OK, so I'd like to welcome everyone to the final lecture in the terror lectures in American art this year,
which are focussed on the theme, a contest of images, American art as culture war.
My name is John Bacon Jr. I'm the 2018 2019 Terror Visiting Professor of American Art here at Oxford.
And before I start, I want to just thank a few people in the history of art department.
I'd like to thank Francesca. Is that for her help with everything tech related and getting all those details together for each week's lecture?
I'd like to thank David Pepper for his help promoting the talks.
Penelope Lane for her help producing posters. And then also Maureen Shapiro for his assistance with designing graphics.
And after today's lecture, there will also be a drinks reception just in the lobby of the Shaw Centre.
So I invite you to step outside for a drink after the end of today's talk.
On July 4th, 1776, the Second Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence,
the statement of rebellion that initiated the American Revolutionary War.
On July 9th, five days later, the text reached New York City.
General George Washington had the document read aloud to his troops and the declaration's words of insurrection hung in the air.
Quote, The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated infamy and usurpations,
all having a direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.
And quote those words inspired riots in many American cities.
The king was burned in effigy, royal symbols torn down and desiccated.
New Yorkers also engaged in this practise of iconoclasm, according to one observer.
Quote, The British arms from over the seat of justice in the courthouse, another rot in stone in the front of the pediment.
And the picture of King George, the third in the council chamber, were thrown to the ground, broken into pieces and burnt.
But New Yorkers also had a uniquely deserving target for their rage, a gilded equestrian statue of King George,
the third that stood atop a formidable base on the Bowling Green, a small patch of turf in lower Manhattan.
That statue had been installed only six years prior.
A statement of the colony's embrace of the British king. In contrast to the British parliament,
the colonists believed that parliament had established various coercive measures and taxes without the king's full approval.
By 1776, attitudes had shifted and the king was target seen as culpable.
The statue was now a hated icon. A mob of patriots descended upon it.
They violently toppled it from its stone base and threw it to the ground.
They hacked at the king and his horse, smashing both to pieces and carted off the twisted chunks of metal.
Only a few fragments remain gilded relics.
Many found decades later stolen from the scene as souvenirs now displayed in the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.
And at the New York Historical Society,
the mob also removed the crowns that capped the fence posts on the wrought iron fence surrounding Bowling Green,
as explained in a plaque now found at the site. Most of the metal scraps, however, were not saved.
They were melted down into liquid led and tin.
The molten metal was formed into many tiny musket balls.
Some forty two thousand and eighty eight in total. And the bullets were delivered to the Continental Army News or Hazard.
Then the postmaster of New York wrote of this transformation, quote,
The king of England's statue has been pulled down to make musket ball off so that his troops will probably have melted.
Majesty fired at them and quote. This melted majesty was indeed used in the war that had just commenced.
Most couples have been found on revolutionary battlefields,
but the site of the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey that are consistent in material with the statue fragments.
Americans fired metal from a monument to King George.
The third, a monument depicting King George. The third. Back at the troops of King George.
The third. Third. Iconoclasm is an enduring American value.
It is a foundational value.
One of the most powerful foundational values present in the very origin myth that establishes the American nation violently destroying icons,
liberating the nation from their weight in order to create a new nation.
A more perfect one persists as an ideal. It is represented here by another painting created decades later, which I will discuss in a bit.
A painting that shows the mob with torches at night.
Iconoclasm is an aesthetic, but also anti aesthetic procedure based on destroying images and objects.
But also in creating new objects and images of that destruction.
But the act of toppling the monument and from there remains left behind,
like the gilded fragments of King George, the third that are transformed into bullets.
Iconoclasm has also become a very charged and very contemporary phenomena in the United States.
On August 12th, 2017, about two hundred and forty one years after King George the third came toppling down on the Bowling Green,
another mob descended on a metal equestrian statue on a stone pedestal that stands guard over a public park.
This one in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the same city where founding father Thomas Jefferson,
a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, had built his plantation home and established the University of Virginia.
The mob, however, did not want to topple that monument.
In fact, their stated goal of assembly was precisely the opposite to preserve the monument from being toppled.
To say that it had been slated for removal by the Charlottesville City Council.
The mob was comprised of white supremacists, including self-identified neo-Nazis, neo fascists and members of various Allbright factions.
