Why smashing statues can be the sweetest revenge
|
Version 0 of 1. The best thing about statues is smashing them. This is true at least for crowds desperate to get some revenge on a figurehead of authority. All over the world and throughout recorded time, attacking statues has proved an eloquent political gesture. In the 21st century, this ancient anti-art is alive and well. This weekend, crowds in Kiev who want closer links between Ukraine and the EU pulled down a statue of Lenin and attacked it with mallets. They could scarcely have picked a better symbol of the Russian overlords they fear – not least because so many statues of Lenin, Stalin and Marx across central and eastern Europe were demolished when Communism fell. The very survival of Lenin's public statue in Kiev, up to now, seems a bit of a tell about the Ukraine government's desire to keep Russia happy at all costs. Now this Lenin has belatedly joined all the other fallen Communist statues, not to mention statues of the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi that all came crashing down when the power they symbolised fell away. There is a fatal attraction that draws angry crowds to bronze and marble figures of rulers. Most of the time, in the modern world, such statues go not only unmolested but unnoticed – no one pays much attention, destructive or otherwise, to the Queen Victorias that can be found in most British cities. Yet the moment authority starts to crumble, statues offer themselves to be attacked. They are so symbolic, and yet so still and passive. They are sitting ducks. This goes to the very heart of what a statue is. No other kind of art is directly associated with power in quite the same way. The first public statues were set up in early towns in the prehistoric Levant and represented ancestors. Maybe even then they were more feared than loved. By the time of the first great civilisations in Mesopotamia and Egypt there was an unequivocal connection between statues and power. Colossal statues of rulers including Rameses the Great and, later, Constantine were put up to awe the people. To be a king was to be sculpted. Because statues are power, they cry out for acts of <em>lèse-majesté</em>. Even ancient Egyptian statues got vandalised, while Roman emperors often had their marble faces broken by Christians. Artistic excellence is no defence. In 16th-century Bologna a crowd pulled down a statue of the hated Pope Julius II and melted it down to make a cannon – no one cared that it happened to be a masterpiece by Michelangelo. Kiev's Lenin has joined a great tradition of statues that became icons of misrule. The only problem is that future protests may not be so lucky in their targets. In democratic societies and in an age of conceptual art, monumental figures of rulers are erected less and less. What will the revolutions of the future be able to trash that matches the eloquence of a tumbling Lenin? Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |