Sheeeeeeer Art Attack

Attacking art seems to be a thing these days.  Actually, it has a long history, but there seems to be an uptick this year.

In February we reported on a Russian security guard who drew googly eyes on a painting, after what was described as a psychological breakdown.

In May a climate protestor smeared cake on the Mona Lisa.  No worries, the painting is protected behind bullet-proof glass.

Now Gustave Klimt bears the brunt of climate activists' wrath. Not sure how this will help their cause.  I almost suspect a false flag to discredit climate change activists....almost.

Hearts and minds!  But as with the Mona Lisa, the Klimt is protected by glass, so the painting and its frame weren't damaged.

I agree that ecological devastation and climate change are of critical importance to all of us.  Not 1st World problems at all.  Quite the contrary.  Developing nations will bear the heaviest load sooner than Europe and North America.

Even though these works of art weren't damaged, I'm still not sure this tactic is the best.  People love art, which is one reason why it's targeted: it gets big publicity. And maybe someone out there will ask themselves if one damaged painting is a bigger outrage than a depleted planet.

I understand the geste of protest, I just think another target might be more effective.  It seems the activist vandals are choosing paintings that won't actually be damaged, so in the end, no harm done.  But the principle of attacking art is well-problematic.  

A lot of modern art was labeled "degenerate" by the Nazis and burned.   The Taliban blew up offending Buddhas.  Art is often one of the first targets of totalitarian regimes.  Even though these works weren't actually damaged, it has bad juju attached to it.  Many won't read beyond the headlines. They see "climate fanatics destroy our cultural heritage."  Our planet it worth fighting for, but we all know it.  Maybe the best tack is monkey-wrenching....

Personally, I look at some Suprematism, or works by Piet Mondrian, and think, yeah, why NOT burn it?   "Broadway Boogie Woogie."  My God, people, what rubbish!

But one must abandon youthful  exuberance at some point.  I used to agree with Breton when he said that the most Surrealist act he could imagine was firing a revolver randomly into a crowd.  Several dozen mass-shootings post-Columbine later, and that ceases to be valid or vaguely witty, even for an embittered, nihilistic crank such as myself.

We need to address climate change. Like, yesterday.  Zoiks.  One damaged painting ain't squat compared to a dead planet.  But attacking art just don't seem like the tactic that'll produce the results we so desperately need.

Mother Nature is ill.  She has a fever.  Either the host (Earth) or the virus (Humans) will die off unless the illness is cured.  

We all know this.  There's no need "to draw attention to the problem."  We need people to act and vote in ways that will resolve it.  Throwing goop on Klimt or cake on Leonardo is so self-evidently pointless and counterproductive one really does have to wonder if the plot was hatched by Total or BP or Exxon....

"You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!"

I sorta kinda wrote about the Georgia Guidestones in 2010.

Old news now, but someone finally blew them up back in July. Locals seem kind of bummed: 

"My initial reaction was heartbreak and anger, frustration.  And I think that's consistent with the community's reaction."  Elberton Mayor Daniel Graves.

Lots of (if not most) articles about the Guidestones play up the anonymity of the person who originally funded the monument. Seems like a Rosicrucian group cuz the mysterious stranger who ordered them called himself RC Christian....subtle. 

The principles engraved upon it are also not inconsistent with Rosicrucian ideas.

The contact was not actually named RC Cola Christian, but Herbert Hinie Kersten, and was a doctor from Fort Dodge, Iowa.  Apparently a fan of David Duke and an outspoken racist who, in addition to financing mysterious monuments, sought to make a definitive scale to show how Whites are the superior race.

The Guidestones have a generally decent message.  Except the population control measures which evoke culling.  That Daisy David Duke support makes that one a bit more chilling.  

Common Sense Renewed, a book intended to explain the Guidestones, is said to describe a eugenics program to keep humanity going in the future.  So, wariness of the stones is not unwarranted.

Was Kersten representing a racist group, or was it a hobby horse of his alone?

Was he alone, or did he represent a group of "Perfectibilists," as the Illuminati called themselves.  A group of sages directing society behind the scenes:  Rosicrucians, Masons, Illuminists?  Secret Chiefs?  An underground stream?  Or a series of ponds?

So someone blowed 'em up.  And the remaining slabs were then demolished.  

Elberton should have kept them, and let the destruction serve as a monument to ignorance.  Fence them up at night to protect them.  Locals are worried about the lost tourist dollars.  Another reason to keep them.  Not just lucre, but as a "fuck you" to those who blew them up.  Leave what's remaining, and the rubble.  Erect a life-sized panel facsimile of the destroyed stone.  Despite some weird ideas and sketchy financing, it was an interesting monument.  At noon each day the sun used to shine through a hole onto that day's date.  It was a functioning solar calendar and clock.

Alas.  Turning destruction into history.  Too late to make lemonade from these lemons.

I've written a lot about the Temple de Sagesse Suprème, the so-called "Illuminati Pyramid" of Blagnac (a suburb of Toulouse).  They tagged and damaged that too.  Hard time to be an esoteric monument.

But we've written about the destruction of monuments before.  In the end, it's a testament to the power of public art as much as public ignorance....see The Politics of Removal for our take on it.

What is it with Georgia and cwazy cupcakes? Walker, Green, and Kandiss Taylor, who wrote:

“I am the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal,” Taylor wrote on social media app Telegram after releasing her video.

Taylor actually promised to blow them up.  Someone did it for her!  She denied involvement when the destruction occurred. 

BTW, here are the Guidestones' injunctions, originally engraved in 8 languages:  English, Spanish, Swahili, 

Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Traditional Chinese, and Russian.

Easy to see how this was seen as a kind of NWO blueprint, or some kind of Utopian scheme proposed by Rosicrucians.

• Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

• Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.

• Unite humanity with a living new language.

• Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.

• Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.

• Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.

• Avoid petty laws and useless officials.

• Balance personal rights with social duties.

• Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.

• Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature.

