Artists & Preservationists Debate the Rush to Topple Statues

[liminalOyster]

Trump Aside, Artists and Preservationists Debate the Rush to Topple Statues
By ROBIN POGREBIN and SOPAN DEBAUG. 18, 2017

Mark Bradford, the renowned Los Angeles artist, says Confederate statues should not be removed unless they are replaced by educational plaques that explain why they were taken away.

For Robin Kirk, a co-director of Duke University’s Human Rights Center, the rapid expunging of the statues currently underway needs to be “slower and more deliberative.”

And Lonnie G. Bunch III, the director the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, proposes that the dismantled statues be grouped together and contextualized, so people understand what they stood for.

In state after state this week, artists, museum curators, and historic preservationists found themselves grappling with lightning-fast upheaval in a cultural realm — American monuments — where they usually have input and change typically unfolds with care. Many said that even though they fiercely oppose President Trump and his defense of Confederate statues, they saw the removal of the monuments as precipitous and argued that the widening effort to eliminate them could have troubling implications for artistic expression.

“I am loath to erase history,” Mr. Bunch said. “For me it’s less about whether they come down or not, and more about what the debate is stimulating.”

So far that debate has been almost entirely a reaction to Mr. Trump and his views on race, with little discussion about the Confederate monuments and sculptures as works of art or historical artifacts of any cultural value.

On Wednesday evening, after President Trump defended white nationalists who wanted to preserve these monuments, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York tweeted that he would remove the busts of two Confederate generals at the City University of New York’s Hall of Fame for Great Americans at Bronx Community College. Other politicians have been issuing similar pronouncements rather than going through the more typical process of consulting art historians and curators or forming study commissions.

The anger and action aimed at the statues are reminiscent of recent controversies over two prominent artworks — Dana Schutz’s painting “Open Casket” depicting Emmett Till, the murdered African-American teenager, in the Whitney Biennial, and Sam Durant’s sculpture gallows “Scaffold,” at the Walker Art Center’s sculpture garden, which was denounced by Native American groups for recalling an act of genocide.

Protesters objected to both pieces on racial, ethnic, and historical grounds and called for their removal or destruction. Neither work celebrated the Confederacy or slavery, however, and both were created as art rather than as public memorials like some of the statues now being removed.

“These are not works of art, they’re propaganda,” the artist Adam Pendleton said of the Confederate statues. “To equate them with how a work of art exists in the world is a false equation. They’re instruments of a political agenda and it would be real folly to suggest that there is any kind of ambiguity.’’

“Their artistic merit is irrelevant because it’s beside the point,” he added. “We don’t think about who created the statue of Robert E. Lee and what her intentions were. We think about who and what Robert E. Lee signifies.”

But others argue that it is possible to defend the Confederate memorials as art without defending the subject matter.

“They also were the work of artists,” said Hollis Robbins, a humanities professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute. She cited Laura Gardin Fraser, whose double equestrian statue of Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson was one of those removed overnight in Baltimore this week. Ms. Robbins said that artwork should not necessarily be discarded because the subject matter or the artists’ personal history is offensive. “Do we teach T. S. Eliot, who was anti-Semitic, or the films of Roman Polanski, who was charged with rape?” she said. “Should we play Wagner in Israel?”

“While I am personally in favor of these sculptures’ going away, I think it’s important to understand that many of these artists did not have a political motivation,” Ms. Robbins added. “They had an aesthetic motivation.”

Several people in the art world said there is an important distinction to be made between private artworks and public monuments. Unlike artwork made by individual artists, many of the Confederate monuments were supported by city or state governments — sometimes including tax dollars — and placed on public land, suggesting official approval of what the statues stand for.

“The Confederate monuments are meant to convey a message that we value the history of oppression,” said Adrienne Edwards, the Walker’s visual arts curator at large.

The statues needn’t be destroyed, many said — simply moved to an environment in which they can be studied and understood as historical relics rather than enduringly potent symbols of oppression.

A toppled Confederate statue in Durham, N.C., on Monday. Credit Virginia Bridges/The Herald-Sun, via Associated Press
Joshua David, the president and chief executive of the World Monuments Fund — which is usually on the side of protecting monuments — said it can be appropriate to move them to museums or other centers of learning.

“These are statues on pedestals, and when you place something on a pedestal you’re putting something in a position to worship it,” Mr. David said. “To create a kind of hero worship around the Confederacy and to support state sanctioned white supremacy, it’s appropriate to re-examine them and to change their context.”

