sabotabby | A very angry and sloppy history of freestanding monumental sculpture in the Western world

Pull up folks—it's time for a rant about statues and monuments.

Hi! Your friendly high school art teacher here. I'm a nice white lady and can't speak to the Black experience of grief and rage brought about by systemic racism—I sympathize, I empathize, and I stand in solidarity, but I will never have that lived experience to be an expert. But do you know what I do know a lot about? Art history. Thanks to the efforts of my truly outstanding teachers and profs throughout high school and university and a bit of Googling 'cause I'm rusty and this isn't my area of focus, I have enough of an understanding of the evolution of sculpture done by white people and what led those monuments that have gotten white people's panties in a bunch throughout the Western world to tell you why tearing them down is no biggie.

Caveat the First: A lot more than statues needs to get torn down. We're talking the entire system of white supremacy and capitalism, etc., but it is shitty if you're a BIPOC to have to walk by some ugly tribute to a slave-owning asshole, and so tearing them down is a low-effort way to open a dialogue about history, reduce microaggressions, and make cities more aesthetically appealing (these statues are f u g l y, fight me). It's a symbol and a start, not a solution.

Caveat the Second: I have very strong feelings about Art, and Public Art, and what constitutes Good Public Art and Bad Public Art, and I can totally get how the art that you're used to can have emotional resonance. I flipped my shit when they moved the Henry Moore sculpture to the wrong side of the AGO, okay? I also lost it when I found out that Gandhi's Roti was closing even though I haven't eaten there in years because change sucks, especially when you feel that that the thing you like (delicious roti if you don't think too hard about what the kitchen looks like) is being replaced by a thing you do not like (idk probably big box stores or condos). I personally do not understand white people's emotional connection to fugly statues but I take it there is one, or one is performed. So I can't really speak to the passion white people are suddenly feeling about rando slaveholder statues. I don't get it and I'll never get it. Also RIP Gandhi's Roti.

Caveat the Third: This is a rant, not a proper essay. You want facts, crack a book. It's also hella simplified.

OKAY HERE WE GO first of all what do I mean by "freestanding monumental sculpture"? This means that there's space around it on all sides, as opposed to something like bas relief, and it's big—life size or larger. This is hard to do, especially out of enduring materials like stone or bronze. We have some very old examples of sculpture but the technology and skills required to do it evolved over time. For example:

This is the Venus of Willendorf. She's great! She's from around 30,000 BC and I usually start my art history lessons by talking about her and various theories around what she was for. You can't really tell from images and not everyone gets to see her IRL, so in case you can't tell, she can't stand up on her own and she's about 4.4 inches tall. So she is neither freestanding nor monumental, just awesome.

This is the Motherland monument by Yevgeny Vuchetich and Vasyl Borodai in Kiev and trust me on this, she is even more rad in real life. She is 335 feet tall and stands on her own, so she counts as a freestanding monumental sculpture. Not all freestanding monumental sculpture is of human figures, but a lot of it is.

So basically, creating monumental freestanding sculpture is a feat of engineering and it took awhile to get there. Also, when we're talking about antiquity, materials and climate play a big role. So while totem poles are also examples of freestanding monumental sculpture and are impressive feats of art and engineering, because 1) wood decays and 2) genocide, we don't have as many examples to talk about. But the oldest one ever discovered was twice as old as the Pyramids so keep in mind that before European art was figuring out how to make a really big art that stood up by itself, Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island had been doing it for millennia.

I digress. In the Western world, freestanding monumental sculpture of people was invented by Black people, specifically the ancient Egyptians. In general, whenever you hear about white culture, you're probably hearing about something that was invented by Black people.

Ancient Egypt! These artists were busy making artistic innovations and then mostly sticking to them for thousands of years. You want the proportions of the human figure? They figured out a formula for that. Pottery? Bunch of advances there. And figuring out how to impressive sculptures of people? They did a lot of that.

The ancient Egyptians created ka statues, which were stone or wood and used to house the spirit after death. Here's an example:

These were reasonably realistic—meant to look like an idealized version of the dead person. They were very formal, stiff, with the head looking forward and shoulders squared. Other statues were standing with one foot forward or seated, because making freestanding sculpture is haaaaaard. They also made reserve heads, which were very realistic portraits; these might have been used as backups in case something happened to the dead person's head, or as models for future sculptures.

