Statues belong in museums

Aserious question: when last did you visit a statue? When last did you admire a statue? When last did you actually care about a statue?

When, that is, until someone started tearing statues down?

I’ll go first: I remember fondly the abstract sculpture at the longago Jan Smuts airport – Danie De Jager’s immense Flight in Space, made of polished bronze, slowly rotating – and then nearby the grim bust of Smuts himself, deadeyed and judgmental.

No prizes for guessing which one I’d like to see again.

The statues that we are drawn to are not those on the current relic-removal role call; they’re not the dead generals, dusty presidents and faded imperialists with hollowed pupils and pigeon poop on their heads, glaring down at children playing in public spaces.

Instead, I have stood awed before the marble friezes at the Parthenon. I have been moved by conceptual monuments to the holocaust, yearning statues beside the sea commemorating drowned sailors, grand Roman horses existent since before Christendom, the brilliant Nelson Mandela “capture” sculpture (albeit in miniature at the Apartheid Museum) and, most recently, by a Dublin statue of a teenager bareback upon a horse, representing her downtrodden district where beloved horses are kept on the wastelands by the youth.

However, tellingly her beautiful steed is a replica of one from an earlier military statue, erected by the colonising British and then blown up by Irish republicans.

Statues have ever been a rallying point for revolutionaries.

Every dictator wants their statue, the taller the better, and of course every movement’s rebel leader must tear it down, and then have one too.

Giant tin gods, all. Nonsense, all. They’re not art: they’re vanities raised in triumphalism, in veneration.

Put them in a museum, with vital context, because alone these statues don’t teach anything at all. If they did, we’d still have statues of Hitler.

Even aesthetically they’re usually glorified representations of their sitters, with mandatory bronze tummy-tucks and marble facelifts. That’s if they’re lucky.

It’s not statues that make us remember the past, but what people did – or didn’t do – that stands tall, or falls, regardless.