Statuemania

Statuemania (noun) is a portmanteau word used for over a century to describe the obsession with erecting statues.

Barbara McLean’s Daphne Akhurst bust

Statuemania is alive and well in Australia. However, Australia’s love of statues is like a gambler who has already lost a fortune but keeps placing bets. Having spent a fortune erecting a memorial, Australia tries to solve more problems by erecting memorials and statues. And consequently, per head of dead or living military personnel, Australia has spent more on war memorials than any other country. The Australian government is spent $140m-plus for the WWI centenary, compared to the British government spending £55m ($94m) Paul Daley reported in The Guardian (15/10/2013). Lest we forget that Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance was the most expensive sculpture commission in the country’s history.

But the multitude of military memorials is just the pointy peak of Australia’s statuemania. More bits of cast bronze are scattered across the country like shrapnel. A statue of Shakespeare in Ballarat, a city that never existed in Shakespeare’s life. A whole street of statues and other memorials along North Terrace in Adelaide; the avenue of heroes, a feature that Melbourne aspired to but could never agree on what road, Swanston Street, Exhibition Street, or St. Kilda Parade.

There is a circle of thirty-two bronze busts on grey concrete plinths outside the Rod Laver Area. One of every person who has won the Australian Tennis Open. The Australian Tennis Hall of Fame is all the work of one woman, Barbara McLean. McLean specialises in making sculpture portraits from photographs. I’d prefer to see one of McLean’s leggy surrealist sculptures than another of her portrait busts, but I can guess which one pays the bills.

Phrenology should not be conducted on these busts because it will reveal nothing. The image of the Australian Tennis Open winner does nothing to our understanding of their place in history. The shape of the skulls of those depicted means nothing but the monied influence of their supporter says everything. What these statues show is political power and how it distorts history. They create the antique relationship to public space where private money can buy a position in a public space forever, preserving a world where money buys respect; the statues of Michael Gudinski (also at Rod Laver Arena), or General Sun Yat Sen in Chinatown, for example.

Why is it a problem? You might be thinking, why aren’t I enjoying all this public art; after all, I am the author of a book on the topic, Sculptures of Melbourne. Sculptors won’t tell you it’s a problem, not while people put money in their pockets. Statuemania keeps foundries and sculptors in business. It preys on the weakness of uninspired, uninformed people who want to do something good. In the last decade, new sculpture foundries have been established in Melbourne to cater to the increased demand.

These statues are “art” in the same way that photographs of bananas in a supermarket advert are “art” as opposed to “copy”. And in the past, statues were serious art, which doesn’t ensure they always will be. That public money is spent on a statue takes away from better public art.

Statues were once exhibitions of technological accomplishment, wealth and power, shock and awe. The technical achievement of casting a giant bronze statue was a public demonstration that the society had highly skilled professionals and the wealth to employ them. Now the technology of making sculptures has been superseded. However, colossal statues are still made as demonstrations of wealth and power. Statue measuring competitions exist because they are erected by patriarchal dicks.

”For more on this topic, read GaryYounge’s “Why Every Single Statue Should Come Down”.

Barbara McLean’s Patrick Rafter bust

Advertisement

Who vandalised the Gandhi statue?

A day after the Mahatma Gandhi statue at the Australian Indian Community Centre in the Melbourne suburb of Rowville was unveiled, someone attempted to behead it with a power tool sometime between 5:30pm on Friday, November 12 and 5:30pm on Saturday, November 13.  For a full report, read SBS or ABC News.

In my extensive research on public sculpture and art crimes, I have looked at almost every report of statues in Australia being stolen or vandalised. So I am aware of the patterns of actions and evidence pointing to motivations.

Each year many bronze sculptures are stolen by scrap metal thieves, but this was not the work of scrap metal thieves. They would have ripped off as much of the statue than the head because they want the weight of scrap metal. Nor was this done by drunken vandals who act impulsively and don’t come equipped with the right tools for the job.

The symbolic action of decapitation is rare and indicates a political or religious aspect to the vandalism. Political vandals are well aware of their own side’s efforts and less aware of the actions of other political views. This can be demonstrated by the right-wing’s confusion in England in 2020 over what statues would be targeted by BLM protesters, leading to right-wingers protecting statues of abolitionists. Political attacks on statues are rare in Australia, and decapitation has only occurred a few times and always by right-wing vandals. (See my blog post about the majority of those incidents.)

Symbolic vandalism of statues in Australia by people with a left-wing anti-colonial political agenda, such as those against Captain Cook, used paint or, in the case of Stephen Langford’s ‘damage’ to Governor Macquarie statue with paper and water-soluble craft glue. These symbolic vandalism is preceded by public campaigns for the statue’s removal; petitioning to remove statues to people who have committed genocide and massacred Indigenous people. When, in other countries, the left-wing has torn down statues, it has been done in public view by a crowd and media as the point is to remove a symbol.

Some people have suggested Khalistan supporters (over the Indian Farmers Protest andSikh separatism), as identical statues in Davis, California and one in Washington DC were also damaged. See reports by the Hindu America Foundation. There have been recent demonstrations supporting Khalistani in Melbourne. However, as no Khalistani flags were displayed at the Gandhi statue, as was done in Washington, and there has been no other propaganda from the vandals. So if it were done by Khalistan supporters, they were incompetent.

