1 00:00:00,360 --> 00:00:06,330 Thank you for that lovely introduction and thank you all for joining this afternoon. 2 00:00:06,330 --> 00:00:10,560 I know it's afternoon in the UK, morning here in the US. 3 00:00:10,560 --> 00:00:17,250 The title of my talk, Monuments and Replica is me trying to figure out a piece of this larger project. 4 00:00:17,250 --> 00:00:20,820 So I'll start by making a few confessions. 5 00:00:20,820 --> 00:00:29,040 But before I do that, I do want to acknowledge that I'm speaking from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. 6 00:00:29,040 --> 00:00:35,940 Our board of trustees has recently adopted a land acknowledgement and after many, many years, 7 00:00:35,940 --> 00:00:43,560 we are all opening our talks and our public presentations with this acknowledgement. 8 00:00:43,560 --> 00:00:48,270 Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Giovana, the the nation, 9 00:00:48,270 --> 00:00:55,090 the lower members of the Confederacy and the Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, 10 00:00:55,090 --> 00:01:01,780 New York State and the United States of America. I'm very pleased to be able to include this land acknowledgement. 11 00:01:01,780 --> 00:01:09,360 I'm also very pleased to say that folks in the history department, of which I'm a member, 12 00:01:09,360 --> 00:01:17,130 have been doing some fantastic work thinking about land grant institutions and the dispossession of indigenous populations. 13 00:01:17,130 --> 00:01:22,440 So let me start on the talk and make some confessions. 14 00:01:22,440 --> 00:01:29,550 I'm not an intellectual historian by training, but I read intellectual histories with some excitement. 15 00:01:29,550 --> 00:01:34,380 I'm very much a historian of gender and I'm very deeply engaged with feminist theory. 16 00:01:34,380 --> 00:01:43,950 I'm also trained, trained as an artwork, but I'm a student of post-colonial theory, aware of its limits and problems, which I'm happy to talk about. 17 00:01:43,950 --> 00:01:52,140 I should also say that I have the enormous privilege to work at Cornell in which critical theory has animated the humanities for several generations. 18 00:01:52,140 --> 00:01:59,400 And she was a member of the School of Critical Theory a few summers ago here in Ithaca. 19 00:01:59,400 --> 00:02:05,160 My second confession, and I think it's a standard confession, which is that I had bigger ambitions for my book, 20 00:02:05,160 --> 00:02:09,780 Gentlemanly Terrorists, and I had planned to hold a second part of the book, 21 00:02:09,780 --> 00:02:20,160 which was about following the commemorations of the radical movements that I have written about in the history of militant nationalism. 22 00:02:20,160 --> 00:02:29,730 I had hoped to focus on how the movement was represented in post-colonial India and then for a variety of reasons, the book got too big. 23 00:02:29,730 --> 00:02:36,780 And so the book that you have seen maybe is only half the book I had intended to write. 24 00:02:36,780 --> 00:02:45,990 I know that the questions of historical heritage and preservation are ablaze in the UK newspaper, so I'm giving this talk with some trepidation. 25 00:02:45,990 --> 00:02:52,590 I'm sure you all have statute fatigue as I do so when I give this paper in part, 26 00:02:52,590 --> 00:02:56,910 I've read some of that work, but I really look forward to your conversations. 27 00:02:56,910 --> 00:03:02,070 Finally, the third confession, and that is that the paper, not surprisingly, 28 00:03:02,070 --> 00:03:07,470 is a part of a new project that brings me to materials that I haven't worked with before. 29 00:03:07,470 --> 00:03:13,830 I'm trying on a number of ideas and I'm thinking through in particular scholarship in the history of art, 30 00:03:13,830 --> 00:03:19,790 in the history of archaeology, which all has brought me closer to the history of things. 31 00:03:19,790 --> 00:03:22,290 These are all fields in which I wasn't trained. 32 00:03:22,290 --> 00:03:30,870 I've been involved in this radical collaboration's initiative and in in some sense, over the two years that the group has been together, 33 00:03:30,870 --> 00:03:36,750 one of the things that I'll say is that we've done a lot of talking about how the ideas float around. 34 00:03:36,750 --> 00:03:45,020 I'm not sure that they've come together in an argument. So I'm trying to identify some of the tensions and how we think of monuments. 35 00:03:45,020 --> 00:03:51,540 I'll start with the slide. That's the cover image of gentlemanly terrorists. 36 00:03:51,540 --> 00:03:55,920 And it's a lithograph that was printed very widely in the 1940s. 37 00:03:55,920 --> 00:04:05,220 Hundreds of these images were printed during the Quit India movement over a generation after your own boss's death. 38 00:04:05,220 --> 00:04:12,900 They publicised Bengal's revolutionary pasts at a time when the future was an open question during could India, as we all know, 39 00:04:12,900 --> 00:04:15,900 the Communist Party of India did not put India, 40 00:04:15,900 --> 00:04:24,570 but it planned for a revolutionary future and it sought recruits through the circulation of images like this. 41 00:04:24,570 --> 00:04:28,410 There are many such printed images and I'll share a few of them. 42 00:04:28,410 --> 00:04:33,570 They appear in crispiness. Book photos of the gods. 43 00:04:33,570 --> 00:04:42,900 You can see here in all of these images could be from preparing for his execution for the attempted assassination of a district magistrate. 44 00:04:42,900 --> 00:04:47,370 There's some images that nearly all of them have this kind of thing. 45 00:04:47,370 --> 00:04:52,620 They're all on a scaffolding or on a pedestal. The one on the right shows them in a courthouse. 46 00:04:52,620 --> 00:05:01,950 The presence of police and judicial authorities are replicated in the various versions of these image of these images and an all of them. 47 00:05:01,950 --> 00:05:09,660 One of the things I'll just point out is he's shown in shorts and a shirt to show how young he is. 48 00:05:09,660 --> 00:05:15,120 The mass replication of printed material is, of course, a hallmark of modernity, 49 00:05:15,120 --> 00:05:19,800 one in which the ability to print many copies and circulate them generated new forms of 50 00:05:19,800 --> 00:05:25,590 belonging and affect Walter Benjamin's important message from nineteen thirty five. 51 00:05:25,590 --> 00:05:29,700 The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction is a starting point for me. 52 00:05:29,700 --> 00:05:36,090 I've returned to it, I think, as many of us do, to elaborate on features of the argument that I hadn't noticed before. 