But others argue that removing a statue from its place of origin diminishes the power of its historical significance. “The meanings and the history that we are able to draw from them in a different site, especially a sort of sanitized site like a museum, are not going to be the same,” said Michele H. Bogart, a professor at Stony Brook University. “That is a historical loss.”

And there are those who warn against rashly removing public art without thoughtful and thorough public discussion. Ms. Kirk of Duke suggested that people in Durham, N.C. — where one statue was pulled down and another was defaced — could brainstorm about monuments that might be substituted for those that were removed.

“Why don’t we have a monument to justice, to the arts?” Ms. Kirk said. “Why don’t we have a monument to John Coltrane? He’s a North Carolinian.”

Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council in New York, also suggested that public officials nationwide, including Governor Cuomo, were moving too quickly on removing the monuments.

“We believe that in instances where there can be a further discussion of public art or the removal or mediation of it, that there should be,” Mr. Bankoff said. “The public discourse is a very important one.”

Mr. Bradford, the artist, said that it was important to have a public process around replacing the Confederate statues so that the broader citizenry could grow from a painful chapter. “If this whole conversation is about the history of this country, then you have to talk about the history of this country,” he said. “Don’t just leave these empty spaces. Contextualize the action. I don’t feel like that can be rushed.”

But Mr. Pendleton suggested that the removal of the statues is in itself a positive form of artistic expression, a “performative act” and long overdue.

“Part of what’s being debated is what these statues represent,” he said. “It’s very clear what they represent: They memorialize a very dark period in American history. We’re talking about a moment when people were enslaved. It’s the opposite of everything America is supposed to stand for. Get them down.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/arts ... trump.html

[Elvis]

I have a Civil War-era Confederate battle flag. It's worth about 800 bucks to a redneck. What should I do with it?

[liminalOyster]

I have a Civil War-era Confederate battle flag. It's worth about 800 bucks to a redneck. What should I do with it?

If not comfortable taking money from the people who'd bid on an ebay auction with description #charlottesville #warofnorthernaggression, I bet you could sell to a film art direction outfitter.

[liminalOyster]

‘A Seed of Healing and Change’: Native Americans Respond to Sam Durant’s ‘Scaffold’
SHEILA DICKINSON

Scaffold, a now storied sculpture by Sam Durant, appeared in the Walker Art Center’s much-loved sculpture garden next to the sugary sweet Spoonbridge and Cherry, a local landmark by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. The ’80s-era Pop icon is a giant bent spoon holding up a piece of bright red fruit. The newer work, installed for an opening that its presence instead delayed, incorporated a sized-to-scale replica of a historic gallows upon which 38 men—all from the Dakota tribe native to the area that is now Minnesota—were executed by hanging in 1862. It was the largest mass execution in U.S. history and took place some 80 miles south of Minneapolis, in a town called Mankato.

Looming over visitors to the newly renovated sculpture park, Scaffold was outfitted with stairs that invited visitors to interact with the piece and children to play. For Native American viewers, the piece looked less like a ‘70s playground and more like a structure designed to kill their ancestors.  The equipment became the province of the powerful—for the viewer who can walk on and off with no further implication considered.

Durant is a Los Angeles-based artist who has produced thought-provoking conceptual work for more than two decades. He created the first iteration of Scaffold through a commission from Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, in 2012, the same year that the 150th anniversary of the Dakota execution was commemorated with a solemn horse journey from the Lower Brule Indian Reservation to the hanging site in Mankato. Olga Viso, the Walker Art Center’s executive director, explained in a press conference last Wednesday that, though the piece was acquired in 2014, neither the proximity to Mankato nor the specific significance of the structure had been perceived as problematic until after the sculpture was erected. Only when the Walker began planning interpretive materials in late May did the institution “begin getting indications of concerns about perception of the work,” Viso said, “and so began the process of consultation.”

Many reasons provoked the strong negative reaction that has been directed toward Scaffold by native and non-native communities in Minnesota, where peace and reconciliation among the two remains a distant goal. Glorified paintings of cultural and racial superiority over the Dakota people created at the turn of the last century still adorn the state capitol’s Senate chambers, even after Governor Mark Dayton set up a special committee last year to survey citizens about relocating the offensive artwork. Despite a majority willing to see the paintings transplanted and all eleven registered tribes of Minnesota requesting that the work go to a museum, only two paintings out of ten were legislatively approved to move.