The best part about Egypt as far as art historians are concerned is that it's a desert so everything was preserved really well, meaning that future artists could look back on these pieces for reference.

Moving on to ancient Greece, you can see just how influential Egyptian sculpture was.

Kleobis and Biton here are from 580 BC, and are what is known as kouroi, or standing nude male youth. They look a lot like Egyptian ka sculptures except kouros stand on their own. There are also kore, which are standing draped female youth, and seated women. Women didn't get to be naked except for in porn. They're pretty generic—they all have the same slight smile and body type, and they're not meant to depict particular individuals. They're stiff and formal. They were for graves and temples and such.

Kouroi are from the Archaic period of Greek art. A major innovation came around in the Classical period, with the invention of contrapposto, which allows the figure to look more balanced, relaxed, and naturalistic.

The short version of this is that the shoulders/torso are on one axis, and the hips are on another, and you put them opposite of each other so that the weight is carried by one leg. I make my students stand up and try it, and then they hate me.

This is Poseidon or Zeus, depending on what you think he's throwing, and he's from about 460 BC. Note that he looks like a real dude, not the idealized and stylized representation of a dude, but a specific person who has spent some time working out.

Here's a Roman marble copy of Doryphoros by Polykleitos (the original is lost). This, if you are an ancient Greek, is the height of beauty and aesthetics and everything good and pure. This is it. This is the ideal body. I could do a whole blather about Greek aesthetics and why the p33ns are so small but the important takeaway is the importance of Classical Greek sculpture in the white imagination.

This is Peak White Civilization, friends. This is when white people were actually coming up with some new ideas rather than creating shittier versions of other people's stuff. If you look at fashy propaganda, you'll see that the aesthetic represented looks a lot like this, even though they're not super into things like democracy and they're not as good at art as the ancient Greeks were, obviously. But those clean, white, sophisticated lines of sculpture wait a sec—

I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH THAT THE ANCIENT GREEKS (AND ROMANS...WE'RE GETTING THERE) PAINTED THEIR SCULPTURES AND THEY LOOKED SILLY AND EVERY TIME YOU LOOK AT A MARBLE STATUE YOU NEED TO REMEMBER THAT IT LOOKED LIKE THIS. Seriously this is the most classic (heh) case of whitewashing (heheheh) in art history and classical sculpture was not white. The paint flaked off because they're old and paint is not as durable as marble. Not all of the people depicted in these sculptures were white either, obvs, which is one of the reasons why the Art History Establishment^TM doesn't want you to know.

Right anyway I have very Strong Feelings about how Greek sculptures were painted.

This right here is public art. Some were for funeral decorations too but a lot were for buildings. They're meant to be looked at. They're meant to impress you. They're meant to represent specific figures and concepts. Basically they are part of the public discussion.

On to the Hellenistic period, which I am a huge sucker for. I like Hellenistic sculpture the best because it is MELODRAMATIC AF. It is overwrought and silly and a big influence on the Baroque, which is my favourite.

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Laocoön and His Sons, who are having the best time dying, clearly.

Hellenistic sculpture was not only a contest to see who could be the most emo sculptor in Greece but also about realism and specificity. This isn't just a random dude with a 72 pack but a specific Trojan priest having a tussle with some sea serpents. This serves a narrative function as well as an aesthetic one. It's telling you a story.

By this point, Greece had been absorbed into the Roman Empire and sculpture had become an industry, leading to a decline in quality, which is part of why art historians tend to harsh on the Hellenistic era. If you're doing a survey course on art history, profs tend to skip over Roman sculpture because the Romans did the typical white person thing and copied what the Greeks had been doing but were worse at it. Basically Roman sculpture is the equivalent of that Gucci purse you bought on Spadina. You're going to use it more than you would the original because it doesn't cost as much as your car, so it'll wear out faster and then you'll complain about cheap Chinese knockoffs even though they were literally made in the same sweatshop. Anyway Roman sculpture is completely awesome for reasons that have exactly nothing to do with their aesthetics.

