Anti-slavery sculpture is being cancelled

Memorial to the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, by Vincent Gray, 2024

 

A remarkable and historically important sculpture is being denied a home.

From 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade, until 1867— two years after the US finally abolished slavery after a bloody civil war — the Royal Navy patrolled the West African coast intercepting slavers and freeing those enslaved.

For the first time in human history, a government took a stand against human slavery. Over its sixty years of operation, the Squadron is estimated to have freed 150,000 slaves!

And yet, in an era when statues themselves are being 'cancelled' — removed or destroyed because those memorialised acquired their prominence through participating or defending slavery — this monument to a remarkable act in defence of human liberty is being denied a home at its most obvious location: in Portsmouth, where the Squadron was based.

The owners of the local shopping centre, Gun Wharf Quays, located by the prominent landmark, the Spinnaker Tower, initially gave permission to site the sculpture there. But subsequently they rescinded it because the memorial ‘lacked authenticity and sensitivity’ and would remind people of ‘a dark part of the nation’s history.’
    Of course, the sculpture actually reminds us of a remarkable act of national generosity, a profound atonement for the role of some British in the slave trade of the 17th and 18th centuries. The establishment of a memorial to the West Africa Squadron does not hide the history of the slave trade nor seek to sanitise Britain’s role in first trading, and then preventing the trade of Africans. Nor would it preclude or prejudice the erection of a memorial to the slaves themselves. Slavery and freedom are part of the same historical narrative and both must be remembered. This sculpture remembers the slaves and the Royal Navy together, and will prompt thoughts and questions about both enslavement and emancipation.
    Portsmouth City Council and the Historic Naval Dockyard in Portsmouth, from where the Squadron sailed, have also declined the offer of the memorial. So has the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, the Historic Dockyard Chatham (where some of the ships were built) and Gosport City Council (where the ships were victualled). As [Colin] Kemp writes [in seeking a permanent home for the statue], ‘The current mood seems only to be interested in apologies and reparations’ and will not recognise the moral action, after abolition, ‘in sending ships to patrol the coast of West Africa for 60 years’.

It's almost like the cancellers want to cancel history.

How do you capture the tragedy of war?

The word monumental is over-used. Sculptor Sabin Howard's new bronze sculpture, a relief to be unveiled in September, is literally monumental. "The memorial is perhaps the greatest work of public art commissioned this century," says reviewer Gerald Boersma. 

The massive bronze sculpted relief, named 'A Soldier’s Journey,' will depict a single soldier’s progression through the war, visually narrating America’s reluctant entry into the fracas engulfing Europe. ... We can’t miss the artist’s message: This “Soldier’s Journey” is equally “America’s Journey.” The space of Pershing Park that Howard’s sculpture makes sacred invites visitors to enter more deeply into our nation’s memory and make its journey our own. In Howard’s sculpture we contemplate the ... heroism, and the indomitable spirit and glory that marked America’s contribution to a European war initiated two and a half years earlier. At the same time, we are asked to reflect on the absurd, inestimable loss of life, the senseless butchery, and stupid arrogance that drives the carnage of war.

Painter Michael Newberry calls this "the most monumental figurative sculpture in America in the last 100 years," and its unveiling next month "a historic moment—witness art history in the making!"

Listen here to the sculptor's interview with Russ Roberts about capturing the tragedy of war.

Shellshocked Soldier

'Three Amigos Return Home'

[Pics from Sabin Howard's Twitter feed.]

Socrates gets physical

Discobolus, by Myron

“[I]t is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit.”

          ~ Socrates, according to Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.12

[Hat tip Stephen Hicks]

"To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Classical Greek spirit that distinguished it from all that had gone before. A tomb in Egypt and a theatre in Greece. The one comes to mind as naturally as the other. So was the world changing by the time the fifth century before Christ began in Athens." #QotD

Dancing female figurine, 2nd Century BC, Western Greek (Source: The British Museum)

"To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the [Classical] Greek spirit that distinguished it from all that had gone before. It is a vital distinction. The joy of life is written upon everything the Greeks left behind and they who leave it out of account fail to reckon with something that is of first importance in understanding how the Greek achievement came to pass in the world of antiquity. It is not a fact that jumps to the eye for the reason that their literature is marked as strongly by sorrow. The Greeks knew to the full how bitter life is as well as how sweet... But never, not in their darkest moments, do they lose their taste for life. It is always a wonder and a delight, the world a place of beauty, and they themselves rejoicing to be alive in it...
    "A tomb in Egypt and a theatre in Greece. The one comes to mind as naturally as the other. So was the world changing by the time the fifth century before Christ began in Athens."
          ~ Edith Hamilton, from her book The Greek Way .

