Hope & Dread, Episode 2: American History, Axed
America’s public spaces have been throbbing with the sounds of loud arguments about history and identity, encapsulated by the debate over Confederate monuments. In this episode, hosts Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman introduce you to artists and curators suggesting new ways of dealing with American history—taking you behind the arguments about whether statues should stay or go and offering a nuanced perspective on a haunted history.
Guests: Maya Benton, Thomas Finkelpearl, Roxane Gay, Jackson Polys and Hamza Walker
Mitch Epstein, Robert E. Lee Memorial/Marcus-David Peters Circle, Richmond, Virginia 2020, 2020, Chromogenic print. 92 x 70 in (233.7 x 177.8 cm) © Mitch Epstein, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Transcript:
Hamza Walker:
These things coming down, and as raw as these things can get, it's like — that's change. You think it's not going to be painful? You think it's not going to be hot? You don't think it's going to be feisty? Well, that's not change at all. It requires you to take a position, and you've got to take a stand, and recognizing that, “oh yeah, this is a fight.” And it's not going to happen without one. Obviously. Blood has been spilled — the impetus for change. And to recognize that people don’t just give up power.
Charlotte Burns:
This is Hope And Dread. I'm Charlotte Burns.
Allan Schwartzman:
And I'm Allan Schwartzman. This is a program about the tectonic shifts of power in art.
Charlotte Burns:
We want to hear from people who are making change and people who are resisting change. There are enormous era-defining shifts happening throughout America's public spaces around monuments, especially those celebrating Confederate soldiers who lost America's Civil War. We're going to introduce you to some of the artists and curators who are suggesting new ways of dealing with American history, taking you behind the arguments about whether statues should stay or whether they should go.
First up, Hamza Walker, the executive director of the non-profit LAXART in Los Angeles.
Hamza Walker:
What do you arm yourself with? And if it's going to be a war of words, if it's going to be a war of ideas, if it's going to be a war of images to realize, like, get on the front line. So arm yourself with those very things.
Charlotte Burns:
Hamza is collaborating with the artist Kara Walker on an ambitious and unusual exhibition, simply titled “Monuments.” They've been working with city and state officials to bring together a group of decommissioned Confederacy statues that, until very recently, lived in America's public spaces.
Hamza Walker:
I like the idea of them being in contemporary art, like, "Oh no, we're going to radically recontextualize them and make them part of now.” Like, how do we look at these things now?
Charlotte Burns:
The exhibition looks at these objects anew, asking questions about the persistence of racism, and free speech and censorship, and about American history.
Allan Schwartzman:
That's indeed what makes it timely, and it's what makes it exciting because now this is an exhibition that is positioned to be of interest and direct relevance to a much larger population. And that is our hope within art. So much of art is about the artists focusing in their studio. So often this world seems remote; but this is one of those rare instances in which art and the public are being thrust into the same space.
Charlotte Burns:
We're living in a period of profound shift and this exhibition deals with that head on. And what's so interesting, as you'll hear through this episode, is how hard it is to organize an exhibition, dealing with history as it's being made. Our guests today raise questions about who is making history and who owns it?
So, Hamza says the idea for the exhibition came from thinking about moments of change in his lifetime, events that might point to progress or change.
Hamza Walker:
I don't think anybody expected there to be a Black president within their lifetimes. And it happened.
And, living in Chicago, another one of the things that happened, the dismantling of the Chicago housing projects — the high rises — those were a fixture of post-war Chicago. For the sake of our imaginations, they seemed just like the pyramids, but the fact of the matter is the towers came down and it represented, I would say, probably one of the most significant transformations of Chicago’s skyline to happen within the last 50 years, easily.
And thinking about the removal of Confederate monuments; the monuments, they were simply there. But, it's like, they lost the war. Like, why are these things around?
Whereas I did have that question as an adolescent even with whatever American history I was being taught at that time. You learn how to navigate around them, a kind of whatever. They were just there in the landscape.
So, their coming down was notable to me. Was this something that represented change? And to do an exhibition that marked what I think of as an historically significant moment — at least culturally. To what extent could one say that this represents a kind of sea change, if we're ready to have this kind of discussion?
Charlotte Burns:
Hamza and Kara began working on the exhibition after what he calls the first wave of the monuments coming down in 2015 after the Charleston church massacre of nine African American people who were murdered at prayer by a white supremacist. Shortly afterwards, the musician and activist, Bree Newsome, climbed the flagpole outside the South Carolina state capital to remove the Confederate flag.