It took 'em a while to finally clock it

The Guardian reports that a recent renovation of Prague's landmark Orloj clock did not turn out as expected.  The mechanisms were updated and some other invisible changes made, but it's part of the visible aspect that has led to the controversy.

The 15th-century astronomical clock includes a 19th-century painting by Joseph Manes depicting the months of the year as zodiac signs.

The new painting has many changes: the ages, physical features, even gender of the figures.  The changes are so significant there can be no question they're intentional.  Some even think the figures represent friends of the artist.

If this were a renovation, it would be understandably an outrage.  But as a replacement, I don't see any big deal.  I suppose the artist signed a contract, so in that case it is a waste of time and money.  But a little "artistic license" doesn't really do any harm.

Why not update things?  The spirit is the same, the poses, the colors.  Does a new face change much?  

After Notre-Dame burned, there was immediately talk about how to renovate it.  Recreate the original or make something modern?  I'm in the latter camp.  Hell, the original spire was a 19th-century addition, not from the same era as the basilica itself (13th century).

Why not let it reflect the times in which it was destroyed and rebuilt?  We don't have to be so thoroughly beholden to the past.  They weren't when they added the spire to Notre-Dame in the 19th century.  These churches took centuries to build, anyway.  Normal that their architecture reflects that.  

The French, btw, have decided to go with the 1859 design.  When the Louvre added I.M. Pei's glass pyramid, critics were apoplectic.  Now it's iconic, an immediately recognizable representation of the museum.  And the Vietnam War memorial was thoroughly derided.  Now it's revered for it's stark beauty and power.  

With Notre-Dame, the opportunity to make something daring and potentially as iconic as its massive facade presented itself.  But much like a lot of things in French governance, they're sticking with what they know instead of daring to innovate.

The clock isn't exactly the same thing, but why not allow a slight modification? Why pretend it's the original, when it isn't?  Maybe the artist should have discussed it.  But then again, it went unnoticed for a while.  It was unveiled in 2018.  I don't know when it was discovered, but the news is only breaking now.  It can't be that dissimilar.

The artist, Stanislav Jirčík, is an academic painter and restorer, but some critics of his joke (?) have called his work amateurish.  But the artist, for now, isn't talking.

But it's a good thing people are discussing it.  Public art matters.

This comes on the heels of a recent incident in which a Russian security guard defaced a painting with ballpoint-pen created googly eyes.

And who can forget the well-meaning Spanish woman who turned a Renaissance-era portrait of Jesus into a kind of monkey?

All Eyes on Me

 

In 2016, LoS reported about the well-meaning Spanish woman who tried to restore an old painting of Jesus and it ended up looking like a monkey.  Ecce Homo, meet Ecce Mono!

Now, in what has been called a "lapse of sanity" a security guard in a Russian museum has made news for "improving" Soviet artist Anna Leporskaya's modernist "Three Figures" by crudely drawing eyes on the faceless figures.  Maybe he was afraid the painting, Ouija board-like, would call up Slender Man? 

("In most stories his face is white and featureless, but occasionally his face appears differently to anyone who sees it....")

The painting is valued at 1 million USD and restoration at 3400 USD.  That's a lot of security guard hours.  And a lapse of sanity to boot.  

Or an homage to Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q..  Or maybe just an irresistible will to whimsy, a return to childhood.  Tell me you've never given a supermodel a blackened tooth or an eye-patch.... never put a Hitler mustache on a Rotarian! 

Maybe a security guard being paid crap wages was making a statement about the irony of a Soviet artist's painting being worth so much.  And knowing that repairing it would cost more than a few month's salary. 

I'm an art lover. When paintings are vandalized I'm scandalized. But for some reason this made me giggle.

Bourdelle's "La France": Montauban copy

When I first saw Bourdelle's La France in Paris in 2011 (on LoS), it encompassed a lot of what I was writing about at the time, featuring symbols with which I'd become very familiar:  A strong woman as an embodiment of France, a serpent, pillars, and a triangle.

There are four bronze castings of the sculpture made from the original maquette, and the Paris version is the fourth (dedicated June 14, 1948).  Another is in Montauban, the capital of the Tarn-et-Garonne, just a short hop up the road from chez moi.  This second casting was dedicated on November 13, 1932.  The base feautures plaques commemorating every conflict from WWI to 21st-century military actions in places such as Chad and ex-Yugoslavia, a couple of names each on small "ex-voto" compared to the hundreds of names around the base naming the staggering number of victims of the Great War.  If you examine my not-so-great photographs, you'll see that for some reason in version two the spear carried by the Athena-like woman is longer than version four, the spearhead seems slightly different, and it certainly isn't hung with the two wreaths one sees on the Paris casting.

The third version is also quite a bit different, as it (quoting myself): 

had originally been placed at the entrance of the "foire d'Alger." After the foire, it was put on the terrace of the Musée de Beaux-Arts, where she scrutinized the Mediterranean.  This one has the most storied history.

As a symbol of de Gaulle, the statue was blown up on the evening of November 26, 1961 by the OAS (Organisation armée secrète), a far-right group who despised de Gaulle for what they perceived as his treason towards Algeria, then a French Department, after his actions led to Algerian independence in 1962.  The socle was pulverized and the statue damaged. 

After this symbolic attack, the pieces were collected and stored until the statue could be repaired.  The French ambassador obtained permission to recover the statue but the French administration refused to pay for the transport cost, instead foisting the responsibility upon Paris' Bourdelle museum.  It was eventually taken to be repaired but the part of the support which depicted the snakes, as well as that part of the lance which held the olive branches, were too damaged to be repaired.  This lance was later sawed down in order for it to fit inside the museum of the Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan military academy.

