Thank you for that lovely introduction and thank you all for joining this afternoon.
I know it's afternoon in the UK, morning here in the US.
The title of my talk, Monuments and Replica is me trying to figure out a piece of this larger project.
So I'll start by making a few confessions.
But before I do that, I do want to acknowledge that I'm speaking from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Our board of trustees has recently adopted a land acknowledgement and after many, many years,
we are all opening our talks and our public presentations with this acknowledgement.
Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Giovana, the the nation,
the lower members of the Confederacy and the Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University,
New York State and the United States of America. I'm very pleased to be able to include this land acknowledgement.
I'm also very pleased to say that folks in the history department, of which I'm a member,
have been doing some fantastic work thinking about land grant institutions and the dispossession of indigenous populations.
So let me start on the talk and make some confessions.
I'm not an intellectual historian by training, but I read intellectual histories with some excitement.
I'm very much a historian of gender and I'm very deeply engaged with feminist theory.
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.
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.
And she was a member of the School of Critical Theory a few summers ago here in Ithaca.
My second confession, and I think it's a standard confession, which is that I had bigger ambitions for my book,
Gentlemanly Terrorists, and I had planned to hold a second part of the book,
which was about following the commemorations of the radical movements that I have written about in the history of militant nationalism.
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.
And so the book that you have seen maybe is only half the book I had intended to write.
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.
I'm sure you all have statute fatigue as I do so when I give this paper in part,
I've read some of that work, but I really look forward to your conversations.
Finally, the third confession, and that is that the paper, not surprisingly,
is a part of a new project that brings me to materials that I haven't worked with before.
I'm trying on a number of ideas and I'm thinking through in particular scholarship in the history of art,
in the history of archaeology, which all has brought me closer to the history of things.
These are all fields in which I wasn't trained.
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,
one of the things that I'll say is that we've done a lot of talking about how the ideas float around.
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.
I'll start with the slide. That's the cover image of gentlemanly terrorists.
And it's a lithograph that was printed very widely in the 1940s.
Hundreds of these images were printed during the Quit India movement over a generation after your own boss's death.
They publicised Bengal's revolutionary pasts at a time when the future was an open question during could India, as we all know,
the Communist Party of India did not put India,
but it planned for a revolutionary future and it sought recruits through the circulation of images like this.
There are many such printed images and I'll share a few of them.
They appear in crispiness. Book photos of the gods.
You can see here in all of these images could be from preparing for his execution for the attempted assassination of a district magistrate.
There's some images that nearly all of them have this kind of thing.
They're all on a scaffolding or on a pedestal. The one on the right shows them in a courthouse.
The presence of police and judicial authorities are replicated in the various versions of these image of these images and an all of them.
One of the things I'll just point out is he's shown in shorts and a shirt to show how young he is.
The mass replication of printed material is, of course, a hallmark of modernity,
one in which the ability to print many copies and circulate them generated new forms of
belonging and affect Walter Benjamin's important message from nineteen thirty five.
The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction is a starting point for me.
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.
Benjamin's essay draws from an essay by Elway's Riegle called The Modern Sculpted Monuments, in which Riegle defined artistic and historic value.
Written in nineteen five Recal considered the emergence of heritage preservation as it aligned with a rage for installing monuments.
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.
Transformed into the statue of kuduro that is on the right,
and in particular I was intrigued by how the man or the young man who is standing
on scaffolding is transformed into this man on the right on a pedestal.
I was curious in particular about the choices that the sculptor made in sculpting the bronze statue on the right.
You can also see that there's a difference in the clothing, a shift from the young man wearing shorts to the young man.
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.
I started to find this out when I was in the blast in India in twenty eighteen.
I obviously hope to go back and find out more so along the process of doing this research.
I've kind of come upon three surprises and I'll tell you what they are.
I've made three confessions. I'll tell you the three surprises amongst them.
The first is the prevalence of the replica and public sculptures, which I'll get to in the second half of the talk today.
Another surprise is that monuments, even as they're intended to showcase stability, authority and permanence, are moved.
And the final surprise, which is the least developed part of the talk today.
But I'm happy to to kind of riff on it in the Q&A, but I'll market.
So you know, where I'm heading is the temporal alignment between modern and colonial and postmodern with post-colonial.
And in particular,
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.
