1 00:00:00,480 --> 00:00:08,040 OK, so I'd like to welcome everyone to the final lecture in the terror lectures in American art this year, 2 00:00:08,040 --> 00:00:14,640 which are focussed on the theme, a contest of images, American art as culture war. 3 00:00:14,640 --> 00:00:21,870 My name is John Bacon Jr. I'm the 2018 2019 Terror Visiting Professor of American Art here at Oxford. 4 00:00:21,870 --> 00:00:27,390 And before I start, I want to just thank a few people in the history of art department. 5 00:00:27,390 --> 00:00:39,060 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? 6 00:00:39,060 --> 00:00:43,410 I'd like to thank David Pepper for his help promoting the talks. 7 00:00:43,410 --> 00:00:52,080 Penelope Lane for her help producing posters. And then also Maureen Shapiro for his assistance with designing graphics. 8 00:00:52,080 --> 00:00:58,050 And after today's lecture, there will also be a drinks reception just in the lobby of the Shaw Centre. 9 00:00:58,050 --> 00:01:07,450 So I invite you to step outside for a drink after the end of today's talk. 10 00:01:07,450 --> 00:01:15,170 On July 4th, 1776, the Second Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, 11 00:01:15,170 --> 00:01:20,600 the statement of rebellion that initiated the American Revolutionary War. 12 00:01:20,600 --> 00:01:26,580 On July 9th, five days later, the text reached New York City. 13 00:01:26,580 --> 00:01:35,460 General George Washington had the document read aloud to his troops and the declaration's words of insurrection hung in the air. 14 00:01:35,460 --> 00:01:43,440 Quote, The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated infamy and usurpations, 15 00:01:43,440 --> 00:01:49,230 all having a direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. 16 00:01:49,230 --> 00:01:54,510 And quote those words inspired riots in many American cities. 17 00:01:54,510 --> 00:02:00,300 The king was burned in effigy, royal symbols torn down and desiccated. 18 00:02:00,300 --> 00:02:05,820 New Yorkers also engaged in this practise of iconoclasm, according to one observer. 19 00:02:05,820 --> 00:02:13,140 Quote, The British arms from over the seat of justice in the courthouse, another rot in stone in the front of the pediment. 20 00:02:13,140 --> 00:02:23,390 And the picture of King George, the third in the council chamber, were thrown to the ground, broken into pieces and burnt. 21 00:02:23,390 --> 00:02:32,460 But New Yorkers also had a uniquely deserving target for their rage, a gilded equestrian statue of King George, 22 00:02:32,460 --> 00:02:40,380 the third that stood atop a formidable base on the Bowling Green, a small patch of turf in lower Manhattan. 23 00:02:40,380 --> 00:02:44,220 That statue had been installed only six years prior. 24 00:02:44,220 --> 00:02:50,790 A statement of the colony's embrace of the British king. In contrast to the British parliament, 25 00:02:50,790 --> 00:03:00,900 the colonists believed that parliament had established various coercive measures and taxes without the king's full approval. 26 00:03:00,900 --> 00:03:07,590 By 1776, attitudes had shifted and the king was target seen as culpable. 27 00:03:07,590 --> 00:03:14,490 The statue was now a hated icon. A mob of patriots descended upon it. 28 00:03:14,490 --> 00:03:19,290 They violently toppled it from its stone base and threw it to the ground. 29 00:03:19,290 --> 00:03:28,220 They hacked at the king and his horse, smashing both to pieces and carted off the twisted chunks of metal. 30 00:03:28,220 --> 00:03:32,540 Only a few fragments remain gilded relics. 31 00:03:32,540 --> 00:03:40,280 Many found decades later stolen from the scene as souvenirs now displayed in the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. 32 00:03:40,280 --> 00:03:43,760 And at the New York Historical Society, 33 00:03:43,760 --> 00:03:51,230 the mob also removed the crowns that capped the fence posts on the wrought iron fence surrounding Bowling Green, 34 00:03:51,230 --> 00:04:00,520 as explained in a plaque now found at the site. Most of the metal scraps, however, were not saved. 35 00:04:00,520 --> 00:04:04,600 They were melted down into liquid led and tin. 36 00:04:04,600 --> 00:04:08,500 The molten metal was formed into many tiny musket balls. 37 00:04:08,500 --> 00:04:17,080 Some forty two thousand and eighty eight in total. And the bullets were delivered to the Continental Army News or Hazard. 38 00:04:17,080 --> 00:04:21,790 Then the postmaster of New York wrote of this transformation, quote, 39 00:04:21,790 --> 00:04:29,590 The king of England's statue has been pulled down to make musket ball off so that his troops will probably have melted. 40 00:04:29,590 --> 00:04:39,060 Majesty fired at them and quote. This melted majesty was indeed used in the war that had just commenced. 41 00:04:39,060 --> 00:04:42,380 Most couples have been found on revolutionary battlefields, 42 00:04:42,380 --> 00:04:50,820 but the site of the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey that are consistent in material with the statue fragments. 43 00:04:50,820 --> 00:04:54,600 Americans fired metal from a monument to King George. 44 00:04:54,600 --> 00:05:00,390 The third, a monument depicting King George. The third. Back at the troops of King George. 45 00:05:00,390 --> 00:05:09,220 The third. Third. Iconoclasm is an enduring American value. 46 00:05:09,220 --> 00:05:11,080 It is a foundational value. 