Video
The Lives of Monuments - Monuments Memory and Cultural Vandalism - Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier
Transcript
EMMA SILVERMAN: For our third presenter, I'd like to draw Erika into the conversation now to give us some broader context for Bill and Rachel's talks about the graffiti at the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War soldier and at NPS sites more generally.
Erika, can you talk about why different publics vandalize cultural property especially when that vandalism is done to make a political statement, as it was at the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War soldier?
ERIKA DOSS: I can, and here we go. Let me see if I can get my PowerPoint set up here.
[Shares screen. Presentation: Monuments Memory and Cultural Vandalism, National Park Service series: The Lives of Monuments.]
How does that look? OK. Thanks, Emma, for inviting me to participate in today's conversation about monuments, memory, and vandalism.
And I do sort of hope to hop on to what Bill and Rachel are talking about regarding this particular incident of vandalism. My remarks are going to focus on, as Emma suggested, how and why some American publics are motivated to deface cultural property and what these acts of cultural vandalism tell us about the meaning of monuments and memory in contemporary America.
[Slide.]
So last summer, following George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis by police on May 25, widespread protests throughout the United States and around the world against systemic or structural racism and police violence occurred.
And I just show a few examples here of the kind of images that we saw and experienced.
[Slide.]
Some protesters in Philadelphia, tens of thousands, rallied at the Philadelphia Art Museum or outside. Some protesters targeted public monuments, such as these managed by the National Park Service. And Rachel showed a few of these images as well in Boston and in Washington, D.C., so the Lincoln Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and on the left the backside of the Shaw Memorial in Boston.
[Slide. Images.]
Others targeted figurative sculpture in the United States, particularly of US presidents deemed representatives of white supremacy and racial inequity, such as Andrew Jackson --- this is the statue of him in Kansas City --- and George Washington. This is a statue that was toppled. So we're looking at it lying on the ground here. And yellow paint was thrown on it. And, also, you'll see on the far left of the pedestal the words "genocidal maniac."
[Slide. Images.]
In Philadelphia, long-time protest against this larger-than-life-sized statue of Frank Rizzo, which was in front of the city's municipal building, and those protests included --- I have on the left being yarn bombed in 2012 and dressed in a pink bikini.
Long-time protests finally led to the statue's removal by order of Mayor Jim Kenney. So this was part of the May and June protest. And likewise, this statue of Christopher Columbus in Marconi Plaza, which had similarly been the subject of sustained and really heated public protests in South Philadelphia, this was boarded up as we see on the bottom and eventually removed from the site.
[Slide.]
And as we've seen in Washington Square here in Philadelphia, graffiti was spray-painted at the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War soldier. So to the right of the Statue of George Washington --- and as Bill said, this is a copy of the statue designed by French artist Houdon --- under the sentence, "Freedom is a light for which many men have died in darkness," chiseled into this limestone wall, somebody wrote the words "committed genocide," and then underneath that as well, someone tagged ACAB short for "All Cops Are Bastards" in bright pink paint.
Graffiti takes many forms.
[Slide. Images: Banksy, "I Remember When (2010)."]
Today, the work of the very well-known British artist Banksy is called street art, not vandalism. And it commands very high prices in the art market and generally broad appreciation for this artist's particular attention to social and political issues.
But the vandalism of national monuments disturbs people.
[Slide. Chat.]
Hundreds of people responded to the NPS social media postings, which I include here, on these incidents in Washington and also in Philadelphia, the statement by the NPS on the left and just some of the many comments that we see on the right.
For many people, vandalism is property destruction and criminal behavior. And indeed, as Rachel pointed out, in US law, vandalism is typically considered a crime subject to penalties from fines and restitution to jail time.
[Slide. Chat.]
The word vandalism, the art historian Sabine Marschall recounts, carries negative connotations associated with violence, unlawfulness, disrespect, disobedience, uncivilized behavior. Defacing a War Memorial that features the figure of America's founding father was seen by many as a sign of civic disorder, and it was denounced as desecration and even iconoclasm.
