What We're Reading: A Monumental Effort

By Roger Berkowitz
Ulrich Baer writes that three new sculptures by Kehinde Wiley, Wangechi Mutu, and Kara Walker offer a new and important way to engage the debates about what to do with historically meaningful but offensive monuments. 

A dreadlocks-sporting young man in a hoodie charges on a powerful steed into Times Square. Four seated women, wrapped in bronze coils, cast their regal gaze from the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A half-naked Venus spouts water into a tiered fountain from her breasts and slit throat in the vast Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Museum. These three recently unveiled artworks, raising the likeness of Black people to monumental proportions, productively reframe the divisive debate over historical monuments….
All three artists sidestep the debate over the ultimate fate of public monuments that glorify one set of historical actors at the expense and exclusion of those who suffered under them. They don’t accept the false choice between preserving or erasing history in the monuments debate but show that history, when distilled into public monuments, is a story authored by individuals with an agenda rather than a straightforward, purely objective rendition of the past. Instead of debating the accuracy of existing monuments, the artists focus on the imagination’s role in accounting for the past. By countering Confederate generals with a African-American man clad in modern clothing; juxtaposing the female caryatids used as pillars to uphold the temple-like Metropolitan Museum modeled partly on African traditions; and responding to a fountain honoring Queen Victoria in front of Buckingham Palace, the three artists change the terms of the volatile but also distracting debate about toppling or maintaining monuments, between erasing and preserving history.