Similarly, it was not until 2015 that the state’s sixth-grade history textbooks were updated to include a more inclusive story of Native Americans in the late 19th century, as well as acknowledgement of the forced removal of the Dakota people. Additional controversy has also arisen over recent talks about how to commemorate the bicentennial of Fort Snelling, which was established as a military base for U.S. forces in 1820 and served as the site of an internment camp for Dakota women, children, and elders after the Mankato executions. To complicate the situation further, Fort Snelling is built at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers—a place known as Bdote, the sacred spiritual birthplace of the Dakota people.

The story that led to the source of the gallows evoked by Scaffold is grim. In 1851, the Dakota signed a treaty that ceded 24 million acres of land (a third of the state of Minnesota) for three cents an acre. Most of the money went to a fur trader named Henry Sibley to, as the lore goes, “settle their affairs.” Some 7,000 Dakota were sent to a 10-mile strip of mostly non-arable land and, by the winter of 1862, they were starving and were refused food and provisions. A trader named Andrew Myrick famously said, “As far as I’m concerned, let them eat grass.” Days later, violence broke out and one of the first casualties was Myrick, found with grass stuffed in his mouth. Thus began the three-month U.S.-Dakota War, during which 303 Dakota warriors were captured and a letter was sent to Abraham Lincoln seeking the right to execute them all. Lincoln sanctioned 38, later to be known as the Dakota 38.

Certainly Scaffold has sparked conversation and raised awareness of the troubled history of the Dakota people. The failure to connect with those traumatized by the work signals how, as Scott Russell and David Cournoryer wrote in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “Minnesota has so successfully wiped clean its awful treatment of Dakota people that no one—no Walker curator, board member or patron—raised the issue of what actual Dakota might think.”

Within a Native American cultural and spiritual understanding of ancestral memory and generational knowledge, the thought of kids climbing and playing on the structure of a gallows struck many as profane. Graci Horne, a young Dakota artist, helped organize protests at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden that grew in size and intensity last week. “I feel sick to my stomach being near this object that replicates the killing of my ancestors,” she said in a conversation at the site. “It is such a disrespectful object.” Signs around her hung on fences with messages like “Take it down.” A makeshift memorial was made with spray paint on sheets spelling out the names of the Dakota who died in 1862. Flowers lay at its base, with LED lights to keep vigil at night.

In January 2016, an early Walker press release provided a brief description of Scaffold, mentioning its gallows-like appearance and its provocative nature but not its structural reference to the Mankato execution. But in an open letter of apology sent May 26 to the Native American news source The Circle, the Walker issued a further statement about setting up a meeting with Dakota elders and Durant himself. The artist declared that he was open to removing the sculpture, and the Walker announced it would delay the grand opening of its newly renovated sculpture garden.

After a mediation session last Wednesday between Dakota elders, Durant, staff from the Walker, and representatives of the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, clear and swift actions were announced, beginning with a traditional Dakota ceremony on Friday and a Native American construction company volunteering its services to dismantle the work. The wood was designated to be transported to Fort Snelling, where it will be ceremonially burned. The Walker also committed to commissioning a new work by a Native American artist, and Durant agreed never to produce Scaffold again while also granting the intellectual property rights of the work to the Dakota people. Durant gravely remarked after the mediation, “I have learned a tremendous amount in this process and I will not make this type of mistake in my work again, I hope.”

Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University and author of Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians but Were Afraid to Ask, has consulted on other public artworks that evoke Native American history. Asked for his thoughts after the announcement that Scaffold would be removed, Treuer told ARTnews,“The artist put white comfort over native comfort. I cannot fathom that an artist could imagine a scaffold for a mass execution would teach white folk or educate our children. I know for a fact there are tried and tested methods of working with communities to build meaningful public artworks about history and that engage children.”
Rory Wakemup, the director of All My Relations Arts, a space devoted to contemporary Native American art in Minneapolis, said, “You can’t blame Sam Durant for trying, but he is a reflection of the system that he came from. He can’t really inform white privilege from a place of white privilege. Ignorance breeds ignorance.”
After the mediation session, Cheyanne St. John, the tribal history preservation officer for the Lower Sioux Indian Community, told ARTnews she is “disheartened that an amazing institution like the Walker, in a unique place like Minnesota with eleven tribal nations and a plethora of resources ready to engage their expertise and perspectives, did not call. If they had done that, they would have avoided all this happening.”