47 00:05:11,080 --> 00:05:21,130 One of the most powerful foundational values present in the very origin myth that establishes the American nation violently destroying icons, 48 00:05:21,130 --> 00:05:26,080 liberating the nation from their weight in order to create a new nation. 49 00:05:26,080 --> 00:05:35,290 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. 50 00:05:35,290 --> 00:05:41,130 A painting that shows the mob with torches at night. 51 00:05:41,130 --> 00:05:49,830 Iconoclasm is an aesthetic, but also anti aesthetic procedure based on destroying images and objects. 52 00:05:49,830 --> 00:05:55,020 But also in creating new objects and images of that destruction. 53 00:05:55,020 --> 00:05:59,430 But the act of toppling the monument and from there remains left behind, 54 00:05:59,430 --> 00:06:05,820 like the gilded fragments of King George, the third that are transformed into bullets. 55 00:06:05,820 --> 00:06:14,700 Iconoclasm has also become a very charged and very contemporary phenomena in the United States. 56 00:06:14,700 --> 00:06:24,000 On August 12th, 2017, about two hundred and forty one years after King George the third came toppling down on the Bowling Green, 57 00:06:24,000 --> 00:06:31,320 another mob descended on a metal equestrian statue on a stone pedestal that stands guard over a public park. 58 00:06:31,320 --> 00:06:37,860 This one in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the same city where founding father Thomas Jefferson, 59 00:06:37,860 --> 00:06:46,820 a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, had built his plantation home and established the University of Virginia. 60 00:06:46,820 --> 00:06:50,990 The mob, however, did not want to topple that monument. 61 00:06:50,990 --> 00:06:59,060 In fact, their stated goal of assembly was precisely the opposite to preserve the monument from being toppled. 62 00:06:59,060 --> 00:07:05,980 To say that it had been slated for removal by the Charlottesville City Council. 63 00:07:05,980 --> 00:07:15,640 The mob was comprised of white supremacists, including self-identified neo-Nazis, neo fascists and members of various Allbright factions. 64 00:07:15,640 --> 00:07:21,400 They were gathered for Unite the right rally intended to bring together white nationalists, 65 00:07:21,400 --> 00:07:33,250 fringe movements newly emboldened by the rise of implicit but also explicit white supremacist discourse in mainstream American politics. 66 00:07:33,250 --> 00:07:41,890 The statue that served as a focal point and backdrop for these events depicts Robert E. Lee, 67 00:07:41,890 --> 00:07:47,170 the general who led the Confederate States Army representing the South during the American Civil 68 00:07:47,170 --> 00:07:56,770 War that began in 1862 and ended with Lee's surrender to the union in 1865 after the war. 69 00:07:56,770 --> 00:08:00,670 Lee supported the reconciliation of North and South, 70 00:08:00,670 --> 00:08:09,760 but he was also a well-documented white supremacist and continued to oppose the extension of political rights to African-Americans. 71 00:08:09,760 --> 00:08:18,070 It is interesting that he also actually opposed the construction of monuments to the so-called Lost Cause mythology, 72 00:08:18,070 --> 00:08:22,630 which to romanticise the Confederacy as a noble project. 73 00:08:22,630 --> 00:08:30,400 He opposed monuments like the statue of him, but they went up nonetheless. 74 00:08:30,400 --> 00:08:34,000 Actually, the mob had arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia, 75 00:08:34,000 --> 00:08:43,120 the night before to gather on the University of Virginia's campus with torches to gather around a different monument, a statue, A. 76 00:08:43,120 --> 00:08:49,990 Thomas Jefferson himself. It is a chilling scene the next day. 77 00:08:49,990 --> 00:08:56,770 The rally exploded into violent confrontations between unite the right and peaceful counter protesters, 78 00:08:56,770 --> 00:09:04,060 resulting in the death of a woman named Heather Higher, a Black Lives Matter activist. 79 00:09:04,060 --> 00:09:08,440 The events in Charlotte still shocked many, myself included. For me, 80 00:09:08,440 --> 00:09:12,490 what happened was shocking because it revealed that forces that had seemed 81 00:09:12,490 --> 00:09:18,250 relegated to the fringe of American society were now suddenly at its centre. 82 00:09:18,250 --> 00:09:23,200 The mob shouted racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic and homophobic hate speech. 83 00:09:23,200 --> 00:09:27,730 The mob represented the rise of white nationalism. 84 00:09:27,730 --> 00:09:37,090 But the events were also shocking because all of it revolved around sculpture, monuments, works of art. 85 00:09:37,090 --> 00:09:42,670 This episode in Charlottesville is perhaps one of the most visceral episodes of the contemporary 86 00:09:42,670 --> 00:09:48,660 American culture wars that are at the centre of this lecture series and comments about the events. 87 00:09:48,660 --> 00:09:50,080 Thomas. Excuse me. 88 00:09:50,080 --> 00:09:59,110 President Trump seemed to indicate a moral equivalence between unite the right participants and peaceful counter protesters from the left, 89 00:09:59,110 --> 00:10:05,110 claiming that there were, quote, very fine people on both sides. 90 00:10:05,110 --> 00:10:13,690 That statement epitomises the divisive rhetoric and deception so central to Trump's political brand. 91 00:10:13,690 --> 00:10:21,070 But when he made those statements, he was specifically commenting on sculpture, on works of art, quote. 92 00:10:21,070 --> 00:10:25,960 So this week, it's Robert E. Lee. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? 