[Slide.]
The cultural vandalism seen here, directed at monuments dedicated to Washington, Robert E. Lee, and Christopher Columbus, is an intentional defacement of cultural property.
It is also an expression of rage, pain, and mourning, a very public declaration that things are very wrong in America, that American citizens are being brutalized, that voices are not being heard, that histories are being denied. Defacing monuments that seem to promote systemic racism and violence or ignore, as this case suggests, George Washington's role in the destruction and devastation, his words, of Indigenous Americans to make way for a new nation of white male landowners may be seen as an act of civil disobedience, a demand for alternative, expanded understandings of early American history of how the US actually came into being.
[Slide. Image: Lincoln Memorial.]
Monuments are the physical markers of social, political, and economic interest. They are highly visible stakeholders in historical memory. And they possess enormous degrees of power and influence, shaping how we feel about ourselves, our neighbors, our nation. Their symbolic capital, following Pierre Bourdieu, helps shape and direct public perceptions of social order, political transition, and national identity.
[Slide.]
When monuments embody values that Americans deem aberrant or inappropriate, when they seem to possess negative symbolic capital, such as white supremacy, slavery, Indigenous dispossession, they may be defaced. They may be removed.
I call this process cultural vandalism --- damaging and/or removing public art for reasons related to changing or shifted understandings of social and political purpose and identity.
And I want to make a distinction here between cultural heritage vandalism and cultural vandalism, which I'd be happy to elaborate on during our roundtable.
[Slide. Painting.]
Americans have practiced cultural vandalism since the nation's beginnings. On July 9, 1776, for example, General George Washington organized a public reading of the Declaration of Independence in New York. Thomas Jefferson listed 27 grievances against King George in the Declaration
Summarized in this sentence, "a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
Inspired by words encouraging them to dissolve the political bands of tyranny, to seek unalienable rights of life, liberty, and happiness, the crowd in New York pulled down this two-ton statue of the king, which had been modeled on a statue of Marcus Aurelius.
Note the participants gather together in Johannes Oertel's version of the scene --- women, children, merchants, working men, people of color, Native Americans.
[Slide. Painting.]
A few years later, William Walcutt also depicted the scene of America's transformation from colony to nation. His paintings similarly shows sacred power falling to the people and suggest how public rituals of cultural vandalism, here seen in the form of statue removal, helped legitimate claims to new forms of social and political authority.
[Slide. Image.]
So these practices of cultural vandalism continue today, similarly sparked by public disaffection with various forms of social and political authority, such as systemic racism and police brutality and their negative symbolic capital as embodied in some examples of public art.
[Slide.]
The graffiti at the monument in Philadelphia may have been motivated, as Bill suggested, by discontent with laudatory or one-dimensional images of George Washington and the lack of attention to what historian Colin Calloway describes as Washington's torturous relationship with Native Americans.
Cultural vandalism makes the negative symbolic capital of troubling memorials visible. It pushes us to recognize the more nuance to the more complicated faces and facts of history. Its practice today suggests the shared concerns of Americans who aim to reconcile historical accountability with national identity and, importantly, national futurity.
In this sense, markers of dissent like the graffiti at the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier challenge deficient images and deficient histories on aspirational terms as calls for change, for new ways of seeing and understanding the people, the stories that constitute American history.
[Slide.]
Let me end by showing how those calls for change have been realized, were made manifest in Richmond, Virginia last summer when the images that we see here were projected onto that huge statue of Robert E. Lee, and the entire site became a lively, colorful space of both cultural vandalism and public interaction. Thank you.
Description
Dr. Erika Doss, Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, discusses why different publics vandalize cultural property, especially when vandalism is done to make a political statement.
Duration
12 minutes, 35 seconds
Credit
Emma Silverman et al
Date Created
06/17/2021
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