She notes that the emergence of postmodern and contemporary art in France is almost entirely disengaged from decolonisation.
I will do justice to work today, but I want to mark it as an important formation.
The book project begins by marking the chronological alignments between the history of Britain and the history of the British Empire,
the establishment of the Royal Academy in Britain coincided and gave rise to what many have called statue mania.
The period between the Napoleonic Wars and the start of the First World War is a moment when hundreds
of statues of imperial military monarchical figures are installed in Britain and across the empire.
Most, if not all, of the statues that one might see in central London or central Calcutta or commissions.
They're paid for by public subscriptions as a way to show the loyalty of the donors and the support for the empire.
And nearly all of the artists were members of the Royal Academy.
The statues are installed a colonised India as examples of public art that's authentically
British possessing the type of aura Benyamin and others defined as important features.
Art is displayed in modern life. In the case of the monuments installed on the Indian subcontinent during the centuries of British occupation,
installing monuments became a way of permanently marking British territory.
There's a number of books that have addressed this and have just put up some covers to kind of talk to them,
not with any deep engagement, but with some reference points,
the dramatic increase in mutely monuments, as Nina Rajagopalan and say childre shown, materialised the trauma suffered by British colonisers.
Mutiny commemorations brought in British tourists to India so that they could experience the trauma of eighteen fifty seven.
And of course, this served as an alibi for the expansion of Empire, as Rajagopalan writes, and a challenge to Walter Benjamin.
She writes, quote, Indeed,
it was the technology of reproduction that converted Mutiny's sites from objects with mere use value to monuments of historic value.
And here she's talking about the ways that mutiny monuments are endlessly photographed, filmed and shown to audiences across the empire.
Thank you. Through the scholarship on colonial India, we know that the birth of photography and the mass reproduction of lithographs generated forms
of popular culture that were able to bypass colonial censors and restrictions and of course,
goddess of the nation is emblematic of that, as is the work of any.
I would also refer you to the digital collections of the test for her website.
The statue, however, because of its monumental size, is presumed the opposite of the lithographs.
It's not mass produced and the materials that are often used, marble or bronze, are meant to be durable and long lasting.
We can agree that the empire was built by a paper reality. It was also built in bronze and marble.
I'll be talking today about the statues that are called quote unquote, life sized.
They're actually larger than life, often eight to ten feet tall, taller than the ordinary human.
They're size projects, a territorial occupation, one that presents the empire as immovable.
The scale of what art historians have called portrait statues differs from busts of which there are many,
as Benjamin noted in the essay that he wrote, the mechanical reproduction quote,
he writes, It's easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here or there than to exhibit
the statue of a divinity that has a fixed place in the interior of a temple.
You may recall that Benjamin's essay marks a shift from the religious to the secular,
a change from the idea of sculpture or painting as one central to religious ritual.
But in the modern era, seen as an aesthetic object that is stripped of religious purpose,
his anxiety about replication is directed to photography and film, which he fears amplifies the secular project in a fascist way.
And we can talk more about that. Even as he notes, it's some form of replication has always existed in art.
We might note that the replica exists as a form of education,
replicas of the body and anatomy classes or features of architecture and archaeology classes.
If you work in the British Library and I hope many of you know what I'm talking about, you may recognise this bust.
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.
This is Henry Colebrooke. You can look him up. It's a replica of the bus sculpted by Francis CHANTREY.
This bust is located by the toilets that are outside the Asia Pacific and Africa collections and has several examples,
including one in the Royal Asia Society.
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.
The placement of these statues is coupled with the building of colonial cities.
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.
And I'll just show you the statue of Edward the 7th, which is sculpted by Thomas Froch here in this image,
it's being unveiled and you can see the veil on the right. I'll say a little bit more about that.
This comes from the photograph album of the Prince of Wales in the Royal Tour of India in nineteen twenty one twenty two,
moving a seemingly immovable object from London to Calcutta, showing how colonial resources,
shipping and transport, as well as the cost of commissioning an artist with payment of the requisite materials,
were used to establish political authority more than a flag and less than a building.
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.
Rather than preserving the old, we were now marking history by putting up new monuments.
You will be surprised to hear that there's a surge of monuments not just after eighteen fifty seven,
but another after Queen Victoria dies in 1991 and then again in the 1980s when I did
research in India and I've done research in Calcutta on and off for many years,
people told me that I should keep an eye out for the bronze statue and it took me a long time to find it.