93 00:10:25,960 --> 00:10:40,680 And is it Thomas Jefferson? The week after. How do these two separate and distinct events relate? 94 00:10:40,680 --> 00:10:47,750 The years 1776 and 2017 are not typically considered alongside one another, 95 00:10:47,750 --> 00:10:59,680 but the events that occurred in those years seemed to speak across the centuries, iconoclasm, past and unrealised iconoclasm in the present. 96 00:10:59,680 --> 00:11:04,630 In today's talk, I explore recent acts of image destruction in the U.S., 97 00:11:04,630 --> 00:11:12,130 specifically activist responses to civil war monuments representing the Confederate states of America. 98 00:11:12,130 --> 00:11:22,210 One of my core arguments is that this activism is actually a reinterpretation of earlier foundational acts of iconoclasm in American history. 99 00:11:22,210 --> 00:11:26,890 Although I'm not sure if activists are even aware of what happened to King George, 100 00:11:26,890 --> 00:11:33,970 the third activists change the meaning of images and objects by destroying them. 101 00:11:33,970 --> 00:11:43,390 But they also changed the meaning of the act of destruction itself and all in relation to very contemporary social and political concerns. 102 00:11:43,390 --> 00:11:49,290 History is reworked through the iconoclastic gesture. 103 00:11:49,290 --> 00:11:53,430 I'm also interested in how new forms of visual experience, 104 00:11:53,430 --> 00:12:00,770 the result of accelerating digital networks and new media have transformed how iconoclasm functions. 105 00:12:00,770 --> 00:12:06,320 In this sense, I don't want to think only about the standard questions in the monument debates like the 106 00:12:06,320 --> 00:12:11,540 arguments for dismantling monuments as opposed to the arguments for maintaining them. 107 00:12:11,540 --> 00:12:19,320 But also, I want to think about how the culture war has become a digital culture war. 108 00:12:19,320 --> 00:12:23,520 Digital culture transforms the stones of civil war. 109 00:12:23,520 --> 00:12:34,110 The marble monuments, the carved granite, the heavy statues and metal plaques, these weighty things made to be permanent, to seem eternal. 110 00:12:34,110 --> 00:12:41,490 They become something instead ephemeral, instantaneous, fast as light as data. 111 00:12:41,490 --> 00:12:51,700 The weight of monuments melts into air as they turn into digital images free-floating fast, moving everywhere and nowhere at once. 112 00:12:51,700 --> 00:12:56,500 The network transference, both the time and space of monuments. 113 00:12:56,500 --> 00:13:03,610 It collapses distance, bringing something far away and solidly anchored into immediate proximity. 114 00:13:03,610 --> 00:13:07,310 Through the interconnected logic of the interface. 115 00:13:07,310 --> 00:13:15,870 This phenomenon allows confrontations with objects that may have previously been left out of sight, out of mind. 116 00:13:15,870 --> 00:13:24,550 They similarly reduce the effects of time allowing works that had been temporarily vandalised to be permanently reframed. 117 00:13:24,550 --> 00:13:33,790 Online. In considering some of the deeper histories that also more recent digital aspects of this debate, 118 00:13:33,790 --> 00:13:40,090 my hope is to bring together some of the themes from the previous three talks in this series, 119 00:13:40,090 --> 00:13:44,800 specifically the five key hypotheses that I put forth in my first talk, 120 00:13:44,800 --> 00:13:55,720 which you may remember, in which I think the ongoing controversy over monuments supports one that these controversies revolve around analogue things, 121 00:13:55,720 --> 00:14:02,490 objects and works of art, better largely experienced online in the digital sphere. 122 00:14:02,490 --> 00:14:09,540 To that, they reflect a polarisation of positions, positions that cannot be reconciled. 123 00:14:09,540 --> 00:14:17,920 Three, that they are both political but also aesthetic, which I think is very evident in this particular debate. 124 00:14:17,920 --> 00:14:22,030 For that, they are about the present, but also the past. 125 00:14:22,030 --> 00:14:30,210 Also something very evident. And then five, these controversies seem new, but are actually old, as old as 17. 126 00:14:30,210 --> 00:14:36,370 Seventy six. Before proceeding. 127 00:14:36,370 --> 00:14:41,560 Allow me to explain the basics, how Confederate monuments came to be. 128 00:14:41,560 --> 00:14:49,930 According to a landmark study by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, first released in 2016 but updated just months ago. 129 00:14:49,930 --> 00:14:54,680 There are some one thousand seven hundred and forty seven Confederate monuments, 130 00:14:54,680 --> 00:15:02,920 placed names and other symbols still in use in public spaces in the United States. 131 00:15:02,920 --> 00:15:13,210 The report indicates that these include specifically 780 physical monuments, but also various sites named after Confederate figures, 132 00:15:13,210 --> 00:15:23,410 including one hundred three public schools and three colleges, 80 counties and cities and 10 U.S. military bases. 133 00:15:23,410 --> 00:15:30,190 The presence of Confederate monuments and place names also extends far beyond Charlottesville, Virginia. 134 00:15:30,190 --> 00:15:37,330 Every state of the former Confederacy has this legacy, but so too do many states that were never part of the Union. 