"To a Maori Figure Cast in Bronze ... "

This Hone Tuwhare poem [read here by the poet] seems strangely topical: the longing of a larger-than-life statue (by Molly McAlister) of a Maori warrior, planted at the foot of Queen St to greet tourists and stray passersby but who remains "hollow inside/with longing for the marae on / the cliff at Kohimarama, where you can watch the ships / come in curling their white moustaches ...

TO A MAORI FIGURE CAST IN BRONZE OUTSIDE THE CHIEF POST OFFICE, AUCKLAND by Hone Tuwhare

I hate being stuck up here, glaciated, hard all over
and with my guts removed: my old lady is not going
to like it

I’ve seen more efficient scare-crows in seed-bed
nurseries. Hell, I can’t even shoo the pigeons off

Me: all hollow inside with longing for the marae on
the cliff at Kohimarama, where you can watch the ships
come in curling their white moustaches

Why didn’t they stick me next to Mickey Savage?
‘Now then,’ he was a good bloke
Maybe it was a Tory City Council that put me here

They never consulted me about naming the square
It’s a wonder they never called it: Hori-in-the-gorge-at-
bottom-of-Hill. Because it is like that: a gorge,
with the sun blocked out, the wind whistling around
your balls (your balls mate) And at night, how I
feel for the beatle-girls with their long-haired
boy-friends licking their frozen finger-chippy lips
hopefully. And me again beetling

my tent eye-brows forever, like a brass monkey with
real worries: I mean, how the hell can you welcome
the Overseas Dollar, if you can’t open your mouth
to poke your tongue out, eh?

If I could only move from this bloody pedestal I’d
show the long-hairs how to knock out a tune on the
souped-up guitar, my mere quivering, my taiaha held
at the high port. And I’d fix the ripe kotiros too
with their mini-piupiu-ed bums twinkling: yeah!

Somebody give me a drink: I can’t stand it

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The naked & the nudes

I spent the weekend with several dozen nudes. it was thrilling!

There were women and men, big and small, young and old. They were bathing, washing, dancing. There were groups picknicking, drinking, playing. One (or two?) were sitting strangely in armchairs. One was trying on hats. Another caressing a dying young hero. One woman was even lying down as a fish.

And there was a couple kissing, or about to. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Flesh-like marble. Intertwined and interlocking. Erotically charged. Moving and alive. Only a true master at the top of his game could have created it, and it took him a decade.

Of course, I’ve seen it before. In protographs. But photographs can give only the suggestion of a story like this. The shadow, but not the substance. Nothing prepares you for the real thing, live and in the flesh and in front of you. There is nothing else in the world like it!

It took me several hours to walk around it — studying it, enjoying it, imbibing it — and I look forward to many more before it returns home in July. It seems to have the whole world in it, and create whole new worlds of its own.

If you have an ounce of soul yourself stiil unstrained, still unfiltered, then take it along to Auckland’s Art Gallery to see the Tate Gallery’s exhibition of nude masterpieces. Take an hour, at least, to walk around Rodin’s The Kiss. Any direction. Sit with it. Study it. if there is a greater work of art in the world, I don’t know it.

‘Fallen,’ by Sam Harrison

 

Fallen, Sam Harrison; concrete, pigment & wax
Wallace Arts Trust

It’s always a thrill to stumble upon something as good as this in a place you never expected, in a collection you’ve never admired by an artist you’ve never heard of. But here it is!

I came across this last Sunday at the Pah Homestead Gallery in Auckland which, other than this, is at present mostly full up with piles of junk.

But this – this is very far from that.

Fallen, Sam Harrison; concrete, pigment & wax
Wallace Arts Trust

I know nothing about the sculptor other than what I’ve read here (and I wonder whether it may be moulded from life?) but I would like to learn much more about him and his other work.

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‘Franz Kafka’s Head,’ by David Cerny

 

 

This moving statue by Czech sculptor David Cerny has Franz Kafka’s head staring straight at the Town Hall’s bureaucrats in Prague, a tribute both to the author and the longevity of his protest against what the sculptor calls “bureaucratic incompetence.”

Of course, Kafka was writing about more than just bureaucratic incompetence – as anyone who has read The Trial or seen Orson Welles’s  brilliant film would know.

But at the intersection of art and politics, the sculptor has achieved something rare, and important.

[Hat tip INSIDER art]

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‘Mephistopheles and Margaretta’

 

This very strange nineteenth-century timber sculpture depicts the two-sided relationship Faust famously had with Mephistopheles (to whom, as the Devil’s representative, he had sold his soul to obtain deeper knowledge“) and Margaretta -- to whom, with his heart, he had fallen hopelessly in love.

