Statues – Monuments #

Tacitus claimed standards of historical research and scholarship should be more than just glorified gossip. We need higher expectations - to commemorate great deeds and to bring to the attention of posterity the damage that evil deeds do and to denounce them.

We create monuments, statues and artistic memorials to commemorate the past. The problem is many become sites of unquestioning glorification rather than of profound reflection? War seldom resembles politicians manufactured memories of it,

Australia has no equivalents of the American monuments to political liberty: the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial.

What this nation does have is war memorials. Our landscape has been transformed by war memorials, small and large, local and national, statues of diggers in the hundreds, obelisks, cairns and cenotaphs. The cult of Anzac has been naturalised in Australia, but, to a newcomer, the monumental honouring of war dead might look excessive. The Heritage Council said that at November 2017 there were some 30,626 monuments across all themes and periods in Australia – 520-plus in Melbourne, a city whose commemorative landscape mostly represents colonial “civic leadership and patriotic and heroic achievement”. (Paul Daley)

Busts and statues of Cook also abound – even the French, however recently, several statues in honor of Cook have been defaced in protest. “Take care that a falling statue does not strike you dead!” (Nietzsche) Original inhabitants are demanding a bit of truth in memorialising our foundations.

The war memorial already has form in refusing to address military traditions that don’t fit a celebratory account of Australian soldiering. Brendan Nelson for years refused to countenance the idea that white Australia’s originating war, the European invasion and occupation of the continent and the subsequent genocide of first peoples, should have any place at the AWM, suggesting instead it be consigned to museums. ……… Anzac Hall memorialised

The $500m Australian War Memorial redevelopment will feature a display on the award-winning Anzac Hall, which will be demolished for the expansion.

Anzac Hall, built just 20 years ago and lauded for its architecture, will be knocked down to make way for the redevelopment ( SMH).

Staff were provided talking points to address visitor concerns, in which they say Anzac Hall was not extendable and no longer fit for purpose.

The project has been criticised for transforming the site from a place of commemoration to “a theme park” that glorifies war ( The Saturday Paper).

The none-too-subtle hawkishness of political rhetoric evoke the memory of war dead with allusions to the beating drums of another supposedly imminent conflict

Alan Tudge asserts Anzac Day has a sacred status that puts it beyond the realm of critical discussion.

Epic of Gilgamesh #

Quests for immortality recur from the oldest literary sources – The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Upon the death of his friend Enkidu. Gilgamesh sends up a great, torn-from-the-gut lament - a dirge - elegy:

“O my friend, wild ass on the run, donkey of the uplands, panther of the wild,” may the Forest of Cedar grieve for you, and the pure Euphrates”.

He calls for his craftsmen to build a great statue of Enkidu to immortalise him—

“Forgemaster! [Lapidary!] Coppersmith! Goldsmith!”—and orders Enkidu’s funerary monument: “Your eyebrows shall be of lapis lazuli, your chest of gold.”

Later, an old woman advises Gilgamesh to gain immortality through his children.

Achilles #

Epic heroes like Achilles sought immortality through Kleos; heroic deaths.

Simonides of Ceos (6th century BC) #

Simonides believed the gods more powerful than men and their attempts to achieve immortality, futile. We might seek to defy time by making monuments to ourselves, but what are they against the powers of nature and the gods at work in them.

When against the everlasting rivers and the flowers of the spring,
The flame of the sun and of the golden moon,
And the eddies of the sea,
He set the might of a gravestone?
For all things are less than the gods,
But a stone even mortal hands can smash,
The man who thought this was a fool.

Simonides claimed that poetry is ‘painting that speaks’

Colossus of Rhodes: #

A gigantic bronze statue of Apollo erected in 280 B.C. on the harbor at Rhodes, and known as one of the “seven wonders of the world.” It was built to celebrate the successful defence of Rhodes city against an attack by Demetrius I of Macedon, using the war machines left behind. It collapsed during the earthquake of 226 BC.

The statue stood astride the mouth of the harbor, so that ships sailed “under his huge legs.”

To you, O Sun, the people of Dorian Rhodes set up this bronze statue reaching to Olympus, when they had pacified the waves of war and crowned their city with the spoils taken from the enemy. Not only over the seas but also on land did they kindle the lovely torch of freedom and independence. For to the descendants of Herakles belongs dominion over sea and land.

Juvenal #

Juvenal , like Simonides, insisted recorded history or song is more durable than stone. In his Rewards of Fame and Eloquence, writes:

“So much more intense is the thirst for fame than for virtue….
Of a few, by their desire for fame and a title, a name that might
Cling to the stones that guard their ashes, those stones the barren
Fig tree’s malicious strength is capable of shattering, since
Even their very sepulchres are granted a limited span by fate.

