This chapter investigates key moments in the artistic practice and the concepts of agency in public space that inform them, showing how the monument, seen as an authoritarian obstacle to action, turns into the performative monument, an object or site that contractually binds its audience in self-aware acts of commemoration. In the decades since the Hamburg memorial, performative monuments have entered the mainstream. In fact, the 1980s and 1990s can retrospectively be characterized as obsessed with memory and memorials. Despite wartime efforts of architects to re-establish monumentality within a functioning communal life - in contrast to the monumentality of fascism and Stalinism - notably those of Sigfried Giedion, for decades after the war the monument haunted public discourse as the symbol of authoritarian politics. The innovation of 1980s countermonuments was to recognize and codify this audience reaction as part of what the monument itself sought to achieve.