardboard box who either is known who it is and you could do the provenance research or the dehumanisation was such that no one's ever going to know who that person is. And actually, what should we do with those legacies, which are not simply the past? You know, they're there in the present and they're being sort of maintained at taxpayer's expense and sort of hidden away in warehouses. And so, yeah, you know the British were famous for dumping the archives of empire at sea or burning the papers. But equally, what the British and others have done the French and the Americans in their different ways as well is hide objects away into the warehouses and so no one knows what's in the museum, and that's another form of silencing or redaction which in these days, time's up for that.

Really, imagine a library, imagine the British Library, or you know, one of the great libraries of the world, where there wasn't a catalogue, you know, and all of the research into the books, all the writing of the next books, would be done only by the librarians. I mean, that makes no sense at all. And that's where we've got to in some sort of parts of the connoisseurship model of our museum. So no, I mean I'm not a sort of conventional sort of connoisseurship art historian. I work across in the books of what I call the four A's archaeology, anthropology, art and architecture which are fields that came sort of together into dialogue at a certain moment in time, you know, which is the same time that we're talking about, you know, and I love that field and many people that will be listening to this will also, you know, feel an affinity and understand the links in between those sort of four fields, but that doesn't mean that we're not sort of constantly reinventing them.

It's hard to imagine any other part of our society where we would be told that if something is out of date or even hurting people, that it's something that sort of couldn't change because we've always sort of done it that way. Imagine that argument for, you know, criminal justice, or for medicine, or for physics, or something you know, if you couldn't reinvent the laws of physics, if that was where the science led. Somehow in the world of culture we allow ourselves to be told the lie which is the big lie in this case really that things can never change. You can never even move an object from an exhibition, or you can never return an object from a museum, or you can never remember somebody else. So that's really what the intervention of this book is about seeking to say. Of course we can remake our memory culture so it's fit for our times.

Finally, what advice would you have for someone who wants to become a researcher across the forays?

So I think reading widely is important. 90% of writing is reading and often we get siloed into reading lists and we just read within our field and, as you'll see in the book, if you know, people pick it up and of course I mean they can also, you know, listen to the audio book as well, sort of reading it, or, you know, downloading it. Listener or the reader will learn that the book is drawing not only from archaeologists, you know, like Augustus Pitt Rivers although there is actually a lot of Augustus Pitt Rivers in the later sections of the book but there's also so many of the key thinkers from African American thinking Sadia Hartman, christine Sharp, from the history of anti-colonialism in the form of Aimé Césaire and Fanon, from reading outside of our field in those ways. So I think fundamentally it's that read, but read widely.

Break the rules about what you're reading or what you think you can cite, think about your citation practices and ultimately try and make it, you know, not boring, because in some ways the boring sort of elements of our discipline are designed as gatekeeping things that turn everyone off and nobody actually wants to think about how we write about it any of the four ways. These are now sort of public spheres, where there are many people that really care about what we do and what we work on and what happens in museums and what happens with our wider memory cultures. You know, the Germans have had this phrase Erinnerungskultur for quite a long time, which is the memory culture. We need that in other parts of the world now and we need to think about sort of how we remake it and who we remember and what the role of our disciplines is in sort of shaping that culture.

Thank you so much for your time today, Dan. This has been such a pleasure.

It's been great. Thanks so much for all.