But here is the statue. It's mounted on a tall plinth about 10 feet high.
It's located in a roundabout and it's actually quite difficult to find.
What I learnt is that the statue was installed in nineteen seventy two and about the twenty fifth anniversary of Indian independence,
which occurred shortly after the war, the end of the war with Pakistan.
The statue itself was commissioned in nineteen sixty nine.
But when the statue is unveiled, it commemorated India's alliance and solidarity with Bangladesh.
Cuvier himself is born in Bangladesh.
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.
By the time it's unveiled, it has a different meaning.
What I learnt as I researched the statue was that it had replaced another statue and that statue is this statue of Lord Upland,
Governor-General of India, from eighteen thirty six to 18, forty two sculpted by Henry Weeks, professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy.
The statue was installed in eighteen forty eight shortly after it left India to return to England.
Some of you will recall that Eden had managed a disastrous intervention in Afghanistan during his term,
is commemorated for his service in India a little less by the time by now.
For some of you, Henry Weeks or the name of Henry, we should ring a bell.
He's also the sculptor who made the statues at the Oxford Martyrs Memorial that was designed by George Gilbert Scott.
Laura Aukland here on the right had never been to New Zealand in his lifetime, even though the capital city was named after him.
You see him donning scholar's robe in the city centre, modestly at street level without a pedestrian pedestal.
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.
This is an image of pan coloured photograph from eighteen fifty one that showed its placement outside Eden Gardens.
The two statues share very little, except that they're both in bronze.
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.
I want to get away from the idea that the kuduro statue replicated Auckland, but rather,
I want to suggest that Auckland was a replication of the ancient statues that preceded him.
The idea that Indian rulers were keen to replace statues of colonial rulers seems to have been a consistent fear.
In the 1950s and 1960s, some figures actively promoted not the figures themselves,
but their followers promoted the installation of statues to replace those who existed before.
That gave you a glimpse of this statue, but I'll share it with you now.
This is a statue of Shivashankar boss on the left and James Yttrium on the right.
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.
If you don't remember who James Bertram is, you know that there are lots of city streets named after him.
He was resident in lockdown. Eighteen fifty four actively involved in the annexation of art and then suppressing the eighteen fifty seven, Muttley.
Although we're reading a great deal about iconoclasm against colonial statues, relatively few statues were destroyed when the British left India.
Most were moved to another location or gathered in museums.
When the Calcutta Municipal Corporation invited the city of Auckland to carve the statue away.
A corporate donation from the New Zealand insurance company made the reinstallation possible in nineteen sixty nine.
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.
What's interesting is that it involves some kind of private philanthropic donation.
So even though these are public statues in the public, they're always funded by private donations.
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.
It, too, is moved to Toronto in Queens Park.
Reflecting on the 19th century, a century in which collecting and classifying evidence of the past was widely embraced, always regal,
defined the modern cult of monuments as a range of values attached to material objects,
art value, historical value, use value, and to that, he added commemorative value.
Distinguishing between those who accepted the decay of old buildings against those who advocated preservation and restoration,
Riegle specified that a growing commitment to preservation invested many objects, even those that were dilapidated or outdated, with new meanings.
As the century ended, the conceit of the modern era was that all types of historical evidence,
old or not, were to be maintained, restored and archived rather than lost to the past.
And of course, this speaks to certain kinds of ambitions that are very much part of the 19th century universal.
As Riegle argues, monuments with, quote, intentional commemorative value aims to preserve a moment in the consciousness
of later generations and therefore to remain alive and present in perpetuity,
close quote. In the colonies, monuments were installed to mark Britain's place in India's history.
They were also intended to outlast the British. As Joseph Kerner, the art historian, has written, quote,
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.
It's actually installed at the height of non-cooperation.
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.
More important, it depends on a logic central to Benjamin's logic that reproduction is some kind of loss to authenticity.
So in the next part of the talk, I want to turn to the use of the replica colonial statues.
And before I do that, I want to share in quick succession a few examples not to overwhelm you with evidence,
but to guide you to the next phase of the talk, which is about the replica.
And in particular, I want to focus on the generative nature of the replica and what replicas can do.
So let me show you this statue, which if any of you spend time in London, you may recognise.
