Statues

Lots of dead white men are coming off their pedestals these days, and I can’t say I’m that exercised about it.  The thing about statues is, they are almost never good art.  There is good sculpture, of course, and very good full body sculpture – but statuary is almost by definition banal.

Case in point: there is a moving larger than life sized statue of Ulysses S. Grant in the Portland Museum of Art, where he is portrayed in his battlefield uniform, his head bowed, his sword and gloves in his right hand, which hangs limply at his side, and his eyes betray weariness, regret, and sadness, and just the lightest hint of relief that the long struggle of the United States’ civil war is over.  It is moving, and when I see it, it brings me to tears: it captures the humanity of one of my country’s greatest men (if not exactly a great president), the only real anti-racist of its first forty-odd presidents, a man who drank because the world wasn’t worth facing up to sober 100% of the time, but who was sober enough to defeat the forces of darkness and hate and do so without relish but with determination and vigour.

The statue was commissioned by a veterans’ group for the Rotunda of the US Capitol Building.  The veterans’ group demanded a statue that was more forceful, that displayed a General, a Statesman, a Force of Nature Who Cannot Be Defied.  None of these were what Ulysses S. Grant was.  He was a human being – and he knew it.  For those of you with some time to kill this summer, read his autobiography, a masterpiece of humility from a man who literally changed the course of history.  But committees of men who wish history told a better story than what they lived are not good judges of art.  The statue in the Portland Museum of Art is a work of art; the statue that now graces the Rotunda – which you can find by a simple Google search or, if you’re in Portland and the museum is open, you can see a picture next to the statue above – is, well, dull.  It’s a statue, alright, and because it’s a statue, it isn’t art.

When we think of great sculptures of the human form, we generally are drawn not to statues of real people – or that is, not of “historical” people – but to allegorical people.  I think in this vein of the forms of Christ on the cross, of Mary holding her child.  David is not an historical David; if he were, it would be absurd.  Bernini’s Saint Teresa, which a good friend introduced me to in Rome when we were both sort of shirking work one afternoon, is clearly both a sculpture of a real woman – some beautiful model, maybe a prostitute plucked from the streets of 17th century Rome, maybe a noblewoman that Bernini particularly enjoyed – and it just as clearly is not an historical portrait of Saint Teresa.  It’s fairly clear that even the Roman statuary that astonishes us with its beauty is not of real, actual historical figures.  What made it art was the fact that the actual human being was ignored, and the artist carved beauty with just a few hints or reminders – say, a prominent nose, or bushy eyebrows, or the right form or beard – that let the viewed say “aha, this is Marcus Aurelius” or “oho, yes, this is clearly Socrates”.

In a pre-visual world – that is to say, in a world which did not have the ability to render faithful printed or broadcast visual imagery – that’s all that was required.  A few hints of what rumour or broadsheet had described as a dominant physical feature were enough for viewers to say yes, that statue is the Man or the Woman.  And similarly, in earlier worlds where information itself was at such a premium that only prominent achievements were worth bothering to transmit, statues could serve as simple exemplars of both Great People and Great Ideas and Great Achievements.

But no one has really lived in such a world in at least two or three hundred years, and really more likely in the last four hundred or so.  The first quality of lived existence that destroyed the ability of a statue to be an Exemplar is, ironically, the diffusion of print media.  Print made the cost of transmitting information cheap, and made it increasingly easy to not simply transmit the Great Achievements of individuals, but also the Paltry and Ignominious Achievements of them as well.  Yes, Pitt the Younger saved the Kingdom and the Crown… but he also was a drunk.  Yes, Alexander Hamilton helped establish the Republic… but he was also an adulterer and, frankly, an asshole.  Heck, even Martin Luther was set up as a pox-ridden sexpot by the counter-propagandists of the Church, using the presses that enabled Martin’s reformation to take fire and change the shape of modern Europe – and that counter-propaganda was, actually, more effective than we’d like to admit.

