``BLOW THE MAN DOWN, BOYS”

Jerry Harkins

You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.

                                                                                                                  ––Exodus 20:4

In every nation through every age there have been some of God’s children who have taken the First Commandment very seriously.  The Bible is strong against the making and worshiping of graven images which it considers to be idolatry.  It makes a single exception in the Book of Numbers (21:8-9) where  God instructs Moses to make a bronze snake and put it on a poll so that people who are bitten by real snakes can gaze at it and be cured.  The commandment is otherwise crystal clear that realistic statues are forbidden.  The Catholic Church interprets this as meaning that believers must not worship statues but can use them to focus their thoughts and prayers.  The difference between adoration and contemplation of the divine seems superficial and statues are an important part of Catholic life.  Pope John Paul II was convinced that the Blessed Virgin had intervened to save his life in 1981 when an assassin shot him four times so he had one of the recovered bullets mounted in her statue at Fatima.  Eastern Orthodox Catholics are a bit more ambiguous.  Their icons are two dimensional images and they generally permit relief sculpture but statues in the round are extremely rare.  Muslims and Jews do not allow images of any kind and Protestants occupy every niche in between.  Southern Baptists are generally opposed to what they consider idolatry but each congregation is largely self-governing and exceptions can be readily found.  Quakers are also opposed to images of any kind, including crosses and even stained glass. Exceptions are rare.  History is replete with iconoclasts destroying images of every description but the main target has always been the three dimensional art of sculpture.

It is not only religious sculpture that is controversial.  For reasons that would probably delight practitioners of psychoanalysis, secular works, especially those placed in public spaces, have their own way of igniting battles royal.  The wide range of controversy and ferocity is suggested by some historical examples:

·  “The Greek Slave” of 1849 by the American sculptor Hiram Powers is a nude and chained maiden captured and sold into slavery by Turks.  Widely accepted by the American public because of its similarity to classical Greek and Roman sculpture, it nonetheless occasioned fierce opposition from proto-Comstockians.  This was met be a brilliant proto-PR campaign led by liberal clergymen which resulted in the adoption of the maidens as a symbol by both abolitionists and early feminists.  The debate continues to the present day.

·  “Liberty Enlightening the World” of 1886 by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, better known as the Statue of Liberty, was also well received by most but attacked on aesthetic, economic and, most vehemently, racial grounds.  A month after its dedication, an editorial in the Cleveland Gazette for November 27 insisted, “Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an industrious and inoffensive colored man in the South to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed. The idea of the ‘liberty’ of this country ‘enlightening the world,’ or even Patagonia, is ridiculous in the extreme.”

·  “Civic Virtue” by Frederick MacMonnies has been denounced by feminists almost since it was installed in City Hall Park, New York in 1922.  It shows a naked male hero holding a sword while standing triumphantly over two beautiful naked women symbolizing vice and corruption.   His genitals are covered by the leaves of a vine and the women’s’ bodies below the waste are actually serpents’ tails.  Mayor LaGuardia had it exiled to Queens Borough Hall in the 1930’s where it resided until 2012 when, at the age of 90, and under renewed attack in the era of #MeToo, it was removed to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn at a cost in excess of $100,000.  A committee of Queens civic leaders wants it back so Green-Wood may not be its final resting place.

·  “Bird in Space” of 1926 is an abstract work by the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi said to represent not the bird but its flight.  It was purchased in Paris by the American photographer Edward Steichen.  However, when it arrived in New York, the Customs Bureau refused to believe it was a tax exempt work of art and imposed a $230 tax on it as a “manufactured metal object.”  This decision was appealed and the trial was followed avidly by the press.  One expert testified  “If that's art, hereafter I'm a bricklayer.”  The court decided it was art but that would not have impressed the American poet and critic John Ciardi who opposed distortion and abstraction of any kind.  He famously wrote, “Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.” 

·  “Chicago Picasso” of 1967 by Pablo Picasso is a monumental cubist work dominating the plaza of the Daley Civic Center in Chicago.  From the beginning, the critics loved it but most Chicagoans made their dislike loud and clear. In part, this was because they also disapproved of the artist’s alleged Communism and his sexual appetites.  The populist columnist Mike Royko opined, “… the fact is, it has a long stupid face and looks like some giant insect that is about to eat a smaller, weaker insect.  Its eyes are like the eyes of every slum owner who made a buck off the small and weak.” Over time, however, most citizens accepted the work as an icon of the city and became proud of it.

