STATUES ARE LIES. Jonathan Jones in The Guardian Website, 21st July 2020

STATUES ARE LIES.  Jonathan Jones, in The Guardian Website, 21^st July 2020

Statues are lies, selfies in bronze – and you can’t bring history to life with dead art.  Why are we obsessed with putting up statues of new heroes to replace old villains like Edward Colston?  Reducing history to celebrity culture won’t help anyone understand the full scale and horror of slavery.  Jonathan Jones.

This is a summary of the article by Jonathan Jones which was published on The Guardian website on 21^st July 2020.

Statues are lies

Marcel Duchamp’s porcelain urinal which he submitted to a New York art exhibition 103 years ago caused the death of the statue as an art form.  Why, then, in the 21^st Century are we ‘obsessing about putting up statues of new heroes to replace the old villains?  All this political radicalism is being betrayed by artistic conservatism’.

The deposition of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol was a ‘dadaist act of creativity’ but the ensuing conversation about a replacement statue has been ‘sterile’, and ‘adds nothing to anyone’s understanding of slavery’ in the context of the British Empire.

A statue is ‘no more than a crude symbol’.  The survival of so many Victorian era statues in British cities arises from the view of 19^th Century historians that ‘history was “created by great men” and their leadership’.  This view was ‘killed’ by the Great War, and it also ‘killed the statue’.  Duchamp’s urinal was first exhibited in 1917; Duchamp’s brother died on the western front in that war.  The British national war memorial, erected after the Great War, is a ‘stark, abstract image of infinite loss and suffering too vast to be contained in a statue of some supposedly heroic figure’.  Edwin Lutyens intended the Cenotaph to be a temporary monument, but ‘it became permanent by popular demand’.  ‘The crass lie of a sculpture’ was rejected and in its place, ‘the contemplative modern poetry’ of the Cenotaph was found to be acceptable.

Slavery is a tragedy equivalent to the First World War.  Jones asks what kind of artwork ‘could convey the scale and nature of the crime’ of Britain’s slave trade 1500 – 1860s. 

Jones considers the Second World War and concludes that it ‘defied anything a figurative sculpture could say’.  He considers the Motherland colossus at Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), and concludes that it is an ‘empty and inhuman display of Stalinist kitsch that does not admit the true chaos of battle’.

Jones asks whether the Shoah (Holocaust) could be commemorated with a statue of a prisoner at Auschwitz, and he concludes that it could not.  He refers to Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin which is abstract: a ‘piece of prime real estate is rendered valueless by making it, for ever, a cemetery of abstract empty tombs’.

Jones writes about the ‘dark abyss beneath Cape Coast Castle in Ghana …. where thousands of captured Africans waited to be dragged in chains onto British ships in the 18^th Century’.  Jones urges that ‘this void – this sepulchral black hole that tells a terrible truth about British guilt – should somehow be brought back to Britain … which surely it can by means of contemporary art, instead of another statue – another token symbol’.