I rather suspect right-wing Australian vandals because of the symbolic decapitation, the ambiguity of the message and the choice of target. The vandals are likely to be the same right-wingers who engage a farcical version of their perception of the left, like the anti-vaxxers using the pro-abortion “my body my choice” slogan. Ambiguity and incoherence are current right-wing strategies because it disrupts the discourse and their masks objectives. So I conclude that the attempted beheading of Gandhi is most likely an Australian right-wing response to a symbol of anti-colonialism, peace and non-violence.

Khalistan demonstration in Melbourne Dec 2020

Statue Wars 2020

The statues are falling so fast. In response to the Black Lives Matter movement statues to racists, slavers and corrupt cops have been removed around the world. It reminds me of the end of the Soviet Union. Statues are being painted, vandalised, removed or pulled down around the world. In the USA it is Christopher Columbus and Confederate generals, in Belgium Leopold II, in England Edward Colston… the list goes on.

Sir John Tweed, Captain Cook, 1914

However, in Australia, no statue has been removed. Not that there aren’t plenty of memorials to racist colonials around. In October 1991 Gary Foley and Robbie Thorpe put the statue of John Batman in Melbourne on trial (developers have since removed that statue so the area could be redeveloped). In 2017 I wrote about the Statue Wars, in 2019 I wrote about the campaign to remove the statue of William Wentworth from Sydney University. Still, I never expected that there would be so much interest in public sculpture.

Public art has always been part of a culture war. So it is not surprising that public art continues to be a cultural battlefield. Before the twentieth century, the purpose of public art was to support the authorities. Defacement was an official practice in the Roman Empire before it came into common, popular use, faces were officially removed from monuments when they fell out of Imperial favour.

I’m reminded of the destruction of the Vendôme column, a monument to Napoleon, that was pulled down in 1871 during the Paris Commune. And that the French Realist artist, Gustave Courbet maintained, in his defence, that he had only called for it to be dismantled and displayed for educational value.

The statue wars have been going on in Australia for a long time, a symbolic battlefield for displaying Australia’s cultural divides. And conservatives are not above vandalising and removing statues and other public sculptures. In the 1980s, people saw the internationalism abstract public art as a cultural battlefield. Consider the year-long controversy over Ron Robertson-Swann’s Vault which was known at the time by the racist phrase: “the Yellow Peril”. And there are also Australia’s most vandalised sculptures: Yagan and Liz and Phil by the Lake. 

Now the cultural battle has switched to the removal of figurative public art representing and glorifying colonialism and other racism. A change in attitude towards public monuments is sweeping the world. A change of symbols of the collective consciousness is an indication of a shift in consciousness. The fall of statues is both a symbolic and real change in the way that public space is seen.

It raises many questions for me. Why should the public space be some triumphal version of colonial history excused with the dubious claim that it is educational? Why do past generations get to dictate what the future will look like by erecting statues? And when will Australia start to change? Is conservative Australia is too powerful, and too deeply in denial, to allow even a symbolic gesture?

Dishonouring the memory

Public statues are about honouring the person portrayed, especially when they are larger than life-sized. There are no public portrait statues created of people who it was not intended to honour. This is because the tradition of portrait sculpture started with the depiction of Ancient Greek gods, demigods and heroes.

The campaign, “Wentworth Must Fall”, at Sydney University to remove the statue of William Charles Wentworth from the Great Hall and rename the Wentworth building is based on the Oxford University “Rhodes Must Fall”
campaign and other campaigns for statue removal that are known collectively as the Statue Wars (see my post Statue Wars 2017).

Removing a sculpture or burning of an effigy is not revising history — it is a symbol of regime change. It is about moving from colonial to post-colonial. The changes in public statues, place names and other symbols is part of post-colonialism. And the question that Sydney University students are asking their university in this campaign is what are they doing to decolonize. Leaving a public portrait statue of a person who is no longer honoured distorts the historical record by implying that the person is still honoured.

It is traditional to burn the effigies of hated figures and remove statues of them. Often when a statue is removed it is destroyed because the people removing it hate the person it represents. This doesn’t have to the case and the statue can be stored, archived, and exhibited in contexts that do not honour the person portrayed (for example in an exhibition of the work of the sculptor who made it).

The statue of Wentworth was made by Pietro Tenerani, a sculptor based in Rome and a student of the Danish neo-classical sculptor Thorvaldsen. During his career Tenerani produced work to order for the Catholic church and nationalists around the world — from a statue of Simon Bolivar for Bogota to a statue of Ferdinand II of Naples for Messina. His portrayal of Wentworth as an orator is more creative than accurate. When the statue was made Wentworth was in his sixties but is portrayed as a younger man. Wentworth himself was not a supporter of the statue. He believed that the funds could have been better spent.

Regardless of the details of Wentworth’s life his statue was and always will be a colonial symbol. The inauguration of the Wentworth statue was an imperial event (as reported in Empire p.5 24 June 1862). Before its unveiling the statue was covered with a flag and the band playing God Save the King several times. Australian nationalists are keen to cement their claims with statues of colonial heroes and post-colonialism is heavily resisted. The current government worships Captain Cook as a demigod of imperial colonisation, worthy of a multi-million dollar memorial.

It is the plinth or pedestal that is the crucial element in the hero worship of these statues. Lying on its side without its plinth statues of Stalin or Felix Dzerzhinsky are inoffensive. If the statue of Wentworth was placed in a pit (maybe with a glass roof so that people could walk over it) it would have a very different meaning.