They were gathered for Unite the right rally intended to bring together white nationalists,
fringe movements newly emboldened by the rise of implicit but also explicit white supremacist discourse in mainstream American politics.
The statue that served as a focal point and backdrop for these events depicts Robert E. Lee,
the general who led the Confederate States Army representing the South during the American Civil
War that began in 1862 and ended with Lee's surrender to the union in 1865 after the war.
Lee supported the reconciliation of North and South,
but he was also a well-documented white supremacist and continued to oppose the extension of political rights to African-Americans.
It is interesting that he also actually opposed the construction of monuments to the so-called Lost Cause mythology,
which to romanticise the Confederacy as a noble project.
He opposed monuments like the statue of him, but they went up nonetheless.
Actually, the mob had arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia,
the night before to gather on the University of Virginia's campus with torches to gather around a different monument, a statue, A.
Thomas Jefferson himself. It is a chilling scene the next day.
The rally exploded into violent confrontations between unite the right and peaceful counter protesters,
resulting in the death of a woman named Heather Higher, a Black Lives Matter activist.
The events in Charlotte still shocked many, myself included. For me,
what happened was shocking because it revealed that forces that had seemed
relegated to the fringe of American society were now suddenly at its centre.
The mob shouted racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic and homophobic hate speech.
The mob represented the rise of white nationalism.
But the events were also shocking because all of it revolved around sculpture, monuments, works of art.
This episode in Charlottesville is perhaps one of the most visceral episodes of the contemporary
American culture wars that are at the centre of this lecture series and comments about the events.
Thomas. Excuse me.
President Trump seemed to indicate a moral equivalence between unite the right participants and peaceful counter protesters from the left,
claiming that there were, quote, very fine people on both sides.
That statement epitomises the divisive rhetoric and deception so central to Trump's political brand.
But when he made those statements, he was specifically commenting on sculpture, on works of art, quote.
So this week, it's Robert E. Lee. I wonder, is it George Washington next week?
And is it Thomas Jefferson? The week after. How do these two separate and distinct events relate?
The years 1776 and 2017 are not typically considered alongside one another,
but the events that occurred in those years seemed to speak across the centuries, iconoclasm, past and unrealised iconoclasm in the present.
In today's talk, I explore recent acts of image destruction in the U.S.,
specifically activist responses to civil war monuments representing the Confederate states of America.
One of my core arguments is that this activism is actually a reinterpretation of earlier foundational acts of iconoclasm in American history.
Although I'm not sure if activists are even aware of what happened to King George,
the third activists change the meaning of images and objects by destroying them.
But they also changed the meaning of the act of destruction itself and all in relation to very contemporary social and political concerns.
History is reworked through the iconoclastic gesture.
I'm also interested in how new forms of visual experience,
the result of accelerating digital networks and new media have transformed how iconoclasm functions.
In this sense, I don't want to think only about the standard questions in the monument debates like the
arguments for dismantling monuments as opposed to the arguments for maintaining them.
But also, I want to think about how the culture war has become a digital culture war.
Digital culture transforms the stones of civil war.
The marble monuments, the carved granite, the heavy statues and metal plaques, these weighty things made to be permanent, to seem eternal.
They become something instead ephemeral, instantaneous, fast as light as data.
The weight of monuments melts into air as they turn into digital images free-floating fast, moving everywhere and nowhere at once.
The network transference, both the time and space of monuments.
It collapses distance, bringing something far away and solidly anchored into immediate proximity.
Through the interconnected logic of the interface.
This phenomenon allows confrontations with objects that may have previously been left out of sight, out of mind.
They similarly reduce the effects of time allowing works that had been temporarily vandalised to be permanently reframed.
Online. In considering some of the deeper histories that also more recent digital aspects of this debate,
my hope is to bring together some of the themes from the previous three talks in this series,
specifically the five key hypotheses that I put forth in my first talk,
which you may remember, in which I think the ongoing controversy over monuments supports one that these controversies revolve around analogue things,
objects and works of art, better largely experienced online in the digital sphere.
To that, they reflect a polarisation of positions, positions that cannot be reconciled.
Three, that they are both political but also aesthetic, which I think is very evident in this particular debate.
For that, they are about the present, but also the past.