The picture shows the sculpture with its mirror behind it.

[Pics by Salar Jung Museum and Navendu Mandal]

‘The Veiled Rebecca’ by Giovanni Maria Benzoni

 

‘‘The Veiled Rebecca’ is a miracle in marble. Conceived by Giovanni Benzoni in 1876, after the Biblical story of a young girl being offered up for marriage by her brother, the sculptor has somehow managed in solid stone to give the illusion that this is a modest yet alluring young woman clad only in a virtually transparent veil.

Very hard indeed to portray completely in photographs, I’m told by friends who have visited the original in Hyderabad (or one of the three copies around the world) that the illusion is virtually flawless – that you have been granted by the sculptor the ability to see through stone.

The sculpture’s home at the Salar Jung Museum has an online gallery to explore further.

[Pics by kgoule, Salar Jung Museum, Wikimedia Commons]

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‘Fugit Amor,’ by Auguste Rodin

 

"Fugit amor" is the Latin for fugitive or transient love…

The Rodin Museum explains the piece:

‘Fugit Amor’ is without question one of Rodin’s most beautiful compositions: the two straining bodies are combined in one perfect flowing movement. This two-figure group, which appeared twice on ‘The Gates of Hell,’ [depicting figures from Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ and] was exhibited as an independent work from 1887 under the names ‘The Dream’ and ‘The Sphinx,’ which show how closely it related to the Symbolist aesthetic of the enigmatic woman.  
    In the second circle of Hell, Dante describes the eternal wandering of couples bound by their sin of forbidden love, [the two depicted here being Paolo & Francesca,] to which Rodin added a Baudelarian theme.
   This sculptural interpretation of the fantasies and anguish of Rodin’s generation was a huge success, so much so that numerous versions in bronze and marble now exist.

 

[Pics by Musee Rodin, Art Archive & ARTExplorer]

Live blogging my visit to the new Len Lye gallery

Sorry folks, no regular Ramble today (find your own reading, damn you), because I'm in New Plymouth visiting a new art gallery shod with stainless steel. This one, designed by Andrew Patterson:

If anyone's genuinely keen, I can 'live blog' the visit. (How's that for high-tech.)

First impression from Devon Street: it's almost anonymous until the sun comes out, and then you have to duck.

I like to just wander when I visit a new building, and just see where the building wants to take me. Let's see where this takes me when it opens one minute from now.

More later (if you want it)...

*****

Well, despite the almost complete lack of interest, I'm going to continue anyway.

Why live blog? Three reasons.

It helps me to collect my thoughts.

Len Lye was what he called a kinetic sculptor: his work is in motion; it has to be experienced live, so it seems appropriate to blog live.

 

Live too because a building like this can't be fully felt just in photographs and plans and in other people's stories. You have to visit. You have to experience it live.

 

****

So who was Len Lye, I hear you ask? He was a New Zealander with an international reputation who was fascinated with movement, and with the variety of movement possible with simple repetitive iteration. In that, Len Lyes was a little like the musician Brian Eno. Eno likes to set up a musical algorithm, a pattern, a process to be followed, then step back and see where it goes. Lye does that with film, and with motors and light and with blades and wands of highly reflective steel. Is it art? Probably not. But it's interesting.

But like many of these things, much of the fun is in the creation. The later observer (or listener) could sometimes be excused for nodding off. How many of his own films for example did the old bastard watch? Probably about as many times as Andy Warhol went to sleep watching his much-celebrated 24 hour film-in-real-time of the sun and moon and shadow on the Empire State Building.

And how many ratepayers really do need a 45m Wind Wand?

At least, with this museum extension (as I understand it) the new Len Lye 'wing' was paid for largely by subscription . . .

*****

The museum's main panels or buttresses, the building's most distinctive feature from the street, do the same job as Lye's algorithms in stainless steel, but with concrete and shadow and light reflected and re-reflected inside from these stainless steel-shod pylons. They are essentially concrete pylons curved in plan to let in light only indirectly between, shod on the outside with the same stainless steel used by Lye and by the once burgeoning Taranaki dairy and oil industries. It's a good synergy, and makes an ingenious reinterpretation.

From inside, a bit like Plato's Cave, we have no direct vision of the outside at all; all the outside light enters between these shaped pylons, and is curved and reflected around before entering indirectly, reflecting differing patterns across the curved surfaces as the sun moves and fades and increases or decreases in intensity. On a rainy day it would be fascinating to watch from inside (enjoying a sun shower would be a godsend!)

