The first thing you see is a horse's butt sticking upside down from the monster's chest. A man's hand descends from the beast's belly, his gloved hand gripping the blade of a fallen saber. The rider's face is not visible, but a mop of well-combed hair hangs from the creature's eyeless muzzle. Each piece of work is taken from the statue of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, which was removed from Charlottesville, Virginia in 2021. It was subsequently given to artist Kara Walker, who carved it according to the butcher's diagram. The finished sculpture “Unmanned Drone” is on display at the Brick in Los Angeles as part of a joint exhibition with MOCA entitled “Monuments” is both an act of carnivalesque retribution and an acknowledgment of the zombie persistence of the Confederacy. The rebellion, defeated over one hundred and sixty years ago, refuses to remain dead; between the creature's legs, a horse's head appears from a hole in the bronze, as if it were a newborn Jackson's.
In March, Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for the restoration of monuments “removed or altered to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.” Chief among them were the nearly two hundred Confederate memorials toppled from their pedestals over the past decade as they became lightning rods for a mass movement for racial justice. In 2017, the impending removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville sparked “Unite the Right,” the largest white supremacist rally in half a century, and the beginning of a backlash that only intensified. Last November, a private park in North Carolina celebrated the “rescue” of three previously toppled statues—not from destruction but from preservation in a county museum, where they might have fallen victim to “a history that does not honor our dead Confederates.”
Alas, the nine statues in Monuments were abandoned, like Scarlett O'Hara's Tara, into a humiliating occupation. IN MOCAwhere all the works except Walker are on display, you'll find Jefferson Davis lying on his back, still covered in pink paint from the protests, raising his hand…Will anyone help me? — to a group of Klan members photographed by Andres Serrano. In another room there is a huge statue of Lee and Jackson with the inscription “BEWARE OF TRAITORS“, scrawled in huge letters on its base, is paired with a replica of the car from Hank Willis Thomas's Dukes of Hazzard – a Dodge Charger, adorned with the Confederate battle flag that stands on its head here. Robert E. Lee of Charlottesville has undergone the most visceral transformation, turning into a neat stacked piles of bronze ingots. (They will be recycled for future work.)
Iconoclasm is a time-tested method of exorcising the ghosts of history. After the fall of the communist dictatorship in Hungary, dozens of decommissioned monuments were sent to Memento Park in Budapest, including the shoes of a huge statue of Stalin, which was torn down by an angry crowd. Artists can go even further by turning public works against themselves. In 2022, after a statue honoring J. Marion Sims, the father of modern gynecology, was removed from Central Park, Doreen Lynette Garner performed surgery on a silicone replica of the statue, reproducing the procedure Sims performed on enslaved women without their consent.