·  “Three Servicemen” was commissioned to create a representational tribute to the soldiers who fought in Vietnam specifically to assuage the outraged response of veterans and politicians to the austere minimalism of Maya Lin’s “Vietnam Wall.”  Dedicated in 1984, two years after the Wall itself, Ms. Lin objected strenuously and Mr. Hart responded in a similar vein.  The controversy raged for several years but quickly evaporated as the power of the wall became obvious. The Hart work and another by Glenna Goodacre depicting the women who served have also become highly admired by all but the most superannuated critics.

Of course, all the arts engender vehement criticism but sculpture, especially public sculpture, seems to bring out the worst in critics, artists and the citizenry.  There are certain sculptors who are particularly vulnerable.  Among contemporary artists these would include the aforementioned Frederick Hart who is thought to be too representational, S. Seward Johnson, Jr. too lowbrow, Richard Serra, too intrusive, Jeff Koons, too trivial, and Damien Hirst, too commercial.  At present, there is a new category of disdained work:  statues of historical figures whose lives did not, in some respects, accord with contemporary standards of morality.  Again, the range is wide, including:

·      Christopher Columbus for genocide against Caribbean natives;

·      Saint Junipero Serra for torture and enslavement of California Indians;

·      Robert E. Lee, for being a slaveholder and a traitor to the United States;

·      William Tecumseh Sherman for war crimes in his march through Georgia;

·      Theodore Roosevelt for being a warmonger and racist;

·      Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony also for racism;

·      Andrew Jackson for the Trail of Tears and the Long March;

·      Kit Carson for implementing the Long March;

·      Charles Lindberg for his Nazi sympathies and his promotion of eugenics;  

·      J. Marion Sims, the Father of Gynecology for experimentation on slave women;  and,

·      Joe Paterno, Penn State football coach, for a subordinate’s pedophilia.

All these people have been honored with one or more statues in one or more prominent locations.  Even today, all have their vociferous detractors and their staunch defenders.  Every single statue on the list has recently been defaced, destroyed or taken down and hidden except for that of the Mss. Stanton and Anthony whose larger-than-life monument (portrayed ahistorically with Sojourner Truth) was installed in New York’s Central Park only recently on August 26, 2020.  It is the first statue of real women gracing the park but is liable to attract attention because Stanton and Anthony did not welcome African-American women to their movement.  We shall see.

I make no claim on the merits or lack thereof of the persons on my list.  It is not that I am without opinions about them.  In the interest of full disclosure, I confess that I have often explained why I have never read the poetry of Ezra Pound by claiming that there are enough great poets to occupy me for life without wasting time reading the work of a crazy Nazi.  I would hate to see New York erect a statue to Mr. Pound in Bryant Park but there is little to fear on that account.  I do wonder, however, if I would join a mob tearing it down if it should come about.  I hope not.

Iconoclasm, like book burning, is always a brutal act even if the work celebrates, accepts or even merely ignores brutality.  It is true, as Shakespeare taught us, “The evil that men do lives after them; / The good is oft interred with their bones.”  But both good and bad are part of our history and our culture.  I am certain that the Taliban blew up the Bamyan Buddhas and ISIS threatened to blow up the Taj Mahal in the belief they were carrying out Islamic decrees.  I and, probably, most Muslim scholars disagree with any such rationale and I strenuously object to people blowing up other people’s history.  In the real world, of course, there are always exceptions.  I would be outraged if Germany erected a memorial to Hitler and I can hear myself saying that the monster was not just part of German history.  I watched with approval as the Iraqi Shiites toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein and the Russians tore down those of Lenin and Stalin.  But not so much Marx.  I wince every time Stalin seems to be making a comeback but, ultimately, it’s none of my business that he appeals to many Russians.

I’m not the only one who draws very fine lines.  America has a long and unattractive history of moralizing, of people trying to force other people to think and act as they do or purport to do.  The key word there is force.  You are welcome to try to persuade me that the earth is flat but not to outlaw condoms or the teaching of evolution.  I believe we all share the right to freedom of speech but Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has no moral right to preach nonsense about vaccinations.  

