I think all creative people are operating from the fear that, of the best of what they did, will anybody remember it? Will anybody tell stories about them? Will anybody keep those pictures on the mantle long after they are gone? It's why people write stories. It's peoples' grave markers.
Iturbide became a non-person in Mexico. His body was not removed to the great Independence Monument erected in 1925 with those of Hidalgo, Morelos, Matamoros, and Guerrero – all of whom had so signally failed to secure Mexico’s independence. The man who actually gave Mexico nationhood remains despised and obscure.
Vaults and caskets are not the law; they are the policy of individual cemeteries. Vaults prevent the settling of the dirt around the body, thus making landscaping more uniform and cost effective. As an added bonus, vaults can be customized and sold at a markup. Faux marble? Bronze? Take your pick, family.
It is important never to forget our history, but parts of our history are more appropriately displayed in museums, not on government property.
Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
We shall lose one advantage of a man’s dying if we are to have a statue of him forthwith…. We should wait till their bones begin to crumble – and then avoid too near a likeness to the living.
Never was a memorial yet erected that was not subject to criticism.
I don't mind being a symbol but I don't want to become a monument. There are monuments all over the Parliament Buildings and I've seen what the pigeons do to them.
The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.
My artistic decision to cast my mother's objects into bronze moves beyond the notions of memorializing her. I've been fascinated for some time with the idea of monumentality and what it means to memorialize. Both of these notions are relevant historically, artistically, and culturally.
The Greeks, the Italians, and the Indians, from whom we get our ideas, erect monuments to ideas; we erect ours to men, and of such monuments we have an oversupply.
I like to believe that rather than destroy icons, I make new ones.