Also something very evident. And then five, these controversies seem new, but are actually old, as old as 17.
Seventy six. Before proceeding.
Allow me to explain the basics, how Confederate monuments came to be.
According to a landmark study by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, first released in 2016 but updated just months ago.
There are some one thousand seven hundred and forty seven Confederate monuments,
placed names and other symbols still in use in public spaces in the United States.
The report indicates that these include specifically 780 physical monuments, but also various sites named after Confederate figures,
including one hundred three public schools and three colleges, 80 counties and cities and 10 U.S. military bases.
The presence of Confederate monuments and place names also extends far beyond Charlottesville, Virginia.
Every state of the former Confederacy has this legacy, but so too do many states that were never part of the Union.
We're not even part of the United States. California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico.
South Dakota. Iowa, Pennsylvania and New York.
The American preoccupation with visualising the past in stone and metal.
So an idealised past. A sanitised past.
A pass in which slavery is hidden.
In which the civil war is a just war, a noble war, a war for states rights is a ubiquitous feature of the American landscape.
This preoccupation with creating and affirming such history, even if it is fictitious, is present on an epic scale.
At the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.,
the Capitol's National Statuary Hall collection includes two statues selected by each state for a total of one hundred monuments.
The space in the Capitol building was actually once the Hall of Assembly for the House of Representatives.
One chamber of the U.S. government's legislative body painting shows the space used in this way.
In 1864, President Lincoln made it a Statuary Hall.
There are currently eight statues representing high ranking political leaders and military officials from the Confederate States of America,
located in Statuary Hall. This location is a privileged site of authority and power of legitimation.
The presence of those eight statues is therefore especially troubling.
The Southern Poverty Law Centre's report also makes the crucial argument that these historical
markers are not just spatially present in an enormous geographic spread across the country.
They are also temporally disparate. Monuments were built immediately following the end of the Civil War.
But the peak period of construction and naming occurred from about nineteen hundred to 1920.
So this period. This timing is significant.
This was the era of Jim Crow when political and social rights granted to African-Americans were stripped away,
when lynching and extra juridical violence increased,
when racism was institutionalised through laws that disenfranchised African-Americans and resegregated society.
This was the period of the Ku Klux Klan resurgence. Another significant moment in the construction and naming also occurred in the 50s and 60s.
So this period. In the civil rights era, when the reactionary forces upholding Jim Crow were under threat.
These dates indicate that building monuments is not a response to the civil war.
It is a response, a backlash to civil rights. The common defence of Confederate monuments is that removal is equivalent to a racing history,
as if history is a stable, permanent, eternal thing, as if it is as heavy as stone and metal.
But it is important to make completely clear that this history is not stable at all.
The history is not even really about the civil war, despite references to historical figures from the 19th century.
It is a history of institutionalised racism in the 20th century.
Of course, the historical references these Monuments Project are also sanitised and fabricated
versions of the Confederacy without the racism that's attended the Confederacy.
They were also intended to unite Southern whites at the time of their construction
in order to create a united front against the advancement of civil rights.
They therefore purposely obscure the complexity of the Civil War era,
in which many states had considerable numbers of white Americans who defected to the union or who resented and rejected slavery.
That historical truth is a raised, not maintained by the presence of these monuments.
Finally, it is worth mentioning the immediate cause of the backlash against monuments,
this public reckoning was prompted by the murderous rampage of Dylann Roof,
who shot and killed nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in the summer of 2015.
Actually, it was not just Rove's rampage. It was also the digital culture of discover after the massacre.
Roof ran a Web site called The Last Rhodesian, a reference to British imperialist and white supremacist Cecil Rhodes,
who is probably familiar to many of you, in part because of the Rhodes must fall campaign.
Roof posted images with Confederate paraphernalia and weapons.
His use of these symbols online in a digital context prompted the public reckoning of these very old, very analogue monuments.
It is easy to misunderstand the monuments controversy as centres solely on the issue of iconography,
on the symbolic function of monuments that represent either explicitly or implicitly white supremacist ideology.
But the impact of these statues is actually more immediate than iconography.
Public monuments operate through the logic of the gays. They are looked at, of course, by all who encounter them, but they also look right back at us.
Robert E. Lee's eyes, rendered in stone and metal, still seem to see.
