The material of mourning: Paul Emmanuel ’s Lost Men as counter-memorials

Paul Emmanuel’s works to be discussed are site-specific, counter-memorial statements called The Lost Men . Each installation consists of semi-transparent cloth banners carrying photographic images of parts of the artist’s body, imprinted with the names of men who represent participants from both sides of each conflict memorialised. These are often men who went undocumented in official records and include those who were lost or killed in major conflicts, from the Frontier Wars in the Eastern Cape: The Lost Men Grahamstown (2004), to the civil war in Mozambique: The Lost Men Mozambique (2007) and from World War 1: The Lost Men France (2014). Emmanuel’s banners are fragile; some have been lost and some have deteriorated in situ . In all their iterations, they engage with memory, impermanence, vulnerability, death and an alternative view of masculine identity that undermines the macho aggression associated with warfare. I discuss the role a lack of material substance plays in enhancing the message of loss and grief. I argue that the very impermanence of cloth is essential to countering what Pierre Nora (1989:8) terms the ‘ lieux de memoire ’ – lasting physical memorials that enshrine and perpetuate “memories” when the lived experience of those memories have long been lost. Emmanuel’s Lost Men are truly in the process of being “lost” through disintegration, and I argue that this physical deterioration, in conjunction with the imagery Emmanuel uses, is the key to their success as counter-memorials. is quite different to the effect of the banners when seen at a distance. The official nature and physical framework of galleries might be equated with the physical permanence of museums and memorials. There is a certain irony to these tattered fragments draped within institutional walls. They appear even more ghostly as one gazes through them at the brick and mortar spaces in which they are now presented; yet owing to their size and proximity they have an emphatic presence as haunting reminders of wasted youth, fragile masculinity and the impermanence of memory.

is an artist who engages with the complex constructs of masculinity and rituals of life and death within the South African context. His early work from the 1990s consists of exquisitely delicate drawings, etchings and lithographs that evoke these existential issues with a subtle and sometimes enigmatic vision that always expresses the vulnerability of life. 1 The works to be discussed here, however, are aspects of Emmanuel's later Lost Men projects (from 2004 and ongoing) -a series of site-specific installations of fragile cloth banners bearing images of Emmanuel's naked body marked with the names of dead soldiers who partook in each conflict. The Lost Men projects have been discussed in several articles, 2 but in this essay I aim to approach the works with particular reference to discourses on counter-memorials. 3 I also consider how Emmanuel's use of fabric as a signifier of human fragility functions within this framework.
Before analysing Emmanuel's approach to memorials, I give a brief overview of the practical aspects of each installation by discussing the choice of setting, the material, and the installation details. I then consider the function and structure of war memorials and monuments and their attempts to "fix" specific memories, in order to provide a context from which to identify how and why Emmanuel's The Lost Men project differs. This is followed by a discussion of The Lost Men under the heading of countermemorials to explain how these installations might actively undermine the commemorative function of memorials. I argue that is it the nature of their (im-)materiality and impermanence, as much as the imagery and content of Emmanuel's works, that identifies them as counter-memorials.