135 00:15:37,330 --> 00:15:44,560 We're not even part of the United States. California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico. 136 00:15:44,560 --> 00:15:49,670 South Dakota. Iowa, Pennsylvania and New York. 137 00:15:49,670 --> 00:15:54,830 The American preoccupation with visualising the past in stone and metal. 138 00:15:54,830 --> 00:15:58,600 So an idealised past. A sanitised past. 139 00:15:58,600 --> 00:16:00,920 A pass in which slavery is hidden. 140 00:16:00,920 --> 00:16:11,030 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. 141 00:16:11,030 --> 00:16:19,760 This preoccupation with creating and affirming such history, even if it is fictitious, is present on an epic scale. 142 00:16:19,760 --> 00:16:23,750 At the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., 143 00:16:23,750 --> 00:16:34,130 the Capitol's National Statuary Hall collection includes two statues selected by each state for a total of one hundred monuments. 144 00:16:34,130 --> 00:16:40,790 The space in the Capitol building was actually once the Hall of Assembly for the House of Representatives. 145 00:16:40,790 --> 00:16:47,630 One chamber of the U.S. government's legislative body painting shows the space used in this way. 146 00:16:47,630 --> 00:16:52,460 In 1864, President Lincoln made it a Statuary Hall. 147 00:16:52,460 --> 00:17:00,200 There are currently eight statues representing high ranking political leaders and military officials from the Confederate States of America, 148 00:17:00,200 --> 00:17:08,270 located in Statuary Hall. This location is a privileged site of authority and power of legitimation. 149 00:17:08,270 --> 00:17:14,540 The presence of those eight statues is therefore especially troubling. 150 00:17:14,540 --> 00:17:20,480 The Southern Poverty Law Centre's report also makes the crucial argument that these historical 151 00:17:20,480 --> 00:17:26,900 markers are not just spatially present in an enormous geographic spread across the country. 152 00:17:26,900 --> 00:17:34,800 They are also temporally disparate. Monuments were built immediately following the end of the Civil War. 153 00:17:34,800 --> 00:17:42,050 But the peak period of construction and naming occurred from about nineteen hundred to 1920. 154 00:17:42,050 --> 00:17:48,580 So this period. This timing is significant. 155 00:17:48,580 --> 00:17:54,850 This was the era of Jim Crow when political and social rights granted to African-Americans were stripped away, 156 00:17:54,850 --> 00:17:58,180 when lynching and extra juridical violence increased, 157 00:17:58,180 --> 00:18:06,850 when racism was institutionalised through laws that disenfranchised African-Americans and resegregated society. 158 00:18:06,850 --> 00:18:17,080 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. 159 00:18:17,080 --> 00:18:26,120 So this period. In the civil rights era, when the reactionary forces upholding Jim Crow were under threat. 160 00:18:26,120 --> 00:18:31,520 These dates indicate that building monuments is not a response to the civil war. 161 00:18:31,520 --> 00:18:43,510 It is a response, a backlash to civil rights. The common defence of Confederate monuments is that removal is equivalent to a racing history, 162 00:18:43,510 --> 00:18:51,670 as if history is a stable, permanent, eternal thing, as if it is as heavy as stone and metal. 163 00:18:51,670 --> 00:18:57,400 But it is important to make completely clear that this history is not stable at all. 164 00:18:57,400 --> 00:19:04,270 The history is not even really about the civil war, despite references to historical figures from the 19th century. 165 00:19:04,270 --> 00:19:10,190 It is a history of institutionalised racism in the 20th century. 166 00:19:10,190 --> 00:19:16,850 Of course, the historical references these Monuments Project are also sanitised and fabricated 167 00:19:16,850 --> 00:19:23,060 versions of the Confederacy without the racism that's attended the Confederacy. 168 00:19:23,060 --> 00:19:28,580 They were also intended to unite Southern whites at the time of their construction 169 00:19:28,580 --> 00:19:34,190 in order to create a united front against the advancement of civil rights. 170 00:19:34,190 --> 00:19:39,080 They therefore purposely obscure the complexity of the Civil War era, 171 00:19:39,080 --> 00:19:49,340 in which many states had considerable numbers of white Americans who defected to the union or who resented and rejected slavery. 172 00:19:49,340 --> 00:19:56,820 That historical truth is a raised, not maintained by the presence of these monuments. 173 00:19:56,820 --> 00:20:02,340 Finally, it is worth mentioning the immediate cause of the backlash against monuments, 174 00:20:02,340 --> 00:20:07,500 this public reckoning was prompted by the murderous rampage of Dylann Roof, 175 00:20:07,500 --> 00:20:18,650 who shot and killed nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in the summer of 2015. 176 00:20:18,650 --> 00:20:26,600 Actually, it was not just Rove's rampage. It was also the digital culture of discover after the massacre. 177 00:20:26,600 --> 00:20:34,820 Roof ran a Web site called The Last Rhodesian, a reference to British imperialist and white supremacist Cecil Rhodes, 178 00:20:34,820 --> 00:20:41,060 who is probably familiar to many of you, in part because of the Rhodes must fall campaign. 179 00:20:41,060 --> 00:20:45,710 Roof posted images with Confederate paraphernalia and weapons. 180 00:20:45,710 --> 00:20:57,750 His use of these symbols online in a digital context prompted the public reckoning of these very old, very analogue monuments. 