So.  Not much new, I just happened to stumble upon La France (#2) in Montauban recently, after having forgotten my idea to try and hunt it down after reading about it while researching the one in Paris.  The different castings each have their own history, and I was surprised to learn they had originally been cast for different kinds of monuments. For example, the original maquette was made to commemorate the US' entry into the First World War.  The project floundered but a half-sized casting was exposed at the Salon in 1923.  In 1925, the full-sized, 9m version was cast for use in an expo, after which it was acquired by Briançon, where it stands alone as the city's war memorial.  The second was made directly for Montauban's monument aux morts.  The commission for the Montauban monument, described as a "temple," was given to Bourdelle in 1921, but the monument was not completed until 1930, a year after Bourdelle's death.  The third sat outside a museum in Algiers, was dynamited by the OAS, and then reassembled for another museum, inside this time, at the École St-Cyr.  Number four honors the Free French and "the call" of June 18 by de Gaulle, and was privately funded.  The OAS must have been thrilled.

In addition to the four 9m casts, there are also some 4.6m casts held by various museums.

Apparently, Bourdelle considered La France to be his greatest work, which is saying something, considering that Bourdelle's body of work is impressive in both quantity and quality.  If you look at his lifespan, 1861-1929, the radical modernity of his work is especially striking.  It's really kind of surprising he's not as well-known as say, Rodin, who was an admirer.  I'm lucky that quite a few of his sculptures dot Montauban.  La France is only one of many Bourdelle's works to be found in and around the historic city center near what is now a museum for another native-son, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

Fiends, Omens, Countrymen, lend me your hands....

(I started this over a month ago and have been lollygagging about, so it's a bit of old news at this point.)

Some cadavers have a more active life than many people who assume they are alive.  Ever see Weekend at Bernie's?  S'nuff said.  Bernie had so many adventures they had to make a sequel to relate them all.

Take Abraham Lincoln....as at least one man has already tried!  The 16th President's corpse has traveled more than many people I know.  His coffin has been moved no less than 17 times and opened on at least five occasions.  That's five documented times.  Who knows who else has snuck a peek?  His tomb wasn't guarded for years.  Anything could have been going on in there.

When it was moved for what is said to have been for the last time, those present opened the coffin to ensure that yes, indeed, they were moving the President; they found his body to be in a remarkable state of preservation, incorrupt, like a saint's remains.  The witnesses half-expected him to sit up and begin telling one of those cryptic anecdotes he was famous for and for which people thought he might have been a total simpleton.  Given his (now) well-documented prowess as a vampire hunter, this would not have been beyond the realm of possibility.  His nocturnal habits and amazing constitution had many people "in the know" speculating about whether or not he'd been bitten and turned, but all that was settled when the fanatical John Wilkes Booth, Knight of the Golden Circle, cried out "Sic semper" and settled the question once and for all.

OK, the vampire thing is bullshit, but it's true his body was said to have been remarkably well-preserved, but perhaps no more than any other.  Lincoln had risen to such a status that by the 20th century he was almost a mythical being.  His memorial, completed in 1922, is almost like the shrine of a God Man.  It's an impressive and humbling statue, strangely intimate for something so grandiose.  Lincoln has a special place in the hearts of many Americans, often ranked as the best of our presidents.  This aura is what led to the attempt to steal his body in 1876.

Without soaking the story with all the details, the outline is this.  A Chicago mobster named James "Big Jim" Kennally ran a counterfeiting ring and his engraver, one Benjamin Boyd, had been arrested.  Kennally needed him back so he conceived of a plot to steal Lincoln's body from his unguarded tomb and ransom it for the release of his engraver; for good measure, he was also going to demand 200,000 dollars.

Kennally and his rather maladroit minions were caught and arrested after one of the guys he'd brought in for the caper turned out to be a Secret Service agent working undercover.  The SS was at that time dedicated to capturing counterfeiters and only later, partially due to this plot, did it evolve into the agency responsible for the permanent security of the President.  Oh, how far we've come from the days when a man or woman could walk up to the White House, knock on the door, and ask to see the President.  And most likely get an audience.  Simpler times that assassinations made more complicated.  Even then political violence was associated with a decrease in personal intercourse.  (Reviewing this post for publication, I have no idea why I wrote that last sentence or how it's relevant exactly, but I kind of like the phrase so, I'll leave it in; why not?)

Sometime last year, at least by December 11th, a plaster study of Lincoln's hand was stolen from the Kankakee County Museum, the work of Lincoln admirer G.G. Allin....woups, I mean G.G. Barnard.  According to the NYT, the police notice said the museum curator described the sesquicentenarian hand as being “the size of a 8-10 pound ham.”  Talk about your ham-handed press releases.

While the hand wasn't a real one, there is something of the grave robbery to this case.  Maybe it's because death masks produced during this period were also in plaster.  Maybe it's some kind of lingering Medieval notion about the power of the image -- statues that weep and heal -- or even a bit of the magical thinking that actually make Voodoo dolls work; they work because people think they do.  Basically, there's a strain of thought in the Western mind that makes the graven image something powerful, alive even.  Pygmalion, Constantine's head, Baphomet.  And then there's the negative power given them by iconoclasts, principal tenets of both Judaism and Islam, not to mention once-sporadic outbreaks of image smashing in the Orthodox world.  The Egyptians at times held that the obelisk was a petrified ray of light and thus contained the essence of Ra himself.  Their funerary practices placed a special emphasis on the objects the Pharaoh would need for the afterlife, the objects and sarcophagi were imbued with their power.  Lincoln, our martyred President, may have developed such an aura of sanctity that even a ham-sized plaster hand made from life could be considered as something akin to a holy relic.

It seems weird, but the holiness of Presidents was a  paleo-meme in the making during the mid-19th century.  Take Brumidi's The Apotheosis of Washington from 1865, which graces the Capitol's rotunda.  The painting references a sculpture from 1840 by Horatio Greenough which portrays Washington as a muscular godling, hand pointing up as opposed to down.  As above etc.  They both hold their swords in a non-threatening manner and have draped material over their knees.  Brumidi, however, took care to keep Washington clothed.  The weirdness of the Grrenough piece, and Washington's naked torso, did not go unmentioned at the time.  It too was designed for the rotunda, but was so scorned and derided that it was moved at least four times before ending up on the second floor of the National Museum of American History, where it has been tucked away since 1964.  Interesting that the essential pose of the sculpture was maintained in the rotunda fresco and specifically turned into an apotheosis; why did they need this Hermetic pose in the rotunda?  Also interesting that this dates from just after the assassination of Lincoln.  The nation's first martyred president.  By that act he'd become something of a god.