Print enabled both wags and liars, supporters and denouncers, to engage in a basically costless battle of words that eroded the ability of bronze or stone to transmit an unambiguous message of the life of a seemingly Great Person.  Indeed, the words steadily and have continuously eroded the very idea that a Great Person exists at any time ever.  To my mind, this isn’t a bad thing; we’re all human, which means we all are capable of greatness and susceptible to being terrible, and the more we can acknowledge this, the more balanced we will be in understanding ourselves.  Even as we admit that some of us do, in fact, achieve great things – the theory of relativity, the Emancipation Proclamation, escaping slavery and inspiring others to fight for freedom, inspiring a nation to realise in law the ideals of civil rights – we still need to acknowledge that Einstein was a fruitcake, Lincoln was a pretty bad attorney, Harriet Tubman wasn’t anyone you’d invite over for dinner, and Martin Luther King Jr. loved the fact that his fame got him laid like a porn star.  Print – or more generally, the limit-approaching-costless ability of print and now internet to transmit information about the entirety of a person, not just their achievements – deprived sculpture of its ability to communicate an unambiguous message about the Great People of history.

The other element, though – related but different – was the long slow march of what I would call the reliable image.  This goes back, actually, to the high point of Western sculpture – the Bernini moment.  Bernini was born just twelve years before Caravaggio died; Caravaggio is one of my favourite portraitists, but he also brings into being the beginning of the emergence of realism in Western painting.  That realism allows viewers to see pictures of Great People “as they are.”  Now don’t get me wrong; painters are ethically little different than the world at large, and thus most of them painted their so-called Great People with appropriate airbrushing out of warts and gout and the pox, with semiotic clues to encourage us to see them in the very fairest moral light.  But still, some real semblance came through.  Even the most fauning portrait of Louis XV transmits his arrogance and inhumanity; the majesty of Valazquez is that even when he flatters his subjects, he still manages to pierce the veil of royalty and find the human being within.  This indeed is the mystery of painting: how can a two-dimensional abstraction somehow reveal the unfathomable nature of being human?

What painting did – and quite quickly did in mass production, as multicolour printing and reproduction rapidly improved in the 18th and 19th centuries – photography took to a new level.  And this in its way destroyed the power of statuary in a final way.  Given that the printed word could reveal the corruption inherent in any Great Man’s life, and that painting or a photograph could show the bare humanity that made every Great Man just another one of us in the most vital way, what was the point of statues?  Why, indeed, did anyone bother with them any more?

Oddly, though, like most final counter-revolutions before the fall, the nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw history’s last, heroic gasp of statue production.  Liberals did it, erecting statues of Peel and Pitt; southern Lost Causers had a particularly fruitful run, and had the added joy of equestrian statuary in an era where bronze was pretty cheap stuff; and of course the totalitarians – who also enjoyed a stranglehold on the press and the printed image, and therefore could integrate the messaging across all mediums – loved statues like no other.  Lenin, Stalin, Gagarin, imagery laden Mothers of Russia, empty and person-less Workers of the World, and for the forgotten states, Hitlers and Mussolinis and Salazars: the totalitarians revelled in the banality of the statue like no era before or, we can imagine and hope, hence.

But in a real way, the totalitarians showed us how, well, idiotic and infuriating statues are.  Idiotic because they are so obviously false as a true representation of a person: how can Kim Jong-il, on a big pedestal, holding his hand in the air, ever represent the man?  Even members of a totalitarian state recognise it’s a folly, although they may be unable to say it out loud.  Knowing what we can know about people – the sheer volume of information available to us – means that a statue is obviously devoid of true meaning, and we can’t escape that self-knowledge.  And as a work of art, we know it is obviously false as well: it may capture a moment – much as a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II from 1965 captures a certain perfect femme d’age certaine grace – but we know that that moment passed, and we have access to those subsequent moments as well.

Someone in 2nd century Marseille, viewing a statue of Octavian, would have had no access to other imagery, and their access to actual information about Octavian’s works would have been limited to the scant data that would have bothered to have been transmitted by two-wheeled cart and disaster-prone trireme.  Someone viewing a statue of John Calhoun in Charleston, South Carolina in the mid 20th century would have been able to call up several decades of favourable and unfavourable caricature from the early 1800s, and would have been unable to avoid realising that the man was a racist and a proponent of the enslavement of blacks – and that he simultaneously valued states’ rights and encouraged the use of federal power to promote imperial expansion.  They might have agreed with him, of course, but they couldn’t avoid the knowledge of Calhoun as a broadly contradictory human being.

