Noisy statues
Friday, July 10, 2020 The purges of Savonarola ... The Lubyanka ... Lt James Cook ... Fremantle Park ... Magdalene College ... Procrustes takes us on an historical magic carpet ride ... Statues and their threat to peace, order and good government ... How to manage dissension caused by images in bronze and stone
David: carved too late to be destroyed by the mob"David must fall", the inevitable cry goes up. After months of trashing statues for connections with racism, slavery and the dereliction of the indigenous, the puritan mob turns its cleansing fury on an art work that idolises a fornicator, who, not content with unleashing himself on another man's wife, had the man in question placed at the front line and left there in battle as the remainder of the army withdrew. Now David could have the widow to himself.
The David was carved by Michelangelo just a half decade after Savonarola organised the Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence, and was himself then executed in 1498.
The mob which had enthusiastically joined in the destruction of art works in 1497, only a year later turned on the organiser, Savonarola. But if David had been carved a mere few years earlier, it might have gone the way of so much other art of which we now can never know.
It must be time to attempt a rational discourse on statues. Who would have thought that such inert forms could generate so much heat. What really disconcerted your scribe was the pictures of Columbus being torn down in Baltimore: the crowd looked like the dustcover from The Lord of the Flies. Such unleashed public passion always leads to tears before bedtime.
First of all, where is a statue placed? One of the arguments from the more dispassionate opponents of statues of slavers/racists/oppressors of the indigenous has been that public places for these artworks are inappropriate, and that as art or historical commemoration, they might suitably be placed in museums or art galleries.
The fate of Felix Dzerzhinsky is instructive. The founder of the Cheka after the Bolshevik Revolution took hold, Iron Felix ran the Red Terror through the years of the Russian Civil War, massacring and slaughtering opponents, or just those who were in the way.
Felix died in 1926, but his statue standing outside the KGB HQ, the Lubyanka, was carted away in August 1991, as a prelude to the regime change that occurred in December that year.
The statue ended-up in a park full of communist era relics of Lenin and Stalin, and is now in what has been described as a hipster outdoor museum on Moscow's outskirts.
Given Putin's nostalgia for the Communist past and his KGB antecedents, he's provided much dog-whistling support for the statue's return to the Lubyanka front-of-house.
There are regular rumbles, but as yet no return of Iron Felix.
Who controls the narrative of history? Well, amazing as it may seem in a democracy, statues don't go up according to popular demand. They get site position permission and funding from the Great and the Good.
Once up, they may be expected to have a long shelf-life, silently proclaiming the perceived attributes of the figure preserved in stone or bronze.
What to do if the attributes finally offend a segment of community empowered by size and passion to do something about the malignant mannikin (the few women in statuary form seem universally inoffensive)?
Events in Virginia and most recently Baltimore involve what seem like lynch mobs bent on revenge on the names of those commemorated.
This response, while understandable, is about as rational as the basis on which the statues were erected in the first place.
Dumping a figure who has been around for many years into the harbour is as good a look as the standard Stalinist scrap-book approach to history: cut out the faces of those in group portraits of the Bolshevik past when they fall to the Great Terror.
The Russians may be onto something when they park the now politically odious in theme parks, away from the centres of power and metropolitan gathering places.
The idea has been broached for the Cook statue in Sydney's Hyde Park, last seen guarded by 20 coppers, including a squad of mounted troopers. Who'd a thunk it?
Up rose the troopers - one, two, three
But that's our next query: should Cook be hidden in a museum, or is there another way of dealing with bruised feelings engendered by his statue?
What of the secondary inscription? As occurred on the Explorers' Monument in Fremantle Park, which declared that the three white men commemorated had been killed by treacherous natives.
A later plaque was placed to point out that the explorers died after invading the lands of indigenous people who were affronted, and that they in turn died in much larger numbers as a result of punitive expeditions.
What might be written on Cook's statue? For a start, most of today's community have no idea, compared with those who were present in the 1880s when it went up, as to Cook's place in the Western canon of rational thought and science.
That needs setting out, which might be followed by separate explanation as to Cook's perceived status amongst our First Nations as the harbinger of doom. The Indigenous curse him not for his actual deeds, but as the enabler of what followed.
That still leaves Cook out in plain sight - the visual reflects the dominant political reality. Most of the community don't care, and if pressed will say that Cook is part of our history, and was a good bloke.
Just go back to a seminal Native Title case, WA v Ward, where McHugh J said:
"Given the racist nature of Australian society at material times, it would not surprise me that, if the Aboriginal people had complained of the injustice of their treatment, the legislature would have replied as the Athenian representatives cynically replied to the Melians from whom they were demanding tribute:
'[Y]ou know as well as we do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept'.
Marx thought that law was a body of rules that upheld what the dominant class in a particular society called its rights. But you do not have to be a Marxist to recognise that at least on occasions the dominant class in a society will use its power to disregard the rights of a class or classes with less power.
On any view, that is what the dominant classes in Australian society did - and in the eyes of many still do - to the Aboriginal people."
What to do? Suggestions have been floated of counter-statuary, perhaps a group of indigenous surrounding Cook. Counter imagery seems a fair response: occupying the same public space and allowing for instant response rather than having to read tiresome plaques.
Even allowing for bruised feelings, there's a lot of room for a comedic response in all this. Take the approach of Magdalene College, Cambridge, which ate its revenge dead cold, 400 years out of time with a blistering gargoyle bust.
Revenge gargoyle of Benedict Spinola, Cambridge
In 1572, the college needed funds urgently (no doubt to keep the supply of wine and food up to top table) and sold a leasehold property in London to an Italian merchant banker, Benedict Spinola.
The property (of huge value today) had been bequeathed to the College by one of Henry VIII's ghastly retinue, Lord Audley, to allow for the generation of revenue.
Selling the lease not only cut off future supply, it was in direct defiance of a 1571 statute that forbade the selling of such leaseholds.
The college agreed with Spinola to avoid the statute by leasing the land to the Queen, on the theory that she wasn't bound by the legislation, and on condition that she in turn lease the land to Spinola.
This was all duly executed by the college, who then lost control of the land and the attendant revenue, on December 13, 1574, a date inscribed on the Tudor bonnet worn by the gargoyle of Spinola (care of the makers of Spitting Image) erected by the college in 1989, and placed on the wall of the river Cam opposite Magdalene.
The college has never flinched from asserting that it was the victim of fraud committed by Spinola, but it had connived all the way.
See, de white folks can use statuary not just for triumphalism, but to cover their embarrassment at having shot themselves in the foot.
There's even a legal sequelae: Magdalene tried to claw the leased land back, and won in King's Bench to a stirring denunciation of the Crown immunity rule from Sir Edward Coke (the Magdalen College case 1615), but then the Earl of Oxford, who had bought the leasehold in turn from Spinola, now out of pocket, went to Equity, where Lord Chancellor Ellesmere swiftly overturned Coke, while promulgating the doctrine of Equity's precedence over the common law: the Earl of Oxford's case 1615.
That takes us to the weirdness of equity lawyers in Equity's last great stronghold, NSW. But that, children, is a story for another day.
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