53 00:05:36,090 --> 00:05:44,160 Benjamin's essay draws from an essay by Elway's Riegle called The Modern Sculpted Monuments, in which Riegle defined artistic and historic value. 54 00:05:44,160 --> 00:05:55,040 Written in nineteen five Recal considered the emergence of heritage preservation as it aligned with a rage for installing monuments. 55 00:05:55,040 --> 00:06:04,380 I want to share with you these two images, and in some ways I'll start by saying I was curious about how the image on the left. 56 00:06:04,380 --> 00:06:08,430 Transformed into the statue of kuduro that is on the right, 57 00:06:08,430 --> 00:06:15,780 and in particular I was intrigued by how the man or the young man who is standing 58 00:06:15,780 --> 00:06:23,400 on scaffolding is transformed into this man on the right on a pedestal. 59 00:06:23,400 --> 00:06:31,590 I was curious in particular about the choices that the sculptor made in sculpting the bronze statue on the right. 60 00:06:31,590 --> 00:06:38,100 You can also see that there's a difference in the clothing, a shift from the young man wearing shorts to the young man. 61 00:06:38,100 --> 00:06:44,040 We're going to the for that. One of the things I'll tell you is that I don't know the answer to this. 62 00:06:44,040 --> 00:06:49,290 I started to find this out when I was in the blast in India in twenty eighteen. 63 00:06:49,290 --> 00:06:56,770 I obviously hope to go back and find out more so along the process of doing this research. 64 00:06:56,770 --> 00:07:02,130 I've kind of come upon three surprises and I'll tell you what they are. 65 00:07:02,130 --> 00:07:07,020 I've made three confessions. I'll tell you the three surprises amongst them. 66 00:07:07,020 --> 00:07:13,590 The first is the prevalence of the replica and public sculptures, which I'll get to in the second half of the talk today. 67 00:07:13,590 --> 00:07:21,480 Another surprise is that monuments, even as they're intended to showcase stability, authority and permanence, are moved. 68 00:07:21,480 --> 00:07:25,530 And the final surprise, which is the least developed part of the talk today. 69 00:07:25,530 --> 00:07:30,210 But I'm happy to to kind of riff on it in the Q&A, but I'll market. 70 00:07:30,210 --> 00:07:38,730 So you know, where I'm heading is the temporal alignment between modern and colonial and postmodern with post-colonial. 71 00:07:38,730 --> 00:07:39,510 And in particular, 72 00:07:39,510 --> 00:07:49,230 I'm thinking about Hannah Feldman's brilliant work from the Nation Torn and her account of the emergence of postmodern and contemporary art in France. 73 00:07:49,230 --> 00:07:57,900 She notes that the emergence of postmodern and contemporary art in France is almost entirely disengaged from decolonisation. 74 00:07:57,900 --> 00:08:03,850 I will do justice to work today, but I want to mark it as an important formation. 75 00:08:03,850 --> 00:08:10,300 The book project begins by marking the chronological alignments between the history of Britain and the history of the British Empire, 76 00:08:10,300 --> 00:08:17,500 the establishment of the Royal Academy in Britain coincided and gave rise to what many have called statue mania. 77 00:08:17,500 --> 00:08:22,840 The period between the Napoleonic Wars and the start of the First World War is a moment when hundreds 78 00:08:22,840 --> 00:08:29,380 of statues of imperial military monarchical figures are installed in Britain and across the empire. 79 00:08:29,380 --> 00:08:36,100 Most, if not all, of the statues that one might see in central London or central Calcutta or commissions. 80 00:08:36,100 --> 00:08:42,730 They're paid for by public subscriptions as a way to show the loyalty of the donors and the support for the empire. 81 00:08:42,730 --> 00:08:47,760 And nearly all of the artists were members of the Royal Academy. 82 00:08:47,760 --> 00:08:52,170 The statues are installed a colonised India as examples of public art that's authentically 83 00:08:52,170 --> 00:08:57,580 British possessing the type of aura Benyamin and others defined as important features. 84 00:08:57,580 --> 00:09:06,030 Art is displayed in modern life. In the case of the monuments installed on the Indian subcontinent during the centuries of British occupation, 85 00:09:06,030 --> 00:09:12,440 installing monuments became a way of permanently marking British territory. 86 00:09:12,440 --> 00:09:18,740 There's a number of books that have addressed this and have just put up some covers to kind of talk to them, 87 00:09:18,740 --> 00:09:22,490 not with any deep engagement, but with some reference points, 88 00:09:22,490 --> 00:09:31,700 the dramatic increase in mutely monuments, as Nina Rajagopalan and say childre shown, materialised the trauma suffered by British colonisers. 89 00:09:31,700 --> 00:09:38,930 Mutiny commemorations brought in British tourists to India so that they could experience the trauma of eighteen fifty seven. 90 00:09:38,930 --> 00:09:47,870 And of course, this served as an alibi for the expansion of Empire, as Rajagopalan writes, and a challenge to Walter Benjamin. 91 00:09:47,870 --> 00:09:49,610 She writes, quote, Indeed, 92 00:09:49,610 --> 00:09:57,800 it was the technology of reproduction that converted Mutiny's sites from objects with mere use value to monuments of historic value. 93 00:09:57,800 --> 00:10:08,400 And here she's talking about the ways that mutiny monuments are endlessly photographed, filmed and shown to audiences across the empire. 94 00:10:08,400 --> 00:10:14,520 Thank you. Through the scholarship on colonial India, we know that the birth of photography and the mass reproduction of lithographs generated forms 95 00:10:14,520 --> 00:10:19,890 of popular culture that were able to bypass colonial censors and restrictions and of course, 96 00:10:19,890 --> 00:10:25,560 goddess of the nation is emblematic of that, as is the work of any. 97 00:10:25,560 --> 00:10:31,860 I would also refer you to the digital collections of the test for her website. 98 00:10:31,860 --> 00:10:38,400 The statue, however, because of its monumental size, is presumed the opposite of the lithographs. 99 00:10:38,400 --> 00:10:46,470 It's not mass produced and the materials that are often used, marble or bronze, are meant to be durable and long lasting. 100 00:10:46,470 --> 00:10:52,900 We can agree that the empire was built by a paper reality. It was also built in bronze and marble. 101 00:10:52,900 --> 00:10:58,080 I'll be talking today about the statues that are called quote unquote, life sized. 