The statue wars: Colston’s replacement
For decades, we paid little mind to the statues that dotted the streets of our big cities, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Nothing, as the saying went, is as invisible as a memorial in bronze.
No longer. For the past few weeks, debate has raged as to whom we memorialise, and it has centred on Bristol: first with the pulling down of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston; now, with the appearance last week, in the same spot, of a new statue of a black woman, by the sculptor Marc Quinn, once a Young British Artist. As an art critic, I am excited that art is suddenly a topic of urgent public debate – but Quinn’s piece left me cold. No one had asked him to put it up, and the statue itself is drearily “literal”. Its appearance looked like a “vainglorious” stunt by a prominent white artist who has made a lot of money from selling “meretricious” pieces to the super-rich.
Well, I liked the statue, said Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. Modelled on real-life protester Jen Reid, and “forged in the fervour of an ideological moment”, it had “undeniable energy, a beauty and strength all of its own”. And while some objected to a “celebrated white artist inserting himself into the debate”, others welcomed Quinn’s guerilla intervention as the action of an ally, said Aindrea Emelife in The Guardian. The Colston statue was made by a white man to honour a slaver; last week, a white man put up a new work “to correct the situation”. But a day after it appeared, the council took it down again, said Jan Moir – leaving no one happy.
Pity the city’s Labour mayor, having to deal with this divisive issue, said The Times. A Bristolian of Jamaican descent, Marvin Rees abhorred Colston’s statue, but had not called for it to be removed, because he knew that if he entered that debate, it would be all he talked about in office. Now, he says Colston has got him anyway: “boxed in”, he finds himself under attack from all sides. Yet he is handling the situation well. He’d asked Quinn not to put up the statue, because he believed it risked causing unrest among those troubled by Colston’s “anarchic” toppling. And he was right to take it down. As he says, Bristol needs to make a “collective” decision as to how it reflects its past.
“People pay for what they
do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply:
by the lives they lead.” James Baldwin, quoted in
The New York Times
“We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practise it.” William Faulkner, quoted
on Al.com
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, quoted on The Conversation