Richmond, VA, the former Confederate capital and major slave trading center, is an active experimental laboratory for removing and transforming old so-called “monuments,” creating new responses to our tragic racial history, and long overdue memorializations of slavery’s victims, including those who rebelled against it. I live a block from the city’s signature Monument Avenue. When the Avenue’s inaugural statue of Robert E. Lee was installed in 1890, Virginia’s governor acknowledged that it was essentially a real estate development, to encourage upscale private home construction. Money for that statue was raised largely by Confederate women. The racist “lost cause” myth was financially operationalized by “New South” entrepreneurs under the urbanist aesthetic of the “City Beautiful.”
The Lee statue stands in what’s now called Marcus David Peters Circle, named for an unarmed Black man murdered by Richmond police. A few months ago, after local crowds toppled effigies of Jeff Davis and Jeb Stuart, Mayor Stoney, empowered by pandemic emergency regulations, directed the removal of traitors’ statues within his jurisdiction. While Governor Northam has ordered removal of Lee’s statue, the process waits on resolution of a lawsuit filed by descendants of the land’s donor. Return of the repressed. Life has not been quiet in the neighborhood. Enthusiastic crowds cheered the old statues’ removal and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ installation of Kehinde Wiley’s parodic “Rumors of War,” whose charging horseman gazes defiantly at the bunker-like headquarters of the Daughters of the Confederacy next door. Gatherings under the Lee statue at Peters Circle have been harassed and disrupted by police firing teargas, contrary to their own regulations. The Circle has become an active social and political center – for BLM activists, sympathizers, sightseers. The statue, its mammoth pedestal, and surrounding new concrete barriers are rich canvases for graffiti, memorials to Black folks killed by the police like George Floyd, and a screen for illuminations that recall both recent dead and earlier heroes like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Residents and visitors have been intimidated by armed Boogaloo boys and other so-called “militias”; there’s an ongoing contest between those inscribing empty pedestals with graffiti and groups showing up, armed, to scrub them off. A few days before the election, a “Trump train” of cars, vans, and trucks noisily circled the Circle, with armed drivers issuing threats. For a week or so after that police blocked all automobile traffic. Another, older part of town, Shockoe Bottom, was the site of one of the country’s largest slave markets and of a graveyard for both free and enslaved African-Americans. There’s an annual memorial observance. I’ll say more later about a project to restore and preserve this sacred ground.
Three months before the 2017 Charlottesville horror, I published an op-ed on the monument question. I criticized the claim that the statues should be preserved in place as “heritage,” and speculated on possible futures for Monument Avenue. Taking a leaf from my teacher Arthur Danto, I deployed a distinction he makes between monuments and memorials in his essay on the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial (or VVM). As Danto disambiguates: “We erect monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so that we shall never forget…Monuments commemorate the memorable and embody the myths of beginnings. Memorials ritualize remembrance and mark the reality of ends.”
In the 2017 op-ed I wrote: “Monuments demonstrate a community’s symbolic honoring of events and people for qualities it finds indispensable to its identity. George Washington, whatever his limits, is honored as father of his country. Memorials, like VVM, are meant to ensure that certain events and people will never be forgotten, although we might be ambivalent about some aspects of the events. We can honor the soldiers named individually, while believing that the war was a disastrous fiasco. By its very form, descending into the ground, the VVM is memorial and not monumental.
“The contested Confederate symbols, originally built in a monumental spirit, were defended as memorials, as ‘heritage.’ The traditionalists wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They desired the monumental’s heroic aura but justified it with the memorial’s principles.”
Now the faux monuments are going or gone. There’s much talk concerning possible replacements, disposition of what’s been removed (relocation in museums, cemeteries, and so forth). Far from history being erased, Virginians are learning about the true causes of the Civil War, how Reconstruction was terminated by the disputed election of 1876, and the Jim Crow period’s fabrication of “Lost Cause” alternative facts that led to those equestrian statues.
I’ll consider three distinct but not incompatible perspectives on present and future monuments and memorials: first, one that emphasizes the values and meaning of public art; second, focusing on challenges faced by contemporary national states in acknowledging their gruesome, traumatic pasts; third, asking the question of how deeply and in what sense works of memory should and can enable us, the living, to be with the dead.
First, there’s the question of public art, the most obvious intersection of the political and the aesthetic. Fred Evans, in his 2018 book Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy, argues that a democracy necessarily involves a multiplicity of distinct views, perspectives, and interests, a “multi-voiced body.” These voices should be given rights of expression and contestation in the public sphere. For Evans, a robust democracy enables and encourages a plurality of voices, thereby excluding what he calls “oracles,” that is, unquestionable (dogmatic) voices of authority. On this view, a democratic society will have the virtues of solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity. Public art should embody and enable these same values.
