The future of statues

Submitted by AWL on 29 June, 2021 - 5:22
Nelson's Column

Eric Lee is right (Solidarity 597) that we should honour fighters for freedom from history; and arguably in a more specific way than by general revolutionary efforts today (Mo Hannon, #598).

But... statues? For whatever reason, we are interested in what writers and public figures looked like. Mathematicians like to know what Maryam Mirzakhani looked like, as well as studying her work on the geometry of complicated surfaces. Big statues, on plinths, in public spaces, are a different form of remembrance from photos, portraits, or writings kept in print, or study groups.

Statues do not tell us what the person looked like. Mostly we can scarcely see the face. They serve only to represent the person as big, above us, in a commanding position. The genre suits its major use: for monarchs and military commanders, above all in the 19th and early 20th century.

However, statues may endure through a sort of withering away rather than them all being pulled down. Apparently there is a statue of Russia’s Tsar Alexander II in the main square of Helsinki, Finland.

No-one in Finland wants to celebrate Tsarist Russia. There has been sporadic agitation against the statue over the years, but it’s quiet now, I guess because no-one sees Tsarist conquest as a live threat (though racism is a live threat in Bristol, or in Oxford).

The statue has succeeded as a landmark because it has failed and become irrelevant in its initial purpose, to exalt Russian autocratic rule over Finland. Perhaps, in the same way, Nelson’s Column now fails as a celebration of British rule over the seas and of anti-French prejudice, and so it “succeeds” as a familiar landmark.

Maybe it will continue to “succeed” under a workers’ government, and that government will feel no need to present workers’ leaders of today as monumental figures on plinths.

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