Memorial sculpture and its discontents: outsourcing Martin Luther King
Folks are not happy about this.
Martin Luther King is about to earn his place on Washington DC’s Mall with a 28-foot high memorial statue that is likely to dwarf those of nearby Lincoln and Jefferson. But that’s not the source of the controversy: the sculptor’s citizenship and the statue’s character is.
Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin was chosen for the honor, immediately raising protests from those who thought the artist for the King memorial should be African-American, or at the very least American. Diversity was not considered a good thing in this particular case.
And now it’s hardly surprising that the model Lei Yixin has unveiled exhibits a certain martial flair, of the Sino-Soviet variety. People who’ve seen it compare it to a “genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries.”
There are small precedents—after all, a statue of Lenin was rescued from destruction and has found a home in Seattle. But that’s Seattle; this is the Mall.
The King I remember was indeed a “monumental” figure—one of the words used to criticize the sculpture. He had a certain bulk, presence, and gravitas. And so I initially thought that perhaps the protesters were overdoing it. But then I did a search and got a look at a model for the proposed sculpture.
Even in the tiny version it looks formidable—and, well, Leninesque:
Here’s a closeup:
Representational art is a tricky proposition these days; it seems somewhat archaic. It used to be that it was easier to express the heroic, but in this more ironic age it hardly does the trick.
But even in earlier times our public sculptures were no strangers to controversy. I recall learning in art class about a sculpture of Washington so widely criticized that it had to be replaced due to public outcry. Commissioned in 1840, it harked back to classical precedents—specifically, a famous statue of Zeus—and portrayed the father of our country as a Roman.
The hints of empire or epiphany weren’t the problems. It was the fact that Washington was half-naked:
Many other statues of King seem to suffer from the same problem as the currently proposed and reviled one. Efforts to make King kindler and gentler fall prey to sculpture’s monumental qualities—after all, it’s large blocks of stone we’re talking about here, and a small plastic clay figure wouldn’t really do, would it? If you Google “sculpture Martin Luther King” under “images” you get this group, and I think you’ll agree that many have a certain Soviet quality.
And so it might just be the nature of the standing stone statue; that’s probably why Lincoln and FDR are portrayed as seated—it humanizes them:
Alas, however, the FDR statue was not without its own controversy. You may recall that advocates for the disabled wanted him to be depicted not only seated but in a wheelchair, despite his own heroic attempts during life to hide all photographic evidence of the fact that he really couldn’t walk. Although they did not succeed, the anti-smokers did: they managed to remove his trademark cigarette (and animal rights advocates did the same for a fox fur that was to originally have been part of a statue of wife Eleanor).
King’s sculptors have no such problems—or do they? Turns out that King was a smoker, too, although according to his driver he was always trying to quit. Perhaps it would soften the image if Lei Yixin were to depict him with cigarette in hand—no, on second thought, best to leave well enough alone.
After perusing the many existent scultures of King, I think the most successful is the one at the University of Texas in Austin. It’s monumental, standing, and dignified, and yet it retains a lively and friendly perspective:
The sculptors? The husband-wife team (aha, diversity of gender!) Jeffrey Varilla and Anna Koh-Varilla, from the exceedingly American city of Chicago. However, it turns out Ms. Koh-Varilla was originally—Korean!
Well, at least she’s from South Korea.
[NOTE: And Ann Althouse has a thing or two to say.]
You picked a good one, U of Texas did, too. Although I am positive the good Doctor wants our best behavior in humanity, because he stood up for better behavior as his lasting memorial.
What were they thinking?
He looks just like the Lenin I saw in Seattle!
I really don’t see the point of all the fuss. If you make a statue of someone, you’re idolizing them in some way. Bringing up connections to “Soviet” looking types neglects the fact that both serve the same purpose. I say make the statue and be done with it.
If you want a “American” statue, that show cases our type of sculpting, put him on a horse, like so:
http://www.philart.net/images/large/washmon.jpg
Now many may say, “MLK didn’t ride a horse!” I say to hell with that. Nothing says liberty like a historical figure riding on a horse with sword in hand.
FDR is seated in a wheelchair in the statue pictured. However, it’s mostly concealed by the draping of his cape. You have to peek around the back of the statue to see a wheel. An appropriate compromise, I suppose, given his both his disability and his strenuous efforts to hide it from the public.
Dallas had, from 1992 up to last year, it’s own Lenin statue which a citizen purchased in Russia and then planted outside his hamburger joint:
http://www.savvycenter.com/explorer/roadside/lenin.htm
The placque says: “America Won”. Lenin ostentatiously faces west.