102 00:10:58,080 --> 00:11:04,350 They're actually larger than life, often eight to ten feet tall, taller than the ordinary human. 103 00:11:04,350 --> 00:11:11,680 They're size projects, a territorial occupation, one that presents the empire as immovable. 104 00:11:11,680 --> 00:11:18,220 The scale of what art historians have called portrait statues differs from busts of which there are many, 105 00:11:18,220 --> 00:11:23,260 as Benjamin noted in the essay that he wrote, the mechanical reproduction quote, 106 00:11:23,260 --> 00:11:29,050 he writes, It's easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here or there than to exhibit 107 00:11:29,050 --> 00:11:34,590 the statue of a divinity that has a fixed place in the interior of a temple. 108 00:11:34,590 --> 00:11:38,740 You may recall that Benjamin's essay marks a shift from the religious to the secular, 109 00:11:38,740 --> 00:11:43,710 a change from the idea of sculpture or painting as one central to religious ritual. 110 00:11:43,710 --> 00:11:49,140 But in the modern era, seen as an aesthetic object that is stripped of religious purpose, 111 00:11:49,140 --> 00:11:58,950 his anxiety about replication is directed to photography and film, which he fears amplifies the secular project in a fascist way. 112 00:11:58,950 --> 00:12:04,770 And we can talk more about that. Even as he notes, it's some form of replication has always existed in art. 113 00:12:04,770 --> 00:12:08,370 We might note that the replica exists as a form of education, 114 00:12:08,370 --> 00:12:14,880 replicas of the body and anatomy classes or features of architecture and archaeology classes. 115 00:12:14,880 --> 00:12:23,970 If you work in the British Library and I hope many of you know what I'm talking about, you may recognise this bust. 116 00:12:23,970 --> 00:12:32,850 It is a very prominent feature of the way that the East India Company used art to publicise what it was doing in South Asia. 117 00:12:32,850 --> 00:12:40,350 This is Henry Colebrooke. You can look him up. It's a replica of the bus sculpted by Francis CHANTREY. 118 00:12:40,350 --> 00:12:47,640 This bust is located by the toilets that are outside the Asia Pacific and Africa collections and has several examples, 119 00:12:47,640 --> 00:12:51,210 including one in the Royal Asia Society. 120 00:12:51,210 --> 00:12:59,400 In colonial India, the statues were often placed on pedestals more than human height so that passers were awed by the sight of bronze statues. 121 00:12:59,400 --> 00:13:03,900 The placement of these statues is coupled with the building of colonial cities. 122 00:13:03,900 --> 00:13:13,620 As Daniel Kalani has noted, the installation of statues and monuments to empire marked the ways in which the city became the space of expansion. 123 00:13:13,620 --> 00:13:21,150 And I'll just show you the statue of Edward the 7th, which is sculpted by Thomas Froch here in this image, 124 00:13:21,150 --> 00:13:26,070 it's being unveiled and you can see the veil on the right. I'll say a little bit more about that. 125 00:13:26,070 --> 00:13:35,010 This comes from the photograph album of the Prince of Wales in the Royal Tour of India in nineteen twenty one twenty two, 126 00:13:35,010 --> 00:13:40,560 moving a seemingly immovable object from London to Calcutta, showing how colonial resources, 127 00:13:40,560 --> 00:13:46,350 shipping and transport, as well as the cost of commissioning an artist with payment of the requisite materials, 128 00:13:46,350 --> 00:13:51,570 were used to establish political authority more than a flag and less than a building. 129 00:13:51,570 --> 00:14:00,570 The statue of the mill worthy became a staple of what Ragle argued was a shift in how we thought of monuments at the turn of the 20th century. 130 00:14:00,570 --> 00:14:08,370 Rather than preserving the old, we were now marking history by putting up new monuments. 131 00:14:08,370 --> 00:14:13,260 You will be surprised to hear that there's a surge of monuments not just after eighteen fifty seven, 132 00:14:13,260 --> 00:14:20,850 but another after Queen Victoria dies in 1991 and then again in the 1980s when I did 133 00:14:20,850 --> 00:14:27,510 research in India and I've done research in Calcutta on and off for many years, 134 00:14:27,510 --> 00:14:34,110 people told me that I should keep an eye out for the bronze statue and it took me a long time to find it. 135 00:14:34,110 --> 00:14:39,600 But here is the statue. It's mounted on a tall plinth about 10 feet high. 136 00:14:39,600 --> 00:14:45,470 It's located in a roundabout and it's actually quite difficult to find. 137 00:14:45,470 --> 00:14:52,700 What I learnt is that the statue was installed in nineteen seventy two and about the twenty fifth anniversary of Indian independence, 138 00:14:52,700 --> 00:14:57,770 which occurred shortly after the war, the end of the war with Pakistan. 139 00:14:57,770 --> 00:15:01,640 The statue itself was commissioned in nineteen sixty nine. 140 00:15:01,640 --> 00:15:09,830 But when the statue is unveiled, it commemorated India's alliance and solidarity with Bangladesh. 141 00:15:09,830 --> 00:15:13,130 Cuvier himself is born in Bangladesh. 142 00:15:13,130 --> 00:15:21,770 And one of the things that's quite interesting about the statue is that when it's commissioned, it has a purpose, which is the anniversary. 143 00:15:21,770 --> 00:15:26,170 By the time it's unveiled, it has a different meaning. 144 00:15:26,170 --> 00:15:35,950 What I learnt as I researched the statue was that it had replaced another statue and that statue is this statue of Lord Upland, 145 00:15:35,950 --> 00:15:43,660 Governor-General of India, from eighteen thirty six to 18, forty two sculpted by Henry Weeks, professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy. 146 00:15:43,660 --> 00:15:49,180 The statue was installed in eighteen forty eight shortly after it left India to return to England. 147 00:15:49,180 --> 00:15:55,660 Some of you will recall that Eden had managed a disastrous intervention in Afghanistan during his term, 148 00:15:55,660 --> 00:16:00,490 is commemorated for his service in India a little less by the time by now. 149 00:16:00,490 --> 00:16:04,270 For some of you, Henry Weeks or the name of Henry, we should ring a bell. 150 00:16:04,270 --> 00:16:12,720 He's also the sculptor who made the statues at the Oxford Martyrs Memorial that was designed by George Gilbert Scott. 151 00:16:12,720 --> 00:16:20,760 Laura Aukland here on the right had never been to New Zealand in his lifetime, even though the capital city was named after him. 152 00:16:20,760 --> 00:16:27,910 You see him donning scholar's robe in the city centre, modestly at street level without a pedestrian pedestal. 