THE PERIL OF MOVING STATUES
ALAN MURDIE wonders if recent outbreaks of iconoclasm across the US and UK reveal our deep-seated fears about whether statues enjoy some uncanny life of their own...
ALAN MURDIE wonders if recent outbreaks of iconoclasm across the US and UK reveal our deep-seated fears about whether statues enjoy some uncanny life of their own...
Over spring and summer 2020, the public display of statues of selected historic figures suddenly excited people on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, intemperate mobs of protestors struck at a diverse range of statues deemed offensive. Events saw attacks on memorials to Civil War generals and the toppling of George Washington’s bust from its plinth at Washington University. In Boston a crowd beheaded a statue of Christopher Columbus, and on the night of 9 June in Richmond, Virginia, another memorial to Columbus was overturned, set on fire and cast into a lake. 1
Four days later in the UK, a copycat incident erupted during an anti-racism protest in Bristol, when protestors toppled an 1895 statue of Edward Colston (1636-1721) and threw it into the harbour. This seemed to mark open season upon other memorials of historical personages in cities around the country. In Oxford, students demonstrated and called for an image of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College ‘to fall’, and other monuments to historical personages as diverse as Lord Nelson in Norwich, Sir Winston Churchill in Whitehall, Sir France Drake in Plymouth and Boy Scout movement founder Baden Powell, resplendent in his uniform and shorts, on Poole quayside in Dorset, were either deliberately damaged or highlighted as being at risk of protests and vandalism. 2
Altogether, there has probably not been such an outburst of iconoclastic sentiment in the UK since the enactment of the injunctions of Edward VI in 1547 demanded statues in churches should be “forthwith taken down”, accompanied by ritualistic homilies and sermons, and when zealous Puritans destroyed or mutilated thousands of images of saints, angels and the Virgin Mary the following century. 3
SCAPEGOATS AND SACRIFICES
Today’s vehement public rages against selected statuary would have intrigued earlier generations of anthropologists, sociologists and folklorists, especially those trained in the Golden Bough philosophy of Sir James Frazer. Within them they would have detected echoes of the age-old rituals of scapegoating and the sacrificing of humans in effigy form (a substitute for actual human sacrifice) for the benefit of the community.
That such events should occur in 2020 during the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and rising unemployment is unsurprising. Tensions over quarantine restrictions on ordinary life have welled up, with many shut inside for weeks feeling like hitting the roof or worse – domestic violence rates have surged over the same period. On stepping outside, the wish to lash out from frustration remains. On a merely personal level this may occur, as when a wound-up or paranoid individual takes against a statue or painting – perhaps perceiving it as staring at him – its motionless and unchanging visage contrasting painfully with his inner mental turmoil. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm stated in The Fear of Freedom (1942): “The state of anxiety, the feeling of powerlessness and insignificance, and especially the doubt concerning one’s future after death, represent a state of mind which is practically unbearable for anybody.”
But, as history shows, these feelings go beyond the individual and can engulf whole groups and communities. In such moods, a prominent sculpture or image becomes a convenient symbol upon which anxieties and grievances, actual or imagined, are projected. The unleashing of aggression and the resulting destruction provide a cathartic release for crowds, experienced as a heady rush of relief.
Just such a desperate collective reaction afflicted the minds of many Sicilians in April 1893, after six dry months without a drop of rain. As gardens and crops withered, they prayed fervently, telling their beads and processing, standing or lying down before statues of patron saints in appeals for spiritual help, holding Masses, vespers, concerts and lighting fireworks. All appeals failed, whereupon crowds turned against their saintly images. Some statues were reversed, like naughty children, and made to face the wall. Others were stripped of their beautiful robes, hauled from churches and plinths and threatened, abused and ducked in horseponds. At Licata the patron saint, St Angelo, was beaten, put in irons and threatened with drowning or hanging. “Rain or the rope!” roared the angry crowd shaking their fists impotently in his face. Eventually the rains came.
4
Such incidents provide a form of collective exorcism, an expulsion of the latest folk demons afflicting a community. Ritualised and repeated, these actions may become
Some statues, like naughty children, were reversed and made to face the wall