This is John Lawrence, also formally viceroy of India. This statue on Waterkloof Place looks like the original.
It, in fact, is a replica that was made after the family of John Lawrence complained about the original the sculpture.
The sculptor Joseph BOEM made a new one from the cast with a different inscription.
And the old one was sent to Lahore, where Lawrence really made his mark.
And, of course, some of his chief commissioner of the Punjab. So this is an image of the original statue.
It was originally placed in Waterloo place, moved to Lahore, and now actually it's been moved to Ireland in nineteen fifty seven.
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.
So ask me about the monument, that monument, if you want to know more.
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.
Lord Clive here on the left and for White Hall on the right in Victoria Memorial.
These statues are put up in 1912 by Lord Curzon after Curzon resigned his position as Viceroy of India.
In spite of some significant opposition, Kurzon raise the funds to commission a statue of Clive by John Tweed.
Although the installation was it was installed, the Clive statue was nonetheless installed outside the Foreign Office in 1916.
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,
showing three historical scenes from Clive's career in India the victory at our cotton seventeen
fifty one victory at plasty and also in seventeen fifty one in the accession to the Wolny.
You'll notice on the right hand side that such a pedestal does not exist.
It was shipped to Calcutta where it was installed in the Victoria Memorial in the nineteen twenties,
one hundred and fifty years after Clive's term in India had ended. There are not the history lessons on the pedestal.
On the right it is a replica made of marble.
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.
One of the things that's interesting about this replica, of course, is that people in Britain needed a history lesson.
People in India might not want to be reminded of that history lesson.
So I'm going to take a breath and pause and I'm going to turn to the next section of
the talk and start by saying this is the part I really don't know anything about,
but become completely invested in contemporary art. And because we've all been away from our libraries of archives,
I've taken this pause to kind of more fully engaged in the ways that contemporary art is talking back to Empire.
It's a secure district, but I'm going to I'm going to walk you through it anyway.
So in June, twenty seventeen, I went to the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis with a group of old friends from graduate school,
we had gathered there for a long weekend. At the end of an academic semester.
We arrived too late to get into the Walker Art Centre, but the sun was setting.
That evening we entered the sculpture garden, which is outside in Minneapolis.
The sculpture garden is a way in which the arts have been supported as being democratic.
And for the people, this democratic purpose is served in many ways.
In the sculpture garden, there's no entry fee, there's no curated path to the space.
And there's also what I would say, art from a range of sculptures.
As we headed toward the sculpture, the bright red cherry on a teaspoon.
This is one of the original pieces of art in the sculpture garden.
I did a double take at the sculpture that is placed further along and you can see it in the distance here.
It was an enormous blue rooster looking regal in size and colour as it looked over the sculpture garden.
I had an intense moment of deja vu. I knew I had seen the sculpture before, but I had never been in Minneapolis later.
I recall that I had seen the Big Blue Rooster in Trafalgar Square one summer when I was doing research at the British Library.
The sculpture had been mounted on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, where it was displayed from July 2013 to February twenty fifteen.
At first I thought it was very strange that a statue of a blue rooster was moved from London to Minneapolis,
from the heart of Empire to the heart of the American Midwest.
Then I learnt that this was a case of two statues and the statue, which is called Hohn in German Cock,
which is its translation in English, had been originally designed for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.
And for those of you who don't know,
the fourth plinth hosts the rotating series of art installations that are specifically commissioned for that space.
The version that was in Minneapolis was a replica, hence the two dates.
Twenty, thirteen and twenty seventeen. My books argument, and I'm imagining this as an epilogue or a final chapter,
is heading toward making a case for contemporary art as an important form of public criticism.
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.
Today, I'll focus on covering afresh, in part because her work allows me to elaborate how her aesthetic and artistic
choices critique the concept of the public statue and the idea of the replica.
The blue statue, when it was originally shown in London,
was unveiled and unveiled here as an important idea by the mayor of London, who was then Boris Johnson.
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.
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.
He makes various kinds of comments about the use of the word cock, which you can watch.
And I'll put it in the chart when I when I finish. Over the last two decades,
the space of the fourth plinth has become a space for temporary commissions
that are overseen by the mayor of London's fourth plinth commissioning group.
The group aims to consider how to remake the space known as the heart of Empire with a rotating series of public sculptures.