153 00:16:27,910 --> 00:16:39,820 And this slide maybe show you the next slide and let me just see if I have it in this next slide, you can see where the statue was originally mounted. 154 00:16:39,820 --> 00:16:52,490 This is an image of pan coloured photograph from eighteen fifty one that showed its placement outside Eden Gardens. 155 00:16:52,490 --> 00:16:56,540 The two statues share very little, except that they're both in bronze. 156 00:16:56,540 --> 00:17:03,620 Maybe I'll bring you back to that. One of the things that's interesting is the robing and that gets us back to the trophy. 157 00:17:03,620 --> 00:17:09,020 I want to get away from the idea that the kuduro statue replicated Auckland, but rather, 158 00:17:09,020 --> 00:17:16,680 I want to suggest that Auckland was a replication of the ancient statues that preceded him. 159 00:17:16,680 --> 00:17:22,740 The idea that Indian rulers were keen to replace statues of colonial rulers seems to have been a consistent fear. 160 00:17:22,740 --> 00:17:29,640 In the 1950s and 1960s, some figures actively promoted not the figures themselves, 161 00:17:29,640 --> 00:17:35,520 but their followers promoted the installation of statues to replace those who existed before. 162 00:17:35,520 --> 00:17:39,690 That gave you a glimpse of this statue, but I'll share it with you now. 163 00:17:39,690 --> 00:17:44,430 This is a statue of Shivashankar boss on the left and James Yttrium on the right. 164 00:17:44,430 --> 00:17:54,870 You can see it's a replica of the same statue. Lutron was at the bazaar crossing before this was installed in nineteen sixty nine on the left. 165 00:17:54,870 --> 00:17:59,940 If you don't remember who James Bertram is, you know that there are lots of city streets named after him. 166 00:17:59,940 --> 00:18:11,200 He was resident in lockdown. Eighteen fifty four actively involved in the annexation of art and then suppressing the eighteen fifty seven, Muttley. 167 00:18:11,200 --> 00:18:20,110 Although we're reading a great deal about iconoclasm against colonial statues, relatively few statues were destroyed when the British left India. 168 00:18:20,110 --> 00:18:24,250 Most were moved to another location or gathered in museums. 169 00:18:24,250 --> 00:18:29,140 When the Calcutta Municipal Corporation invited the city of Auckland to carve the statue away. 170 00:18:29,140 --> 00:18:36,370 A corporate donation from the New Zealand insurance company made the reinstallation possible in nineteen sixty nine. 171 00:18:36,370 --> 00:18:46,090 So one of the things I'm really interested in is these post-colonial moving statues across continents and nearly in all the cases I've found so far. 172 00:18:46,090 --> 00:18:50,920 What's interesting is that it involves some kind of private philanthropic donation. 173 00:18:50,920 --> 00:18:56,690 So even though these are public statues in the public, they're always funded by private donations. 174 00:18:56,690 --> 00:19:04,030 I'll just show you another statue that's moved. I showed you that with the seventh here on the left in New Delhi in nineteen sixty nine. 175 00:19:04,030 --> 00:19:09,730 It, too, is moved to Toronto in Queens Park. 176 00:19:09,730 --> 00:19:18,130 Reflecting on the 19th century, a century in which collecting and classifying evidence of the past was widely embraced, always regal, 177 00:19:18,130 --> 00:19:24,430 defined the modern cult of monuments as a range of values attached to material objects, 178 00:19:24,430 --> 00:19:30,510 art value, historical value, use value, and to that, he added commemorative value. 179 00:19:30,510 --> 00:19:38,610 Distinguishing between those who accepted the decay of old buildings against those who advocated preservation and restoration, 180 00:19:38,610 --> 00:19:49,380 Riegle specified that a growing commitment to preservation invested many objects, even those that were dilapidated or outdated, with new meanings. 181 00:19:49,380 --> 00:19:55,200 As the century ended, the conceit of the modern era was that all types of historical evidence, 182 00:19:55,200 --> 00:20:01,170 old or not, were to be maintained, restored and archived rather than lost to the past. 183 00:20:01,170 --> 00:20:09,470 And of course, this speaks to certain kinds of ambitions that are very much part of the 19th century universal. 184 00:20:09,470 --> 00:20:16,760 As Riegle argues, monuments with, quote, intentional commemorative value aims to preserve a moment in the consciousness 185 00:20:16,760 --> 00:20:22,220 of later generations and therefore to remain alive and present in perpetuity, 186 00:20:22,220 --> 00:20:27,650 close quote. In the colonies, monuments were installed to mark Britain's place in India's history. 187 00:20:27,650 --> 00:20:34,430 They were also intended to outlast the British. As Joseph Kerner, the art historian, has written, quote, 188 00:20:34,430 --> 00:20:43,070 Monuments are built obstinately to endure and not just reflect on this statue of Edward the 7th, which I've written a little bit about. 189 00:20:43,070 --> 00:20:47,860 It's actually installed at the height of non-cooperation. 190 00:20:47,860 --> 00:21:00,040 The urge to preserve depends on the idea that these monuments were unique and singular, to topple a statue or behead a statue is to kill the king. 191 00:21:00,040 --> 00:21:08,710 More important, it depends on a logic central to Benjamin's logic that reproduction is some kind of loss to authenticity. 192 00:21:08,710 --> 00:21:14,400 So in the next part of the talk, I want to turn to the use of the replica colonial statues. 193 00:21:14,400 --> 00:21:21,280 And before I do that, I want to share in quick succession a few examples not to overwhelm you with evidence, 194 00:21:21,280 --> 00:21:25,300 but to guide you to the next phase of the talk, which is about the replica. 195 00:21:25,300 --> 00:21:31,940 And in particular, I want to focus on the generative nature of the replica and what replicas can do. 196 00:21:31,940 --> 00:21:38,800 So let me show you this statue, which if any of you spend time in London, you may recognise. 197 00:21:38,800 --> 00:21:46,480 This is John Lawrence, also formally viceroy of India. This statue on Waterkloof Place looks like the original. 198 00:21:46,480 --> 00:21:53,860 It, in fact, is a replica that was made after the family of John Lawrence complained about the original the sculpture. 199 00:21:53,860 --> 00:22:00,220 The sculptor Joseph BOEM made a new one from the cast with a different inscription. 