The restaurant’s owner hated Communism, was famously curt and cranky with his customers, gave out Susan B. Anthony coins as change, and successfully sued the City of Dallas to be allowed to continue leaving open bowls of mayonnaise out on his tables. He brought to court a scientist who testified the mayonnaise likely was healthier to eat after a week or a month of sitting out than after a day. The City of Dallas had no legally sufficient response to the learned scientific witness.
As all good things must come to an end, the proprietor retired last year, after 50 years in the hamburger business. The new owner has moved the restaurant nearer to SMU, and the statue of Lenin is gone from public sight.
I have seen many dozens of Lenin statues. They stood in every provincial city, often even in small and very small towns. It was a whole industry of making them, as well as thousand placards and other imagery, so a well-established canon for such icons exists. It was copied in any communist country, so the stilistics is immediatly recognizable. And yes, the statue discussed here is done exactly in this manner.
This statue kerfluffle reminds of previous commentary about art: mostly political statement(?), or mostly conveying what cannot be conveyed by mere words? This statue, to my taste, is a bit heavy on the political statement.
To me, this statuesque MLK is a scold. It’s true the real MLK was a type of scold. However, he could not scold until and unless the subjects of his scolding were first inspired to recognize their own higher virtues. Therefore, before MLK scolded, he necessarily had to inspire recognition of higher virtues. MLK’s ability to inspire ought be recognized more than his ability to scold. Anyone can scold. MLK was not great b/c he could scold.
Augustine:
h/t
Sergey,
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned how much I enjoy your comments. Very much.
Besides looking “Soviet”, it really isn’t a very good likeness of Dr. King!
I think it looks more like a plumped-up Eddie Murphy.
Ummmmm…. does that statue remind anyone else of the posters for “Shaft” and other “blaxpoitation” films of the 60s and 70s?
A black man in a flashy suit posing like James Bond… all that’s missing is the wide-brimmed fedora. And yes, the cigar.
The Austin statue visually expresses King’s rhythmic, engaging oratory – which is the point, and what we all remember best.
It’s interesting that the sculptor is drawing a blank – considering how rich King’s era was in graphic arts and visual expression.
Two things strike me. First, the facial expression whose features (slightly exaggerated?) lean toward anger rather than either hope or resolve. Second, the crossed arms, which are aloof at best and rejecting at worst.
The Texas statue has the head tilted; I can see why this might not be the most desirable posture for a memorial.
If the crossed arms were caressing a Bible, the entire quality of the statue would change. It would also better represent Dr. King, whose advocacy and ministry were inseperable. (I wonder if the whole problem with crossed arms is that they embrace nobody but the self?)
I agree with Neo’ s assessment that the Univ. of Texas – Austin is probably the best representation of Rev. King. It captures who he was – a pacifist preacher who really preached to all of us. The statue has arms open and one raised — much as I remember watching him at podiums giving speeches. He had to bring people into his way of thinking of the future — all people of all backgrounds. He couldn’t achieve his objective by blocking out, which the Chinese-made statue seems to do with the feet apart stance, folded arms and stern — if not, angry, gaze.
The Chinese statue appears to me to be militant, angry, and forbidding — not open to ideas — or people. I’m sure he was very angry at times, but he spoke with hope and possibility for change; not bleakness and bitterness (sound like anyone we know in current news?).
By the way, I find no fault with the artistry of Lei Yixin. He is most gifted and is able to create a real-to-life man emerging from a block of cold stone. It is the stance and positioning that he chose — I wonder if he knew of the man, his history, who he was and what he represents still today, or if he approaches his task only from a technical point of view. I believe that makes a huge difference in the result.
Any suggestions for the Jimmy Carter statue? I have a few. None are appropriate for family viewing.
Do you know that the industry I mentioned was invented by Lenin himself? It was called “Lenin’s Plan of Monumental Propaganda”. The reason was that in a country where 80% of population was illiterate, only monuments can convey propoganda message to unwashed masses. And Hitler, too, accepted this way to propagandize. I have seen models of statues that were intended to be installed in all Nazi conquered countries, including Russia. The likeliness in style to Stalin era monuments is striking.
Those Lenin-like statues are pretty common here in Indonesia, gifts of the Soviets to Sukarno to commemorate the Indonesian war of independence against the Dutch. Always so heavy, excessively heroic, with set, upturned jaws and gazes that look out into the distance. Your basic 1000-yard stare. They’re no more attractive here than they are elsewhere in the world.
I agree that the UTA statue is the better of the two, but I also think there’s something missing from it as well. Maybe take the earlier suggestion of Dr. King hugging a Bible in the new statue, and instead put one in his left hand in the UTA statue. Thoughts?