It’s interesting in the extreme that very few new statues are being put up.  I think it’s a positive development, actually: why would we erect idols of Famous Men (or Women – and remember sufragettes and imperial monarchs have more than a few effigies in hard metal) in an era where our access to information about people as complete people is so vast?  It’s not just that Bomber Harris callously thought that killing German civilians was an expeditious and just way of conducting war: it’s that he was also reviled by his fellow officers for being a bully and a prig, that he divorced his wife of twenty years to marry a 20 year old on the eve of the war, and that he was a categorical racist of the worst Rhodesian sort.  Even less ambiguous figures probably didn’t want statues of themselves: yes, Dr. King was an adulterer, but he was also a minister who preached humility.  If he really believed in humility, would he want to be cast in bronze and put above the rest of us on a marble plinth?  Or would he be content to live on in his words, in the staticky black and white film of his speech at the Lincoln Memorial, in his press conference eloquence after being freed from the jails of Birmingham?  Didn’t he often and effectively express that the movement had nothing to do with him?  It was about his children, and white people’s children, and how they would sit down and play with one another.  He knew that his dream was about the world after him – not about him.

In an era of hot media, one might think that statues serve a kind of enduring or historical role.  But unlike prior hot media eras, of orality and the instantiation of knowledge, we can both speak and see the truth and record it and watch it again, in some degree of accuracy.  Statuary is revealed for being the product of an older age, a technologically dead age.  In that prior era, it had a valid purpose: it was a kind of posted notice, with visual effects to facilitate understanding.  Not art, mind you, even then; newspaper headlines can be literature but it happens only rarely when a Feneon comes around,  But once the free press destroys its informative function, and realistic and reproducible visual media destroys its function to publish imagery, statuary’s sole remaining utility is revealed for what it is: as a kind of permanent statement of power.  Setting something up in metal or stone and setting it above or outside of the usual marketplace of ideas is valuable not for the information itself, but for the statement about the establishment of permanence.  Statues – in an era of free information and recognisable transmission of images – exist solely as projections of power.  Every statue is simply a statement of power.  It should surprise no one that insecure and narcissistic regimes – Southern revivalists in the US, imperialists in Great Britain and Canada and across the former realms, totalitarians wherever they thrive – fall back on it as an “art”-form so readily.  Every statue – literally all of them – that has been erected since the emergence of print media and replicable realistic human representations, is just simply an expression of power.  Not education, not honor or remembrance: just power.

So let’s get rid of them already.  Interestingly, though, that doesn’t mean the end of sculpture, or even more narrowly of sculpture of the human form.  I think a proper question to ask of a statue, in regards to its artistic merit, is this: is it worth looking at eye to eye?  Is it worth it on a human, sentient, reflective scale?  Most statuary will fail this test, but some won’t, and I think revealingly, most sculpture will.

Ulysses S. Grant in the Portland Museum of Art looks not at us, but looks down on the tragedy in which he was forced to participate.  Not far from him, in similar white marble, a pearl diver lies dead on the rocks, having plunged too deep into the waters.  Both of them look at us with deadened eyes and ask us to wonder with them, why death comes to those who don’t seek it.  The Lincoln in the Memorial, larger than life but looking with even greater sadness over the reflecting pond and into the distance at the lawmakers beyond, forces us to ask whether we are continuing in the mission of liberty for all, justice for all, government for, by and of the people; the Lincoln in the park with the slave at his feet seems to say “why am I here, and why can’t this man walk with me,” and in so doing asks to be taken down.

I think we have come to a time where statues serve no real purpose, their prior purposes of edification and description better served by other means, and their indirect purpose of power never being valid in the first place.  Empty plinths can remind us of the vapidity of the last two hundred years, but in the future, I’m looking forward to sculptures that look me in the eye and tell me their story in all of its fullness, with all the regret than any fully lived life must feel.

I know artists, although many of them prefer not to know me.  Keep carving stone and casting bronze: but my humble ask is that they do so in order to find the humanity of their subject.  Any sitter’s history isn’t worth it.  None of us deserve to be cast in permanence.  Even though all of us deserve to have our stories told.