200 00:22:00,220 --> 00:22:05,080 And the old one was sent to Lahore, where Lawrence really made his mark. 201 00:22:05,080 --> 00:22:12,620 And, of course, some of his chief commissioner of the Punjab. So this is an image of the original statue. 202 00:22:12,620 --> 00:22:22,420 It was originally placed in Waterloo place, moved to Lahore, and now actually it's been moved to Ireland in nineteen fifty seven. 203 00:22:22,420 --> 00:22:32,440 The next statue I'll share with you and you can tell I have a lot to say about statues, so this is little sculpture on the bottom of the bowl. 204 00:22:32,440 --> 00:22:35,440 So ask me about the monument, that monument, if you want to know more. 205 00:22:35,440 --> 00:22:46,510 But the statue, I just want to the replica here I want to address is the statue that's been relatively controversial in recent months. 206 00:22:46,510 --> 00:22:53,650 Lord Clive here on the left and for White Hall on the right in Victoria Memorial. 207 00:22:53,650 --> 00:23:01,750 These statues are put up in 1912 by Lord Curzon after Curzon resigned his position as Viceroy of India. 208 00:23:01,750 --> 00:23:09,220 In spite of some significant opposition, Kurzon raise the funds to commission a statue of Clive by John Tweed. 209 00:23:09,220 --> 00:23:17,920 Although the installation was it was installed, the Clive statue was nonetheless installed outside the Foreign Office in 1916. 210 00:23:17,920 --> 00:23:26,320 It shows Clive dressed in military clothing. But I'll just focus your attention to the pedestal where there are bulk reliefs on each side, 211 00:23:26,320 --> 00:23:31,960 showing three historical scenes from Clive's career in India the victory at our cotton seventeen 212 00:23:31,960 --> 00:23:37,300 fifty one victory at plasty and also in seventeen fifty one in the accession to the Wolny. 213 00:23:37,300 --> 00:23:43,060 You'll notice on the right hand side that such a pedestal does not exist. 214 00:23:43,060 --> 00:23:48,040 It was shipped to Calcutta where it was installed in the Victoria Memorial in the nineteen twenties, 215 00:23:48,040 --> 00:23:54,160 one hundred and fifty years after Clive's term in India had ended. There are not the history lessons on the pedestal. 216 00:23:54,160 --> 00:23:57,230 On the right it is a replica made of marble. 217 00:23:57,230 --> 00:24:04,060 I should also say that, Jennifer, how the artist is going to give a talk about this in a few weeks time, which I recommend. 218 00:24:04,060 --> 00:24:09,130 One of the things that's interesting about this replica, of course, is that people in Britain needed a history lesson. 219 00:24:09,130 --> 00:24:14,340 People in India might not want to be reminded of that history lesson. 220 00:24:14,340 --> 00:24:20,640 So I'm going to take a breath and pause and I'm going to turn to the next section of 221 00:24:20,640 --> 00:24:26,280 the talk and start by saying this is the part I really don't know anything about, 222 00:24:26,280 --> 00:24:35,220 but become completely invested in contemporary art. And because we've all been away from our libraries of archives, 223 00:24:35,220 --> 00:24:44,550 I've taken this pause to kind of more fully engaged in the ways that contemporary art is talking back to Empire. 224 00:24:44,550 --> 00:24:50,530 It's a secure district, but I'm going to I'm going to walk you through it anyway. 225 00:24:50,530 --> 00:24:57,460 So in June, twenty seventeen, I went to the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis with a group of old friends from graduate school, 226 00:24:57,460 --> 00:25:02,890 we had gathered there for a long weekend. At the end of an academic semester. 227 00:25:02,890 --> 00:25:07,150 We arrived too late to get into the Walker Art Centre, but the sun was setting. 228 00:25:07,150 --> 00:25:12,640 That evening we entered the sculpture garden, which is outside in Minneapolis. 229 00:25:12,640 --> 00:25:17,140 The sculpture garden is a way in which the arts have been supported as being democratic. 230 00:25:17,140 --> 00:25:20,950 And for the people, this democratic purpose is served in many ways. 231 00:25:20,950 --> 00:25:27,130 In the sculpture garden, there's no entry fee, there's no curated path to the space. 232 00:25:27,130 --> 00:25:34,880 And there's also what I would say, art from a range of sculptures. 233 00:25:34,880 --> 00:25:39,380 As we headed toward the sculpture, the bright red cherry on a teaspoon. 234 00:25:39,380 --> 00:25:43,790 This is one of the original pieces of art in the sculpture garden. 235 00:25:43,790 --> 00:25:50,870 I did a double take at the sculpture that is placed further along and you can see it in the distance here. 236 00:25:50,870 --> 00:25:59,030 It was an enormous blue rooster looking regal in size and colour as it looked over the sculpture garden. 237 00:25:59,030 --> 00:26:08,660 I had an intense moment of deja vu. I knew I had seen the sculpture before, but I had never been in Minneapolis later. 238 00:26:08,660 --> 00:26:15,170 I recall that I had seen the Big Blue Rooster in Trafalgar Square one summer when I was doing research at the British Library. 239 00:26:15,170 --> 00:26:23,750 The sculpture had been mounted on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, where it was displayed from July 2013 to February twenty fifteen. 240 00:26:23,750 --> 00:26:30,440 At first I thought it was very strange that a statue of a blue rooster was moved from London to Minneapolis, 241 00:26:30,440 --> 00:26:34,460 from the heart of Empire to the heart of the American Midwest. 242 00:26:34,460 --> 00:26:41,180 Then I learnt that this was a case of two statues and the statue, which is called Hohn in German Cock, 243 00:26:41,180 --> 00:26:47,390 which is its translation in English, had been originally designed for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. 244 00:26:47,390 --> 00:26:48,800 And for those of you who don't know, 245 00:26:48,800 --> 00:26:56,000 the fourth plinth hosts the rotating series of art installations that are specifically commissioned for that space. 246 00:26:56,000 --> 00:27:00,860 The version that was in Minneapolis was a replica, hence the two dates. 247 00:27:00,860 --> 00:27:10,060 Twenty, thirteen and twenty seventeen. My books argument, and I'm imagining this as an epilogue or a final chapter, 248 00:27:10,060 --> 00:27:15,580 is heading toward making a case for contemporary art as an important form of public criticism. 249 00:27:15,580 --> 00:27:24,360 And the artists that I'm really most engaged with is Karen Walker and her commission in the turbine hall at Tate Modern a few years ago. 250 00:27:24,360 --> 00:27:30,120 Today, I'll focus on covering afresh, in part because her work allows me to elaborate how her aesthetic and artistic 251 00:27:30,120 --> 00:27:35,700 choices critique the concept of the public statue and the idea of the replica. 