What is crucial to the performative monument cannot be impermanence as such, but the temporal interaction with an audience that itself is no eternal public, but a succession of interacting subjects. Ephemerality of objects is one strategy among others in making concrete this temporality of the work. Theoretically, the task is to understand the combination of political needs and aesthetic solutions proposed for them that comprise the performative monument. Performative monuments work to establish a political relation to a history that the performer has not personally experienced. The attitude to the past of the spectator of a performative monument is conventionalized and made public, and thus becomes an object of public inquiry. The book connects performance with history through the recent phenomenon of re-performance, reconstructing the different temporal layers of the audience of one act. It turns to the Austrian avant-garde since the 1960s, whose contradictory, elaborate staging of visceral acts. The book examines art in the former Yugoslavia. It starts with early works by Marina Abramović wherein she politically marks the city through acts of erasure and projection. The book begins with the Venice Biennale of 1976, remarkable for contributions by Joseph Beuys, Jochen Gerz, and Reiner Ruthenbeck that circle around the monument as metaphor for national identity. Gerz's 1986 Monument against Fascism, a column that visitors signed as a protest against fascism and that was lowered into the ground when enough signatures had accumulated, is key to this development.