A Daring Show Remixes the Monuments of the Confederacy
The first thing you see is a horse’s ass, protruding, upside down, from the thorax of a monster. A man’s arm descends from the beast’s stomach, his gloved hand clutching the blade of a fallen sabre. There’s no sign of a rider’s face, but a head of well-coiffed hair dangles from the creature’s eyeless muzzle. Every part of the work comes from a statue of the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson that was removed from Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2021. It was subsequently given to the artist Kara Walker, who carved it up in accordance with a butcher’s diagram. The finished sculpture, “Unmanned Drone”—on view at the Brick, in Los Angeles, as part of a joint exhibition with MOCA called “Monuments”—is at once an act of carnivalesque retribution and a recognition of the Confederacy’s zombie-like persistence. A rebellion defeated more than a hundred and sixty years ago refuses to stay dead; between the creature’s legs, a horse head emerges from a gape in the bronze, like a new Jackson already foaling.
In March, Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for the reinstatement of monuments “removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.” Chief among them were nearly two hundred Confederate memorials forced from their pedestals over the past decade, when they became lightning rods in a mass movement for racial justice. In 2017, the imminent removal of Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue provoked Unite the Right, the largest white-supremacist rally in a half century, and the start of a backlash that has only intensified. Last November, a private park in North Carolina celebrated its “rescue” of three previously toppled statues—not from destruction but from preservation in the county museum, where they might have fallen prey to “a narrative that didn’t honor Our Confederate Dead.”
Alas, then, that the nine statues in “Monuments” have been abandoned, like Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara, to mortifying occupation. At MOCA, where all the works but Walker’s are exhibited, you’ll find Jefferson Davis lying on his back, still streaked with pink paint from protests, raising an arm—Will anyone help me?—toward a group of Klansmen photographed by Andres Serrano. In another room, an enormous statue of Lee and Jackson, with “BEWARE TRAITORS” scrawled in huge letters across its base, is paired with a replica of the car from “The Dukes of Hazzard,” by Hank Willis Thomas—a Dodge Charger, emblazoned with a Confederate battle flag, which here stands totalled on its head. Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee has undergone the most viscerally satisfying transformation, into neatly stacked piles of bronze ingots. (They will be recycled for a future work.)
Iconoclasm is a time-honored means of exorcising history’s ghosts. After the fall of Hungary’s Communist dictatorship, dozens of decommissioned monuments were sent to Budapest’s Memento Park, including the boots from an enormous statue of Stalin, which had been torn down by irate crowds. Artists can go further still, turning public works against themselves. In 2022, after a monument honoring J. Marion Sims, the father of modern gynecology, was removed from Central Park, Doreen Lynette Garner conducted surgery on a silicone replica of the statue, reënacting a procedure that Sims had performed on enslaved women without their consent.