252 00:27:35,700 --> 00:27:39,150 The blue statue, when it was originally shown in London, 253 00:27:39,150 --> 00:27:46,620 was unveiled and unveiled here as an important idea by the mayor of London, who was then Boris Johnson. 254 00:27:46,620 --> 00:27:55,200 The idea of unveiling, which is so central to feminist and post-colonial thinking, is an important form of ritual when it comes to public statues. 255 00:27:55,200 --> 00:28:09,780 And we'll have to think I don't have time to share with you this statue, but you should watch Boris Johnson unveiling the statue. 256 00:28:09,780 --> 00:28:16,800 He makes various kinds of comments about the use of the word cock, which you can watch. 257 00:28:16,800 --> 00:28:22,310 And I'll put it in the chart when I when I finish. Over the last two decades, 258 00:28:22,310 --> 00:28:28,190 the space of the fourth plinth has become a space for temporary commissions 259 00:28:28,190 --> 00:28:32,940 that are overseen by the mayor of London's fourth plinth commissioning group. 260 00:28:32,940 --> 00:28:41,460 The group aims to consider how to remake the space known as the heart of Empire with a rotating series of public sculptures. 261 00:28:41,460 --> 00:28:47,310 It has an imagination of a more inclusive and multicultural public in mind. 262 00:28:47,310 --> 00:28:54,840 And one of the interesting things about Catherine afresh is, of course, she is both German and also an avowed feminist. 263 00:28:54,840 --> 00:29:02,490 She's been described as a sculptor of the female gaze, and she commented that her design was intended to be humorous. 264 00:29:02,490 --> 00:29:07,110 She intended for this to be a double entendre and a counter monument that drew 265 00:29:07,110 --> 00:29:12,150 attention to the masculine and martial forms of the other statues in the square. 266 00:29:12,150 --> 00:29:17,970 The Guardian's review ran under the charge headline Big Blue Cock erected on the fourth plinth. 267 00:29:17,970 --> 00:29:29,240 It noted the sculpture was gleefully feminist, poking fun at the statues of men Nelson George the Fourth and the generals Havelock and Napier. 268 00:29:29,240 --> 00:29:35,630 From Trafalgar Square, the 14 foot tall monument was moved to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, 269 00:29:35,630 --> 00:29:41,960 D.C. on July 20 16, where it is now permanently situated. 270 00:29:41,960 --> 00:29:47,540 What's most important is the sculpture stands on the ground so that an observer can stand feet to feet with it. 271 00:29:47,540 --> 00:29:51,020 The proximity allows the viewer to see the detail on the rooster's features, 272 00:29:51,020 --> 00:30:00,230 which are carefully crafted from fibreglass, to replicate the figures on the real the features of a real rooster. 273 00:30:00,230 --> 00:30:07,020 In these two installations, the experience of seeing the sculpture is transformed. 274 00:30:07,020 --> 00:30:12,680 Oh, geez, I can't. I realised that there was a reason that I was going to show you this clip. 275 00:30:12,680 --> 00:30:17,160 Let me show you what it looks like in Trafalgar Square. 276 00:30:17,160 --> 00:30:29,000 I just saw the artist, Katerina, about our interpretation of this fantastic work that we're about to unveil. 277 00:30:29,000 --> 00:30:38,080 And she said it was a. 278 00:30:38,080 --> 00:30:48,930 Of Spain's. Brings a bit of risk, but also, of course, the cultural just. 279 00:30:48,930 --> 00:30:55,380 Well, I think it's a testament to our sense of freedom, liberty. 280 00:30:55,380 --> 00:31:08,610 But we have here is that this beautiful, beautiful sculpture, which I'm sure about through all. 281 00:31:08,610 --> 00:31:13,650 This beautiful, beautiful sculpture. If you were to Google it in a beautiful time, 282 00:31:13,650 --> 00:31:22,840 you will probably not be able to find it because that search engine would collapse on prime private property on the way. 283 00:31:22,840 --> 00:31:34,050 But in the meantime, feast your eyes saw also this beautiful sculpture. 284 00:31:34,050 --> 00:31:50,720 It is the big blue. 285 00:31:50,720 --> 00:31:58,790 So I don't know how many of you were able to hear Boris Johnson's words, but in the unveiling he said if you were to Google it in a few years, 286 00:31:58,790 --> 00:32:04,010 it would crash the search engine and the prime minister might in a few years, 287 00:32:04,010 --> 00:32:17,060 which I think is interesting in these two installations between Trafalgar Square and the statue, the sculpture here in Washington, D.C., 288 00:32:17,060 --> 00:32:24,440 the experience of seeing or experience the sculpture has been utterly transformed merely by the fact that the one in D.C. does not have a pedestal. 289 00:32:24,440 --> 00:32:28,970 In this sense, it provokes an older set of questions about aesthetic values, 290 00:32:28,970 --> 00:32:36,210 about the importance of frames to paintings, columns to a building, and one might add, pedestals to sculptures. 291 00:32:36,210 --> 00:32:40,620 One can't pose the question of Paragon a great concept, 292 00:32:40,620 --> 00:32:50,280 he expressed an anxiety that frames and pedestals added to the excessive ornamentation that was a hallmark of the Baroque as a classicist Verdi plant. 293 00:32:50,280 --> 00:32:55,280 And Michael Slyer have noted. And let me just share with you some of the. 294 00:32:55,280 --> 00:33:01,670 Their work as the classicists very polite Michael Skya squire have noted in their 295 00:33:01,670 --> 00:33:05,300 engagement in Derrida's engagement with confirm the idea of the supplement, 296 00:33:05,300 --> 00:33:14,210 the pedestal is not a mere adornment, but rather the existence of pedestal transforms the viewing experience for the person looking at a piece of art. 297 00:33:14,210 --> 00:33:21,800 In this reading plan, Squire press the idea that no art, particularly ancient classical art, is ever finished. 298 00:33:21,800 --> 00:33:34,470 And here they're very, very interested in the replications of classical art through the two millennia of what is called Western culture, 299 00:33:34,470 --> 00:33:37,220 they draw from the work of a contemporary artist, Anthony Gormley, 300 00:33:37,220 --> 00:33:43,280 to show how sculptures are mounted in different ways and provoke us to think about statues in a new way. 301 00:33:43,280 --> 00:33:49,790 Like Fresh. Antony Gormley has been a part of the fourth plinth commissions, the Blue Rooster. 