For this reason,
Confederate monuments were purposely placed in civic spaces where their gaze could fix a public through a panoptic form of visual control.
They function not only to represent a version of history, but also to enact that history again in the present.
Through the visual control of space, they police space, they intimidate.
Many monuments were placed into open squares in front of courthouses, for example,
in spaces that had juridical legitimacy and would have been frequently encountered by the public.
We have talked at length over the past few weeks about the gays and how violence in American history often employed,
looking from watching acts of racial violence, lynching, for example,
or the executions that occurred on scaffold structures in open spaces to the impact of the photographic remains left behind after the act.
These rituals take place for people to see, to watch and then to image.
And continually we imagine through visual culture, monuments are similar.
Their spatial function often also intersected specifically with lynching, which sometimes occurred in their vicinity.
The lynch mob often gathered in the front of courthouses near Confederate monuments.
Perhaps one reason for the public reckoning over monuments is the fact that all of them are now
suddenly ever present watching from the public square of the 21st century from the Internet.
After the statue of King George, the third was destroyed at Bowling Green,
the marble pedestal upon which it had stood was left in place, a purposely empty pedestal, a place holder that signified the absence.
Presence of that statue was tyranny,
but absence signified the new power of an American republic in which authority would be located not in a single figure,
not in the monarchy, but in the people.
A 70 90 painting by John Trumbull, the most famous painter of the American Revolution, depicts George Washington triumphant at the end of the war.
Washington had been forced to abandon New York City to British forces at the beginning of the revolution.
Not long after the Declaration of Independence was publicly read aloud and the gilded King George, the third came toppling down.
But now George Washington stands in witness as British troops are forced to flee Manhattan.
Their ships setting sail in the distance. He stands in modest military garb with his horse beside him.
Behind him is the Bowling Green with his empty pedestal.
George Washington functions as a dismantle equestrian statue.
One, George defeated, the other. Triumphant, one icon destroyed, another created.
Informal terms, the painting demonstrates this ironic succession from King George to George Washington.
The pedestal is visible underneath Washington's horse, while the horse and pedestal are at different spatial depths.
The implication is that Washington, having won the war of independence, is the new embodiment of the people now deserving of the empty pedestal.
Numerous images produced in the period reiterated this claim through depictions of the pedestal that once belonged to King George the third.
A print after designed by Charles Buxton from 1798 uses the same play of absence and presence.
Washington stands between obelisks marked liberty and independence on the actual pedestal.
Now inscribed with his name that once belonged to the other George.
He is surrounded by patriotic paraphernalia.
And what might as well be a version of Trumbull's painting behind him depicting British troops on the retreat.
The prince could not be clearer in turning an actual figure into a figure of stone and metal into a new monument to replace the one destroyed.
Later, images would keep the mythology of iconoclasm alive in the 19th century, in the decades before the American Civil War.
There were multiple printed excuse me, painted versions, a canvas by German American artists to harness.
Adam Ortal from 1848 shows the mob at night that year.
In 1848, revolutions had erupted in Western Europe, including in Turtle's native Germany,
where Friedrich Vilhelm eventually suppressed revolutionary and Republican forces successfully restoring absolutist imperial rule.
In this context, in Germany, advocating for the revolutionary and Republican cause required a disguised approach,
and the origin myth of the American Republic in that toppled gilt statue was an
appropriate way of embracing revolution in the present through a displaced,
historical and displaced national image of iconoclasm.
Another painting by William W. Walcott of Ohio similarly uses American history to comment on contemporaneous political events.
Events of the present. Well, Club made the painting while abroad in Paris just as the second republic began to falter and fall.
Napoleon, the third, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, had already been elected president, but then seised power in an 1851 coup.
By 1852, he had installed himself as Emperor Walcott cut,
an impassioned supporter of the Republican cause and of Democratic rule, could not paint current events while living in Paris.
But he could paint them by proxy through reference to the American context,
through reference to George the third, who is now refigured as Napoleon the third.
What is fascinating about these images is the way they reclaimed and we signify iconoclasm from decades ago,
appropriating the destruction of one icon to comment on the hoped for destruction of another.
They use the past to create very precise and contemporary political meanings in their present.
Of course, the context to which both Ortal and Walcott painted their specific references to France
and Germany were subsequently forgotten and are probably lost for most viewers.
