What Do Statues Stand For?

Statues, monuments, and memorials cast in bronze or carved in stone, strive for everlasting permanence. The Venus of Willendorf—though not monumental in stature at only 4.4 inches tall (but just imagine a larger than life replica in a public space)—has already persisted 30,000 years. Even knocked from their pedestals, drowned in oceans or buried in soil, these forms are designed to endure. Artist Nicholas Galanin dug a grave for Sydney’s much-hated statue of Captain Cook, while simultaneously imagining a future archeological dig that could unearth it. His installation for the 2020 Biennale of Sydney, Shadow on the land, an excavation and bush burial, consisting of a hole in the ground in the shape of the still-standing 12-foot monument, speculates on a tomorrow when yesterday and today’s settler colonialism is past and buried, yet acknowledges a haunting presence persisting in the earth and in collective memory.

The persistence of these objects is not entirely inevitable. Destruction is an option. For a 1994–95 competition to design a memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, artist Horst Hoheisel proposed blowing up Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate and grinding its stone to dust. He didn’t get the commission. In 2017, a Ten Commandments monument had only been installed outside the Arkansas State Capitol for less than 24 hours when a man yelled “Freedom” and crashed his truck into the biblically-inscribed granite, smashing it to pieces. Later, after the privately-funded monument was replaced and returned to its public perch, the Satanic Temple attempted to donate to Arkansas’s state government, as a symbol of religious pluralism, their own crowdfunded monument—a bronze sculpture of Baphomet, a winged goat-headed deity, complete with a pentagram and two smiling children. Without a member of the legislature willing to sponsor consideration of their Éliphas Lévi-inspired sculpture, the Satanists opted to display it on a flatbed truck in front of the Little Rock capitol, protesting the confluence of church and state embodied by a Christian monument on government property.

While Baphomet’s presence in Little Rock was only for an afternoon, there are other, more permanent, installations that embody the idea of monuments in dialogue. During Spain’s 16th-century conquest of the Philippines, Datu Lápú-Lápú, leader of the Mactan tribe, refused occupation, resulting in a battle during which Mactan warriors killed Spanish colonizer Ferdinand Magellan. Over 300 years later, the Spanish Queen Isabella erected a memorial to Magellan, four stone pillars and an obelisk. 75 years later, in 1941, not long before the Philippines’ emancipation from the US, another memorial was erected several feet away, a 60-foot-tall bronze statue in the image of Lápú-Lápú, his back turned to Magellan’s intact shrine, the colonial past remembered alongside “the first Filipino to have repelled European aggression,” as the plaque recognizes Lápú-Lápú.

Another example is the memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. at the National Mall in Washington, DC erected in 2011—shocking, or maybe not so shocking, that it took so long—the Social Realist-style homage to the civil rights leader positioned across a reservoir known as the Tidal Basin from the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. The original design of the MLK memorial saw to have inscribed this quote from King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered half a mile away at the Lincoln Memorial:

The quote used in the end—“out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope”—does less to connect King’s memorial to the Jefferson monument, which his granite-carved eyes stare at across the water. King’s reference to the promissory note pledging equality which Jefferson helped write, yet which his actions, as the owner of over 700 slaves, did not live up to. For art historian Sarah Lewis, the correspondence of these two memorials across a chasm of both space and time, shifts us to inhabit the future real conditional tense: “What must have had to happen here on this soil, in this country,” she asks, “for these two monuments to be set in relationship to each other?”

The poetics or politics of these pairs of monuments memorializing Lápú-Lápú and Magaellan, MLK and Jefferson, should not be twisted into any sort of defense of racist statues’ preservation. We don’t need to keep slave traders and Confederate generals on pedestals for any sort of history lesson, even with the addition of another monument as a sort of footnote. These painful histories are already a part of our present. If a monument is “an artifact to make tangible the truth of the past,” then poet Caroline Randall Williams insists we have many living testaments. As “the descendent of Black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped them,” she suggests that her body is a monument, “a tangible truth of the South and its past.”

There are others’ whose stories we can honor. And we are seeing more and more statues commemorating abolitionists like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, as well as less traditional interventions in the landscape of public monuments. Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War (2019) draws on the militaristic statues of men on horseback which date back to the Italian Renaissance, and which Confederate monuments model themselves after, but his mounted rider is instead a Black man in a hoodie with locs and Nike sneakers. Kara Walker made a fountain commemorating the Atlantic Slave Trade, Fons Americanus (2019), controversial for its figures subverting tropes of antebellum caricature, and evocative of her mammy-as-sphinx sculpture, an homage to sugarcane plantation workers, A Subtlety (2014), truly monumental in scale. Artists Glenn Cantave and Idris Brewster have designed augmented reality monuments, recognizing Black icons like Audre Lorde and Jackie Robinson. Artist Moses Sumney, alongside the recent video he directed and starred-in for designer Thom Browne’s SS21 collection, asks: “What does it mean to put a Black body on a pedestal in statuesque poses at a time when literal statues are being toppled around the country, around the world, at a time when white suprematist relics are being destroyed, challenged, removed, and descended nationally with fervor? What does this symbolism mean?” But figurative representation isn’t the only way to remember.

Inspired by 20th-century movements like minimalism and land art, counter-monuments are, according to cultural critic James E. Young, “ethically certain of their duty to remember but aesthetically skeptical of the assumptions underpinning traditional memorial forms.” German artists like Jochen Gerz have grappled with how to design anti-fascist monuments when there are fascist tendencies to “an enormous pedestal with something on it presuming to tell people what they ought to think.” In 1986, Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz designed a 12-meter-tall, one-meter-square pillar encased in lead which slowly sunk into the earth. They prompted the people of Harburg, the working class suburb of Hamburg where it was installed, to inscribe their names into the monument, thereby committing themselves “to remain vigilant.” The more people participated, the faster the pillar was swallowed up by the ground, the artists explaining, “one day it will have disappeared completely, and the site of the Harburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.” Another counter-monument came the year before, the Aschrott Fountain in Kassel, Germany, designed by Hoheisel (the artist who wanted to blow up Brandenburg Gate). Marking the site of a fountain built by a Jewish citizen, which was then destroyed by the Nazis, Hoheisel created its negative image, a 12-meter-deep hole where the 12-meter-tall fountain once stood, striving to “rescue the history of this place as a wound and an open question.”

Designed to provoke rather than to console, people don’t always like counter-monuments. Public works like the Gerzs’ can come across as ugly and baffling—one Harburg resident suggested their Monument Against Fascism should be blown up; another compared it to a chimney. Should art specialists and academics always be dictating how the non-expert public ought to remember? After the statue of Sims, the Antebellum gynecologist, was removed from Central Park, the City of New York invited artists to submit proposals for a new sculpture in its place. While an expert panel selected prize-winning blue-chip artist Simone Leigh, she graciously deferred the commission to a lesser-known artist, Vinnie Bagwell, whose proposal the activists who fought for Sims’ removal preferred. Leigh’s design depicts a reclining Black woman, enclosed in a frame of holly shrubs, to be surrounded by a carpet of bluebell flowers each spring; Bagwell’s an erect Black woman angel, an eternal flame in one hand and the serpent-entwined Staff of Asclepius in the other, the faces of other Black women on her skirt.

Titled Victory Over Sims, it’s expected to be completed and installed at the park in 2021. To echo Lewis: “What will have had to happen?”

Whitney Mallett is a New York-based writer and filmmaker.