It’s time the courts started applying the establishment clause of the First Amendment to multi-culturalism. We got the Sacagewea dollar because, after all, what could be a better leftist icon than Native American, woman, and slave all rolled into one?
Now we get the Reverend/i> Martin Luther King as Lenin. The irony is too delicious; I say let it stand. What I want to know is why the judges couldn’t find a trans-gendered, disabled artist of mixed race? So much for judging a man by his character, or an artist by his art. We step from parody to farce without even blinking. Such is the price of decadence. Merrily do we skip down the road of political correctness into the land of oblivion. The End.
Actually, my only real complaint, because I think that the small model looks incredible, is that I don’t like the idea of the statue being larger than two greats like Lincoln and Jefferson. This is not to downplay Dr. King’s achievements, but to make his statue larger than the other two’s would seem to imply he was a more significant person than Jefferson or Lincoln, with which opinion I would strongly disagree.
I second njcommuter. The man was a preacher. He should be shown as such.
On reflection, I wonder if Lei Yixin takes his inspiration for pugnacious attitude from the likes of Sharpton and Jeremaid Wright.
Soften the mouth, tip the head forward, loosen the arms and add the Bible. Or else tilt the head slightly heavenward and begin the statue just below the waist, which would be set about four feet above the ground/platform, and loosen the arms and add the Bible.
A Bible, depicted in a national monument statue, is a political statement about the meaning of these words:”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”and thus the Bible’s inclusion vs exclusion is a hot political issue – which is presently unlikely to be decided in favor of inclusion – as political forces do not agree on what the seemingly simple words mean.
It’s no wonder Dr. King possesses a scolding expression in the artist’s model: he is thoroughly disgusted that he is denied a Bible! He is denied an acknowledgment of the central influence of his life, of his thinking, of his beliefs.
If MLK designed his own statue, a Bible would be depicted. His life was not about himself, nor his opinions, nor his abilities. His life was about God, and God’s opinions, and God’s abilities.
Is not the militant nature of the statue fitting, considering where the movement went (if it was not clandestinely that way anyway)? I am not a believer in the dark nature of socialism and communism combined with any “freedom movement”. As for the size of the statue, which should also be contentious, the problems enumerated by the movement he has come to symbolize is as disproportionate to need and real necessity as the statue is to the man’s worth, especially compared to those other memorials and men. Sad, really, noting that every “benefit” gained for those people has only ensured the people he tried to free have, by a 90% margin, chained themselves to the very party which had kept it in slavery and in Jim Crow systems. And, really, still does. Offering fluff, pats on the head, fuffra, and bits and pieces of a broken dream, not too dissimilar from the lies, beads, blankets, and other trinkets which bought my part relatives lands.
What was it Riddick said when he watched the little monster rip one guard apart, and as the other guard turned to get it, it’s even larger mother got him from behind and from the dark? Ah, right… “Beautiful”. And, so it is.
All the footage i ever saw of Dr King seemed to come off to me as a very humble man. Albeit with a mission.
What we have here is a clear attempt to remake him by those who lost sight years ago what the man was about.
sergey says: The likeliness in style to Stalin era monuments is striking.
well yeah, since its all soviet realism… even obama posters are soviet realism. i remember the temporary monument they put up in ny at the iceskating rink.. a pole into the sky with people walking on it… and all i could think of was the similar sculpture from the height of soviet realism that was the same thing.
sergey, are we two the only ones that can see and understand that the american left is constructing the same mental prison that germany did? that people today no longer wonder how it happened because they think that its a flaw in the body of the people, and not a method that the people first accept the horrors when they are not horrible. so civil forfieture was fine against those who took drugs as they were presumably having too much fun and were too dangerous.. now they do it for drunk driving, and other things… and a few companies who are huge sell the stuff for billions in revenue in which the public has no say.
they tested demonizing a group and taking its property away, and everyone here said.. ok… we dont like them, so let them take the stuff away.
now we all have the precendents that this and other things have set. the flds thing has set the precident that christian is authoritarian, and so is hitlerian (a lie), and so is a good enough reason for taking the children wholesale. most arent pahying attention to the hows and whys and most are accepting that its ok to take 400 kids on the presumption that there might be abuse and that the whole belief of the group IS the abuse. a few more of these and the state power to take children en masse bevcause they attend catholic school will be in place.
dont think so… then see where civil forfietyre has gone.
sergey and i seem to ahve a perspective where we see the games and the ulterior motives. it seems very frustrating that others just choose to not have or see the options that are nothing but the unthinkable hiding in the unthinkable.
when i saw watson lose his career, i knew that we were far enough along to create lysenkoism, and any other mental mind prison at whim.
a far as king is concerned, how about reading about his attending the highlander school? and how rosa parks attended it to learn how to do her bus thing? and how pete seeger did too… and how the same persons that funded tuskeegee, funded highlander. etc.?
