Public Statues Across Time and Cultures

Christopher P. Dickenson, Christopher P. Dickenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000368260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

This book explores the ways in which statues have been experienced in public in different cultures and the role that has been played by statues in defining publicness itself.

The meaning of public statues is examined through discussion of their appearance and their spatial context and of written discourses having to do with how they were experienced. Bringing together experts working on statues in different cultures, the book sheds light on similarities and differences in the role that public statues had in different times and places throughout history. The book will also provide insight into the diverse methods and approaches that scholars working on these different periods use to investigate statues.

The book will appeal to historians, art historians and archaeologists of all periods who have an interest in the display of sculpture, the reception of public art or the significance of public monuments.

1 Statues and Public Space

An Introduction

Christopher P. Dickenson

Naked except for a pair of Y-fronts, the man lurches unsteadily forward, his weight shifting from the right to the left foot. His arms reach out limply before him, his hands loosely open. The slight paunch, the subtle variations in skin tone, the stretched veins on the backs of the hands, the creased underwear, all work toward a powerful illusion that this is a real man. Yet he does not follow through with his step. His frail hands betray not the slightest hint of a tremor. He does not breath. The tension between the figure’s intense lifelikeness—its hyperreality in the parlance of art history—and the abject absence of life creates a sense of unease, which can somehow be sensed even on seeing it on a photograph. The brain perceives that this is not a real man at all. But then what is it? A creature that has materialised from a dream? The total lack of muscular tension, the loll of the head and closed eyes tell us that the man is himself dreaming, unaware of his surroundings and unaware of you or me as he staggers forward, sleepwalking. He is ‘Sleepwalker’, the creation of American sculptor Tony Matelli (Figure 1.1). In 2014, this piece art achieved worldwide celebrity because of the controversy that arose after it was installed outside the Davis Museum on the campus of the all-women Wellesley College, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, to coincide with an exhibition of works by the artist inside the building.

On the day that the work appeared, an undergraduate student of the college started a petition calling for its removal to inside the museum, explaining:

Within just a few hours of its outdoor installation, the highly lifelike sculpture by Tony Matelli, entitled ‘Sleepwalker’, has become a source of apprehension, fear and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for some members of our campus community. While it may appear humorous, or thought provoking to some, the ‘Sleepwalker’ has already become a source of undue stress for a number of Welles ley College students, the majority of whom live, study, and work on campus. As the sculpture was placed in a highly trafficked location, it is difficult for students wishing not to see the ‘Sleepwalker’ to travel to the campus center and the residential and academic quads.

(emphases added)¹

The museum’s director issued an immediate response defending the decision to display the piece at that location on the grounds that art should provoke discussion, that ‘Sleepwalker’, far from being an aggressive predator, was a ‘vulnerable’ and

Figure 1.1 Tony Matelli, Sleepwalker, 2016, The High Line, New York.
Source: Courtesy Tony Matelli Studio.

‘profoundly passive’ figure and that many students clearly did not find him threatening but were interacting with him in a playful way, posing for selfies beside him.² The petition eventually gathered some 1,012 signatures, a not insignificant number considering that the college’s undergraduate body comprises around 2,700 students; but arguably more striking is how the episode briefly captured the attention of the world’s media.³ Interest in the controversy was in no small part due to its connection to larger questions about campus free speech, which have been fiercely debated in recent years.⁴ The widespread popularity of the story, however, surely also had to do with to an inherent fascination for the power that this object, a crafted likeness of a human being, had to provoke such strong emotions and to generate such disagreement. The newspaper articles invariably included a photo of ‘Sleepwalker’ to spark interest. While the petition referred to the work as a ‘sculpture’, the word used to describe it by many newspapers and by many of those who left reasons for signing the petition—a word Matelli himself has also used of the work—was ‘statue’.⁵

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following definition of the word ‘statue’:

1. 1. A representation in the round of a person, animal, etc., which is sculptured, moulded, or cast in marble, metal, plaster, or a similar material; esp. such a representation of a god, allegorical figure, or eminent person, usually life-size or larger.
   2. Figurative and in similative use, esp. with reference to being motionless or silent.
2. More generally: an effigy; an image, a portrait. Obsolete.
3. Usually in plural. Any of various children’s games in which players must stand still in different postures. Also more fully game of statues, statue game, statues game.

Matelli’s ‘Sleepwalker’ certainly conforms to many aspects of these definitions. Others, however, are more problematic, and if we probe the expectations that we would normally have of a statue a little deeper and test them against this piece of art, the ease of categorizing it—and indeed the possibility of readily defining what exactly a statue is—begins to break down.

‘Sleepwalker’ is most definitely a sculpture in the round, a representation of a man. It is life-size. It is—though the subtle paint works to convince us otherwise—made of metal, bronze, in fact, a material used for creating statues since antiquity.⁶ But is it a portrait, or even a representation of a real person? The viewer has no way of knowing whether this sculpture was modelled on a real individual or whether it is a figment of the artist’s imagination conjured into reality. Perhaps its dreamlike quality brings it closer to the realm of the gods and encourages us to see it almost as an icon. Yet its costume, stance and the indignity of being caught somnambulating in a state of undress suggest an ordinary everydayness. If it is an image of a real, living person, it would certainly not seem to be an eminent individual—the man’s dishevelled state and his unflattering circumstances hardly seem celebratory. Perhaps more saliently, the sculpture lacks the tell-tale nametag or inscription that is so often affixed to the bases of statues to tell us who they represent. For this figure has no base. Perched on a pedestal, a statue quite literally elevates its subject above other mere mortals, the base a metaphor for the symbolic elevation inherent in the commemoration.⁷ But ‘Sleepwalker’ has been brought down to the ground, not only occupying the same space as us, his viewers, as all sculpture in the round does, but sharing the floor with us, walking among us, inviting us to interact with him.