****

Back outside again after a quick wander around, I'm intrigued to watch a small girl jumping and laughing at the play of sun and shadow and sparkle on the pavement as the brightly polished curved stainless pylons drive the sun and clouds around to paint changing patterns on their surface and on the footpath. To her credit her mother lets her be, quietly handing her some shades to slip on as she blinks with increasing sunlight, without breaking her moment in the sun's many re-reflections.

****

Inside again and through the shop, and upwards along the main entrance procession: the ramp up here into the main spaces uses the street's slope well, you enter the main spaces up the ramp, with just you and these towering hypnotic plylons sharing the space, like some ancient hypostyle hall but more elegantly rendered, with the soft reflected light filtering through between and across the sculptured concrete. As with all ingeniously repeating patterns, the pylons' interlocking shape and their repetition leaves you seeking more: the sun's patterns themselves are hypnotic, but your curiosity and the pull of the space between them draw you deeper inside. A good tension. Very well done.

(As it happens, the Conc floors too inadvertently follow the idea of the algorithm, but this time in a less fortuitous way, the re-entrant angles formed at the sharp base of each pylon causing cracks at each pylon's junction with floor. Oh for a short length of steel in the right place at the pour!)

This entrance space is definitely the gallery's signature space, by far the most impressive space here, and is entirely without Len Lye's own work--except by ingenious emulation. The rest of the spaces are really standard-issue gallery spaces you can find anywhere in the world, though perhaps with less actual art on the walls. (On today's visit only a Toss Woolaston, a Shane Cotton and a Colin McCahon are flying a pretty feeble flag.)

****

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‘Cathedral’ – Auguste Rodin

It would be his birthday today (so I was reminded by Homepaddock), so an ideal time to consider that what Auguste Rodin could do with a mere pair of hands, other sculptors struggled to do with whole galaxies of complete human figures. When I first posted this a few years ago, I quoted now-silent Wellington blogger Oh Crikey'.

Who would've thought a mere 'hand' could convey so much anguish & torment, or tenderness & delicacy? ... In Maori terms, we could say Rodin's sculptures have a mauri, or a 'life force.' The more rational among us will scoff, ‘Oh, that's silly, inanimate objects can't possibly have a life force!’ But they're dead wrong, Rodin is alive!

Rodin: the sculptor who breathes life into mere stone.  In a beautiful photo by Mark Klym.

NB: You might enjoy some rare footage of Rodin from 1915 that’s been recently uncovered. Posing for the camera more than really working, but still fascinating to see the great man in motion:

[Hat tip Sandrine L.]

Lest we forget

Today is Armistice Day—Remembrance day.

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in the year 1918, the guns of the Western Front finally fell silent and the human carnage of the First World War came to a close – in the West, anyway, if not in the Bolshevised East.  Yet while the guns went silent, the results of the war would stay with us, like a bacillus, for decades to come.

They are with us still.

The world that emerged from World War I was vastly different to the benevolent, cultural milieu that entered it so optimistically four-and-a-half years before. The war into which European empires stumbled and New Zealand and Commonwealth soldiers tumbled so eagerly (at first)—into which American President Woodrow Wilson thrust American troops on the basis “the world must be made safe for democracy”--succeeded instead in ending ending empires, impoverishing democracies and delivering misery to millions.

Far from being The War to End All Wars, it instead set the world up for decades of pain to come.

It was the war to end all peace.

Britain and Germany were bankrupted, and the war debts of all combatants would infect western economies for years to come, until their final annihilation in  German hyperinflation, the collapse of the classical gold standard, and the maw of the worldwide Great Depression – and the calls for “a good war” to fix things.

The Bolshevik takeover of Russia, still in place at the Armistice--a wartime piece of German treachery that eventually enslaved around 300 million people – too decades before those enslaved were eventually liberated.

The “state socialism” adopted by all the west’s Great Powers in the war took hold and grew, its virus corrupting every democracry and infecting every single big statist of the next generation, from Keynes to Herbert Hoover to FDR, all of them to a man learning their interventionism in the corridors of power they so loved so far behind the front lines—learning in those corridors lessons they would never unlearn about the “power” of the state and how they could heft it when their own time came. Those lessons are still being inflicted upon us by their students and admirers who, when they hear that “war is the health of the state,” begin beating the drums.

Meanwhile, in the German trenches were born the seeds of World War II.

The march of the Nietzschean call to arms in defence of the Fatherland and its “blood and soil” began there; what Clemenceau called the “twenty-year ceasefire” that was the Versaille Treaty was first bewailed by the men who fought there; and there too was born the myth of Der Dolchstoß so exploited by the Nazis – that the “good Germans” who were fighting at the front remained undefeated, but were “stabbed in the back” by a surrender forced upon them by a coterie of Jews and other traitors in their rear echelons.