The Lost Men
The Lost Men projects began with The Lost Men Grahamstown (1-10 July 2004; Figure   1). The installation consisted of 21 synthetic voile banners 4 hanging in three parallel rows, like laundry on washing lines. It was erected on a piece of empty land adjacent to the 1820 Settler's Memorial and the Settler's Monument building, thus responding to specific battles and acts of colonial appropriation that have been memorialised on this site. The work includes the names of both black and white soldiers who took part in the Frontier Wars that occurred between 1779 and 1879. 5 These names were imprinted into Emmanuel's naked skin with lead type 6 and photographed before the marks could fade. These names are clearly visible in the photographs on the banners and look like scars on Emmanuel's skin. The procedure for "embossing" the names of participants in each conflict is carried through into all The Lost Men projects. Emmanuel (2015a) notes that, for this first project, the letters were only pressed onto his body for about ten to fifteen minutes and the marks faded quite quickly. For the later projects he lay in moulds for up to half an hour ( Figure 2) and the imprints on his body took much longer to fade away. officials objected to what they identified as a graphic display of male nudity. The installation was nearly censored entirely, but eventually was allowed to go ahead provided the two most "offensive" banners were removed (Emmanuel 2019). 9 The third work in the series, The Lost Men France (1 July-1 October 2014), was a sitespecific, once-off counter-memorial and an official feature of the 2014-2018 First World War Centenary. It consisted of five banners each 5m x 5m, hung from seven meter high poles erected along the Rue de l'Ancre, which is a farm road that runs through wheat fields leading up to the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. The site responds to the fields of battle (in which it stands), as well as counters the rigidity of the official built memorial covered with the names of missing sodiers ( Figure 5). The road on which the banners hung also connected the memorial with the Lonsdale cemetery containing the graves of soldiers who died in WWI (Emmanuel 2020b naked bodies hanging adjacent to the official memorial caused offence to some people.
Others objected to the critique inherent in the idea of a counter-memorial that questions their acceptance of the grand gestures of traditional memorials. But as Jonathan Jones' (2014) review of this exhibition explains, ' [Emmanuel] reminds us in a simple stark way that war is not about ideas or causes or hardware but the destruction of human beings.
Nudity in this context is the unveiled truth.' Unlike the previous two installations, which used the more robust synthetic voile, these banners were made of silk organza, which is fragile and less durable (Emmanuel 2019).
As the banners, subject to the ravages of inclement weather, remained for three months, the images printed on them faded and they eventually hung in tatters with some even falling into the fields ( Figure 6), becoming, as Annette Becker explains (2020:24) 'shrouds marking the location and giving a name to the bodies which were lost -or found? -in the land of the Somme'.

Memorials and monuments
Art historian Arthur Danto (1986:42) identifies the purpose of memorials as aids in remembering, reconciling and healing. In other words, memorials function as places to mourn, whereas Danto (1986:42) sees monuments as markers of celebration, glorifying  contrasting with the bronze of the figures. 11 This "memorial" is quite clearly demonstrating the triumphal celebration of "heroic" individuals and a particular national victory that occurred a mere 11 years prior to its unveiling. The purpose appears to be to promote national pride rather than memorialise the dead, so it seemingly fits into the category Danto describes for monuments rather than memorials. 12 John Bodnar (2010:141), in fact refers to it as both a cultural icon and a monument, because it evokes 'the memory of one of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific war without any hint that there was enormous loss of life on the island'. I suggest that it functions in terms of Michael Rowlands's (1998:54) explanation for some memorials that are deemed to be successful 'not by encouraging remembrance but rather by the demands they make for recognition of what was done, to whom and by whom'. In other words, it is a means to overcome the negative emotions raised by wasteful death and achieve catharsis in the viewer by evoking a message which 'unproblematically affirm[s] that they did not die in vain' (Rowlands 1998:62).
Accepting that the line between memorials and monuments is clearly blurred, whether monument or memorial, most of those erected by national governments since the twentieth century to memorialise armed conflicts have been physically large (or "monumental") and therefore visually impressive. Traditional memorials that include figural representations, in the words of Bodnar Canadians who died in France and whose graves are unknown, but they appear secondary to the impact of the scale of the monument and the decorative scheme.
The Vietnam War Memorial, designed by Maya Lin, on the other hand, lists the names of the 57,000 dead without glorifying the conflict or trying to evoke unity, without any comment, and without any decoration whatsoever. 14 As Peter Boswell (1998:10) explains: 'It neither apportions guilt or claims victory. It simply affirms the fact, far more real than any political idea, of being there and dying there'. This memorial also has a minimal architectural presence. 15 Several writers have identified Lin's memorial as a counter-memorial, owing to its lack of glorifying additions and unmonumental construction. In a discussion of the simple lists of names on the memorial, Rowlands France is a direct reference to this memorial, as mentioned above, and was installed so that both Lutyens's memorial and Emmanuel's counter-memorial could be seen and read in conjunction with each other (Figure 8).  To conclude this section, war monuments and memorials are designed to, as Rowlands (1998:63) explains, acknowledge the importance of death and sacrifice for an ideology.
In addition, they acknowledge that there is gain from that sacrifice and thus deify (glorify) the dead by providing a physical reminder of their sacrifice as sustenance for our fading memories. Pierre Nora (1989:7) identified such monuments as 'lieux de memoire, [or] sites of memory' which are constructed to replace the real environments where memories evolve. Nora (1989:12) thus ascribes responsibility to monuments and archives as a repositories of past events, ensuring they provide 'commemorative vigilance' lest we forget. The problem with erecting lasting physical memorials to embody historical events is that the real memory of which event is gone and the lieux de memoire, in whatever form, become a 'reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer' (Nora 1989:8). This raises the question -is a counter-memorial inherently countering this forced memory? Might the purpose of a counter-memorial be about forgetting? And if so, how does it accomplish this?

