That Colossal Shadow

The following is a sneak peek from our May issue, heading to newsstands now.

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Statues embody a collective psyche, the thoughts of the most powerful at the time of their creation, and we, the people who follow, lap up like water against the bronze feet and marble pedestals, pushing and pulling against the original we.

An Altogether More Difficult Question

In late May, the Monument Avenue Commission, convened by Mayor Levar Stoney, will issue its verdict about what, if anything, should be done with the Confederate statues erected on that street between 1890 and 1929.

The mayor is as conflicted as the city he represents.

When Stoney established the commission in June of last year, he described the monuments as “nostalgia masquerading as history,” and he singled out tennis star Arthur Ashe, a Wimbledon winner and political activist, as the “only true champion” among the statues. However, Stoney did not include removal in the commission’s original mandate and had advocated adding context during his campaign. “I wish these monuments had never been built,” he said when announcing the commission, “but like it or not, they are part of our history in this city, and removal will never wash away that stain.”

However, following the bloody alt-right demonstration in Charlottesville two months later, Stoney broadened the commission’s scope to consider the statues’ removal, saying that he personally finds them “insulting.”

Are we a city of monuments, or a city of memorials? Is one more innocent than the other?

But, here, we’re not trying to resolve the question of should they stay or should they go but rather to ask: What do they mean right now? What does their continued existence say about us?

Monuments vs. Memorials

At the unveiling of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1985, the critic and philosopher Arthur Danto wrote in The Nation, “We erect monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so that we shall never forget.”

He went on to refine the distinction, writing that monuments “commemorate the memorable and embody the myths of beginnings. Memorials ritualize remembrance and mark the reality of ends.”

Are we a city of monuments, or a city of memorials?

Did we begin as a city of monuments and end up a city of memorials?

Is one more innocent than the other?

Thirty years later, artist Nate DiMeo, musing upon the 2015 decision by the Memphis City Council to remove the statue and remains of Confederate general and original KKK grand wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest from a downtown park, said — practically piggybacking on Danto’s notion of the ritualization of remembrance — “Memorials aren’t memories. They have motives.”

Those motives, says DiMeo, last year’s Metropolitan Museum of Art artist-in-residence, are bound up with the anxieties and identity crises of the culture that erects them — whether that culture is in Richmond, or Memphis, or New Delhi, or Paris.

The insecurity, the sense of a people trying to maintain their grip on the past, is, he says, the same.  

New Delhi

In the late 19th century, Britain erected a slew of statues in New Delhi. The men depicted were not, by any objective measure, great men.

Writing in The New Yorker last year after a recent visit, the author Steve Coll described them as “obscure governors-general and military men — memorials to functionaries whom, as it turned out, history would little remember.”

Among these monuments, perhaps the most notable was a 50-foot-high monument of King George V, situated on the grand mall in New Delhi.

Coll described it thusly: “So ridiculously high that it all but announced that British power was overcompensating.”  

Two Memories Woven Into Each Other

In 2005, the French philosopher and writer Bernard Henri-Lévy traveled the U.S. for a year. His impressions were published in his 2006 book “American Vertigo.” Besides being deeply thoughtful, his words are valuable for being those of an informed outsider.

In Montgomery, Alabama, BHL, as he is known, visited the Rosa Parks Library and Museum, dedicated to the civil rights activist and the 1955 boycott of segregated public transit she inspired, and viewed the civil rights memorial, a marble clock “engraved with the names of forty heroes and martyrs of the cause.”

Contemplating the strange juxtaposition of a memorial honoring civil rights martyrs in a town that was the first capital of the Confederacy and a center of racial violence, he wrote: “The whole problem here, for instance, on this avenue where, three hundred feet apart, Jefferson Davis declared war and Rosa Parks waited for a bus, is that the two memories are woven into each other and that one can’t appear without the other yielding to it.”  

Altering the Context

In April 2017, Gary Shapiro, a professor of philosophy at the University of Richmond who resides one street over from Monument Avenue, wrote a letter to the New York Times.

“The traditionalist defense is not couched in the language of monumental achievement,” Shapiro wrote. “It is rather called the preservation of ‘heritage.’ ”

In Shapiro’s view, the “heritage not hate” defenders are confused. The statues represent men considered exemplars of nobility, honor — and white supremacy. The monuments memorialize that sensibility. He argued that providing context in the form of plaques was one way to address this ongoing problem.

It is far from a perfect solution, but what context plaques would do is allow the monuments to continue to stand, acknowledging the wishes of their defenders and champions, while fundamentally altering the context in which they exist, a gesture toward the rest of the city that finds them to be a symbolic reminder of a painful past.

Though the statues went up as monuments, Shapiro seemed to be saying in his op-ed, time has turned them into memorials.