Hamza Walker:
Bree Newsome was kind of the beginning, that was really a breaking point. Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, was the first mayor to get the approval from the city council and then to proceed with the taking down of the city's Confederate monuments. And then following suit right after New Orleans, Charlottesville was next in line. That sparked the Unite the Right rally. Then Baltimore, Gainesville, Silent Sam in North Carolina.
And the second wave is obviously after the murder of George Floyd. So, I'd just started reaching out to municipalities when the pandemic had hit and then we have the murder of George Floyd, and we went from a universe of 35 or so statues to suddenly 150. So, this is playing itself out right now, in real time, as an issue. So, we find ourselves suddenly in the middle of debates about, "Okay, now they come down, now what to do with them and what role do we play in the fate of these monuments?"
So, the idea that we can both take these monuments off your hands — if you don't want them back, fine, we'll just take them to the local smelter. Or we can give them to artists to repurpose. So, suddenly having that discussion at the core of the exhibition in terms of opening up a space for potential reenvisioning of what a monument is, what do you do with the pedestals, right? Can something else go there? Should the bronze be returned to the community? Is it just down with bronze in general, right? No more statues, no more gods, no more masters—which is very different than when the exhibition first started in 2018.
Charlotte Burns:
So, Hamza talks about monuments as representing a sea change if we are ready to have that discussion. Do you think we are, Allan?
Allan Schwartzman:
Well, we are in the discussion, whether we're ready or not, we're ready. We're in it. I find this really interesting as a kind of paralleling of what's happening in society and what is happening within the field of art and more specifically contemporary art. Even the use of the word monument — nobody makes monuments anymore. Monuments are what get toppled when governments fall.
And the greatest monuments made within recent generations are, in fact, people's monuments. They're the Vietnam Memorial. They are the AIDS Quilt. They are intentionally and necessarily anti-monumental because they are about marking these bigger moments in history where lives are changed and where society reflects.
So, certainly in the art field, I don't know anybody who is seeking to be put on a pedestal. And so it does really seem like the appropriate moment, all around, that this question of the pedestal—which again, is an art concept—but is now having direct relevance within the broader culture within society, within a questioning in general about what it means to revere somebody — why you're revering them? And I think that the fact that we're at a moment where a broad population not linked to art, but just people, are saying, "Why are these things still here?"
Charlotte Burns:
I think it's also... There comes a point, I remember as a kid walking around London or something and seeing all the statues celebrating all the great men, and it sort of dawned on me at some stage, "Why are all these blokes on horses? Where are the women? What happened to the girls?" And they just are disappeared from history.
And so, I never thought about what effect that has on people. I never thought about it within the American context of what it must feel like to grow up and your geography — your landscape of your life, the streets that you live on, the parks that you go and play in — are named after people that would have wished an entirely different life upon you. And how that must feel as a young person growing up; how loaded these spaces are, and what relief and release there must be in them coming down. Like Hamza says, these may as well have been the pyramids in our imaginations, and for that landscape of lives to feel so different is really important.
And so, this is beyond who gets celebrated, who sits on the horse. This is about all of those naming conventions and all of those histories, and what possibilities are allowed for future generations.
Allan Schwartzman:
When you have a large percentage of a population of all different political persuasions, religious beliefs and histories, recognizing the unjustness of something that was never questioned before and insisting that things must change — that's a time of fundamental change. Whether that change continues along at the same pace or not remains to be seen, but that's a door that gets closed on history.
Charlotte Burns:
You also talk about the art context and what Hamza and Kara are doing is taking something that's been separate to art for a long time and they're making an exhibition. They're planting culture at the center of these enormous questions about what it means to be a democracy, who a nation should honor and remember, and how society should view itself through the monuments it creates and the histories it tells.
One of the clearest precedents for this is the “Degenerate Art Exhibition”, which was a show organized by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party in Munich in 1937. Upon taking power, one of the first things the Nazi Party did was to take the reins of culture, controlling what was disseminated into the broader public. The “Degenerate Art Exhibition” was this sort of Dadaist gathering of 650 works of art, each of which had been confiscated from museums in Germany. And now were put on display as examples of works and artists that went against the very idea of what it meant to be German.
And if you think about how often it seems that history is repeating itself, this new Monuments exhibition, grappling as it is with what it means to be a nation, seems instead like history's being picked up and put on its head. Because now, the artists are taking control.
We'd like to introduce the writer and editor, Roxane Gay now, whose thinking and writing is concerned with many of these issues.