The relevance of Roman monumental sculpture to my rant is that unlike the Egyptians or Greeks, Rome was less concerned with artistic innovation and more concerned with building a fucking empire and making sure everyone they conquered knew who was in charge, even during periods where that changed a lot. Roman sculptors were really good at portraiture and making a sculpture look like the specific dude. The Roman Empire was really good at absorbing other civilizations and assimilating their cultural and religious traditions. They also kidnapped a lot of Greek sculptors and enslaved them, which is part of why Roman sculpture looks a lot like Greek sculpture.

Roman politics were pretty nasty, not that anyone's was particularly idyllic back in the day, at least in that part of the world.

One very notable thing about Roman sculpture is that a lot of the examples we have are missing heads. Now, these pieces in fairness are pretty old, but look at Egypt over back there, with much older sculptures with heads are still attached. Did the Romans just suck at structural integrity?

Well, yeah, but also they did it on purpose.

See, the Roman Empire was pretty innovative in the use of art as propaganda. Want to venerate an emperor or prominent citizen? Pop up a statue of him looking regal and impressive. Now everyone can look up and see what an important dude he is. But the Roman Empire was also pretty innovative in DRAMA, so frequently said people fell out of favour or were stabbed to death a bunch of times and LOOK YOU DON'T WANT TO WASTE A PERFECTLY GOOD STATUE THAT SHIT IS EXPENSIVE how many Greek art-slaves do you think we have at our disposal??? They made the bodies some generic fit guy, and the heads realistic portraits. The heads were detachable so you don't have to tear down and replace a whole sculpture when the subject turns out to be an asshole; you can just take off the head and swap it for a different head. Guaranteed he'll turn out to be an asshole too, because you know what ancient Rome was like. But at least you didn't have silly debates about PRESERVING THE PAST FOR POSTERITY or some bullshit. The Romans knew where it was at in that respect.

They also had another excellent tradition called damnatio memoriae where the idea was to erase the offender from history—strike his name from any written record, scratch his face off coins, and rework all his statues. That was for when you really pissed someone off, like if you tried to overthrow Tiberius and didn't do a good job of it(oops).

Which brings me, at long last, to my actual point. As with ancient Rome, contemporary freestanding monumental sculptures of Important Dead White Guys serve primarily, not as historical education, but as propaganda, and are designed deliberately to evoke the tradition of Western antiquity. Just look at them. They look basically like Greek and Roman statuary except not as good. There is no real aesthetic virtue to them; they exist to draw continuity between the Great Western Tradition of Advanced Civilization and the present day, between the Roman Empire and the American Empire. There is no real historical or educational virtue to most of them—in the US, for example, most were erected between 1900-1920, not during the Civil War, for the primary purpose of terrorizing the Black population under Jim Crow. They invoke the aesthetics of ancient history but they are very modern.

But unlike ancient Romans, contemporary Americans (and Britons, and Canadians) do not have the sophistication to view art or history as a living discipline, constantly evolving. If something was carved in stone it is, well, carved in stone. Statuary suggests permanence, and Americans in particular are very invested in the idea of permanence, attaching a religious significance to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution and the flag that feels very alien if you're not raised with that ideology.

After all, if it looks and feels old, it must be important, right? Especially in a relatively young empire. Mount Rushmore, which was once the Six Grandfathers, looks like a big important landmark that was there for ages. It was actually completed in 1941, within living memory, and by a Klansman no less. (And if you probably know this, but if you don't, it's on a site sacred to the Lakota, was stolen and mutilated illegally, and is basically the equivalent of someone breaking into the Vatican and replacing the Last Judgment with the Piss Christ. Except worse because genocide.)

The tradition of this form of art (I use art loosely here, as contemporary examples are not art in the way that the classical ones are) is one of influence, evolution, and repurposing. Old things are destroyed and replaced by new things. This is what happens when you take a visual representation and you put it outside, for the public to see.

Sometimes public art is just...no longer fit for purpose. Politics change, aesthetics change, and people change. This happened gradually in ancient Egypt, and often violently in ancient Rome. And we are seeing it happen now—which is a good and healthy thing.

Basically, sometimes you just gotta damnatio memoriae that shit.