A lithograph roughly contemporary with Constantino Brumidi's painting shows Lincoln and Washington in an oddly intimate embrace, as if Washington is pulling Lincoln to his feet, resurrecting him perhaps, and holding a laurel wreath over his head; it is titled Washington and Lincoln. (Apotheosis).  Apotheosis represents the ultimate step on Lincoln's journey.  Where can he go now that he's become a god?  First a crowned martyr, then....deification.  Making good men better.

On LoS we've posted a few times about the political uses of the corpse.  In No body home, we compare the postmortem treatment of Osama Bin Laden and Che Guevara.  Both were rather hurriedly disposed of so as to avoid any prolonged controversy about their ultimate destination.  Bin Laden was dumped into the sea and Guevara dismembered and sent to many secret locations.  No grave in order to prevent their final resting places from becoming shrines, rallying points for disaffected young radicals.  The Soviets were hip to this risk as well, which is why they never really buried Hitler's body.  They wanted to prevent any place from becoming a pilgrimage destination for a new generation of Nazis; they were afraid of the corpse's power.  They burned it, ground it up and burned it again, eventually scattering the ashes in the Dneiper.  But always in almost tentative baby half-steps.  They apparently kept some charred skull fragments hanging around until god knows when, for all we know they could still be an a shoe-box somewhere in a vast Russian warehouse like the Ark in Indiana Jones.  The Soviets were into the power of corpses as shrine-fodder.  They did, after all, put Lenin on display at Red Square, as if his corpse were the golden milestone of the U.S.S.R.

Many believe Hitler may have not died at all.  He may have been ferreted off to Argentina....  That's the danger of not producing a body.  People will say Hitler's death was a fabrication, or that Osama had been long dead and only used as a bogeyman to scare the American people like children afraid of being carried off in a rotten sack by a smelly old man.

A disappearing body is a powerful religious symbol; one could reasonably argue that the empty tomb is the critical circumstance which saved Romano-Hellenized Judaism from obscurity; just another failed Messiah.  But this Nazarene was something different; and even he spoke of the severed hand.

And if your right hand subverts you, cut it off, cast it from you, for it is profitable for you that one of your members be lost, and not that your whole body fall into Gehenna.

-- Christ, Jesus H. (Matthew 5:30 | Aramaic Bible in Plain English).

Argentina has produced one of the strangest cases of postmortem dismemberment I've read about.  This is the case of the surgical removal of Juan Peron's hands long after his body his was laid to rest in his mausoleum; the "theft" was a hornet's nest of conspiracy theories, said to involve the P2 Lodge, the Mafia, and elements of the Military junta who brutalized the country at the time of the grave robbery.  There are many theories behind the theft.  Some say it's related to occult practices like those which result in the creation of a Hand of Glory.  In addition to the occult value of the Hand, which allows its bearer to unlock any door, it might have actually worked -- some speak of Swiss bank accounts accessed with his thumbprint.  Others cite alleged Masonic punishments for breaking one's oath.  Still others point to a kind of symbolic and even more potent kind of castration; the hands -- being very visible in his televised speeches -- became associated with his gift of oratory, which was one his most effective tools in swaying the people.  Incidentally, in an older post (The hand is the whole, 29 January, 2011) we made the connection between the Hand of God and the Voice of God in medieval iconography.  Scientists measuring brain activity have noted that the language centers of the brain are stimulated to the same degree and in the same location whether the language be spoken, or communicated via sign language.

In The hand is the whole I wrote quite a bit about the relationship between the hand and images of power and authority, citing several popular expressions.  These metaphors are often about force, dominance and the effective exercise thereof. 

• His response was a bit heavy-handed.  
• She rules the office with an iron fist.  
• The man was strong-armed into signing the contract.  
• He can't escape the long arm of the law.

In Star Wars the changing balance of power between Vader and Luke is always preceded by a de-handing.  In another quasi-Oedipal conflict, Hook chases Peter Pan, to exact revenge for having been de-handed by him.  ("Peter" being slang for penis is surely a coincidence).  He is also driven into paroxysms of fear at the sound of an approaching clock.  The Lost Symbol is kicked off, if we can mix up our body parts, by the discovery of a Hand of Glory in the Capitol rotunda, which sits at one end of the National Mall, that Tree of Life directly across from the Lincoln memorial.  It occurs to me that in Game of Thrones, Ned Stark, the King's "Hand" (who is beheaded!) is a perfect illustration of this point.  The Hand represents the King, can speak on his behalf -- recall that the hand and the tongue activate language centers in the listener is the same manner -- and generally enforces his Will; the instrument in short, of Power.

The de-handing of Perón was more than a simple castration; it was a killing of the father, as in the Star Wars films.  A hand-less man is diminished in ways a legless man is not.  The hands are part of effective communication and without hands we are rendered partially mute.  I'll paste back in a fragment I wrote earlier:  "it was a cutting out of the tongue, for these hands held vast powers of communication."  Perón, from beyond the grave, could not exercise power over the popular imagination as he might have been able had he been whole.  In Buenos Aires, an enormous pair of portraits of Evita face the Obelisk, symbol of the Republic.  Graffiti to Evita is everywhere.  She is worshiped like one of the legendary folk saints that flourish in Argentina:  San La Muerte, Gauchito Gil, La Difunta Correa.  But Juan is strangely mute.