It has an imagination of a more inclusive and multicultural public in mind.
And one of the interesting things about Catherine afresh is, of course, she is both German and also an avowed feminist.
She's been described as a sculptor of the female gaze, and she commented that her design was intended to be humorous.
She intended for this to be a double entendre and a counter monument that drew
attention to the masculine and martial forms of the other statues in the square.
The Guardian's review ran under the charge headline Big Blue Cock erected on the fourth plinth.
It noted the sculpture was gleefully feminist, poking fun at the statues of men Nelson George the Fourth and the generals Havelock and Napier.
From Trafalgar Square, the 14 foot tall monument was moved to the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C. on July 20 16, where it is now permanently situated.
What's most important is the sculpture stands on the ground so that an observer can stand feet to feet with it.
The proximity allows the viewer to see the detail on the rooster's features,
which are carefully crafted from fibreglass, to replicate the figures on the real the features of a real rooster.
In these two installations, the experience of seeing the sculpture is transformed.
Oh, geez, I can't. I realised that there was a reason that I was going to show you this clip.
Let me show you what it looks like in Trafalgar Square.
I just saw the artist, Katerina, about our interpretation of this fantastic work that we're about to unveil.
And she said it was a.
Of Spain's. Brings a bit of risk, but also, of course, the cultural just.
Well, I think it's a testament to our sense of freedom, liberty.
But we have here is that this beautiful, beautiful sculpture, which I'm sure about through all.
This beautiful, beautiful sculpture. If you were to Google it in a beautiful time,
you will probably not be able to find it because that search engine would collapse on prime private property on the way.
But in the meantime, feast your eyes saw also this beautiful sculpture.
It is the big blue.
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,
it would crash the search engine and the prime minister might in a few years,
which I think is interesting in these two installations between Trafalgar Square and the statue, the sculpture here in Washington, D.C.,
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.
In this sense, it provokes an older set of questions about aesthetic values,
about the importance of frames to paintings, columns to a building, and one might add, pedestals to sculptures.
One can't pose the question of Paragon a great concept,
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.
And Michael Slyer have noted. And let me just share with you some of the.
Their work as the classicists very polite Michael Skya squire have noted in their
engagement in Derrida's engagement with confirm the idea of the supplement,
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.
In this reading plan, Squire press the idea that no art, particularly ancient classical art, is ever finished.
And here they're very, very interested in the replications of classical art through the two millennia of what is called Western culture,
they draw from the work of a contemporary artist, Anthony Gormley,
to show how sculptures are mounted in different ways and provoke us to think about statues in a new way.
Like Fresh. Antony Gormley has been a part of the fourth plinth commissions, the Blue Rooster.
And I'll just go back just to show you some of other Frisch's sculptures.
The Blue Ridge is one of Russia's largest sculptures and demonstrates how she takes ordinary objects and plays with scale.
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.
And on the right you can see the seeds of the strawberry.
In Benjamin's account, the replica allows us to see things that we might not have seen in film.
It's possible to slow down movements so that we can see the component parts that the human eye might not see.
Quote, Technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself for sculptors.
The model is a way to experiment with technique using a low cost material,
usually plaster fresh uses plaster, casts, a method that's long been deployed in sculpture.
And increasingly, she uses 3-D printing to generate moulds at different sizes.
Her use of 3D painting means that she can scale objects to small, to much larger,
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.
Some casts are preserved so that the bronze statue can be replicated and I want to end with that.
So think about how these casts are being made, a plaster cast to preserve.
They've been used in archaeological studies both to document and to study.
And I'll just show you a statue that Jennifer Trimble has identified.
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.
After the discovery of Pompeii became the classical and the classic image of the female form.
And it became very popular in the art that followed.
Many of these statues were brought back to Europe and became a part of royal collections in the 18th century.
Others remained where they were, and in the 19th century,
archaeologists became especially concerned that these type of artefacts remain exactly where they were.
And instead the plaster cast became the way that you could show people the
statues that existed in the ancient past without actually moving the statues.
As mortgage lending argues in plaster monuments, classic classical forms were used to train archaeologists, classicist art historians.
The copy became a low budget way to train students. And what she writes about is how most major universities have cast collections.
Cornell's does, as does Oxfords, although the collections have been destroyed in some of the major museums in which they existed.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan.