181 00:20:57,750 --> 00:21:04,980 It is easy to misunderstand the monuments controversy as centres solely on the issue of iconography, 182 00:21:04,980 --> 00:21:14,100 on the symbolic function of monuments that represent either explicitly or implicitly white supremacist ideology. 183 00:21:14,100 --> 00:21:19,840 But the impact of these statues is actually more immediate than iconography. 184 00:21:19,840 --> 00:21:29,650 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. 185 00:21:29,650 --> 00:21:35,930 Robert E. Lee's eyes, rendered in stone and metal, still seem to see. 186 00:21:35,930 --> 00:21:37,100 For this reason, 187 00:21:37,100 --> 00:21:46,790 Confederate monuments were purposely placed in civic spaces where their gaze could fix a public through a panoptic form of visual control. 188 00:21:46,790 --> 00:21:55,220 They function not only to represent a version of history, but also to enact that history again in the present. 189 00:21:55,220 --> 00:22:02,510 Through the visual control of space, they police space, they intimidate. 190 00:22:02,510 --> 00:22:06,980 Many monuments were placed into open squares in front of courthouses, for example, 191 00:22:06,980 --> 00:22:14,440 in spaces that had juridical legitimacy and would have been frequently encountered by the public. 192 00:22:14,440 --> 00:22:21,130 We have talked at length over the past few weeks about the gays and how violence in American history often employed, 193 00:22:21,130 --> 00:22:26,860 looking from watching acts of racial violence, lynching, for example, 194 00:22:26,860 --> 00:22:37,780 or the executions that occurred on scaffold structures in open spaces to the impact of the photographic remains left behind after the act. 195 00:22:37,780 --> 00:22:43,870 These rituals take place for people to see, to watch and then to image. 196 00:22:43,870 --> 00:22:51,630 And continually we imagine through visual culture, monuments are similar. 197 00:22:51,630 --> 00:22:59,920 Their spatial function often also intersected specifically with lynching, which sometimes occurred in their vicinity. 198 00:22:59,920 --> 00:23:07,170 The lynch mob often gathered in the front of courthouses near Confederate monuments. 199 00:23:07,170 --> 00:23:13,230 Perhaps one reason for the public reckoning over monuments is the fact that all of them are now 200 00:23:13,230 --> 00:23:29,140 suddenly ever present watching from the public square of the 21st century from the Internet. 201 00:23:29,140 --> 00:23:33,490 After the statue of King George, the third was destroyed at Bowling Green, 202 00:23:33,490 --> 00:23:45,230 the marble pedestal upon which it had stood was left in place, a purposely empty pedestal, a place holder that signified the absence. 203 00:23:45,230 --> 00:23:48,140 Presence of that statue was tyranny, 204 00:23:48,140 --> 00:23:56,990 but absence signified the new power of an American republic in which authority would be located not in a single figure, 205 00:23:56,990 --> 00:24:01,700 not in the monarchy, but in the people. 206 00:24:01,700 --> 00:24:14,260 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. 207 00:24:14,260 --> 00:24:20,110 Washington had been forced to abandon New York City to British forces at the beginning of the revolution. 208 00:24:20,110 --> 00:24:29,700 Not long after the Declaration of Independence was publicly read aloud and the gilded King George, the third came toppling down. 209 00:24:29,700 --> 00:24:35,970 But now George Washington stands in witness as British troops are forced to flee Manhattan. 210 00:24:35,970 --> 00:24:44,400 Their ships setting sail in the distance. He stands in modest military garb with his horse beside him. 211 00:24:44,400 --> 00:24:49,870 Behind him is the Bowling Green with his empty pedestal. 212 00:24:49,870 --> 00:24:54,820 George Washington functions as a dismantle equestrian statue. 213 00:24:54,820 --> 00:25:02,410 One, George defeated, the other. Triumphant, one icon destroyed, another created. 214 00:25:02,410 --> 00:25:09,340 Informal terms, the painting demonstrates this ironic succession from King George to George Washington. 215 00:25:09,340 --> 00:25:17,950 The pedestal is visible underneath Washington's horse, while the horse and pedestal are at different spatial depths. 216 00:25:17,950 --> 00:25:29,680 The implication is that Washington, having won the war of independence, is the new embodiment of the people now deserving of the empty pedestal. 217 00:25:29,680 --> 00:25:39,950 Numerous images produced in the period reiterated this claim through depictions of the pedestal that once belonged to King George the third. 218 00:25:39,950 --> 00:25:48,730 A print after designed by Charles Buxton from 1798 uses the same play of absence and presence. 219 00:25:48,730 --> 00:25:55,210 Washington stands between obelisks marked liberty and independence on the actual pedestal. 220 00:25:55,210 --> 00:26:00,380 Now inscribed with his name that once belonged to the other George. 221 00:26:00,380 --> 00:26:03,200 He is surrounded by patriotic paraphernalia. 222 00:26:03,200 --> 00:26:11,300 And what might as well be a version of Trumbull's painting behind him depicting British troops on the retreat. 223 00:26:11,300 --> 00:26:23,450 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. 224 00:26:23,450 --> 00:26:32,360 Later, images would keep the mythology of iconoclasm alive in the 19th century, in the decades before the American Civil War. 225 00:26:32,360 --> 00:26:40,130 There were multiple printed excuse me, painted versions, a canvas by German American artists to harness. 