Vandalism? No, throwing Colston into dock was ‘art’
Historian claims statue protests were ‘pageants’
THE infamous felling of a statue of Edward Colston by a mob was a form of ‘pageant’ and ‘public art’, an historian has claimed.
Alex von Tunzelmann risks controversy with her comments about the attack on the figure of the 18th century slave trader which prompted a national debate.
Four people were cleared of criminal damage this year despite CCTV evidence showing their roles in toppling the statue during a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in Bristol in June 2020.
Miss von Tunzelmann told the Chalke Valley History Festival: ‘It was reported at the time that an unruly mob pulled the statue down but actually the pulling down itself was rather an interesting form of pageant.’
She said the statue was then covered in graffiti and red paint. Two black protesters knelt on its neck for eight minutes, just as a US police officer had done on the neck of George Floyd, whose killing triggered the BLM protests.
‘It was then dragged through the streets in a sort of public progress of humiliation and finally thrown into the harbour, which was a deliberate recalling of the 19,000 slaves who died aboard Colston’s ships and were thrown into the sea,’ she said. ‘So one could say this form of pageant was itself a form of public art.’
Miss von Tunzelmann, author of the book Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History, described the BLM protesters who defaced and pulled down statues of ‘slave holders, confederates and imperialists’ in countries including the US, the UK, South Africa and India in 2020 as part of ‘a global wave of iconoclasm’.
She added that in the US and UK ‘Republican and Conservative administrations took the opportunity to build a culture war ... positioning themselves as the last defenders of American and British civilisation against barbarism, political correctness and what is increasingly called wokeness’.
Robert Poll, who founded the Save Our Statues campaign after Colston’s statue was torn down, said last night: ‘The Nazis considered book burning ceremonies a kind of pageant and public art. It doesn’t mean it should be welcomed by a civilised society. The destruction of art is barbaric and by elevating it we legitimise it.’