Roxane Gay:
I think that one of the challenging things about history is that people tend to suggest that history is this thing that is back behind us. And we've dealt with all of that and they simply didn't know better, but they did know better and they did bad anyway. And so, I think that context is everything. And I also think that it's important for us to draw connections between what history was, what happened and how it influences the way that we live today, because that connection is critical and that informs so many realities.
Charlotte Burns:
To what extent are Confederate monuments the tip of a cultural iceberg? When people protest their removal, they often say, "It's gone too far." What do they mean? They often say, "This is what we've always done. It's tradition." In a later episode in this series, we'll talk to the curator, Maya Benton about an exhibition of photographs dealing with segregated proms that were taking place in Oregon up until just a few years ago.
The argument for keeping these young adults’ events segregated was that “this was the way it's always been done.” “It's tradition,” but tradition can be a very cozy blanket covering a multitude of sins. Here's Maya Benton.
Maya Benton:
That reframing of racism as tradition is both incredibly disturbing and also much more accurate than just calling it racism because it is a tradition in this country. And I think it's very hard to step away from tradition. You inherit these narratives from your family, from your parents, from your community, and you're taught that this is the way it's been, and this is the way it should be. And it takes a lot of courage and strength and fortitude to create a path that is different from the one that has been provided for you.
Charlotte Burns:
This is why some of the key cultural battlegrounds in America right now are in the education system; fights at school board meetings between parents and teachers over the history that's being taught.
Critical race theory, an academic school of thought that argues that the American legal system facilitates and even insulates racial inequality has unexpectedly become a flashpoint in American politics. Whose history gets told? Well, that's the battle.
Hamza Walker:
You have to clarify what it is that people mean by history. The Lost Cause is one of the greatest propaganda campaigns ever waged in this country. It made it into textbooks. And so, what passes as history is no history at all. This campaign started after the Civil War. So, the ennobling and the shift in the rhetoric, “what was the Civil War about?” So this whole bullshit line that all of us were fed as kids about it being about states rights and not about slavery is absolute bullshit. It is a lie. Now, can we actually tell the story of what the Lost Cause actually is as an historical phenomenon and in its living vestiges?
So this whole campaign about the disenfranchisement of Black people in this country that is going on right now, that is a living extension of this shit. So, if you want to call it history, it's like, "No, no, no, no, no. Let's point to what the effects of this thing have been in this living present," rather than to go back to this false narrative, right? So, if we're really going to talk about what that narrative was and the living legacy of Jim Crow, there is plenty to say, right? But to call it simply history as though “Oh, it's a fact that somebody—the daughters of the Confederacy—erected a statue,” it's like, no; that's an interest group that put these things up essentially.
So, don't buy it and the politicians and whoever it is they're going to try and sell you this stuff. No, right? So, the sooner that we can actually admit to this and it takes work, history books will have to be rewritten. Let's get with the program, right? So, it's not like that was then, this is now. It's like — no, this is still going on and it is never too late.
Charlotte Burns:
Hamza talks about the myths that spring up, often well after historical events. The Lost Cause, for instance, sees the Civil War as a heroic fight by the Confederates to safeguard states rights, rather than as a protectionist war over indentured slave labor.
This view was promoted heavily at the turn of the 20th-century and then again in the 1950s and 1960s, when lots of these monuments were erected and when history books were rewritten. All of this was driven by Lost Cause organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of the Confederate Veterans.
One of the most profound influences on this episode for Allan and I — precisely for how it reframes the debate around history and heroes — was a piece of writing by the American poet and author, Caroline Randall Williams that appeared in the New York Times in June 2020. It's titled, My Body Is a Confederate Monument. And in it, she reminds us that history is always about the effect of the dead upon the living. Here is an excerpt, read by the actress Saundi Harrison-Cooksey.
I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.
If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.
It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.
What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?
You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand-dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.
Allan Schwartzman:
She is not a person outside of that discussion. She is that discussion. It's the brutality of being forced to see a reality for all that it is in a way that I think only an artist can drive home so clearly.
Art has never been central to the birth of America. In fact, it's always been easy to demonize art as being something that represents the elite. But, the reality is that, while art has often been used as a weapon politically against creators, that creative people do lead the way. They have clarity as to realities of our time that are unlike those of most other people.
Charlotte Burns:
In putting together this episode — and indeed the next one, “Controlling Culture,” released next Wednesday — the intersections between art and politics are frequently and often volatile, as we came to discover.