Surely one of the most common expectations we have of statues encountered on street corners or public squares is that they are not simply works of art but that they have been erected to commemorate someone or something. If the word ‘sculpture’ is a label that describes an artistic medium, the word ‘statue’ tells us something about the cultural meanings bestowed upon particular pieces of sculpture. The word ‘statue’, at least in the way that it has traditionally been used in Western history for the last few hundred years, most often suggests a ‘monument’. ‘Sleepwalker’ defies so many of our expectations of what a monument should be still. But is it perhaps still a statue after all?

Statues as Monuments, Statues and Publicness

Figure 1.2 John Rysbrack, statue of Queen Anne, Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire.
Source: Photo by the author.

The power of statues to serve as commemorative monuments surely depends above all on their publicness. Statues have sometimes been set up to honour prominent individuals in private settings, but such works inevitably and quite deliberately refer to statues set up in the public sphere; such statues are also exclusively to be found in the houses of the rich and powerful, who enjoy both the wealth to afford them and the space to display them. Encountering John Rysbrack’s overlife-size statue of QueenAnne in the Library of Blenheim Palace (Figure 1.2) provokes surprise—as the first Duchess of Marlborough no doubt intended when she had it installed—because everything about it, from its pose to the material used to its ornately carved pedestal, evokes the settings of the city square, the courthouse, or the cathedral, where we would expect to see such a sculpture. Indeed, the statue had originally been intended for a more public location at an alms-house in St Albans but had only stood there for a short while before the dowager Duchess had it brought to its current location. But placing the work in the library does more than simply call to mind the public realm. It actively engages in the public sphere, since it was designed to convey a message to an audience beyond the palace’s walls. Queen Anne’s statue was not placed in the library for the private contemplation of the Marlborough family. It was a statement of the close relationship of friendship and patronage that the family, and the dowager in particular, had enjoyed with the deceased Queen and was intended as a veiled attack on the new reigning House of Hanover.⁸ It was intended to be noticed by visitors and discussed in polite society. If even such an ostensibly private statue can be thought of as a public monument, it is worth interrogating more deeply the nature of the relationship between statues and publicness for those that stand in settings to which a larger community has access.

Cities throughout history and in all parts of the world have had places where people have gathered together: to trade, to participate in religious festivals, to take part in politics, to be entertained, to talk, to socialize, or to exercise. Spaces might be purpose-built to accommodate such functions—we might think of plazas, market halls, thea tres, bathhouses or parks—but other spaces of interaction, such as streets and areas of unused land between buildings, can develop more organically as areas of communal use. It is convenient to refer to such spaces as ‘public’, but on closer consideration, truly public space proves impossible to find. There are always conventions, rules and regulations that govern the types of people who have access to particular areas and the types of activities and behaviour that are tolerated there. The power to reshape or transform the appearance or layout of ‘public spaces’ is also always unevenly distributed throughout society. Modern theorists of urbanism have argued that a fundamen tal characteristic of ‘public space’ is its contested nature.⁹ How it is used, who it is used by and what it looks like are always determined by negotiations of power between the different groups with a vested interest in it. The idea that the publicness of space is relative rather than absolute is emphatically stressed by the geographer Don Mitchell, who argues that the ‘idea [of public space] has never been guaranteed. It has only been won through concerted struggle, and then, after the fact, guaranteed (to some extent) in law’ (emphasis in original).¹⁰

For most of the time the contest for public space proceeds slowly, through subtle acts of deviation or resistance to the society’s norms, through discussions about the use of space or through changes to the built environment; occasionally, tensions increase rapidly and reach a breaking point, erupting in protests against the ruling authorities or in confrontation between different groups and sometimes in violence. Most of the time there is an underlying, enduring quality to public space that serves to reproduce a society’s values and existing power structures. Public space acts as an arena in which familiar patterns of behaviour are played out repetitively day after day, sometimes, especially in pre-industrial societies, over many generations. The architecture that constitutes and frames public spaces has a permanence that grounds a community in a shared history. This again is especially true for the pre-globalized world, when people were typically much more rooted to their locales than they often are today. The power of the built environment to shape or influence relations of power has been exploited by authoritarian governments since the dawn of civilisation, and most pronouncedly by modern totalitarian regimes. The political significance of public architecture is more subtle and less straightforward to read for societies with greater political freedom and higher collective participation in government, yet here too the built environment is of profound importance in reinforcing, and at times challenging, existing relations of power. The categories ‘building’ and ‘monument’ fade easily into one another. It is certainly useful to think of buildings that become particularly charged with meaning and thereby play an important role in reproducing cultural memory as monuments....