From Alpha-Zeta 16 October, 2012:

Eva Perón's body also suffered indignity in death; her corpse was ignobly shuffled about before returning to Buenos Aires.  After the military coup of 1955 her body disappeared.  It was secretly put into a crypt in Milan under the name María Maggi (Mary Magdalen?).  "Evita" was exhumed and repatriated in 1971, placed in an elaborate and highly secure tomb, which has become a popular shrine, and she, revered like a saint.   What is important is that her body has remained intact.  In his essay on "Latin America" in The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, John McManners "claims that Eva Perón consciously incorporated aspects of the mythology of the Virgin and of Mary Magdalene into her public persona."

Anyway, Lincoln's hand -- a few weeks later -- remains lost.  The nation hasn't crumbled.  Whoever took them probably just wanted a nifty and easy-to-score souvenir.  But given the recent spate of attacks on Confederate flags and memorials, it could be a kind of revenge by a lone "Lost Causer" of the sort who put a bullet into Lincoln's head in the first place...

And I just noticed that the museum director in is named Connie Licon.  Missing two letters.  Like two missing hands!!!!                 

Bwa-ha-ha-haaah!!

The Politics of Removal

Four-square

Unmitigated drivel about public art, architecture and monuments make up a large percentage of LoS posts. From time to time we've talked about the destruction of past monuments to reflect changing aesthetics, political ideologies, practical urban renewal, etc. The erasure of the past for political reasons was common enough in ancient Rome and Egypt, where sometimes an emperor or pharaoh would efface inscriptions on monuments in order to diminish the achievements of a rival or to sully the name of a predecessor.

A few days ago, the New Orleans City Council voted for an ordinance that will lead to the removal of four monuments in that city which honor Confederate heroes.  The Atlantic says:

This decision constitutes the most sweeping removal of Confederate iconography since the lowering of the Confederate battle flag in Columbia, South Carolina, this past summer, and offers the clearest evidence yet that the Lost Cause view of the Civil War has finally lost.

It is in the larger historical context that we view this news. New Orleans feels confident it can remove four big monuments and in no way be culturally diminished, a definitive sign of the changing of the guard.

Louisiana's governor even stepped into the fray and tried to block their removal, not because of the history they represent, but because they represent history.  In an interesting twist, however, the Governor isn't some disgruntled old white dude.  He's young, conservative and of Indian heritage -- Bobby Jindal.

I have no confusion over why people want these to come down. Hard to swallow walking past some tax-supported public art erected to glorify a man who fought a war to keep your people enslaved.

The removal is said to be temporary; the goal being to put them together in some kind of park or memorial where they can be re-contextualized. I always get a bit disconcerted by attempts to alter history, something Winston Smith-y about it, but if done correctly, I suppose the monuments can be preserved in a way that doesn't insult the large black population of the city.

One thing that stood out was that the monuments were brought down for being a "public nuisance." You'd think any nuisance would be a result of the actions of people, not inert marble and bronze. Also curious is that an anonymous donor is footing the bill; what are the donor's motives? Get rid of these things ASAP....or to protect them from destruction by attaching the condition that they'll foot the bill only if they are preserved?

Apparently there's a U.S. place names bureau that periodically changes official place names from time to time. This has included eliminating offensive racial epithets from creeks, mountains, towns, etc. Battle Creek, Oklahoma, for example, was known as Nigger Creek.  Until 1990!  The conundrum came up recently in France for a town called Mort aux Juifs: "Death to Jews" (residents voted to retain the name).  In Spain, Arabs can't be too happy in Matamoros: Kill Moors.  

I'm not against periodically updating place names to reflect changing attitudes, but I do wonder where removing monuments will stop.  (A question which sadly puts me in the company of some serious assholes; where it does stop will be debated for a long time to come, but taking Confederate symbols from state flags, for example, is a start about which I have no doubts whatsoever....)

A mental flash: as of 2016 the World Fantasy Award will no longer feature the likeness of H.P. Lovecraft because of his virulent racism; attitudes which even by the standards of his time were pretty harsh.  This pissed off Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, who said he returned his two WFAs and urged a boycott of future ceremonies.  Like Jindal, Joshi is Indian, demonstrating that this issue is not just black and white....

Nor do I oppose taking out the Confederate flag from state flags, which were only added in the 50's as a middle finger to Washington de-segregationists.  By removing these Confederate flags, it's not an attack on Southern heritage or Confederate dead, but an attack on Jim Crow. 

I don't have any strong feelings against removing these four monuments in New Orleans, despite the money and manpower expended on such endeavors.  But I'm uncomfortable with the destruction of historical monuments and buildings in general.  And I wonder....Jefferson and Washington owned slaves, so will they eventually become targets? Because that's a totally different scale altogether, as improbable as it is unfeasible.  It's like the debates in literature about Céline or Ezra Pound; do we refuse to acknowledge their place in the canon because they happened to be anti-Semites or fascist sympathizers?

I would propose that the answer doesn't lie in removing these monuments, but perhaps adding context, whether in the form of interpretive signs and markers, or some kind of counterbalance, a monument to show that there is the will to spend as much time and energy on honoring another person and ideology as there is on what's currently there.

This is all part and parcel of Art History.  And this subject certainly merits close attention.  I'd like to see a survey of what has been destroyed and removed instead of what's been created and installed.  Who and what we honor, and how, are living polemics.  The struggle over symbols is in this case also a struggle over urban space.  As something tangible it is easier to quantify, to actually do something on a monumental scale that will alter the city-scape.  One could call it the Politics of Removal. 

I've always wondered when they'll go after that Pike statue in DC.... (8/15: The mayor, more than half of the D.C. Council, and the D.C. attorney general have joined activists in calling for the removal of a statue of a Confederate general from federal land in Judiciary Square.)

Removing four statues seems appropriate if you're aiming to re-orient a map -- one for each cardinal direction.  The statues represent Gen. Robert E. Lee (1884), Pres. Jefferson Davis, Gen. Gustave Toutant Beauregard (also a Freemason) and the Crescent City White League (1891).  

