'It's exciting!': Tracey Emin, Anish Kapoor and Jake Chapman on the statue-topplers

Jake Chapman wants Colston beheaded, Anish Kapoor wants a memorial to the millions killed by slavery, and Tracey Emin is thrilled the ‘stale old men’ are going. Artists and sculptors respond to statue outrage

There are many ways to destroy a statue. In 2003, a weightlifter took a sledgehammer to the giant statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. In 1966, an IRA dissident put a bomb inside Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin. During the so-called Leninfall in 2014, arc welders, saws and even tractors were used to pull down some of the 5,500 statues of Lenin in Ukraine. “With enough angry people,” said Hanna Bondar, Kiev’s former deputy chief architect, “you just need your hands.”

Even Antony Gormley’s work has suffered destruction. In 2015, the British sculptor’s cast-iron figure LAND came down in a storm, toppling into the sea at Kimmeridge Bay, Dorset. Gormley said he was thrilled, citing it as proof of the work’s “dynamic relationship” with nature.

Today, with slave-trader Edward Colston’s statue chucked in Bristol Harbour, the sculpture of genocidal colonialist King Leopold of Belgium removed from its plinth in Antwerp, and the statue of Scottish slaver Robert Milligan carried away by crane from the Isle of Dogs in London, statues are in a dynamic relationship not with nature but with human outrage.

The Ukrainians who took down Soviet-era statues were part of the Revolution of Dignity. Is something similar happening in Britain and beyond? Artist Jake Chapman is doubtful: “It would be nice to think that the domino effect of Colston, Leopold and Milligan might culminate in some critical resolution of colonialist power, all offending monuments broken into pieces on the ground – in the same way that the toppling of Stalin and Saddam Hussein signalled the end of tyranny. But it’s unlikely. 

“The sight of a teetering despot resonates with the symbolic downfall of a regime – but I suspect that what’s on offer here is, at best, a political adjustment. Since no wider revolutionary downfall is on offer, the pessimist in me wonders, when the dust settles, whether the obliteration of such vile effigies might unwittingly concede to a timely revisionism, where those obscene objects that stick in the craw of our history are wiped from memory at too cheap a cost.”

It’s a good point: Britain has previous in carrying on regardless, in silencing those who yearn to make the country feel proper shame for our ancestors’ crimes. Yet other demolitions will doubtless follow. “I think it’s good they are being taken down,” says fellow artist Tracey Emin, “but they should go to a museum, not be destroyed. The history should be explained for future generations. It’s exciting to see what will be put in their place. Nice to know it’s not going to be a load of stale old men.”

Why does destroying a statue matter? Perhaps you can tell more about a country from the statues it demolishes than from the ones it leaves up. “Public objects have a powerful grip on our consciousness,” says sculptor Anish Kapoor. “It is as if they speak to each of us in spaces we share – an act of shared communion witnessed by a public object. The symbolic language of the public object is now at long last being reconsidered. The male bigots who have stood aloft in our public squares are being seen for what they are. We are right to remove them and consign them to oblivion. 

“The 19th-century propensity to memorialise the men who won wars, or the men of colonialism, lingers still,” says Kapoor. “What of the forgotten in our society? What of a memorial to the 12 million people who died in the slave trade? What of a memorial to the famine in Bengal in 1943, caused by Winston Churchill’s colonial disregard?”

Who will be next to fall? Cecil Rhodes seems a safe bet. His statue at Oriel College, Oxford, has been targeted by protesters who see him as a white supremacist who used slave labour in his De Beers Consolidated Mines company. Oxford University chancellor Chris Patten this week accused them of hypocrisy since, he said, a trust set up after the mining magnate’s death pays for the education of more than a dozen African students at the college each year. Chapman suggests that removing Rhodes’s statue may not be enough, indeed may be a compromise: “As Brecht said, ‘What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?’ Might we not be tempted to ask, ‘What is the removal of Rhodes from outside the building compared to the levelling of the building?’” Statues, he points out, are not the only symbols of injustice and inequality.

Another possible candidate is Mahatma Gandhi. In 2018, students removed a statue, donated by India, from the campus of the University of Ghana in Accra because of what they saw as the anti-colonialist’s racist attitudes to Africans and because, as academics put it in a petition, in South Africa he was known “for his role in the establishment of the infamous caste-like apartheid system”. Perhaps Gandhi’s statue in London’s Bloomsbury should be removed. And if not, why not?

One key question is what should happen once they’re down. In 1689, a mob in Newcastle tossed a statue of James II into the river, seeing it as papist propaganda. But it was later retrieved and melted down to make church bells. Perhaps a similar fate lies in store for the likes of Colston’s statue. Bristol’s first black mayor, Marvin Rees, said the authorities planned to fish the statue out of the harbour and install it in a museum as “part of the overarching story of the city of Bristol”.

That overarching story should perhaps include not just Colston’s statue but the people who tore it down. After all, as historian David Olusoga wrote in the Guardian this week: “Whatever is said over the next few days, this was not an attack on history. This is history. It is one of those rare historic moments whose arrival means things can never go back to how they were.”

It’s worth juxtaposing Olusoga’s words with what Donald Trump tweeted when statues of Confederate generals were taken down by anti-racist protesters a few years ago: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.” The US president saw removing statues as historical erasure. But protesting against statues actually tends to bring the person they honour back from obscurity, from the slow but steady erasure of time.

What is astounding is how so many of the problematic, often stale males on plinths have been hiding in plain sight for years, centuries even. “Memorialisation,” says Chapman, “is always the preferred fiction of history. I suspect that most of us pass by public monuments with a blind indifference that’s only equal to the violence they mask. They go unnoticed in the same way that power goes unnoticed. Implicit in the image of civilisation is the myth of bloodless progress. 

“But, every so often,” Chapman says, “they become the brunt of popular anger. Out of nowhere, they become synonymous with the power they represent, functioning as surreptitious objects of rage. You wonder whether such monuments are constructed out of durable materials to endure the weather – or the violence that rises up to mock them.”

Russia offers a lesson in what to do with the statues unfit for public purpose. Many effigies of Stalin, Lenin and Dzerzhinsky wound up at the Park of the Fallen Heroes in Moscow. Today, 700 artworks are on display there with another 200 in storage. English Heritage and the National Trust could establish its parallel. It would be like the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, albeit with less aesthetic merit. The proceeds from ticket sales could be directed at properly educating Britain about its slave past.

Chapman would like the current mood of fury to last, even if we run out of statues to topple. “Is there some other way to prolong our revulsion? Why not sever the hands of Leopold’s statue and decapitate Colston? Why not turn these figures into objects of public ridicule, pilloried and left stranded in the misery of their exposure, as indictments of enduring racism?”

Heather Phillipson, the artist who is about to put a dollop of whipped cream on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, echoes these feelings. “The UK’s confrontation with its shameful histories – still leeching – is so overdue. Watching a slave trader get sunk was vital. Could this mark the beginning of our rotten system’s reckoning? I hope so. The whole system needs debugging and rebooting – urgently. As for what happens next to these statues and their vacated sites, it’s time for white people to listen and make space. Something thrilling can happen. A fresh gale is building. Let’s let it fly.”

Contributor

Stuart Jeffries

The GuardianTramp

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