Paris: Part One

DiMeo: “[Monuments] are historical. They are not history itself.”

In Paris, it all began with a crash and a fatality at Place Vendôme on Aug. 13, 1792. Reine Violet, a vendor for Jean-Paul Marat’s revolutionary newspaper, threw a rope over a huge 1699 statue of King Louis XIV on horseback, to pull herself up so she could bust off its head. She didn’t know that the bolts from the king and his horse had been removed. The entire statue toppled, crushing Violet. The only part that survived is in the Carnavalet Museum: the king’s 330-pound bronze foot.

Not even 20 years later, a towering monument to Napoleon was installed in the same spot. A commemoration of the emperor’s many victories, it was modeled after the Roman Emperor Trajan’s victory column. The artist, Antoine-Denis Chaudet, depicted Napoleon as a conquering Caesar, surveying his realm.

It had the look of antiquity, of permanence, of history.

In fact, the installation was remade six times over the next 50 years.

The victorious Allies of 1814 had no taste for Chaudet’s Napoleonic glorification, having just defeated the emperor. They replaced the piece with King Henry IV, and then, under the rule of Louis XVIII, with a flag bearing a fleur-de-lis.

In 1833, a dozen years after Napoleon’s death, he was reinstalled on his pedestal via a piece known as “The Little Corporal,” the handiwork of Charles Emile Seurre, which supplanted the flag.

It, too, was soon replaced — by another version of Napoleon, again as Caesar.

New Delhi: 50 Years Later

In New Delhi during the 1960s, the municipal government rounded up all the British statues in the city, all those vestiges of colonial rule, and placed them in Coronation Park, the former colonial parade grounds.

Over time, the elements — and straying cricket balls — began gradually to chip away at the once-proud symbols of the former British “Raj.”

In his New Yorker piece, Steve Coll ruminated on the “eerie, unintentional beauty” of a place that “feels as mysterious as Stonehenge.”

“New Delhi had not erased its imperial origins,” he wrote. “It had collected painful symbols of it and then allowed their potency to dissolve.”

The Uses and Abuses of History

In “American Vertigo,” BHL turned to the 1874 Friedrich Nietzsche essay “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” and reintroduced his historical divisions of the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical.

The monumental reassures people through permanent and “inalterable images of its past grandeur.” But, Nietzsche warns, “Monumental history deceives in its analogies. It attracts the spirited man to daring acts with its seductive similarities and the enthusiastic man to fanaticism.”

The critical, according to BHL, involves subjecting the monumental to the “harsh but just tribunal of scientific history.”

“Memorials aren’t memories. They have motives. … They are historical. They are not history itself.” —Nate DiMeo, artist

Where things go very wrong in the United States, he believes, is a pervasive and delusional antiquarianism.

We might understand “antiquarian” history as hoarding. Nietzsche explains that one who is stuck in the antiquarian mode “envelops himself in a moldy smell.” Rather than a jumbled mass of actual stuff, intense antiquarianism collects an assortment of old ideas that prevent the growth of new ones. When the past is more important than the living present, “then the tree dies unnaturally, from the top gradually down to the roots, and at last the roots themselves are generally destroyed.”

It is a form of memory “that is both anxious and lazy,” BHL wrote, and, what is more, ‘‘ ‘un-American’ since, by a singular reversal of roles, it is in the process of turning that great America of the Enlightenment … into a country even more enslaved to the past than the most past-obsessed European countries.”

In Venice, a New New Delhi

Nine fiberglass sculpture fragments were installed on the main grounds of the 2015 Venice Biennale — each with something missing.

The work — by the artist’s collective known as Raqs: Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta — was purposefully titled “Coronation Park.”

In a video about the installation, Sengupta said that what they hoped to explore was the tension of “in-between time” — a time between erection and destruction, a state inhabited by all things that are built.

The pieces all had George Orwell quotes attached. One read: “He became a sort of hollow, posing dummy. He wore a mask, and his face grew to fit it.” It was a kind of sculpture — stately, proud, reminiscent of a memorial. A robe held the shape of a body, but there wasn’t one.  

Paris: Part Two

In April 1871, almost 50 years after Napoleon died, and soon after they had taken control of Paris, the revolutionary Communards took aim at the Vendôme Napoleon.

It was, they wrote, a “monument to barbarism, a symbol of brute force and glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international law, a permanent insult to the vanquished by the victors, a perpetual assault on one of the great principles of the French Republic, Fraternity.”

The Communards appointed the artist Georges Courbet, friend of the working man, to oversee all public art and museums. Courbet urged removal of the Place Vendôme Napoleon Column to Les Invalides, the French military memorial and site of Napoleon’s tomb.