302 00:33:49,790 --> 00:33:55,070 And I'll just go back just to show you some of other Frisch's sculptures. 303 00:33:55,070 --> 00:34:01,520 The Blue Ridge is one of Russia's largest sculptures and demonstrates how she takes ordinary objects and plays with scale. 304 00:34:01,520 --> 00:34:11,870 Her other sculptures of the egg of strawbery of a skull, the model of the Madonna enlarge these forms so that we can see the details more closely. 305 00:34:11,870 --> 00:34:15,920 And on the right you can see the seeds of the strawberry. 306 00:34:15,920 --> 00:34:21,740 In Benjamin's account, the replica allows us to see things that we might not have seen in film. 307 00:34:21,740 --> 00:34:29,090 It's possible to slow down movements so that we can see the component parts that the human eye might not see. 308 00:34:29,090 --> 00:34:37,730 Quote, Technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself for sculptors. 309 00:34:37,730 --> 00:34:42,110 The model is a way to experiment with technique using a low cost material, 310 00:34:42,110 --> 00:34:49,220 usually plaster fresh uses plaster, casts, a method that's long been deployed in sculpture. 311 00:34:49,220 --> 00:34:58,210 And increasingly, she uses 3-D printing to generate moulds at different sizes. 312 00:34:58,210 --> 00:35:04,630 Her use of 3D painting means that she can scale objects to small, to much larger, 313 00:35:04,630 --> 00:35:14,130 what she's been doing is working with these different scales as a way of thinking about how replicas of different sizes do different things. 314 00:35:14,130 --> 00:35:19,560 Some casts are preserved so that the bronze statue can be replicated and I want to end with that. 315 00:35:19,560 --> 00:35:25,470 So think about how these casts are being made, a plaster cast to preserve. 316 00:35:25,470 --> 00:35:29,790 They've been used in archaeological studies both to document and to study. 317 00:35:29,790 --> 00:35:33,330 And I'll just show you a statue that Jennifer Trimble has identified. 318 00:35:33,330 --> 00:35:45,270 She works on Roman archaeology and she notes that this statue of the large Herculaneum woman found in the early seventeen hundreds and 17 turns. 319 00:35:45,270 --> 00:35:52,110 After the discovery of Pompeii became the classical and the classic image of the female form. 320 00:35:52,110 --> 00:35:55,860 And it became very popular in the art that followed. 321 00:35:55,860 --> 00:36:03,180 Many of these statues were brought back to Europe and became a part of royal collections in the 18th century. 322 00:36:03,180 --> 00:36:06,660 Others remained where they were, and in the 19th century, 323 00:36:06,660 --> 00:36:13,200 archaeologists became especially concerned that these type of artefacts remain exactly where they were. 324 00:36:13,200 --> 00:36:18,690 And instead the plaster cast became the way that you could show people the 325 00:36:18,690 --> 00:36:25,500 statues that existed in the ancient past without actually moving the statues. 326 00:36:25,500 --> 00:36:36,120 As mortgage lending argues in plaster monuments, classic classical forms were used to train archaeologists, classicist art historians. 327 00:36:36,120 --> 00:36:44,610 The copy became a low budget way to train students. And what she writes about is how most major universities have cast collections. 328 00:36:44,610 --> 00:36:52,830 Cornell's does, as does Oxfords, although the collections have been destroyed in some of the major museums in which they existed. 329 00:36:52,830 --> 00:36:56,910 The Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan. 330 00:36:56,910 --> 00:37:03,690 This is the type of collection the Royal Academy sculpture would have trained on before they cast their old sculptures. 331 00:37:03,690 --> 00:37:08,310 And I'll just show you a cast that's in the Pournelle cast collection. 332 00:37:08,310 --> 00:37:16,710 There's about eight hundred casts in this collection, and I would describe it as a hodgepodge in the sense of their bust, their Life-Size statues. 333 00:37:16,710 --> 00:37:21,180 They're also casts of architectural features. 334 00:37:21,180 --> 00:37:27,620 Cash collections made from ancient statues are no longer the way that sculptors learn how to sculpt for someone like Katherine, 335 00:37:27,620 --> 00:37:33,810 the fresh, working contemporary art. The idea of replicating or playing with the classical foundations of sculptural 336 00:37:33,810 --> 00:37:41,580 art has been put aside in favour of reworking models that are on everyday objects. 337 00:37:41,580 --> 00:37:50,490 I want to just show you the third version of The Rooster, and it was shown last year in L.A. It's mounted on a green pedestal. 338 00:37:50,490 --> 00:37:55,410 It's endorsed with statues that really are of two life sized people. 339 00:37:55,410 --> 00:38:00,180 So these people really are between five and a half and six feet tall. 340 00:38:00,180 --> 00:38:04,440 They're looking at their phones and they're positioned in front of the Blue Rooster. 341 00:38:04,440 --> 00:38:11,010 As she noted in an essay, roosters often make a lot of noise, but the chickens rarely notice. 342 00:38:11,010 --> 00:38:17,190 In her liberation, she critiques her own statues as barely drawing any attention. 343 00:38:17,190 --> 00:38:21,360 Her vision is reminiscent of Robert Musso's famous incantation about statues, 344 00:38:21,360 --> 00:38:27,120 quote, There's nothing in the world as invisible as monuments, close quote. 345 00:38:27,120 --> 00:38:31,960 In museums formulation, which was written around the same time as Benjamin's essay Music, 346 00:38:31,960 --> 00:38:48,100 laments that mass media in the form of advertising has a deeper impact on our affective states than the monuments we walk by every day. 347 00:38:48,100 --> 00:38:53,860 The site of Trafalgar Square was pure genius for the fourth plinth project because it's often the place 348 00:38:53,860 --> 00:39:00,220 that those who want to establish the install celebratory statues want to place their heroic figures. 349 00:39:00,220 --> 00:39:01,090 Gary Young. 350 00:39:01,090 --> 00:39:08,890 For those of you who know who chaired the 4th commission, wrote a very good essay in The Guardian recently, which I'll share with the top leader. 351 00:39:08,890 --> 00:39:15,910 As I conclude, I want to end not with a set of conclusions, but rather with an example about how the public debate about statues has focussed on 352 00:39:15,910 --> 00:39:22,840 preservation on the grounds that these are somehow original works of art that cannot be moved. 353 00:39:22,840 --> 00:39:29,230 As we know, monuments are always being moved. That's how they got to the colonies in the first place. 