Public Art and the Constitution of Social Meaning

Art has many functions, only some of which can be reduced to learning to appreciate standard aesthetic criteria of beauty and form. Art is, among other things, both the terrain of, and often a weapon in, the culture wars that course through societies. This is, of course, especially true of public art—the art chosen self-consciously by public institutions to symbolize the public order and to inculcate in its viewers appropriate attitudes toward that order. Although occasional museum curators may devote themselves to "art for art's sake," I think it fair to say that this concept makes no sense to anyone concerned with the art that is found in those spaces that are most truly "public" in a political sense, such as the space surrounding capitol buildings, city halls, national cemeteries, and the like. Art placed within those spaces is almost always the product of some instrumental purpose outside the domain of pure aesthetics, and one's analysis (or response) to such art will inevitably be influenced by knowledge about its topical subject and the political resonance that surrounds it. One might, I suppose, deny the honorific "art" to such creations, but I am not sure what purpose that denial would serve, especially given that great museums all over the world are filled with objects whose original purpose was to serve political ends and whose formal aesthetic merits may sometimes be questionable.

As already noted, I am interested primarily in Southern cities and their use of public space. I thus begin with Richmond, Virginia, and its aptly named Monument Avenue, one of its principal thoroughfares. It gains its name from the fact that over many blocks one sees impressive statues of Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America, and three of his most prominent generals, J. E. B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and, of course, Robert E. Lee. A final statue memorializes Matthew Fontaine Maury, "the father of modern oceanography" who resigned his commission in the United States Navy to command, albeit from the shore (because of an injury), the naval forces of the Confederacy.

It perhaps goes without saying that there is no memorial to Abraham Lincoln or to Ulysses S. Grant on Monument Avenue or, so far as I know, elsewhere in Richmond. Michael Kammen laconically notes that a 1902 effort by some Confederate veterans to erect a memorial to Grant in Richmond foundered after receiving only sixteen dollars! And consider this outraged response by President Lyon G. Tyler of William and Mary to a 1908 proposal to erect a statue to Lincoln:

To ask the South to put a monument to Lincoln, who represents Northern invasion of the homes and firesides of the South, would be as absurd as if I were to ask the North to put up a monument to Jefferson Davis.... I do not care to force [Davis's] memory upon a people with whom he is not identified. In the same way, I am sure that the South can never be brought to regard Mr. Lincoln in any other political light than that in which Mr. Davis is regarded by the North—as the champion of a section.

Although one might be forgiven the surmise that Lee and Davis are unmemorialized in any Northern city, a monument to Lee was erected at the Gettysburg battle-field in 1917, upon the initial sponsorship of Virginia and Pennsylvania in 1903, just as a monument to the Confederate dead had been unveiled at Arlington National Cemetery in 1914. These were scarcely uncontroversial. Edward Linenthal notes an 1887 vote by the national encampment of posts of the Grand Army of the Republic "that no local post should support 'erection of monuments in honor of men who distinguished themselves by their services in the cause of treason and rebellion,'" and the G.A.R. successfully blocked Virginia's attempt to place Lee in the statuary hall of the United States Capitol. For better or worse, such passions had presumably dissipated thirty years later, as charges of "treason and rebellion" were forgotten and replaced by new narratives of the courage and valor displayed by adherents of the Lost Cause now joined together with their former opponents in an ever-more-truly United States.

The most notable tribute to Lincoln is obviously found some 120 miles north of Richmond, in Washington, D.C. The Lincoln Memorial is the central temple of the American civil religion, though smaller memorials to the sixteenth President dot especially the Northern and Midwestern landscape. One can, of course, find jointly shared heroes of the two cultures, the most obvious one being George Washington, venerated both in Richmond and the city that bears his name. (Though recall that the current New Orleans school board refuses to honor Washington at all, given his status as a slaveholder.) Consider, however, the fact that the great obelisk called the Washington Monument is surrounded by American flags and is clearly meant to celebrate Washington the national liberator, the founding father of a new Union, not Washington the Virginian. One doubts that this is altogether true of the Houdon statue of Washington in Richmond, whose local admirers might want us to believe that Washington, like Robert E. Lee, would have given priority to his Virginia identity over his national one had the two ever emerged sharply in conflict in his own lifetime. After all, Washington had given priority to his parochial American identity against wider loyalties to the Great Britain that claimed sovereign authority over its colonies.

Moving farther south, to Columbia, South Carolina, one can see not only civil statuary reminiscent of Richmond's (though nowhere so grandly displayed as on Monument Avenue), but also, waving over the state capitols (though under the American flag), the battle flag of the Confederate States of America to which South Carolina, like Virginia, proudly belonged (or, depending on one's theory, attempted to belong) between 1861-65. This flag, the "Southern Cross," is commonly, though incorrectly referred to as the "Stars and Bars," which properly refers to the "official" flag of the Confederate States of America, which consisted of three stripes—two red separated by a white — and a circle of seven stars in the upper corner. Most Americans, one suspects, could not identify this official flag, whereas few indeed, whatever their regional background, could fail to identify the battle flag. This no doubt helps to explain why the state flags of Georgia and Mississippi explicitly incorporate the battle flag of the Confederacy, rather than the official flag, into their current state flags.

One quite dramatic difference, then, between many Eastern European capitals and those of the present United States is precisely the extent to which memorials to lost (and ostensibly defeated) causes continue to occupy places of public honor. Unlike the displaced statues of Stalin or Hoxha, the statues on Monument Avenue (and elsewhere throughout the South)...