Counter-memorials/monuments
The term "counter-monument" was employed by James Young (1992:271) in response to the problem of holocaust memorials in Germany, where young artists and architects faced the incongruous task of memorialising events in which they took no part and did not personally experience. In addition, they were constructing memorials where the notion of glorifying a cause has no meaning, After all, while the victors of history have long erected monuments to remember their triumphs, and victims have built memorials to recall their martyrdom, only rarely does a nation call on itself to remember the victims of crimes it has perpetrated (Young 1992:270). Young (1992:271) explains that in Germany, the response to this 'memorial conundrum' was for artists and architects to create 'counter-monuments' that inherently undermined the very function of a monument, both in structure and purpose.
According to Quentin Stevens, Karen Franck and Ruth Fazakerley (2012:952), the term counter-monument is imprecise and covers too many diverse approaches to reactions against monuments. To clarify the counter measures and define the terms more clearly these authors have identified 'anti-monumental' and 'dialogic' approaches to creating counter-monuments (Stevens et al. 2012:952). In the first instance, a monument might adopt 'anti-monumental design approaches to express subjects and meanings not represented in traditional monuments', whereas a dialogic monument is a direct commentary on the purpose or the design of a specific monument, in which case it is usually physically paired with the monument in question (Stevens et al. 2012:952 Stevens et al. (2012:952) furthermore explain that dialogic monuments may not necessarily be anti-monumental.
Emmanuel's approach to creating a counter-memorial falls into both these categories.

For example, in The Lost Men France and The Lost Men Grahamstown, these installations
were both site specific. Their pastel colours, the fragility of their substance, the fragmented images of Emmanuel's marked body that looks soft, unmanly and ephemeral are conceptually and visually the antithesis of the adjacent stolid, imposing stone monuments. In both installations one looks through the semi-transparent banners to see the land-scapes upon which so many of these named men died. As Stevens et al. (2012:9 62) explain, the proximity of monument and counter-monument 'dramatises new meanings beyond those conveyed by each of the works considered individually' and they might thereby be identified as dialogic.
In terms of design approach, however, all Emmanuel's The Lost Men installations are also anti-monumental. If the meaning of a monument is considered, Emmanuel's installations are not didactic; they do not present 'arguments regarding civic duty and responsibility' (Sci 2009:42), but instead question such arguments and leave the viewer to contemplate what the answers might be. Their subject is loss, pain and death rather than glorifying a political ideology. In addition, they actively undermine a patriarchal ideology normally associated with war memorials. Male nudity, for example, infers The examples Young (1992)  negative-form monument to commemorate the Nazis' destruction of the Aschrott-Brunnen, a 12 meter high, pyramid shaped fountain in Kassel that had been a gift from a Jewish entrepreneur (Young 1992:288). Hoheisel commemorated the absence of this fountain by recreating its silhouette and lowering this shape into the ground, thus memorialsing an absence by preserving that absence in negative space (Young 1992:290). Another example, the Harburg Monument against Facism designed by Jochen and Esther Gerz, is a 12 meter high by 1 meter square lead column, which was installed in 1986. A stylus was attached and people were invited to inscribe names or graffiti, and as the column became filled it was lowered into the ground. Eventually (by December 1990), the column was completely underground and the top covered with a grave stone with the words 'Harburg's monument against Facism' (Young 1992:276).
In these examples there is still some form of memorial that is preserved, even if it is in negative terms (Hoheisel) or underground (Gerz) with a small reminder of what is buried inscribed in the gravestone on top, as would be the norm for any burial.
Emmanuel's installations foreground the importance of fabric as the substrate that underlines his anti-monumental approach. Each soft gauzy banner of voile or silk organza has a formless pliancy that is shaped by the wind (Figure 9), the semi-transparent sheets tangibly evoke the soft vulnerability of the skin imprinted on them, and flutter gently in a manner antithetical to the rigidity of soldiers marching in straight rows or buildings constructed in straight lines. Such flimsy material has nothing to do with masculinity nor with monuments, other than a passing reference to the flags representing the ideologies that underpin the wars being memorialised. The images on these "flags" have been discussed at length in all articles on The Lost Men and can oviously be described as counter-ideological, inasmuch as images of mortality and vulnerability are counter to the memorial impulse.
Despite the care with which the remnants of The Lost Men France are exhibited or stored, they are neither permanently displayed nor will they exist in perpetuity. Their material presence has already deteriorated markedly owing to the silk content in the material (silk is a notoriously difficult material to preserve). 19 The nature of fabric is something we associate mostly with clothing or home décor -personal items that touch our skin and The Lost Men function in terms of Young's (1992:295) identification of the countermonumental impulse that 'refers not only to its own physical impermanence, but also to the contingency of all meaning and memory -especially that embodied in a form that

