Sinking Monuments: Notes on our Current Statuophobia
In 1936, Austrian novelist Robert Musil famously wrote of an apparent paradox: “there is nothing more invisible than a monument.”[1] Nothing seems further from the truth right now. In Bristol, U.K., protesters recently tossed a statue of slave trader Edward Colston into the harbor (figure 1); in Antwerp, Belgium, activists are defacing bronzes of King Leopold II, once the absolute ruler of the Congo in Africa; in the United States, protesters are toppling Confederate and other monuments; and across the world statues of Christopher Columbus are falling.
Figure 1. Edward Colston’s statue being tossed into the Avon river, Bristol, U.K. Photograph by Keir Gravil, June 7, 2020. Courtesy Flickr under Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0.
The vanquishing of these monuments speaks to the welling up of rage and discontent against their role—Confederate, patriarchal, colonial, racist, genocidal—as spatial reminders of structural and representational inequality. It also reveals a special affinity between social protests and monuments; between citizens occupying the streets to demand justice and the dead bronzes standing in their way. In Chile, this tension has been bubbling up, and gaining momentum for some time now. During months of massive protests for equality, justice, and redistribution, all ignited by a public transportation fare hike, demonstrators toppled, beheaded and vandalized monuments honoring Spanish colonizers and Republican war heroes who sought to eradicate native peoples (figure 2).
Figure 2. Monument of General Manuel Baquedano vandalized during protests, Plaza de la Dignidad, Santiago de Chile. Photograph by Valentina Rozas-Krause, January, 2020.
The current hostility to monuments is different from the statuophobias of the past. In the nineteenth century, city planners considered the growing number of new unregulated monuments a threat to traffic and hygiene. A century later, in Musil’s time, the aversion toward monuments evolved into a counter-monument movement. According to architectural historian Andrew M. Shanken, those who studied the urban body politic and public space generally found them pointless, with many planners in fact troubled by the proliferation of items in the landscape that, from their perspective, had no real function.
Today we are grappling with a different kind of monument malaise: our monuments no longer reflect who we are. The problem is twofold. On the one hand, since the cultural shift of the 1960s, cities have largely failed to build monuments representing evolving and aspirational values: monuments to Black lives, to women, to the LGBTQ+ community, to people of color, to immigrants, to the disabled, and to ordinary citizens. On the other hand, cities have been reluctant to remove monuments, no matter how racist, celebratory of colonial oppression, or otherwise offensive—and not just in the U.S. South. As I have written about elsewhere, in Berlin, for example, Black and Afro-German activists and their allies have struggled for over a decade to build a memorial to the victims of the German Colonial Empire, which settled across Africa, in particular in present-day Namibia, Cameroon, Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania, as well as to remove colonial and racist street-names from the city center.
Now people have taken things into their own hands. Most of the monuments that have been toppled in the past few weeks were removed without permission by activists and protesters. One of the few exceptions is the Columbus statue at Coit Tower in San Francisco, which the city removed preemptively as a form of preservation. While these actions might seem rash, they are a response to centuries of racism, veiled and overt, and indifference that have allowed the monument status quo to perpetuate. In other words, without the citizen activism, the Robert E. Lee, Leopold II, and Columbus statues of the world would likely remain intact, protected by a veil of selective invisibility.
Conservatives claim that removing monuments is an erasure of history. In response to our present-day statuophobia, Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently said that removing statues of controversial figures is “to lie about our history.” This widely echoed argument not only conflates history with its representation, but also assumes that all monuments were erected with the purpose of preserving the memory—of a deed, event, or figure of the past. Both assumptions are false.
“Statues, like Colston’s, which represent the most reprehensible acts, deserve to stay under water, permanently.”
While monuments might tell stories, they are not stone and bronze versions of peer-reviewed history books. Monuments, rather, are the result of selection and erasure, heavily weighted in favor of those who hold power. Every statue is the product of a specific cultural and political milieu that decides to elevate a certain version of the past, over multiple others. The Confederate monuments that proliferated after the end of the American Civil War, and in later eras of racial turbulence, to spread the false narrative of the “Lost Cause” illustrate this point. These Confederate statues are, in fact, not historical monuments, but purposefully ahistorical representations of the past.
History at large is not in danger. What is threatened by the removal of monuments is a version of the past, one that justifies colonialism, genocide, slavery, and injustice in the name of supposed progress and enlightenment.
As the monuments are attacked and fall, the question, of course, is what do with them. The Colston monument, like most of those discussed, was salvaged. It is now being stored in an undisclosed location. Eventually, we might expect it—like others coming down—to be housed in a museum, where curators can present it with context. Still on view, but now safely out of the public sphere, or at least in a much more obscure corner of it.
Figure 3. Aerial view of the temporary location of the Colston statue, Bristol harbor, U.K. Courtesy Google Earth, 2020.
I think this is the wrong approach, especially if applied widely without considering the particular history of each monument and its location. For the circumstance of the undoing is itself a history—a real history—that, unlike the atrocities of the past, deserves to be memorialized. Some monuments that have been defaced but still stand should be left as they are—showing the accumulative signs of vandalism and re-appropriation. Others might be left standing, but put in dialog with new monuments that reframe their values. Statues, like Colston’s, which represent the most reprehensible acts, deserve to stay under water, permanently, remembered by a displaced Google Maps location (figure 3).
NOTE
[1] Robert Musil, “Monuments,” in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. Peter Wortsman (New York: Archipelago Books, 2006), 64–68.