The Highlander Folk School, located in Monteagle, TN, was founded by Don West, District Director of the Communist Party in North Carolina, and Miles Norton, Director of the Commonwealth College. Based upon testimony by members of the school, the school was cited for conducting subversive activities by the state of Tennessee, and closed by court order in 1960
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Mr. Egerton shows that Mrs. Parks was in fact an alumna of an institution in Monteagle, Tennessee, known as the Highlander Folk School, usually and not inaccurately described as a “communist training school.” Highlander was founded and run by a gentleman named Myles Horton, who was never actually a member of the Communist Party but told a veteran Red pal that he didn’t join so he could avoid having the label pinned on him. For all practical purposes, Horton was a communist.
As Mr. Egerton writes, “Highlander had started summer workshops on school desegregation in 1954, right after the Brown decision. The Montgomery NAACP wanted to send a delegate to Highlander the next year. They chose their youth director, Rosa Parks.”
Mr. Egerton’s book contains a photograph of Mrs. Parks with Horton at the school in 1957, but her first training session took place only a few months before she sat down in the front of the bus in December, 1955.
Her action is widely and probably rightly regarded as the beginning of the civil rights movement in the South. Was it in fact an act of communist subversion?
In 1957 a photograph was taken of an audience at the school that showed Martin Luther King sitting in the front row. Right next to him was a comrade named Abner Berry, the correspondent of the Communist Party’s official newspaper, the Daily Worker. In the 1950s King’s enemies plastered it all over the South to discredit King and his movement. It did discredit them–at least in those quarters that thought hanging out with Communists was discreditable.
Today, fewer people think so, and the discovery, from opened Soviet archives, that communists really did penetrate high levels of the U.S. government and the atom bomb project, falls on ears that don’t want to hear about it. But it’s also clear that they penetrated–and used–the civil rights movement as well.
It’s well documented that King himself was surrounded by known communists like Stanley Levison and Hunter Pitts O’Dell, the latter actually a member of the party’s national committee in 1961. King’s bitterly anti-American speech on the Vietnam war, praising Ho Chi Minh and comparing American soldiers to Nazi storm troopers, in 1967 was written by Levison, whose influence on King was the main reason for FBI surveillance of him.
Today, Americans have been so brainwashed by the propaganda of the left, communist or not, that they’re likely to regard the Reds in the civil rights movement as the real heroes who led the fight against murderous bigots in Southern backwaters. Immersed in white guilt, a vast number of Americans now accept that the entire history of their nation up to the 1960s was a dark age of repression and hatred, with only a few bright spots like Abraham Lincoln and the crusade against Hitler.
Having lost their own history, Americans can no longer expect to keep the nation their history created and defined. That, of course, was the whole point–to strip away the real past as well as the legends that allow Americans to exist as a people and to put in their place new myths–and a new population–that will give birth to a new order that Myles Horton and his comrades would have liked. It’s an amazing story, about how an entire people was bamboozled out of its own heritage and its own country. Some day, when we have a good conservative administration in Washington, the Public Broadcasting System ought to make a film about it.
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The school and king had relations with a man by the name of Carl Brandon… through SCEF.
Carl Branden was convicted of criminal sedition in 1954. He and his wife purchased a home for blacks in a white neighborhood to incite racial violence. Later they were charged with bombing the same house to win sympathy for their cause and to raise money. Ann Braden today is a founder of the Atlanta based “Center for Democratic Renewal” which smears Conservative patriots.
The Highlander school was financed by the Julius Rosenwald Fund. At one time Rosenwald headed Sears Roebuck Co. He spent $22 million financing civil rights groups. His daughter Edith Stern continued to give money to the SCEF and Highlander Folk School after her father’s death. Her husband, Alfred stern of New Orleans, fled to Russia just before he was to be arrested on spy charges.
The most disturbing truth revealed by this election campaign is 91% of black Democrat votes for Obama. I do not call it racism, it is not. But it means that a vast majority of blacks still believe that their problems are rooted not in their own dysfunctional getto culture, but in some conspiracy of whites, and hope for some society reforms to save them from this peril. This is not healthy for them. The only thing that really can improve this situation is moral transformation: nobody can liberate those who do not want to be free and self-reliable.
Sergey i agree totally…
and maybe a better way to put it. no one can liberate those who believe that being imprisoned IS liberation!
Lenin was a sick thief. The MLK statue does look like the old soviet Lenin statues. It is really sad that Dr. King has been made to look like a thief.
San Juan Del Sur Hotel
Charles Barkley has long supported the political career of President Barack Obama.