Of the four, the last is quite shocking.   It doesn't honor a politician or general.  It commemorates a battle in which an army of about 5000 from the White League attempted to take over the state government in September 1874.  It was the culmination of series of violent events stemming from a disputed 1872 election, including the massacre of over 220 people, most of them black, at Colfax.  Somewhere around 30 people were killed at Coushatta.  Both of these places are between a three- or four-hour drive from New Orleans these days.

The White League was essentially an extra-legal paramilitary working on behalf of the Democratic Party to suppress the vote, harass carpetbaggers, intimidate blacks and above all regain control of the government.  Unlike the KKK, the White League worked openly, without disguises.  When the Democrats did regain control of the government a couple years later, the militants in the White League were re-absorbed into various state militias and the National Guard.  What was essentially a terrorist militia became redistributed throughout the existing legal state and national military.  The Klan was finally suppressed about this time under intense pressure from the Federal government.  But in many ways it didn't really matter; the Klan had already achieved its goals by putting Democrats in power throughout the South, where they would remain firmly ensconced until the Civil Rights Era.

 

In the 20's and 30's the Klan re-appeared; it was an entirely different organization, but it had taken to mass parades and rallies as much as night riding.  It was in this "2nd generation" that the Klan membership was historically at its highest, and perhaps most highly-influential.

This could account for why an inscription was added to the monument in 1932 stating that the Yankees "recognized white supremacy in the South" by withdrawing Federal troops after the violent exploits of the White League.  Note that the monument doesn't talk about recognizing "states' rights" or the "legitimate grievances of Southerners resulting from the punitive measures of Reconstruction" which is how defenders of the monument and the confederate flag frame the aftermath of the Civil War.  Nope, the monument celebrates Northern recognition of white supremacy.  No surprise that a city which is 60% black would vote to bring it down.

To call for the removal of this inscription is not being "politically correct".  This is not "college student crybaby safe space" stuff.  This is about repudiating a publicly-funded tribute to the openly white supremacist paramilitaries which took control of the government that established the laws defining blacks as second-class citizens for the next hundred years.

This flat-out racist monument graced New Orleans until 1989.  At that time, it was removed in order to do work on Canal Street.  City leaders probably hoped to mothball it, but some angry citizens kicked into gear and had it re-erected.  In 1993 it was moved to the spot where the battle actually took place, which had the side benefit of being somewhat out of the way, silenced to some degree.  The inscription added in 1932 was covered up and a more conciliatory inscription added. 

Where it goes now is anybody's guess.  Soon after the council's vote, various plaintiffs filed suit to block further removals: the Louisiana Landmarks Society, the Foundation for Historical Louisiana, the Monumental Task Committee Inc. and Beauregard Camp No. 130, a New Orleans chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Of course, what happens will not be determined by questions regarding what we honor and how, but by legalities regarding who owns the land where they are situated, the fact that two of the monuments are on the National Register of Historic Places, and various laws protecting historical monuments and veterans memorials.  Laws created, in other words, exactly for this kind of situation.

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Winners writing history:

US 3rd Army blowing up swastika at the zeppelin field in Nuremberg, 1945

Taliban blowing up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, 2001.

A "spontaneous event" stage-managed by a US Psyops team. Firdos Square, 2003

My Bologne has a first name:

L'obelisque

When I moved to Toulouse in April, 2002, I lived a few hundred yards away from this plaza and for over a year regularly frequented the restaurants and bars nearby.  My best pal Alex's office is just around the corner and the plaza provides a convenient shortcut to the hopping/happening Place St. Pierre.

Which is why it's kind of odd that I must have seen this plaza fewer times than I can count on one hand.

The few times I had been there I must have

dithered about as if in a dream, 
some kind of hapless mote 
floating through on a sunbeam

(from Burning Pizzle by J. Trenchwheat)

because I'd never really quite grokked -- done the spit-take as it were -- the fact that there's an obelisk fountain at the dead center.  And if there's anything I'd grok, it's an obelisk fountain.  This quiet, almost hidden plaza in the midst of one of Toulouse's hubbiest bubs features an obelisk and, as Prof. Freedom Williams once said, "I'd never even gone "hmmm."")

The Place de Bologne is relatively new, so it's jut another indication that the Egyptian Revival is still going strong in Toulouse  (I've written extensively about plethora of contemporary pyramid monuments in the metropolitan area).  Egypt remains a source of inspiration for architects, developers, and builders as it has since the Phoenicians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans -- times when Egyptian civilization was the antiquity of what we consider our own antiquity.

Place de Bologne as seen from the LoS helicopter

Take a S.I.P.

Imagine how geeked out I got when after seeing the obelisk I took a look at the office doors facing it and saw a triangle logo for home builder (an outfit called S.I.P.)  I have explored the links between Freemasonry, the Egyptian Revival(s), the triangle and/or pyramid logo, and the French real estate and construction industries.  In this case I was doubly geeked:  facing this first S.I.P. was another be-triangled business:  Groupe Osiris (!) is a developer and real estate manager.

Osiris has the cool-for-us title of the "Lord of Silence" -- but he was also known as the "Lord of the Dead" and the "King of the Living".  Interesting -- perhaps the Groupe seeks to evoke the importance of urban planning and lodging as a controlling force in our lives.  Haussmann certainly understood the relationship between urban geography and political liberty when he designed wide boulevards favorable to army forces and cannon at the expense of the narrow streets favorable to building blockades and defending the poor quarters with rusty rifles and kitchen knives.

King of the Living Room

When Toulouse performed the same kind of "remodeling" (at about the same as Haussmann), the city's motivations were probably less strategic than practical in terms of everyday traffic.  In any event, if an urban zone is defined by the constant reconstitution of its component parts (to paraphrase T.A. Wilson), a city is in a constant state of degeneration, regeneration, and transformation.
Osiris worship was in essence a cult of regeneration and rebirth, and a city it essentially an entity which is dying and re-birthing itself at every second of every day.  The city is its own mother, father, and child, a family coiled-up into a convoluted relationship which at its mutating center is a kind of cosmic incest.  (If in fact we can speak of a center at all; perhaps it's less inaccurate to speak of something so folded up in upon itself that it's all periphery.