354 00:39:29,230 --> 00:39:35,290 Another argument for preservation has been about the originality of the statues. 355 00:39:35,290 --> 00:39:48,190 And what I want to end with here is that few statues were original or all that authentic. 356 00:39:48,190 --> 00:39:54,520 So I focussed on fresh in part because I really wanted to bring you Trafalgar Square, 357 00:39:54,520 --> 00:39:58,870 and the part that I want to talk about in closing has a longer version of an essay that 358 00:39:58,870 --> 00:40:03,130 I've written for the Royal Historical Institute blog that will go live next week. 359 00:40:03,130 --> 00:40:12,610 The essay focuses on an effort that followers of Cecil Rhodes made in the 1930s to have a statue of Rhodes installed in Trafalgar Square. 360 00:40:12,610 --> 00:40:20,730 It's the same group of followers that proposed the installation of Rhodes at Oriel College and Oxford. 361 00:40:20,730 --> 00:40:26,010 It occurred a generation after roads died and the argument at that point was that roads, 362 00:40:26,010 --> 00:40:31,200 a legacy, was being forgotten for reasons that are unclear from the records. 363 00:40:31,200 --> 00:40:37,110 The Public Works Department resisted having a statue of Rhodes placed in Trafalgar Square. 364 00:40:37,110 --> 00:40:44,700 And instead they suggested that the the people who wanted to donate the funds for it looked elsewhere. 365 00:40:44,700 --> 00:40:51,030 I want to start here with the original statue and original quotes to commemorate Cecil Rhodes, 366 00:40:51,030 --> 00:40:58,110 it's on Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa, and it is described as Cecil Rhodes on a force. 367 00:40:58,110 --> 00:41:02,760 The statue was shown at the Royal Academy in 1994 before it was sent to Cape Town, 368 00:41:02,760 --> 00:41:12,210 where it was installed in a park and memorial designed by Herbert Baker was the same Herbert Baker who designed the central buildings in New Delhi. 369 00:41:12,210 --> 00:41:16,590 The Cape Town installation is flanked by lions. You can see them here on the left. 370 00:41:16,590 --> 00:41:21,510 The Lions are deliberately replicas of those that are at Trafalgar Square. 371 00:41:21,510 --> 00:41:24,780 On the right is a display from November twenty seventeen. 372 00:41:24,780 --> 00:41:32,760 This version is the fourth version of this statue and will be placed at the George Watch Gallery south of London. 373 00:41:32,760 --> 00:41:37,470 So I read these documents a few years ago thinking that there was no statue of Rhodes to London, 374 00:41:37,470 --> 00:41:47,070 which is something that his followers proposed several times from the nineteen thirties into the 1970s. 375 00:41:47,070 --> 00:41:51,730 But it turns out there is a replica of the monument to Rhodes. 376 00:41:51,730 --> 00:41:58,200 It depends on how you would define replica. So here is physical energy in Kensington Gardens. 377 00:41:58,200 --> 00:42:03,900 And rather than being an image to Rhodes, it's an image to the artist George Frederick Wachs, 378 00:42:03,900 --> 00:42:08,970 who used to live a short walk away from Kensington Gardens. 379 00:42:08,970 --> 00:42:15,180 Because it's not marked as an image to Rhodes, it evades the problem the road statue represents in London, 380 00:42:15,180 --> 00:42:22,210 and it allows the public to appreciate the art of the Royal Academy sculptor. 381 00:42:22,210 --> 00:42:23,050 So in closing, 382 00:42:23,050 --> 00:42:30,490 I want to return to the idea of the replica and post-colonial studies drawing from the work of Homi Bhabha and partially Patha Chatterji, 383 00:42:30,490 --> 00:42:35,770 we've become accustomed to thinking of mimicry as a derivative form of expression. 384 00:42:35,770 --> 00:42:40,840 Judith Butler, writing in the same moment as Bob, of course, challenged the idea of derivation, 385 00:42:40,840 --> 00:42:49,870 and she instead argued the copies are forms of remaking, challenging, stretching and expanding in the study of what we used to call drag queens. 386 00:42:49,870 --> 00:42:56,250 Butler allowed us to imagine the language of transgender studies and non binary life. 387 00:42:56,250 --> 00:43:05,310 So in the larger project, I want to think through how the replica became an important way of creating a visual unity between cities of the Empire, 388 00:43:05,310 --> 00:43:11,550 Auckland and Calcutta, Delhi and Toronto, London and Cape Town and, of course, Calcutta. 389 00:43:11,550 --> 00:43:19,290 In its duration, the replicas tied Britain's campaigns for public art and public sculpture to sites that were never public. 390 00:43:19,290 --> 00:43:29,360 In the same way in the colonies, the statues mark a territorial occupation, the firmly established colonial sovereignty. 391 00:43:29,360 --> 00:43:38,090 This permanence belied the idea that Britons would never leave and of course, all of these statues have outlasted the British Empire by over 70 years. 392 00:43:38,090 --> 00:43:45,680 The mounting in the pedestals are crucial, I've shown you just one example of that in the Lord Clive statues in London and in Calcutta. 393 00:43:45,680 --> 00:43:51,380 It's interesting that contemporary artists are subconsciously playing with how statues are mounted. 394 00:43:51,380 --> 00:43:58,580 It's interesting also that Antony Gormley suggested a few weeks ago that the statue of Rhodes should be turned around as a way, 395 00:43:58,580 --> 00:44:07,850 as a low cost way to show that the circumstances have changed and the historical conditions under which Rhodes was installed no longer apply. 396 00:44:07,850 --> 00:44:14,600 Contemporary artists like Ghormley Fresh and Claire Walker are actively creating these sculptural traditions. 397 00:44:14,600 --> 00:44:19,440 And I'll just share the statue of the commission that Carole Walker did. 398 00:44:19,440 --> 00:44:22,400 It's on the right in the turbine hall at Tate Modern. 399 00:44:22,400 --> 00:44:35,040 It's been disassembled and the the statue after that, she is critiquing on the left, which is the Victoria Memorial statue done by Thomas Barock. 400 00:44:35,040 --> 00:44:42,750 In closing, I hope we can emerge from the era of statue mania to a new age of public sculpture that is truly public. 401 00:44:42,750 --> 00:44:53,160 I hope we can begin to imagine how feminist and colonial works of art might challenge the legacy of public statues and colonialism in my imagination, 402 00:44:53,160 --> 00:45:02,106 as we travel from city to city, which many of us do. I hope that we can encounter big bluebirds everywhere.