Is it possible to separate the two? I asked someone who has experience in both worlds. Tom Finkelpearl is a former museum director who became the commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Tom was key in creating a culture plan in 2017 that directly tied city funding to the diversity of the employees and board members within arts organizations. Tom’s abrupt exit from the department in 2019 took many by surprise. He seemed to have been the victim of controversies around, you guessed it, public monuments.
Tom Finkelpearl:
Public art is fraught with controversy. I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing. People really feel empowered to bring their opinions to the fore, and I think that there are controversies that arose in New York City that were sort of political controversies masked as public art controversies.
Charlotte Burns:
So, while Tom was cultural commissioner of New York, there was a controversy over whether or not the city should take down the monument of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle. There was also a big argument around a statue in front of a Natural History Museum that depicts President Roosevelt on a horse with two subservient looking figures, one native American and one African beside him.
Tom Finkelpearl:
These controversies sort of developed around a couple of different things simultaneously, and one was race and identity. Folks in the Native American community said “Christopher Columbus is a genocidal force in the history of the United States.” People in the Italian community said, "No, the Columbus monument was put up in the late 19th century when there was a lot of prejudice against Italian Americans." Which is true also.
So, all these things were playing out. And then there was also a question of taste and that had to do with sort of the art side. So, what kind of monument makes sense to put up? Is it something put up by an art world star or something put up by somebody, let's say, more embraced by "the community.” The community being sort of code words sometimes for folks who are not in the art world directly.
Charlotte Burns:
So, de Blasio asked Tom to convene a monuments commission, which he did, and which was co-chaired by Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. They formed a group that put together a detailed report, but the controversies rolled on and Tom stepped down.
I wondered how he was feeling now on the other side of the storm.
Tom Finkelpearl:
I think it's fascinating. I plan to write a book about monuments sometime in the future once I have digested some of the insanity, but I don't really regret what happened. I think it's just inevitable in the time. There are lots and lots of controversies happening that are very difficult for people — let's say museum directors all over the country and curators are facing these and some people are losing their jobs, et cetera.
The thing that happens if you're in the public sector these days and culture is controversy around monuments. I think it's all part of the same thing. And I basically support the protestors and they're right to protest, and we did our best.
Charlotte Burns:
Allan, I was curious to ask you your memory of all of this, because mine — and this is something we reported on at the time — it was less an art world issue than more a the city governance one. And it's interesting that the art world as you talked about earlier is so removed from these conversations around monuments. Why is that?
Allan Schwartzman:
Well, I think it's several things. One is that monuments are not what interest contemporary artists. A monument is a pre-modern notion. If you look at the history of modern sculpture from Rodin to Brancusi and beyond, the idea of breaking the pedestal and bringing sculpture into real space has been the primary mission of sculpture throughout the history of modern art. But, it's also that art in this period — from let's say the mid-19th century forward — is really a history of art-about-art and monuments are an art that is essentially propagandistic in nature.
And propagandistic I say it in the broadest sense of the term, not just as one of manipulation, but it's about ideals.
Charlotte Burns:
Propaganda is a great term to consider in any conversation around public commission by governments and interest groups. Artists, of course, often bring a different perspective than the official one.
I spoke to the artist Jackson Polys, who is a core collaborator of a group called the New Red Order or the NRO. It's a really interesting artist group that uses some much-needed humor as a Trojan horse, getting the public to crowdsource acts of rebellion all while posing truly difficult questions, but often in the language of corporate motivational speakers.
[Audio excerpt from New Red Order’s Never Settle: Calling In, 2020]
New Red Order is named after an old American organization called the Improved Order of the Red Men that was revived in the 1930s as a “whites only” fraternity. It's red face rituals and regalia were inspired by that moment of American foundational history, the Boston Tea Party when the Sons of Liberty, disguised as Mohawk Indians, threw chests of tea into the harbor in an act of protest against Great British taxes. So, as NRO says, America is founded on indigenous appropriation, and indigenous erasure.
Jackson Polys:
The two-channel film, Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality, is a shift of the idea of culture capture toward monuments. The idea of culture capture kind of originated when we were noticing the desires for photogrammetry as a form of repatriation of indigenous ancestors and materials back to their communities.
Charlotte Burns:
So, basically instead of museums giving objects back, they wanted to capture them photographically in order to create 3D reconstructions, and then return those to the communities from which the originals had been taken. Of course, the community said, "Well, we'd quite like the originals. Thank you very much." And the museums did return those artifacts, but only after embarking on this process of capture and recreation. And the native groups were often called upon in these instances to authorize not only the returned works, but also, for instance, hand-paint the recreations, which is a kind of wild layering of ownership and history. Talk about people finding it hard to let go.