Human society is complex and often surprising.  When I think of all the art that has been attacked as somehow unacceptable or discomforting, I cannot help but think about the exceptions, the contrary examples.  Anthony Comstock did not live long enough to mount one of his trademark crusades against the last work of Daniel Chester French, the remarkable sculpture “Andromeda,” which is arguably one of the most erotic images

ever carved in marble.  Yet it has been widely praised by critics and the public ever since it was finished in 1929, in part because French was a beloved public figure and in part because the work has seldom been exhibited outside his studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.  However, thousands of people visit, photograph and post it on the internet every year without incident.  One wonders what would happen were it installed on the Boston Common or in the Smithsonian Institution.  Would it be thought to objectify a woman’s body?  Or, worse, be pornographic?  Would there be demands  to remove it?  The answers for Boston are maybe not.  For Washington, D.C., it would seem inevitable that congresspersons of various persuasions could not resist storming the ramparts.  You will have to forgive me for saying so, but it would be even more shocking if any of the solons could tell you who Daniel Chester French was, what the Greek myth of Andromeda and Perseus was about or how the sculpture was made.  Admittedly none of that is important to the success of the communication between the artist and the viewer, just as it is not important that Bird in Space has no feathers.  Indeed many contemporary artists do not give their works titles or give them titles unrelated to their creative intent.  French was an upright American of the Victorian era.  His intent was never salacious.  Rather, Andromeda is a hymn to beauty, a validation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s axion that, “…if eyes were made for seeing, / Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.”

Sculpture may be the most powerful medium for capturing and communicating ideas that are nebulous, elusive or incompletely formed, as though seen through St. Paul’s glass darkly.  This is true whether the work is directly representational or highly abstract.  In either case, it can convey its message without the intermediation of words.  Robert Burns brilliantly defines love as like a red, red rose but the reader has to think about it.  Not so if you come upon a glass rose created by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, the father and son team of Czech artists who made the Ware Collection at Harvard. The dimensionality is more emotionally revealing and more immediate than the poem.  A David Smith geometric piece of industrial steel or a Henry Moore “Reclining Figure” in bronze may be a low definition or cool medium in Marshall McLuhan’s terms while Andromeda would be higher definition or hotter.  Each communicates with an immediacy that no other medium can match.  It merely takes the first two a little more time to sink in.  What exactly “sinks in” is non-verbal by its nature.

When protesters complain that the statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History makes them “uncomfortable” because of the supposed racism of the two other figures depicted, they are confirming its immediacy.  It is not necessary for them to know anything much about Roosevelt or his era, about the iconography of the other figures or about the intent of the sculptor, James Earle Fraser.  When the Mayor of New York says, “The statute clearly presents a white man as superior to people of color and that’s just not acceptable in this day and age and it never should have been acceptable,” he is trying to define the protesters’ discomfort in the words of a twenty-first century politician/art historian/critic.  That discomfort may not be inappropriate but is also not precise or even concrete.  By today’s lights, Roosevelt was a complicated man.  Among other things, he shared a degree of the racism most of us find immoral today.  Was his racism as evil as Hitler’s anti-Semitism?  Is his progressive leadership obliterated by his faults?  Are these even legitimate questions?  Discuss.  Of course, if you tear down his many statues, you obliterate the questions for yourself and everyone else.

As a general rule, people who do violence to public sculptures that discomfort them are the intellectual and moral heirs of Anthony Comstock and Jimmy Swaggart.  But, like all general rules, there are always going to be exceptions.  People of good will can disagree about whether Theodore Roosevelt was a bombastic racist or an admirable pilgrim who contributed greatly to making America a more perfect union.  Was he a patriot or jingoist, a peacemaker or warmonger, a conservationist or trophy hunter?  Of course, he was all of these things to one degree or another.  He was also the most popular man in America.  In the 1904 Presidential election, he defeated his principal opponent by a margin of twenty percent, one of the largest landslides ever.  In other words, his sins were the characteristic morality of a majority of Americans of his times.  Can we afford to expunge a man who did so much to shape and be shaped by those times from our history because they make us uncomfortable?

It is a legitimate question and one without a definitive answer.  On the one hand, as the philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  His words are engraved on a plaque at Auschwitz which was considered too evil to be leveled after World War II.  It was preserved to make people feel uncomfortable.  On the other, though, the historian Edward Gibbon concluded that history serves no purpose, follows no course, makes no promises, promotes no values.  It is, he said, “…little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”  

The iconoclasts of old at least had empirical objectives.  Oliver Cromwell made no secret of his desire to erase Irish history.  The Taliban openly published their objective of erasing any history that did not comport with their understanding of Islamic law.  But the lives of individuals and nations are always to be understood as journeys, not destinations.  Those who would shape the future of our history would do well to understand where we have been.