226 00:26:40,130 --> 00:26:46,340 Adam Ortal from 1848 shows the mob at night that year. 227 00:26:46,340 --> 00:26:53,690 In 1848, revolutions had erupted in Western Europe, including in Turtle's native Germany, 228 00:26:53,690 --> 00:27:04,040 where Friedrich Vilhelm eventually suppressed revolutionary and Republican forces successfully restoring absolutist imperial rule. 229 00:27:04,040 --> 00:27:12,590 In this context, in Germany, advocating for the revolutionary and Republican cause required a disguised approach, 230 00:27:12,590 --> 00:27:18,110 and the origin myth of the American Republic in that toppled gilt statue was an 231 00:27:18,110 --> 00:27:23,510 appropriate way of embracing revolution in the present through a displaced, 232 00:27:23,510 --> 00:27:30,710 historical and displaced national image of iconoclasm. 233 00:27:30,710 --> 00:27:41,510 Another painting by William W. Walcott of Ohio similarly uses American history to comment on contemporaneous political events. 234 00:27:41,510 --> 00:27:52,380 Events of the present. Well, Club made the painting while abroad in Paris just as the second republic began to falter and fall. 235 00:27:52,380 --> 00:28:03,270 Napoleon, the third, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, had already been elected president, but then seised power in an 1851 coup. 236 00:28:03,270 --> 00:28:08,940 By 1852, he had installed himself as Emperor Walcott cut, 237 00:28:08,940 --> 00:28:17,490 an impassioned supporter of the Republican cause and of Democratic rule, could not paint current events while living in Paris. 238 00:28:17,490 --> 00:28:22,560 But he could paint them by proxy through reference to the American context, 239 00:28:22,560 --> 00:28:30,620 through reference to George the third, who is now refigured as Napoleon the third. 240 00:28:30,620 --> 00:28:38,360 What is fascinating about these images is the way they reclaimed and we signify iconoclasm from decades ago, 241 00:28:38,360 --> 00:28:45,410 appropriating the destruction of one icon to comment on the hoped for destruction of another. 242 00:28:45,410 --> 00:28:52,740 They use the past to create very precise and contemporary political meanings in their present. 243 00:28:52,740 --> 00:28:59,160 Of course, the context to which both Ortal and Walcott painted their specific references to France 244 00:28:59,160 --> 00:29:04,440 and Germany were subsequently forgotten and are probably lost for most viewers. 245 00:29:04,440 --> 00:29:12,340 The paintings seem to be simple history paintings depicting the events of 1776. 246 00:29:12,340 --> 00:29:20,050 What is fascinating, of course, is that this same procedure, reclaiming iconoclasm and re signifying it, 247 00:29:20,050 --> 00:29:30,450 replays yet again with public monuments functioning today as the site for similar responses to contemporaneous political events. 248 00:29:30,450 --> 00:29:34,230 For example, after the Unite the Right rally, 249 00:29:34,230 --> 00:29:44,240 the Charlottesville City Council engaged in a deliberate aesthetic and anti aesthetic gesture, a visual politics of presence and absence. 250 00:29:44,240 --> 00:29:49,040 They cover the statue of Robert E. Lee with a large black tarp. 251 00:29:49,040 --> 00:29:56,990 The result, a bit like a work by Christo and John Claude, changes the meaning of the sculpture by hiding it. 252 00:29:56,990 --> 00:30:04,580 The body of Robert E. Lee is shrouded as if dead, as if the figure deceased is in a body bag. 253 00:30:04,580 --> 00:30:13,450 The effect also creates an empty void, simulating the absence of removal without removing anything at all. 254 00:30:13,450 --> 00:30:24,430 Like the pedestal without its statue, the shrouded form signifies to absence. 255 00:30:24,430 --> 00:30:32,020 There are, of course, many strategies activists can use to activate these monuments. 256 00:30:32,020 --> 00:30:44,220 Perhaps the most significant is not removal, not signifying through absence, but vandalism, tagging, splashing with red paint. 257 00:30:44,220 --> 00:30:55,350 This strategy, which seems impulsive and spontaneous, it's just graffiti, after all, actually functions as a way of permanently marking the monuments. 258 00:30:55,350 --> 00:31:02,550 Paint washes away, but the digital image that captures the iconoclastic gesture lives forever. 259 00:31:02,550 --> 00:31:11,700 A Google search course for a specific Confederate monument now brings forth images of their successive desecration over time, 260 00:31:11,700 --> 00:31:18,080 forever framing the work in negative terms as a statement of white supremacy. 261 00:31:18,080 --> 00:31:23,750 Take, for example, a monument from the small city of Reidsville, North Carolina. 262 00:31:23,750 --> 00:31:34,580 The Rockingham County Confederate Monument. A driver asleep at the wheel of his automobile barrelled into the towering stone monument in 2011. 263 00:31:34,580 --> 00:31:40,950 The statue had then stood at the centre of town in a traffic round about. 264 00:31:40,950 --> 00:31:46,140 It toppled over. Breaking into pieces. It could not be repaired. 265 00:31:46,140 --> 00:31:49,890 But a new reconstruction was proposed. 266 00:31:49,890 --> 00:31:56,190 It would be placed not in the traffic roundabout, but in a private cemetery on a plot of land owned by the unit. 267 00:31:56,190 --> 00:32:01,140 United Daughters of the Confederacy, who had commissioned the original statue. 268 00:32:01,140 --> 00:32:09,930 More than 100 years ago, that new monument became an instant target and has been repeatedly vandalised. 269 00:32:09,930 --> 00:32:13,890 These acts of iconoclasm never gained national attention. 