Jackson Polys:
There's something we found interesting about this kind of activity that the difficulty of letting go of the ownership of the object and letting go of that kind of archival impulse — the desire to have everything still held by institutions and also recognizing the obvious partiality of that original impulse to just scan the items and send those back, because it's easier and quicker and one, the institution doesn't have to worry about whether the object is going to deteriorate, even if that might have been accepted by those communities. That kind of asymmetry was something that stood out.
Charlotte Burns:
So this is where the NRO does something really cool that totally twists this idea of capturing culture.
Jackson Polys:
Accomplices or ourselves could go into institutions, take a series of photos even if the objects were behind glass and then repatriate them, in a rogue sort of fashion, back to the people from which they were originally taken. So, Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality is a shift toward that kind of activity into the capturing of monuments. And we focused on three different monuments. This originally started with the Museum of Contemporary Art. And so the Spirit of Transportation, which is a representation of an indigenous person under duress, carrying a canoe, and then one very famous sculpture, End of the Trail.
James Earle Fraser's original intent for that was to have it be as big of the Statue of Liberty at the precipice on a cliff, the Pacific, facing the Pacific and the slumped body of the native person on a slumped tourist facing the imminent demise of the sunset after the progress of Western expansion. And then the Theodore Roosevelt Monument in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Charlotte Burns:
So, while the city was arguing over what to do about the Roosevelt Monument as we've heard from Tom Finkelpearl, the NRO recaptured it anyway, which in my mind points to the future. We're all going to be walking around shortly in these new realities that are part-real, part-augmented. So essentially, why can't we just build or smash whatever we want in our own metaverse? The reality of these monuments will shift just as our personal realities do, too.
It's a nice reminder that, much as people fight over these objects, we don't always have control anyway. Here's Hamza again.
Hamza Walker
Recently, St. Charles, it's in the Gulf. They had incredible floods and we actually were able to speak to the chief of police, essentially, who was the steward of the Confederate monument that the city council narrowly voted to actually keep up rather than remove. And within weeks of them voting to keep it up, a hurricane came along and took the thing down off its pedestal, and pretty much damaged it beyond repair.
So, we're calling to see if we can borrow this object and he said, "I don't have feelings for this thing one way or the other, but I know just mentioning this to — and I would have to mention it to the city council, even if it is my call to make — but it would stir up feelings that right now I need everybody to be focused on the floods and the hurricanes that we just went through. And I just can't..." [Laughter] and I just really liked the honesty and the candor of him saying, "Right now, that damn monument is the last thing on anybody's mind. And I want to keep it that way. It's the last thing that should be on our mind."
Charlotte Burns:
I love that too though, the futility of it all. It's like, "Let's fight to keep something permanent."
Hamza Walker:
Right. Oh-
Charlotte Burns:
This is the idea of a fixed history and then the hand of God smites it anyway.
Hamza Walker:
Exactly. Think about it this way: The city council votes to keep it up. That's one thing. Act of God comes along and takes it down. That's another thing. Now, the thing the city council can't do is vote to put a new Confederate monument. So, if you want to take that as progress, it's like, "I'll take it." Like, "Okay."
Charlotte Burns:
Take the wins.
Hamza Walker:
Right. Exactly. It's like, "Okay. You know you can't do that." The one that's there, you can go on and say, "Well, it's been there for 80 years," or whatever. So.
Charlotte Burns:
I love that. That is so good. And it's also, you so rarely get good news, climate change stories, so.
Allan Schwartzman:
Well, that truly is an instance where fate has pricked the air out of that bubble.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. So, these might seem like quintessentially American issues, but as we will see next episode, when we travel to Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, governments are attempting to meddle in culture. Once again, this issue of who controls history and who has the right to tell stories.
Tune into Hope & Dread every Wednesday and subscribe wherever you find your podcasts.
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Hope & Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new editorial platform created by Schwartzman&.
The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.
Robert Bound is our associate editor.
Additional research and support has been provided by Calder Singer, Catherine Sensenig and Ali Nemerov.
Music, of course, by the inimitable Philip Glass.
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Mitch Epstein, 'Robert E. Lee Memorial/Marcus-David Peters Circle, Richmond, Virginia, 2020’, 2020, Chromogenic print, 92” x 70” (233.7 x 177.8 cm) © Mitch Epstein, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
