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| Laura Gardin Fraser, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, 1948, with Hank Willis Thomas' A Suspension of Hostilities, 2019 |
What should we do with early 20th-century monuments to Confederate generals and politicians? Post George Floyd, there was a vague consensus that likenesses of Robert E. Lee and pals should be taken out of the public square and shown in museums where they can be "contextualized." The trouble with that fuzzy ideal is that monuments are big and thus expensive to move, store, or conserve. The nation has few history museums with the space and budget to display them. Art museums have little interest in the monument sculptors, who were backward-looking contemporaries of Brancusi and Giacometti.
Despite that, a dozen decommissioned monuments have made it to Los Angeles for museum display, if temporarily. On view in MOCA Geffen's "MONUMENTS" are Confederate statuary from Baltimore, Charlottesville, Richmond, Raleigh, and Montgomery. For the first (and last?) time they appear in the context of an art museum, alongside works of 19 contemporary artists, mostly Black, reflecting on the history and fantasy underpinning the monuments.
As conceived by The Brick director Hamza Walker, "MONUMENTS" is both a history show and an art show. The visitor willing to read labels will learn that Southern cities raised solemn monuments to their war dead in the years immediately after the Civil War. However, the statuary here is much latter, early to mid 20th century. Swaggering and nostalgic, it reframes the Confederacy as a "Lost Cause," a noble experiment that had nothing to do with slavery. Of course it did, and a wall text by W.E.B. Du Bois puts it succinctly. So does a longer 1861 quote from Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens: "Our new government is founded upon… the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
For the moment, the monuments at MOCA Geffen are contextualized and challenged; presented as art, historical artifact, and thought experiment. I can't imagine a better afterlife for these works. But "MONUMENTS"—including Kara Walker's Unmanned Drone, shown at The Brick—ends May 3, 2026. After that, the question remains: Where do they belong?
Despite the news coverage of toppled statues, the vast majority of the nation's 900-some Confederate monuments are still standing, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon.
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| Exhibition entrance, MOCA Geffen |
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| Bronze ingots from Charlottesville's Robert E. Lee Monument |
The ingots are intended to be reused in a future monument for Charlottesville.
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| Martin Puryear, Tabernacle, 2019. Glenstone Museum |
Puryear's Tabernacle combines the forms of a Civil War forage cap, a cannon, and a crosshairs.
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| Frederick William Sievers, Matthew Fontaine Maury, 1928, with paintings from Walter Price's "Cadence" series, 2022–2024 |
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| Karon Davis, Descendant, 2025 |
Descendant portrays Karon Davis' son Moses holding a toy version of Lexington's monument to Confederate General John Hunt Morgan. Family tradition holds that Karon was a descendant of Morgan.
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| Monument Lab, An American Reflection, 2025 |
The Monument Lab's short video offers fun and awful facts. One is that Gen. Robert E. Lee, who lost, got more monuments than Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who won and became U.S. President.
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| Cauleen Smith, The Warden, 2025 |
Cauleen Smith's piece temporarily incorporates "The Vindicatrix," an allegorical figure who stood atop a 67-ft. Doric column in Richmond's Jefferson Davis Monument. The figure faces two black-mirror walls as surveillance video camera broadcast live images of the figure's pointing hand, intended to signify divine blessing.
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| Stan Douglas, Birth of a Nation, 2025 |
The modern Ku Klux Klan was a Hollywood monster-turned-real. D.W. Griffith's
Birth of a Nation (1915) revived the moribund terror group. Stan Douglas reshoots a scene from Griffith's film in a five-channel video with Black actors.
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| Hugh Mangum, untitled portrait, about 1897–1922. Courtesy of the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University |
Hugh Mangum (1877–1922) was an itinerant photographer in North Carolina and Virginia. Half a century after his death, his glass-plate negatives were discovered in a barn. Unusual for the Jim Crow era, Mangum (who was white) photographed sitters of all races. The images here are modern prints from his negatives.
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| Hugh Mangum, contact sheet, about 1897–1922. Courtesy of the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University |
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| Jon Henry, from "Stranger Fruit" series, 2014–2021 |
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| Edward V. Valentine, Jefferson Davis, 1907. The Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia |
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| Andres Serrano, from "The Klan" series, 1990 |
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| Abigail DeVille, Deo Vindice (Orion's Cabinet), 2025 |
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Comments
> was a Hollywood monster-
> turned-real. D.W. Griffith's
> Birth of a Nation (1915)
> revived the moribund
> terror group.