Given the increasingly restrictive circles in which the elite travel, and -- like boolean ovals -- intersect through various boards, clubs, business groups, Lodges -- tighter and tighter as we head towards the tip of the pyramid -- it's no small wonder these increasingly reduced and therefore intimate business bedfellows move with ease within the nomenclature of this incestuous Egyptian genealogy: Horus, Osiris, Cheops....

One of the many challenges facing urban planners is how to move a city forward without totally destroying its past.  One can't forbid any and all new construction in an historic city or we end up stunting a city's dynamism.  We have a static showpiece where we can't even put in a new skylight because it doesn't mesh with the surrounding 19th century character, for instance.

That said, I'm a firm believer in taking the time and spending whatever is necessary to properly investigate new construction sites and thinking long and hard about what we're destroying.  When in the 19th century the city of Toulouse plowed through the medieval warren of the centre ville to create a logically straight pair of central axes, they did indeed facilitate movement through the center of town; they also forever destroyed  its medieval character.  The neighborhoods around these axes remain today among Toulouse's most beautiful streets.  Imagine what has been lost.

In my own time, during the renovation and construction of the new Palais de Justice, the remains of the palace of the Counts of Toulouse were found; minimal archaeological investigation was carried out and what we might have learned from it has probably been lost forever.
  

Not so far from there, the destruction of a building attached to the Church of the Dalbade revealed a medieval cemetery underneath.  This was also investigated, but then, poof, a new building appeared and the cemetery was lost forever.

The Place de Bologne is another such place, which "represents in an edifying manner the problems posed by a certain kind of urbanism" (here).  Some of the buildings were renovated for use in the current plaza, but some very old buildings, in one of the oldest parts of Toulouse, were simply destroyed.  If we were dealing with some run-of-the-mill urban building, we could shrug it off as acceptable change.  "Urban Renewal" has been used to put lipstick on the pig of various corrupt and disruptive schemes dreamed up by developers eager to squeeze every last coin from every last square foot, but if we look past the abuse of this doctrine, we'll find it's a necessary and even positive part of urban evolution.  Without renewal, there is no urban stasis, only decay.

But the ruins here were in fact the last vestiges of the palace of the Visigoth kings of Toulouse, before various depredations obliged them to remove to Toledo (Spain, not Klinger's hometown).

This is an important and relatively under-known period of the city's history:  the Dark Ages, the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages -- the Visigoths being one of the tribes who brought that about -- in the epicenter of Gallo-Roman France.  The Visigoths had sacked Delphi and Rome and legend has it that they made off with the spoils of Solomon's Temple.  They built the first Church of the Daurade in an octagonal, Byzantine style, so-named for its golden mosaics.  Their kingdom extended from Andalusia to the Loire and Toulouse was their capital; Place de Bologne was the epicenter.

The worst part is what they destroyed it all for; the architecture is unremarkable and the entrances to the plaza are gated, giving the impression of a private rather than a public space.  Indeed, all the buildings on the plaza are a tightly controlled development, not really an organic residential zone but operated by one of the powerful developers which have had so much power in determining the ever fluid urban and suburban landscapes of French cities and villages

As one site puts it "the result of these errors makes this place close, cold, without life.  With a century of history destroyed beneath our feet."  Interesting now that I think of it.  Another one of these "dead zones" is Compans Caffarrelli, which, incidentally, is another big plaza surrounded by high-rises, a public space privatized, basically, but with a cold and inert feeling despite the fact that several hundred people probably live there.

One must also consider the chilling effect of all this not only on street life, but free speech.  Consider this anecdote from a few years ago:

Taking pictures of this pyramid and architecture, Daurade was approached by a squat little security guard, a little nervous and scowling, who informed him that taking pictures is forbidden. So there you have it. On the city streets one is free to photograph what one wants. But as all this public space is enclosed and privatized, public inquiry and expression are somewhat less free. In fact, taking a photo is forbidden. Whatever the reason for this, security probably, it still doesn’t eclipse the fact that in this new world order everything will be for sale, and those with money to buy are welcome. As long as the money keeps flowing in the right direction: up towards the pinnacle.

The fountain isn't remarkable:  an obelisk in an octagonal basin, accessed by three steps which form the octagonal base.  The plaza itself is paved in the same form.  I suppose one could read something into the three steps in terms of Freemasonry, but that may be pushing it!  It occurs to me that this is the second thing in this post described as octagonal; it's possible the form of the plaza is a reference to the original Church of the Daurade which sat in roughly the equivalent position at the other end of the Quai Lucien Lombard.

I've already mentioned in a few posts how the Count of Montalambert called Toulouse the "home of vandalism".  Part that vandalism isn't just the destruction of history, but replacing what has been destroyed by shite architecture.  Toulouse has recently been obliging people on the outskirts to sell their homes so they can be razed and big dumpy apartment blocks put in their place.  The whole quasi-rural character of vast tracts close to the dead center of Toulouse have been sucked into a cold and sterile, inorganic mess of character-less, undifferentiated buildings.

So, I was attracted by the Egyptian obelisk and, sniffing around for anything vaguely Masonic, came across the two developers using triangles -- a subject to which I've already dedicated both a post and a Picasa album -- one of these developers specifically evokes Osiris.  A curious choice, given the theme of death and rebirth.  They certainly killed something off here -- a piece of history which could furnish much-needed detail about the Visigoth period of Toulouse -- but whether something worthwhile has been born from this remains to be seen.

The Vandals of Toulouse

I started our last post about one week ago and only published it yesterday.  I hadn't intended to write so much about bricks but the details seemed to become relevant as I went along.  This is somewhat fortuitous because on Saturday I came across a church that grabbed my eye and, as it turns out, was designed by an architect who also created the first industrialized brickworks in Toulouse.