270 00:32:13,890 --> 00:32:18,780 This was, after all, before Dylann Roof. Before Black Lives Matter. 271 00:32:18,780 --> 00:32:24,600 Before the contemporary monument wars had exploded across the Internet. 272 00:32:24,600 --> 00:32:34,710 But the images of its destruction persist. Red paint splatter of blood whipped across the pedestal, 273 00:32:34,710 --> 00:32:44,430 metaphorically signifying the blood of slavery on the back of which the Confederacy stood and for which it fought spray paint. 274 00:32:44,430 --> 00:32:52,710 Jim Crow, slavery, KKK. There are countless examples of this phenomenon. 275 00:32:52,710 --> 00:32:59,700 Hundreds of monuments permanently altered by the temporary impermanent effects of spray paint. 276 00:32:59,700 --> 00:33:10,920 This condition is paradoxical. The digital image is typically considered ephemeral and fleeting, but it seems to last forever. 277 00:33:10,920 --> 00:33:18,350 The vandalism conducted spontaneously and washed away remains. 278 00:33:18,350 --> 00:33:28,850 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, 279 00:33:28,850 --> 00:33:39,100 remade in the present. The stones of civil war are not eternal, not dead, but merely canvas for new meanings and new messages. 280 00:33:39,100 --> 00:33:51,560 Their surfaces come to life. Let me bring these many threads together, iconoclasm, old and new. 281 00:33:51,560 --> 00:33:56,360 Past and present with one more example, 282 00:33:56,360 --> 00:34:04,190 a Confederate monument that until recently stood on the campus of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, 283 00:34:04,190 --> 00:34:08,670 made of a stone base that supports a bronze sculpture. 284 00:34:08,670 --> 00:34:19,570 The statue depicts a soldier in the style of the silent sentinel figures without ammunition, their guns at rest. 285 00:34:19,570 --> 00:34:25,420 The style was mass produced and widely appeared in monuments across the country. 286 00:34:25,420 --> 00:34:33,400 The construction of Silent Sam, as he is known, was approved in nineteen oh eight and the monument was dedicated in 1913. 287 00:34:33,400 --> 00:34:42,250 It was, in other words, created not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but at the height of Jim Crow. 288 00:34:42,250 --> 00:34:51,430 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, 289 00:34:51,430 --> 00:34:56,830 make the racial motivation for the construction of the monument very clear. 290 00:34:56,830 --> 00:35:03,160 Quote, The present generation scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the 291 00:35:03,160 --> 00:35:10,030 welfare of the Anglo-Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war. 292 00:35:10,030 --> 00:35:18,540 Their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo-Saxon race in the south, end quote. 293 00:35:18,540 --> 00:35:25,050 That description specifically references the Reconstruction era following the civil war, 294 00:35:25,050 --> 00:35:32,280 when the KKK used terrorism to intimidate African Americans after slavery was abolished. 295 00:35:32,280 --> 00:35:40,320 Extra juridical intimidation was one way to continue to enforce white supremacy in the same speech. 296 00:35:40,320 --> 00:35:49,470 Carr also refers to, quote, horse whipping an African American woman until her skirts hung in shreds because the woman had, 297 00:35:49,470 --> 00:35:54,090 quote, publicly insulted and maligned a southern lady, end quote. 298 00:35:54,090 --> 00:36:05,870 So there are echoes of Emmett Till here. Activists have long targeted silence, Sam, on account of these associations with racism. 299 00:36:05,870 --> 00:36:13,430 Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the monument was vandalised with paint. 300 00:36:13,430 --> 00:36:20,360 In the 1970s, it was the site of demonstrations led by the campus's black student movement in the 1990s. 301 00:36:20,360 --> 00:36:30,320 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. 302 00:36:30,320 --> 00:36:38,990 A graduate student at USC, now a professor named Adam Darby, discovered the transcripts of Julian Cars speech and published excerpts. 303 00:36:38,990 --> 00:36:51,090 The monument then became even more highly charged. Clearly, the statue served as a blank slate for the projection of new meanings. 304 00:36:51,090 --> 00:36:58,410 In 2015, it was vandalised with the words Black Lives Matter, KKK and murderer. 305 00:36:58,410 --> 00:37:02,250 Then it was defaced again with the phrase, Who is Sandra Bland? 306 00:37:02,250 --> 00:37:09,180 A reference to the African-American woman who died in police custody that year in 2016. 307 00:37:09,180 --> 00:37:15,030 A man was arrested for spray painting the monument in 2017. A man beat it with a hammer. 308 00:37:15,030 --> 00:37:20,820 The acts of vandalism accelerated. 309 00:37:20,820 --> 00:37:30,180 In 2018, in the evening of August 20th, a mob of angry students gathered holding placards and posters one, for example. 310 00:37:30,180 --> 00:37:38,670 Honoured victims of racial violence, including, quote, the unarmed black woman beaten by Julian car and quote. 311 00:37:38,670 --> 00:37:46,740 Using ropes. The statue was toppled at nine 20 p.m. Video and photos show students cheering and 312 00:37:46,740 --> 00:37:53,160 attacking the remains of silent Sam and capturing their own act of iconoclasm. 313 00:37:53,160 --> 00:38:01,330 In yet more digital images. The statue was later removed to an undisclosed location. 