Wakemup said he sees an opportunity offered by the negligence of the past. “Large art institutions like the Walker are by design exclusive,” he said. “The Walker is now poised to set an example in the way it connects to communities of color, such as the native community in Minnesota.”

At the Dakota ceremony on Friday, the low throb of the drums ground the beats of traditional Dakota music while the smell of sage wafted over the crowd. The smoky scent surrounded Scaffold, sealing the negativity in and ensuring it would not travel with the wood when it moves. After the Native construction crew members were blessed, they mounted the structure and, with the loud grind of a chainsaw, began the deconstruction. The Dakota people now have access to all the material that made up the sculpture.

The ceremonial actions of dismantling Scaffold and burning it can be “more than a media play that acts as a Band Aid,” Wakeump said. “Rather, it is planting a seed of healing and change—which might be an oak, solid and lasting, if the Walker nurtures it.”

http://www.artnews.com/2017/06/05/a-see ... -scaffold/

[Elvis]

I have a Civil War-era Confederate battle flag. It's worth about 800 bucks to a redneck. What should I do with it?

If not comfortable taking money from the people who'd bid on an ebay auction with description #charlottesville #warofnorthernaggression, I bet you could sell to a film art direction outfitter.

Ebay doesn't allow that shit. Seriously, confederate flags no longer allowed on eBay—and I'm down with that. But the prop dept. idea is great, thanks.

I've been hanging onto the flag for almost 20 years. I always need cash, and one rationale goes: "some redneck would be out $800, and what would he have—a stupid antique flag." But I've never tried to sell it, and I think I should either give it to a museum that wants it, or burn it, maybe in some kind of public exhibition.

[Iamwhomiam]

A battle flag is usually a localized flag that includes the unit number and is not necessarily a duplicate of the flag of the Confederate States of America. Some are exceptionally rare and quite valuable.

Lots of Civil War battle reenactors are also collectors of memorabilia from that era, so you might want to connect with one of their groups to shop your flag around. An antique dealer too, would be another good prospect, either to purchase it or to sell on consignment for a commission or set fee. They might have certain customers who ask them to keep an eye out for items they would be interested in purchasing for their own collection. Whatever. It will only grow in value over time.

[8bitagent]

The toppling of these statues should have happened a LONG time again.

[Cordelia]

What's accomplished by removing statues? It's a token gesture, imho, that doesn't change the historical landscape they were part of. But If they are removed, what about their other depictions, like in paintings? The Smithsonian's 'National Portrait Gallery' displays, for the viewing public, portraits of Confederate Generals, such as......


Robert E. Lee


Stonewall Jackson

Take them out of their galleries? Remove them from their collection? Where do the gestures end?

[barracuda]

Take them out of their galleries? Remove them from their collection? Where do the gestures end?

Screen Shot 2017-08-20 at 3.13.42 PM.png

[Cordelia]

^^^Thanks. Cool.

[Cordelia]

Fuck it, just rename the damn statues to honor the horses:

"'Traveller' Bearing His Traitorous Weight'


'"Little Sorrel' Bearing His......'

[Iamwhomiam]

In museums, Cordelia, is where such artworks with historic value belong, where they can be admired by those wishing to do so. Lee's or some other such notable character's portrait hung in a museum isn't nearly as 'in your face' as a statue commemorating the institution of slavery and those who fought to uphold it, if you pass by it twice a day. Or once.

Nah, not in the land of the free, where everyone is equal.

Fuck that "The South Will Rise Again Bullshit." Let's finally be done with it and let it die & remain dead forever.

Edited to add:

Besides, their horses were far better treated than their slaves, so not much of an improvement, but I like your title!

[peartreed]

Or the statues could just be downsized to feature only the horses asses.

[Iamwhomiam]

^^^^ Ha!

[norton ash]

Ole Bull

I saw this statue in Loring Park, Minneapolis, and I thought he might be a Civil War hero or a politician with the nickname 'Ole Bull.'

Looked it up... there's a reason he's playing a fiddle.

Ole Bornemann Bull (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈu:lə ˈbʉlː];[1] 5 February 1810 – 17 August 1880) was a Norwegian virtuoso violinist and composer.[2][3] According to Robert Schumann, he was on a level with Niccolò Paganini for the speed and clarity of his playing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_Bull

My kind of hero.