A lack of ethics and tolerance of mendacity in order to sustain a political philosophy has a way of turning people into what they'll insist is not of their own nature but perhaps that of people they dislike and oppose:
From woodrowwilsonhouse. org:
"On February 18, 1915, the new film The Birth of a Nation, directed by David Wark Griffith, was shown to President Woodrow Wilson in the East Room of the White House. It was the first film ever to be shown inside the White House and was watched by President Wilson, his family, and cabinet members."
"As the Democratic nominee in 1912, Woodrow Wilson attracted attention from a range of African American leaders, drawn by his New Freedom platform, which emphasized opportunity and fairness. Among those taking interest in his campaign were W.E.B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP and editor of The Crisis magazine, and William Monroe Trotter, civil rights activist and publisher of The Guardian newspaper." [End quote]
Slate:
"Shocked at the uproar that Birth caused among liberal intellectuals and the NAACP, Griffith did something no unreconstructed bigot would do. He made Broken Blossoms (1919), about a tender romance between a white woman and a Chinese man....Gone was the paranoia of Birth—with its scheming mulattoes and rants against interracial marriage. In was a new kind of racial sensibility—not up to par with modern standards but different than anything he had shown before.
What all this suggests is that Griffith had no well-formed inner politics and that whatever ideology he put on the screen was malleable to the social whim of the moment (or whatever books he was reading). If this idea seems strange, it’s because the American directors making political films these days—Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Tim Robbins, Warren Beatty—have fairly obvious political agendas of their own. To praise or criticize the ideas in their films is to praise or criticize their own ideas. That won’t work with Griffith. He was a sophisticated filmmaker, but he wasn’t a sophisticated thinker."
PBS:
"Over the last century, historians have continued to dig into the proceedings of the Wilson administration and it has become clear that Edith Wilson acted as much more than a mere “steward.” She was, essentially, the nation’s chief executive until her husband’s second term concluded in March of 1921." [End quote]
“History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” – Mark Twain
Do you pine for filmmakers of old who were non-committal politically? You refer to modern film directors who "have fairly obvious political agendas of their own," as if that's a bad thing. I myself appreciate artists who bring their convictions to life in their art.
> modern
FWIW, only the opening sentence in the first post was me---ie, if "you" was a reference to me.
Slate .com:
D.W. Griffith in Black and White
Was the Birth of a Nation director really a racist?
By Bryan Curtis
Jan 03, 2003
Incidentally, LACMA's website right now in particular has the quality of being something I'd associate with a second-tier municipal art gallery. Perhaps a museum based in Denver, Colorado, Orange County, Calif or, even more humbly, Des Moines, Iowa. Maybe a bit more sophisticated, however, but not by much.
I realize that contemporary art and the type of exhibits (ie, if they're non-Pollock-type names) reliant upon them cost less money to organize, install and display. But I don't recall LACMA of years ago ever coming off quite so piddly. Between the budget-busting aspects of the new building and the director's love of contemporary-contemporary-contemporary, today's LACMA sure won't be both cash-rich and also luring in Louvre-sized crowds.
--- J. Garcin
Ok, I'm starting.
LACMA is hardly alone in having a travesty for a website.
Where is the fullness of a picture of your pictures?
Where is the 4000x4000 pixel imagery?
Has no one written a 1000-word summary of what makes each of your artworks unmissable? If you bought it, it must be collecting dust in the file. If you had to sell the acquisition to the board, make it public.
Does provenance deserve no treatment whatever on your sites?
The data are there. Why, 3 decades into the internet age, don't you have your acts together on so basic a means of attracting your audiences?
I have no words!
If it's that taxing, just appropriate the Met's website architecture. Start with the 100 most importantof your holdings, and build out from there.
What are you doing all day?
If LACMA's exhibits featured an Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp or Mark Rothko (disregarding whether the big name happens to be a cliche), and even if there weren't special temporary displays of Renaissance, Impressionist or Gothic, etc, works, the museum wouldn't seem as much the Bakersfield Art & Gift Emporium.
Los Angeles Times, May 2023:
"LACMA might be a de facto museum of contemporary art, but frankly it's not a very good one."