The paintings seem to be simple history paintings depicting the events of 1776.
What is fascinating, of course, is that this same procedure, reclaiming iconoclasm and re signifying it,
replays yet again with public monuments functioning today as the site for similar responses to contemporaneous political events.
For example, after the Unite the Right rally,
the Charlottesville City Council engaged in a deliberate aesthetic and anti aesthetic gesture, a visual politics of presence and absence.
They cover the statue of Robert E. Lee with a large black tarp.
The result, a bit like a work by Christo and John Claude, changes the meaning of the sculpture by hiding it.
The body of Robert E. Lee is shrouded as if dead, as if the figure deceased is in a body bag.
The effect also creates an empty void, simulating the absence of removal without removing anything at all.
Like the pedestal without its statue, the shrouded form signifies to absence.
There are, of course, many strategies activists can use to activate these monuments.
Perhaps the most significant is not removal, not signifying through absence, but vandalism, tagging, splashing with red paint.
This strategy, which seems impulsive and spontaneous, it's just graffiti, after all, actually functions as a way of permanently marking the monuments.
Paint washes away, but the digital image that captures the iconoclastic gesture lives forever.
A Google search course for a specific Confederate monument now brings forth images of their successive desecration over time,
forever framing the work in negative terms as a statement of white supremacy.
Take, for example, a monument from the small city of Reidsville, North Carolina.
The Rockingham County Confederate Monument. A driver asleep at the wheel of his automobile barrelled into the towering stone monument in 2011.
The statue had then stood at the centre of town in a traffic round about.
It toppled over. Breaking into pieces. It could not be repaired.
But a new reconstruction was proposed.
It would be placed not in the traffic roundabout, but in a private cemetery on a plot of land owned by the unit.
United Daughters of the Confederacy, who had commissioned the original statue.
More than 100 years ago, that new monument became an instant target and has been repeatedly vandalised.
These acts of iconoclasm never gained national attention.
This was, after all, before Dylann Roof. Before Black Lives Matter.
Before the contemporary monument wars had exploded across the Internet.
But the images of its destruction persist. Red paint splatter of blood whipped across the pedestal,
metaphorically signifying the blood of slavery on the back of which the Confederacy stood and for which it fought spray paint.
Jim Crow, slavery, KKK. There are countless examples of this phenomenon.
Hundreds of monuments permanently altered by the temporary impermanent effects of spray paint.
This condition is paradoxical. The digital image is typically considered ephemeral and fleeting, but it seems to last forever.
The vandalism conducted spontaneously and washed away remains.
The activist interventions on these monuments indicate that things made long ago in stone and metal can just as easily be re signified and reframed,
remade in the present. The stones of civil war are not eternal, not dead, but merely canvas for new meanings and new messages.
Their surfaces come to life. Let me bring these many threads together, iconoclasm, old and new.
Past and present with one more example,
a Confederate monument that until recently stood on the campus of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill,
made of a stone base that supports a bronze sculpture.
The statue depicts a soldier in the style of the silent sentinel figures without ammunition, their guns at rest.
The style was mass produced and widely appeared in monuments across the country.
The construction of Silent Sam, as he is known, was approved in nineteen oh eight and the monument was dedicated in 1913.
It was, in other words, created not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but at the height of Jim Crow.
Remarks made at the dedication in 1913 by a U.N. SI alumnus and member of the university's board of trustees named Julian Carr,
make the racial motivation for the construction of the monument very clear.
Quote, The present generation scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the
welfare of the Anglo-Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war.
Their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo-Saxon race in the south, end quote.
That description specifically references the Reconstruction era following the civil war,
when the KKK used terrorism to intimidate African Americans after slavery was abolished.
Extra juridical intimidation was one way to continue to enforce white supremacy in the same speech.
Carr also refers to, quote, horse whipping an African American woman until her skirts hung in shreds because the woman had,
quote, publicly insulted and maligned a southern lady, end quote.
So there are echoes of Emmett Till here. Activists have long targeted silence, Sam, on account of these associations with racism.
Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the monument was vandalised with paint.
In the 1970s, it was the site of demonstrations led by the campus's black student movement in the 1990s.
It was a forum for speeches following the verdict of not guilty for the police officers who had beat Rodney King in Los Angeles in 2011.