Evans highlights Krzystof Wodiczko’s work, which contested the gentrification and depoliticization of New York’s Union Square. From early on, the space was aligned with liberty, attracting public gatherings, especially in crisis times. In the neo-liberal 1980s the Square’s borders were more intensely commercialized, its internal structure altered by removing trees, consolidating paths and rendering it more panoptical. Wodiczko enacted a form of artistic resistance to this process, illuminating the existing statues of Washington, Lafayette, Lincoln, and Charity with transfiguring projections, associating them with the homeless, immigrants, and the marginalized.
The projections on the former Lee monument are analogous, now recalling acts and words of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass who fought for universal citizenship, now illuminating names and faces of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other unarmed victims of the police.
These images are necessarily ephemeral, existing at the far end of the spectrum whose extreme is the monumental with its aspiration to eternity. Yet we are learning that all monuments, like democracy itself, are fragile, subject to natural and political alteration, destruction, neglect, and ruin. The lessons of the Lee/M.D. Peters and Union Square projections are metaphysical as well as political. Robert Smithson claimed that the ruined monument is the paradigmatic form of an era increasingly aware of relentless environmental and social entropy.
The nocturnal projections on Monument Avenue are strikingly brilliant, welcome and timely, helping to focus the community’s productive energies in the present crisis. Nevertheless, they are by their nature transient phantasms.
Most of the emphasis in Evans’s thoughtful concept of public art is on the present and the future. But what’s happening to public space in the US? It’s under threat because of permissive gun laws, “militia” culture, and militarized police who cooperate with armed right wingers. And it’s subject to attrition as we retreat into privacy, provoked by health crises and the isolation of online life. To what extent is so-called “public space” truly available on the same terms to the whole public, to all citizens, residents, and visitors regardless of race, class, gender, and other qualities? Drawing on Wodiczko and others, Evans provokes us to reflect on such questions.
Beyond that, I think more is required in coming to terms with the national past. Evans speaks more frequently of “democracy” than of the state. However strongly we are moved by Jacques Derrida’s idea of a “democracy to come,” or its American analogues in thinkers like Dewey and Rorty, there is no escaping the nation’s past genocide of indigenous peoples, enslavement of Blacks, and denials of basic rights. What must a nation remember? What should a nation never forget?
Susan Neiman tackles such questions in her recent book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.
She concentrates on the ways that two national states – Germany and the US – come to terms with their shameful pasts, or fail to do so. Neiman articulates the German concept of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, “working-off-the-past,” a term with no obvious English equivalent. For decades after 1945, the German majority was reluctant to acknowledge the depth of Nazi evil and its acceptance or support by much of the population. West Germans commonly claimed that they were the victims of Allied bombing and occupation. Change came in the mid-1990s with the Wehrmacht Exhibition and younger generations coming of age. Previously large numbers of Germans believed that Nazi atrocities were carried out mainly by the SS and that few were aware of extermination camps and Eastern front atrocities. Then it became undeniably clear that ordinary soldiers participated in the evils, also known to their contemporaries. The change of consciousness led to new instructional programs in schools and large audience media events. Also to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of Berlin, the same city’s Jewish Museum, and other highly visible markers.
Despairing Americans might say the Germans began their deep process of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung after fifty years, while the US has had over 150 to launch such a process. Neiman offers an alternative chronological analogy. She notes that the 1964 Civil Rights Act marked the legal end of Jim Crow with respect to the franchise and public accommodations, as 1945 did the Nazi surrender. The passage of years is also a passage of generations. Perhaps, Neiman cautiously suggests, after immersing herself in biracial reconciliation ventures in Mississippi, much of the US is on the verge of awakening.
In 1897 William James gave the dedicatory address at the unveiling of Saint-Gaudens’s Boston memorial to Robert Gould Shaw. For Neiman this was an exemplary, if preliminary, form of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. Shaw was a young Boston Brahmin who died along with many soldiers as he led the Union Army’s first all Black regiment into a difficult battle at Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Seasoned art historians disagree over whether the Black soldiers depicted in relief are fully individualized or not. There’s less disagreement about the content of James’s address. He says that it’s all too easy to praise military courage, for human beings retain an ancient “battle-instinct.” What deserves recognition in “the monuments of nations” is “civic courage” as displayed in fighting a nation’s “deadliest enemies,” which are typically internal. Such was the battle against slavery. Shaw and his regiment should be honored not simply for military valor, but for embodying civic courage in the quest for equality. I stress James’s repeated reference to the nation here to indicate that it’s not an indeterminate public or democracy that is cast as agent and audience but a political state with a specific history.