Juvenal’s tribute to Solon is limited to four words: “Eloquent Solon, the Just”.

‘What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.’ Pericles

John Donne and Shakespeare #

Donne claims “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms”.

From Shakespeare Sonnet 55:

“Not marble nor the gilded monuments/Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme….”

………. Robert Browning in The Bishop Orders his Tomb instructs his “nephews” to insure that his mausoleum is grander; with higher quality marble, more expensive stones than any other Bishop’s.

Shakespeare has Montague promise to redeem their quarrel by:

“For I will raise her statue in pure gold,”

As if a gold statue, of Juliet, will make up for their rancoured hate.

Robert Herrick:

Upon Ben Jonson

Here lies Jonson with the rest
Of the poets; but the best.
Reader, would’st thou more have known?
Ask his story, not this stone.
That will speak what this can’t tell
Of his glory, So farewell.

Herrick too, obviously believes art outlives stone.

Percy Bysshe Shelley came across a ruined statue of an Egyptian ruler, creating an image of Ozymandian arrogance, together with its “sneer of cold command”, a hollow boastfulness:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

Statues #

What do statues tell us about our past? Perpetrators of great historic wrongs are often socially constructed. The reflect the prevailing values of the times.

‘As long as there have been statues, there have been people who destroy statues’

One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil. And why, then, should you not pluck at my laurels? You respect me; but how if one day your respect should tumble? Take care that a falling statue does not strike you dead! You had not yet sought yourselves when you found me. Thus do all believers — Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you. (Nietzsche Quoted by Jung to Freud, 1912)

Kenneth Slessor #

While Slessor laments the fact that Joe Lynch has no grave with permanent “funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.” he has been immortalised in Five Bells. The fact that this poem lives on seventy years later illustrates what Auden said about Yeats; “the death of the poet was kept from his poems”.

Cancel Culture #

damnatio memoriae - latin

Take care that a falling statue does not strike you dead!
(Nietzsche; Quoted by Jung to Freud, 1912)

Cancel cultures tend to raid past eras and try offenders on present standards.

Beethoven’s crime is being a straight white male. He is also rebuked because of his mononym; known by a single name, like Solon, Michelangelo or Shakespeare.

The #Metoo movement can become one of those catch-all nets capturing everything from sexual abuse, harassment to a bad date.

Some precious puritans become pursed lip foes of all men.

Anti - intellectual smears represent a steady creep of social justice tyranny. They dumb us all down, killing curiosity, cleaving to dogma over reason; politically correct orthodoxies over bold thinking.

Noam Chomsky warned of the danger of a constricted society afraid of free exchange of information and ideas within a liberal society, breeding intolerance and stupidity; zealots dreaming of less informed citizens.

In Rome, damnatio memoriae was enacted when Constantine discovered Crispus was having an affair with his second wife, Fausta, scandalous because Fausta was Crispus’ own stepmother.

Monuments

What Does It Take to “Kill” a Monument?

A research project tracks every statue of a racist figure that fell last summer — and suggests the possibility of their resurrection is looming.

From May 30 to June 30, 2020, at the height of Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, over 100 monuments that glorified racism came down in the US — from colonial and genocidal figureheads toppled by crowds and drowned in rivers to enslavers and Confederate soldiers ordered removed by acquiescing governments. But where are those monuments now? And what will it take to ensure they are never put back on a pedestal?

These are the questions posed by Lyra D. Monteiro, an assistant professor in American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, and her former students Hayat Abdelal and Tyler Crespo Rodriguez. Inspired by conversations about the fate of fallen statues that arose during a graduate seminar Monteiro taught at Rutgers this spring, titled “Public Histories of Slavery,” they began tracking the disgraced sculptures.

“We became concerned with the relative absence of awareness of what happened to statues after their removal was celebrated,” Abdelal, Monteiro, and Rodriguez told Hyperallergic. Many of the toppled symbols, they discovered, are now sitting safely in storage, the possibility of their resurrection always looming.

“Our emphasis is on highlighting the tendency for these statues to survive such attacks — even if they’re moved elsewhere, they’re often cleaned, dredged from rivers, have missing body parts reattached by governments or other owners of the statues, and stored for their own safety,” the group said. “We believe that this reflects the power inherent in the oppressive nature of these physical objects.”

This summer, they launched their project “How to Kill a Statue,” a series of daily Twitter and Instagram publications for every monument “attacked” exactly one year ago last summer, including those decapitated, spray-painted, toppled in protest, or formally removed. They turned to a range of sources — from platforms doing similar cataloguing work, like @move_silent_sam and @heresysquad, to news articles, Change.org petitions, and even lists compiled by disgruntled conservative Tweeters.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, October 11, the team released an interactive map with photos of the fallen statues and the date and circumstances of their dismantling.