A graduate student at USC, now a professor named Adam Darby, discovered the transcripts of Julian Cars speech and published excerpts.
The monument then became even more highly charged. Clearly, the statue served as a blank slate for the projection of new meanings.
In 2015, it was vandalised with the words Black Lives Matter, KKK and murderer.
Then it was defaced again with the phrase, Who is Sandra Bland?
A reference to the African-American woman who died in police custody that year in 2016.
A man was arrested for spray painting the monument in 2017. A man beat it with a hammer.
The acts of vandalism accelerated.
In 2018, in the evening of August 20th, a mob of angry students gathered holding placards and posters one, for example.
Honoured victims of racial violence, including, quote, the unarmed black woman beaten by Julian car and quote.
Using ropes. The statue was toppled at nine 20 p.m. Video and photos show students cheering and
attacking the remains of silent Sam and capturing their own act of iconoclasm.
In yet more digital images. The statue was later removed to an undisclosed location.
The stone pedestal, that empty signifier remained until January of this year.
The debate over Silent Sam is by no means over the statue or what is left of it.
Continues to hang in legal peril, its future uncertain.
The story of silent Sam recalls a series of dates. 1776 on the Bowling Green.
1848 in a painting by Yohannes, Adam Wortzel. 1854 in the painting of William Walcott.
2018 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. To me, this action in twenty eighteen is the most American of actions.
One firmly rooted in actual history. Perhaps more historical than silence,
Sam ever really was both in the persistent American practise of changing the meaning of monuments through
iconoclasm and also changing the meaning of iconoclasm itself by activating its contemporary resonance.
I want to conclude this talk and this series as a whole with one final image,
one that brings together some of the irreconcilable tensions I have discussed.
The image is actually one I selected for use in the promotion of the series online on Oxfords history of our Web site,
a work of art created by an artist run political action committee, or PAC.
The same type of organisation that finances partisan political advertising during election campaigns in the U.S. called for freedoms.
The group aims to use the infrastructure of American political campaigning to inspire civic debate.
Their billboard was placed in rural Mississippi in 2016 and an empty strip of land near the highway.
It depicts a famous photograph of civil rights activists led by John Lewis, now a congressman crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
A Sunday, March seven, 1965, the peaceful,
non-violent demonstrators were confronted by a wall of Alabama state troopers who ordered the activists to disperse when they did not.
The troopers began attacking them with clubs and tear gas.
The brutality was captured on televised images, images that ricocheted across the country, beamed into living rooms on TV.
An image by photojournalist Spider Martin became one of the most compelling images of the civil rights movement.
The event. Was known as Bloody Sunday.
It led directly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson just over a week later.
The images propelled actual social and political change.
But the image here is on a billboard, and it's covered, of course, by the slogan of Trump's presidential campaign, Make America great again.
I hope this series of talks has made very clear that such a phrase is really a lie.
When exactly was America great? This series of talks has demonstrated that the US was founded on violence,
on using violence against indigenous Americans, black Americans, American immigrants and refugees.
The clash of text and image in the Four Freedoms billboard is thus satirical and ironic.
It uses some of the techniques we have encountered before, whether in the imagery decolonise this place used at the Whitney,
which repeated Andy Warhol canvases with canisters of tear gas or in the references to the playground in Sam Durand's scaffold.
The billboards, satire and irony was lost on some.
It soon created its own culture war. The governor of Mississippi, a Republican, declared that the billboard had to be removed, censored.
But some on the progressive left called for the very same thing.
They did not see the work as satirical or ironic, but as a sincere call for white supremacy.
For the time before the march on Selma, before Bloody Sunday, before the Voting Voting Rights Act.
Billboards are by definition, almost dumb.
Obvious, straightforward, but the work managed to provide conflicting meanings.
It's visual and textual messages not aligned. But in contrast.
The billboard functions like a meme, and the debate also played out online on Twitter with angry denouncements from all political perspectives.
It is a fitting work with which to end this lecture series because it represents the confusing, contradictory tensions that define our present moment.
The work is ironic, but also maybe seen as sincere analogue, but also digital.
An image of the past, but also the present.
It brings together the many clashes and confrontations that characterise the contemporary contest of images.
Thank you.