As a pragmatist, James’s temporal horizon is the future. There was little discernible interest among white Americans then in memorializing the centuries-long outrages of slavery – or the genocide of indigenous peoples. Indeed, eleven years later, James’s Harvard colleague, neighbor, and friend Josiah Royce turned to the past in his Philosophy of Loyalty. Royce defended the Southern idea of the “lost cause,” apparently having imbibed the “alternative facts” of “states’ rights” that were furiously propagated in the post-Reconstruction era. He left a stain on American philosophy by specifically commending the erection and veneration of statues to Lee and other Confederates as exemplifying “loyalty to loyalty.”
Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung demands recognition of the victims. In addition to the large memorial at the center of Berlin, Neiman notes other forms of remembrance, including small plaques embedded in the city’s sidewalks with names and dates of individual German Jews killed at the extermination camps. Neiman sees the nation’s task from the standpoint of Enlightenment universalism. In line with “Black Lives Matter,” she implies that not until the value of those lives unjustly taken have been recognized can we legitimately claim to value all lives. There can be no argument with this, but could something more be at stake?
Is Enlightenment universalism fully adequate to a nation’s victims’ demand for recognition? Hans Ruin, in his recent book Being With the Dead: Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness, recalls Antigone.
She insists that burial rites for her dead brother are required so that she can be with the dead. She speaks not of ghosts or specters, but of a felt sense of continuity with the departed. Ruin takes this as emblematic of human culture’s distinctive engagement with generations no longer living. We need to free our conception of being with the dead from racist and colonialist concepts of “ancestor worship” and the like deployed by nineteenth century imperialist anthropology as it stigmatized supposedly “primitive” cultures. At the deepest level, memorials are more than reminders that we should never forget (as in Arthur Danto’s definition). We are not only inextricably social but also intergenerational creatures, defining ourselves in terms of familial, ethnic, national, and cultural lineages.
This brings me back to Richmond. There’s now an annual event of consecration at the site of the city’s African Burial Ground involving dance, song, and ritual. Participants invoke the memory of Gabriel Prosser, an enslaved young blacksmith who organized a rebellion in 1800. When the plot was betrayed by a confidant, Gabriel and others were executed. Now busy, noisy highway overpasses loom over sections of the Burial Ground, making auditory communication difficult for those coming to be with the dead and honor the ancestors. In last year’s twilight ceremony, hundreds of participants were supplied with earphones, so that they could share in the music, song, and speech of the occasion. The pragmatics of the memorial called for a fusion of the archaic with contemporary technology – as in the Peters Circle illuminations. I suppose that only a minority of those present were descendants of those buried there. It’s likely that many had no enslaved Richmond ancestors and that forebears of many came to the US after the Civil War. Nevertheless, their – and my – Richmond is built upon the bodies of these dead. As the 1619 Project reminds us, Virginia was the original site of chattel slavery in what became the United States. Plans are afoot for a nine acre memorial park to honor the dead here. Fortunately, concerned citizens have been effective so far in preventing the area being transformed into a housing and commercial center anchored by a baseball park. They fended off an unholy real estate deal.
A closing thought: Foreign observers as well as US historians of art and culture remark on the country’s mania for monuments and its associated record of heated controversies over their content. I offer this hypothesis: the quantity of a nation’s monument-building and related discussion is proportional to its internal discord. Where there’s little internal conflict there are fewer monuments and less of what Kirk Savage calls “monument wars.” Some Americans have realized this. After the Civil War Robert E. Lee rejected the idea of Confederate monuments. America’s leading designer and thinker of public space, Frederic Law Olmsted, ran guns for Abolitionists and directed the Union Army’s health services during the war. He opposed the idea of large-scale post-war architectural monuments and memorials, suggesting instead that local communities could honor their dead by having children initiate handmade cairns of small stones. The young would be learning to live with the dead, staying close to the earth. Adults might supplement them with larger stones, that would eventually harbor vegetation. I’d like to think that Olmsted would have understood the value of a memorial park at the African Burial Ground.
(This text is a lightly edited version of a presentation in a panel discussion on “Monuments and Memorials” at the annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, November 13, 2020)
Gary Shapiro
Gary Shapiro is Prof. Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Richmond. He has written widely on continental philosophy, the philosophy of art, and American thought; in 2016 he published Nietzsche's Earth: Great Events, Great Politics (University of Chicago Press).