This is the type of collection the Royal Academy sculpture would have trained on before they cast their old sculptures.
And I'll just show you a cast that's in the Pournelle cast collection.
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.
They're also casts of architectural features.
Cash collections made from ancient statues are no longer the way that sculptors learn how to sculpt for someone like Katherine,
the fresh, working contemporary art. The idea of replicating or playing with the classical foundations of sculptural
art has been put aside in favour of reworking models that are on everyday objects.
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.
It's endorsed with statues that really are of two life sized people.
So these people really are between five and a half and six feet tall.
They're looking at their phones and they're positioned in front of the Blue Rooster.
As she noted in an essay, roosters often make a lot of noise, but the chickens rarely notice.
In her liberation, she critiques her own statues as barely drawing any attention.
Her vision is reminiscent of Robert Musso's famous incantation about statues,
quote, There's nothing in the world as invisible as monuments, close quote.
In museums formulation, which was written around the same time as Benjamin's essay Music,
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.
The site of Trafalgar Square was pure genius for the fourth plinth project because it's often the place
that those who want to establish the install celebratory statues want to place their heroic figures.
Gary Young.
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.
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
preservation on the grounds that these are somehow original works of art that cannot be moved.
As we know, monuments are always being moved. That's how they got to the colonies in the first place.
Another argument for preservation has been about the originality of the statues.
And what I want to end with here is that few statues were original or all that authentic.
So I focussed on fresh in part because I really wanted to bring you Trafalgar Square,
and the part that I want to talk about in closing has a longer version of an essay that
I've written for the Royal Historical Institute blog that will go live next week.
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.
It's the same group of followers that proposed the installation of Rhodes at Oriel College and Oxford.
It occurred a generation after roads died and the argument at that point was that roads,
a legacy, was being forgotten for reasons that are unclear from the records.
The Public Works Department resisted having a statue of Rhodes placed in Trafalgar Square.
And instead they suggested that the the people who wanted to donate the funds for it looked elsewhere.
I want to start here with the original statue and original quotes to commemorate Cecil Rhodes,
it's on Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa, and it is described as Cecil Rhodes on a force.
The statue was shown at the Royal Academy in 1994 before it was sent to Cape Town,
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.
The Cape Town installation is flanked by lions. You can see them here on the left.
The Lions are deliberately replicas of those that are at Trafalgar Square.
On the right is a display from November twenty seventeen.
This version is the fourth version of this statue and will be placed at the George Watch Gallery south of London.
So I read these documents a few years ago thinking that there was no statue of Rhodes to London,
which is something that his followers proposed several times from the nineteen thirties into the 1970s.
But it turns out there is a replica of the monument to Rhodes.
It depends on how you would define replica. So here is physical energy in Kensington Gardens.
And rather than being an image to Rhodes, it's an image to the artist George Frederick Wachs,
who used to live a short walk away from Kensington Gardens.
Because it's not marked as an image to Rhodes, it evades the problem the road statue represents in London,
and it allows the public to appreciate the art of the Royal Academy sculptor.
So in closing,
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,
we've become accustomed to thinking of mimicry as a derivative form of expression.
Judith Butler, writing in the same moment as Bob, of course, challenged the idea of derivation,
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.
Butler allowed us to imagine the language of transgender studies and non binary life.
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,
Auckland and Calcutta, Delhi and Toronto, London and Cape Town and, of course, Calcutta.
In its duration, the replicas tied Britain's campaigns for public art and public sculpture to sites that were never public.
In the same way in the colonies, the statues mark a territorial occupation, the firmly established colonial sovereignty.
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.
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.
It's interesting that contemporary artists are subconsciously playing with how statues are mounted.
It's interesting also that Antony Gormley suggested a few weeks ago that the statue of Rhodes should be turned around as a way,
as a low cost way to show that the circumstances have changed and the historical conditions under which Rhodes was installed no longer apply.
Contemporary artists like Ghormley Fresh and Claire Walker are actively creating these sculptural traditions.
And I'll just share the statue of the commission that Carole Walker did.
It's on the right in the turbine hall at Tate Modern.
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.
In closing, I hope we can emerge from the era of statue mania to a new age of public sculpture that is truly public.
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,
as we travel from city to city, which many of us do. I hope that we can encounter big bluebirds everywhere.