The Église St. Jean-Baptiste d'Ondes is the parish church of Ondes, the next village after our neighboring village of Grenade-sur-Garonne.  It's a small place but is home to a few interesting buildings, one of which is a "haunted mansion" style house that sustained severe fire damage a few years back.

What struck me about the church were two things, the Tetragrammaton in the pediment, a triangle in glory, and the obelisks flanking the facade.

We have traced the use of free-standing architectural elements to delineate the entrance to sacred space back to the Egyptian use of two obelisks at the front of their temples.  This was picked up by the Phoenicians, who used two pillars instead of obelisks.  According to legend, it was Hiram Abiff, Phoenician architect, who used them in his design for Solomon's Temple.  The tale of Hiram and his murder by three unworthy laborers is an important story in Masonic lore.  A Masonic Lodge is ostensibly based on descriptions of Solomon's temple and thus, has an entrance clearly demarcated by two pillars called Jachin and Boaz after their Biblical ancestors.  But we've talked about all this at great length before. (See labels: obelisk and/or pillars).

I was tooling about with a friend when we ran across the church; i's design, atypical of the region, caused us to speculate about the date.   The friend suggested 19th century and I agreed, placing it at about 1830 or even a bit earlier, maybe 1810.  I also wondered if I was mistaken in seeing obelisks these church towers.  This close-up show that the edges of the obelisk are bevelled somewhat, so in a sense they are octagonal.  What struck me was the decorative element at the corner, a scallop or flower-like ornament which almost certainly has a name; but my days of intensively memorizing the architectural orders and their elements have been over for more than 20 years and besides, I don't think we ever got around to this one.

Does anyone have any idea what this element is called?

As luck would have it I saw some movement in the library across the street.  It turns out a ladies' knitting circle was just wrapping up but the most outgoing of the ladies talked to me a bit.  Apparently the church is rarely opened and she didn't know when it was built.  But this was a library, and she had a book in hand, toot sweet.

She leafed through the fat, self-published tome and voila, there was a lot of information about the church.  It was designed by one August Virebent (1792-1857) and work began in 1839.  Kudos for me!  This is pretty much exactly contemporaneous with the peak of the career of Urban Vitry (1802-1863).  Vitry, who we've discussed on LoS in several posts, was city architect of Toulouse from 1830 to 1843.  He put more typical obelisks at the entrance to his Terre Cabade cemetery (approved 1832, opened 1840) and designed a massive obelisk to commemorate the Battle of Toulouse (1814), constructed between 1835 and 1839.

This book also mentioned that one of the Virebents had married a Vitry; Wikipedia reveals that August Virebent's father Jean-Pascal (1746-1831), was not only Vitry's predecessor as city architect (from 1782 to 1830) but also his uncle.  August Virebent and Urban Vitry were cousins.

Both were men of their times, using classical elements liberally in their work.  Virebent was known especially for his use of caryatids and other sculptural motifs on his facades.  The "obelisks" on St. Jean-Baptiste church remind me of Vitry's tomb, the only photo of which I have is unfortunately too cropped to truly grok the similarities.  But the following photo of the Vitry-Bezat (I'm not entirely certain of the second name) family mausoleum is instructive.

You'll notice that the corner elements on the mausoleum are almost identical to those on the church.  So we can see that Virebent's flourish was part of the standard vocabulary of the time--for Vitry and Virebent at least.  Though this isn't "proof" of anything, it does support my reading that these towers on the Église St. Jean-Baptiste are (or refer to) obelisks.

Photo by flikr user christine.petitjean: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tisstit/5182656924/

I was pleased to learn that Virebent and Vitry were family and shared an aesthetic, but in light of my last post about the bricks used in local architecture, it's a happy coincidence the the younger Virebent was also known for being a briquetier, or brick manufacturer.  He developed and registered a patent for the ingredients and process of manufacturing brick; so, Virebent contributed to the Toulousain aesthetic at the most fundamental level.  His process made it easier to create bricks of varying dimensions that were both easier to cut and allowed for mortar to set better.  He also invented a machine that produced a finer, more solid and compact clay to produce a red or white brick-making material that made it easier to create decorative elements and reliefs based on brick.  Virebent is credited with being the first to industrialize the production of both humble bricks and decorative elements based on brick.  Form followed invention and today we see a multitude of forms in brick that had previously required the use of the slower and more expensive  technique of cutting stone.

Virebent's brick works seems to have continued to operate into the 1960's and the machines and processes used in the terra cotta industry today aren't much different from those he developed.

The first mention of a church at Ondes dates to 1538; it was dedicated to Notre Dame de l’Annonciation.  In 1613, the Archbishop of Toulouse judged that it was too small and authorized a replacement.  By the 1830's the church was in such a state of disrepair that instead of renovating it, a new construction was ordered.  The materials were found locally and the ornaments all came from Virebent's brickworks.  All the labor was performed by locals, for free, except for the artisans such as masons and carpenters.  The church was largely finished by 1848, but work on the decoration continued until 1866, by which time Virebent and Vitry were dead.

As for the title of this post, Vitry and the elder Virebent are largely responsible for the look of downtown Toulouse as it appears today, with two large thoroughfares forming a cross at its center.  It was rational and practical but the work, along with other urbanization projects, indiscriminately destroyed many of the cloisters and medieval streets that until then had characterized the center of town.  This earned Toulouse the title "capital of vandalism".

One man's "development" is another man's destruction, something that holds true today.  Toulouse is being transformed at a rate unseen since the days Vitry and Virebent were razing a good chunk of downtown Toulouse, for better or for worse, and a lot of these new projects are still using those red and white bricks.  Vitry and Virebent (the elder) are pretty much synonymous with the Toulouse style, sober and retrained with a strong neo-classical flavor and occasional Egyptian touches.  There is no indication, however, that they were Freemasons, so we can chalk this up to the wider interest in Egypt which spurred the ongoing revival that both preceded and followed their careers.