This myth, so poisonous and and so wrong, fanned the flames of nationalistic racial hatred into the next even larger conflagration. It took the utter defeat of Germany twenty-seven years and 100 million lost souls later to finally lay these myths and tragedies to rest.

This “stab in back” myth, that the German surrender of November 1918 allowed to take hold, offers a lesson that needs to be learned and relearned: that to be lasting a defeat must not be a negotiated surrender allowing the losers to rewrite history, but it must bring home the true horror of war to those who promote it; it must be crushing, and must be seen to be crushing—as it finally was in World War II. (Of the Axis powers, at least.)

This is the lesson offered by historian John David Lewis in “Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History,” which argues that for lasting peace, the goal of a war must be not just wearing out your enemy, but utterly defeating his will to fight.

Lest we forget indeed. If truth is the first casualty of war, then the the memory of its lessons and of its unintended consequences must surely be the second.

[Image, by the way, is of Charles Sargeant Jagger's Artillery Monument at Hyde Park Corner, London.]

‘Universal Soldier,’ by Martine Vaugel

See more at sculptress Martine Vaugel’s site.

The art of power

As Daryl Kerrigan sagely observed in The Castle, power pylons are a reminder of man’s ability to generate electricity. What he didn’t go on to wonder about is why they have to be so bloody ugly.

In Iceland however they’re not, Choi+Shine Architects explaining that their unique designs “transform mundane electrical pylons into statues on the Icelandic landscape.”

Making only minor alterations to well established steel-framed tower design, we have created a series of towers that are powerful, solemn and variable. These iconic pylon-figures will become monuments in the landscape. Seeing the pylon-figures will become an unforgettable experience, elevating the towers to something more than merely a functional design of necessity…

Even better . . .

    The pylon-figures can all be achieved from the modification of existing lattice towers.

All they require is imagination…

A great pity that Choi+Shine—or anything along the lines of creativity—never visited the many pylons now littering the Waikato, Franklin and around the foreshores of the Manukau Harbour.

[Hat tip CCR]

'La Belle Heaulmiere' by Rodin

Now, this piece will confound a few of you: La Belle Heaulmiere by Rodin, also known as 'She who was once the Helmet-Makers Beautiful Wife,' or 'The Old Courtesan.'

You might see this work by Rodin and ask, “WTF?” "Why the ugliness?” “Who would want to look at that old crone?"

In answer, let me quote the words of two masters.

An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be... more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive, prisoned inside her ruined body.
~ R. Heinlein via Jubal Harshaw, speaking about on 'La Belle Heaulmiere' in Stranger From a Strange Land.

Or you might consider the sentiments of Shakespeare from his Sonnet 73, apposite here, in which he spoke of:

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west…

So, d'you think Rodin has pulled it off the task described by Harshaw?

Or do you have the sensitivity of an armadillo?

(Or, perhaps, are you just not letting on . . . )

[Previously posted in 2007]

Pierre de Wiessant - Auguste Rodin

The character ‘Pierre,’ from Rodin's evocative Burghers of Calais ensemble sculpture is a great figure in his own right, one of Rodin's finest in my view, and part of a piece of intense nobility and powerful human drama -- and doesn't that hand just say so much?

The Burghers of Calais (Les Bourgeois de Calais) is one of the most famous sculptures by Auguste Rodin, completed in 1888. It serves as a monument to an occurrence in 1347 during the Hundred Years' War, when Calais, an important French port on the English Channel, was under siege by the English for over a year.

The story goes that after a victory in the Battle of Crécy, England's Edward III laid siege to Calais, whereupon Philip VI of France ordered the city to hold out at all costs.

Philip himself failed to lift the siege and starvation eventually forced the city to parlay for surrender. The dealing did not go well. Edward offered to spare the people of the city if any six of its top leaders would surrender themselves to him, presumably to be executed. Edward demanded that they walk out almost naked with nooses around their necks, and be carrying the keys to the city and castle. The burghers volunteered, to save their city, and began their final short journey  …

‘The Soldier of Marathon Announcing the Victory,’ by Jean-Pierre Cortot

You all know the  story, or should do.

This is Cortot’s evocative depiction of the moment when the soldier, Pheidippides, arrives in Athens having ‘run his last race’—bearing the news as he expires that Greece has triumphed over the invading Persian army.  Browning immortalised the story in verse.

Portrait, by Hironori Kawabata

Artist Michael Newberry calls this bust by Hironori Kawabata a “beautifully soulful portrait.”

And a wonderfully strong presence it is.