A month later, under the direction of the Communards, mobs pulled down the tower, as bands played “La Marseillaise” and photographers vied for the best angle of the destruction.

As one observer recalled, “Ah, I shall never forget that colossal shadow falling across my eyes. … The column lies on the ground, split open, its stony entrails exposed to the wind. Caesar is lying prostrate. … The laurel-wreathed head has rolled like a pumpkin into the gutter.”

To Change the Future or to Erase the Past?

Why, throughout history, have people destroyed monuments?

Howard Risatti, a professor emeritus of contemporary art and critical theory at Virginia Commonwealth University, isn’t entirely certain, even after having explored the question for years.

“Is it to change the future,” he asks, “or to erase the past?”

Either of which, he adds, “would seem to be dubious premises.”

If you were looking for a measured and nonideological explanation for why we are locked in this endless tug-of-war, you can hardly do better than that.

“Public art is the expression of the time in which it’s made .. the relevance is decided by the community.” —Hamilton Glass, Richmond artist

He has more questions.

“Is it political opportunism by some people for self-promotion?” Risatti asks, continuing to turn the problem over. “We do get a sense of that playing out in Richmond. Or is it a kind of revenge? If the latter, on whom is the revenge being inflicted, and to what end?”  

Of Time and Relevance

Hamilton Glass, a Richmond artist who is working on a community mural for the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Bridge: “Public art is the expression of the time in which it’s made. It is the physical representation of values. The relevance [of that work] is decided by the community. And if something is no longer relevant, then that’s where the conversation begins. If we don’t believe in this anymore, then maybe it should go to an appropriate place where we can learn about what it meant.”

Staring Into the Void in Varina

In September, 65 members of the Virginia Association of Museums gathered at the Varina Public Library. They met to decide what we talk about when we talk about monuments.

All agreed that a memorial is for something that happened on a specific site or where someone is buried. A monument serves as an overarching expression of what exists in the public realm — and what’s appropriate may change over time.

As soon as the group attempted to move beyond that very basic definition, however, all was murk.

If, for instance, you remove the man on the horse and leave the base, or if you take the base, too, how do you commemorate a void? What will you replace it with? Is leaving a blank space just an open wound of memory?

On these questions, the group in Varina was unable to reach consensus.

“If I had to say,” Jennifer Thomas, the association’s director, offers, “I would think that people tend to lean more toward adding interpretive elements to the current sculpture rather than to take things away.”

Removing the sculptures to museums, which are institutions of interpretation, is problematic, she says. “The problem with that is museums with stretched resources,” Thomas says. Not just fiscally, but physically. If, as an example, Lee came down, you’d need a place the size of an airplane hangar to house the piece. And then who pays for all this?

It is her last point — having nothing whatsoever to do with questions of logistics — that is her most fascinating: “Isn’t Monument Avenue already an open-air museum?”  

Symbols Narrated Through Time

Corey D.B. Walker, dean and professor of religion and society at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology of Virginia Union University: “We can put up a plate against those monuments that doesn’t agree with what that dominant symbol presents, but that offers no guarantee of how those symbols will be narrated through time.”

He adds, “We’ve never come to an understanding about what the conclusion of the Civil War means in the context of ‘We the people.’ What is the circumference of ‘We’ in those founding documents?”

Questions of memory and history have long been a part of Walker’s thinking. A professor at the University of Virginia when Monument Avenue Commission member Ed Ayers was dean of Arts and Sciences, he led discussions that grappled with the legacy of slave owner Thomas Jefferson and his lofty ideals for liberty and education.

The questions he asked of Jefferson are also pertinent to the Monument Avenue debate: “How do you memorialize a tragic history, and how do you have the public begin to come to grips with that tragedy and also the ongoing reverberations?”

Paris: Part Three

When the French government made its swift reentry to Paris, executing and exiling the Communards and their sympathizers, Courbet received jail time and blame for the toppling of the Napoleon Column.

After his 1872 release, the artist exiled himself to Switzerland, where he continued to make art and drink heavily, while the French government seized whatever of his art they could lay their hands on and kept hounding him for restoration money.

The column went back up in 1874, with a copy of the Caesar-style Napoleon on top, where to this day — blessed with a 2014 touch-up job, courtesy of the Ritz Hotel — it remains.

The In-Between

Let’s go back to the New Delhi-based Raqs Collective and their premise that tension lives in the in-between — the time between a statue’s dedication and its eventual decay or destruction.

We, as a city, are caught between the desires of those who wish to protect the past and those who wish to secure the future. We are trapped — trapped and anxious and uncertain.

We will only escape when these statues that hold our gaze completely erode away or when something supplants them. Then, we can get on with the business of living in the now.