314 00:38:01,330 --> 00:38:08,340 The stone pedestal, that empty signifier remained until January of this year. 315 00:38:08,340 --> 00:38:14,700 The debate over Silent Sam is by no means over the statue or what is left of it. 316 00:38:14,700 --> 00:38:21,780 Continues to hang in legal peril, its future uncertain. 317 00:38:21,780 --> 00:38:31,640 The story of silent Sam recalls a series of dates. 1776 on the Bowling Green. 318 00:38:31,640 --> 00:38:42,700 1848 in a painting by Yohannes, Adam Wortzel. 1854 in the painting of William Walcott. 319 00:38:42,700 --> 00:38:52,630 2018 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. To me, this action in twenty eighteen is the most American of actions. 320 00:38:52,630 --> 00:38:58,120 One firmly rooted in actual history. Perhaps more historical than silence, 321 00:38:58,120 --> 00:39:05,740 Sam ever really was both in the persistent American practise of changing the meaning of monuments through 322 00:39:05,740 --> 00:39:18,910 iconoclasm and also changing the meaning of iconoclasm itself by activating its contemporary resonance. 323 00:39:18,910 --> 00:39:24,520 I want to conclude this talk and this series as a whole with one final image, 324 00:39:24,520 --> 00:39:31,180 one that brings together some of the irreconcilable tensions I have discussed. 325 00:39:31,180 --> 00:39:39,190 The image is actually one I selected for use in the promotion of the series online on Oxfords history of our Web site, 326 00:39:39,190 --> 00:39:44,440 a work of art created by an artist run political action committee, or PAC. 327 00:39:44,440 --> 00:39:54,880 The same type of organisation that finances partisan political advertising during election campaigns in the U.S. called for freedoms. 328 00:39:54,880 --> 00:40:02,650 The group aims to use the infrastructure of American political campaigning to inspire civic debate. 329 00:40:02,650 --> 00:40:10,300 Their billboard was placed in rural Mississippi in 2016 and an empty strip of land near the highway. 330 00:40:10,300 --> 00:40:20,190 It depicts a famous photograph of civil rights activists led by John Lewis, now a congressman crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. 331 00:40:20,190 --> 00:40:25,240 A Sunday, March seven, 1965, the peaceful, 332 00:40:25,240 --> 00:40:35,260 non-violent demonstrators were confronted by a wall of Alabama state troopers who ordered the activists to disperse when they did not. 333 00:40:35,260 --> 00:40:40,260 The troopers began attacking them with clubs and tear gas. 334 00:40:40,260 --> 00:40:51,100 The brutality was captured on televised images, images that ricocheted across the country, beamed into living rooms on TV. 335 00:40:51,100 --> 00:40:58,510 An image by photojournalist Spider Martin became one of the most compelling images of the civil rights movement. 336 00:40:58,510 --> 00:41:03,940 The event. Was known as Bloody Sunday. 337 00:41:03,940 --> 00:41:12,370 It led directly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson just over a week later. 338 00:41:12,370 --> 00:41:17,720 The images propelled actual social and political change. 339 00:41:17,720 --> 00:41:29,400 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. 340 00:41:29,400 --> 00:41:35,310 I hope this series of talks has made very clear that such a phrase is really a lie. 341 00:41:35,310 --> 00:41:43,600 When exactly was America great? This series of talks has demonstrated that the US was founded on violence, 342 00:41:43,600 --> 00:41:51,640 on using violence against indigenous Americans, black Americans, American immigrants and refugees. 343 00:41:51,640 --> 00:41:59,230 The clash of text and image in the Four Freedoms billboard is thus satirical and ironic. 344 00:41:59,230 --> 00:42:07,210 It uses some of the techniques we have encountered before, whether in the imagery decolonise this place used at the Whitney, 345 00:42:07,210 --> 00:42:18,970 which repeated Andy Warhol canvases with canisters of tear gas or in the references to the playground in Sam Durand's scaffold. 346 00:42:18,970 --> 00:42:24,820 The billboards, satire and irony was lost on some. 347 00:42:24,820 --> 00:42:34,770 It soon created its own culture war. The governor of Mississippi, a Republican, declared that the billboard had to be removed, censored. 348 00:42:34,770 --> 00:42:39,350 But some on the progressive left called for the very same thing. 349 00:42:39,350 --> 00:42:46,010 They did not see the work as satirical or ironic, but as a sincere call for white supremacy. 350 00:42:46,010 --> 00:42:56,000 For the time before the march on Selma, before Bloody Sunday, before the Voting Voting Rights Act. 351 00:42:56,000 --> 00:42:59,960 Billboards are by definition, almost dumb. 352 00:42:59,960 --> 00:43:05,540 Obvious, straightforward, but the work managed to provide conflicting meanings. 353 00:43:05,540 --> 00:43:12,060 It's visual and textual messages not aligned. But in contrast. 354 00:43:12,060 --> 00:43:22,810 The billboard functions like a meme, and the debate also played out online on Twitter with angry denouncements from all political perspectives. 355 00:43:22,810 --> 00:43:31,780 It is a fitting work with which to end this lecture series because it represents the confusing, contradictory tensions that define our present moment. 356 00:43:31,780 --> 00:43:39,340 The work is ironic, but also maybe seen as sincere analogue, but also digital. 357 00:43:39,340 --> 00:43:43,810 An image of the past, but also the present. 358 00:43:43,810 --> 00:43:52,000 It brings together the many clashes and confrontations that characterise the contemporary contest of images. 359 00:43:52,000 --> 00:43:52,353 Thank you.