Conclusion
In The Lost Men installations, Emmanuel deals with the trauma and memories of events that he did not witness nor partake in. His purpose, instead, is to engage with the posttraumatic memory of recorded conflicts by expressing them through his own personalised, metaphorical language of loss and pain. As an artist he is not attempting to create a permanent memorial, but is instead reacting to the notions of glory, nationalism and purpose that underpin such edifices, by presenting their obverse. The Lost Men installations and Remnants expose the futility of attempting to "fix" memories and encapsulate the ideologies with which they were associated, within a prescriptive, rigidly-defined monumental form that will have continued relevance. Emmanuel's use of fragile semitransparent cloth on which to express his counter-memorial impulse is, I would argue, more profoundly emotive and pertinent to the theme of wasted life and fading memories than any traditional memorial could be.  Allara (2012Allara ( , 2017Allara ( , 2020. Allara has also written on Emmanuel's earlier work, Transitions (Allara 2011), and on Remnants, (the remnants of Lost Men France), which were exhibited in Boston (Allara 2016). See also Irene Bronner (2012), Jonathan Jones (2014) and Karen von Veh (2019) Terry Sole in 1986. The names of black combatants were more difficult to trace, as they do not appear in any official (or semi-official) records. The few names Emmanuel found were jotted in the margins of diaries kept by British soldiers, anecdotal entries, incomplete, often misspelled (anglicised) and usually without a surname. Emmanuel (2020a) explains that due to these difficulties, the names he employed, both black and white, were mostly selected at random.
6. Emmanuel would lie on the letters, often with weights applied to his body to ensure that the names were pressed deeply into his skin.

7.
Emmanuel (2020b) notes that this moratorium was in place while he was researching for The Lost Men Mozambique, but it may have changed now.
8. For a more detailed discussion of these works and the political and social implications, see von Veh (2020:30-43).
9. Further discussion on the censorship issue in Mozambique can be found in von Veh (2000:36-40). Images of the memorial can also be found on this site.
12. Owing to this blurring of categories, I intentionally use the terms monument and memorial interchangeably in this essay. flagpole with a flag and a nearly 3 meter high statue of three soldiers was approved. Fortunately, these additions were not placed close to the wall, in an attempt to preserve the integrity of Lin's design. 'A statue dedicated to the women who served in the Vietnam War was also added to the site in 1993' (Klein [sa]).

The Vietnam War
Memorial consists of two black granite walls, 250 feet long, that meet at a right angle.
The ground slopes from the outside edges down towards the vertex (meeting point) where the walls rise to a height of 10 feet (Hagopian 2005:97).

All information on the Thiepval Memorial is taken from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission
(2020) website.
18. Emmanuel (2020b) explains that when he stood underneath the lists of names, they were so vast that they became almost featureless, and any emblematic detail was subsumed by this overwhelming evocation of loss. Perhaps Emmanuel's experience might explain the effect this memorial had on Lin.
19. In addition to the physical insubstantiality of these counter-memorials, The Lost men Grahamstown banners were themselves lost in a tragic car accident while being transported and the original The Lost Men Mozambique banners have also been 'lost' (Emmanuel 2015b).
20. When exhibited as Remanants, their presence up close in a gallery space is quite different to the effect of the banners when seen at a distance. The official nature and physical framework of galleries might be equated with the physical permanence of museums and memorials. There is a certain irony to these tattered fragments draped within institutional walls. They appear even more ghostly as one gazes through them at the brick and mortar spaces in which they are now presented; yet owing to their size and proximity they have an emphatic presence as haunting reminders of wasted youth, fragile masculinity and the impermanence of memory.