Category Archives: statues

Over-inflated?

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So a Tom Brady statue was unveiled last month outside the New England Patriots football stadium, the old quarterback depicted with a right arm raised in triumph. The thing weighs 12,300 pounds and stands 17 feet tall, but appears a bit out-of-proportion; the head is too small, floating above all that padding.

The obvious intent was to glorify the seven-time Super Bowl champion, so it might have been an opportunity to embody a hackneyed modern sports cliché by sculpting Brady’s little noggin on the body of a goat. Anyway the effigy, which is a poor man’s Michelangelo’s David with clothes, feels excessively worshipful of a fellow whose most significant impact on humanity was throwing a football—accurately, yes, but just a football—and therefore maybe a tad over the top.

Not that such a rite is unusual. There are massive bronze renditions of accomplished jocks in abundance—from baseball’s Babe Ruth to golf’s Tiger Woods, boxing’s Oscar de la Hoya to football’s Johnny Unitas, soccer’s Diego Maradona to hockey’s Wayne Gretzky, as well as sculptures of coaches and sports executives—most having been unveiled while the actual human being was still alive.

But the argument here is that such forms of adoration are better reserved for long-dead figures—therefore not feeding on the objects’ self-importance, as if they are being canonized, somehow representing a purity of virtue impossible for any human being to live up to.

Penn State’s Joe Paterno had been feted for his wildly successful football coaching record with a bronze statue on campus in 2001—only to have it ignominiously removed and hidden away 11 years later. It was judged to have a become a “source of division and an obstacle to healing” after Paterno was found to have covered up allegations of child sexual abuse by his veteran assistant coach. Possibly if the school had waited until Paterno’s complete history was available, and he was safely in his grave, before considering affording him such an honor.

A recent essay by Sally Jenkins in The Atlantic pondered a better use of sports-related sculptures—as representations of something beyond the individual’s specific accomplishments on the playing field. First of all, she noted, “Of all the public indignities great athletes are subjected to, from the meme to the boo to the hurled bottle, undoubtedly the worst is the bad statue. A bronze figure in a stadium plaza is so much more permanent than an insult, and the irony is that a Dwyane Wade or a Michael Jordan has to accept the thing as a compliment. The statue’s intent is to immortalize. Instead, it kills its subject dead.”

It is a common slur, after all, to describe any athlete’s resemblance to a statue, thereby invoking the image of being frozen-in-place while action swirls around him or her.

Jenkins argues that “only one truly great bronze rendering of a renowned athlete [that was] produced in recent decades is the abstract” of tennis champion Arthur Ashe at New York City’s National Tennis Center—which “surges from the earth like a lightning bolt striking upward instead of down. The sculpture, unveiled by the artist Eric Fischl in 2000 and titled Soul in Flight, is worth pausing to look at, for its instructive power and its indictment of the ponderous slabs of metallurgical debris that litter other stadiums and arenas.”

That statue isn’t really a rendering of Ashe, and is not so much lionizing his reign among jocks as a visual of wider possibilities. He was the rare athletic champion who actually connected with the real world—an activist against South African apartheid, a public face in the fight against HIV (which he had contracted through a blood transfusion after a second heart attack), an advocate for children’s education, a published historian.

There is, by the way, a statue in Richmond, Va., that captures a real-life image of Ashe, holding a tennis racket in one hand—but with a message beyond sports. Ashe is surrounded by children, with a stack of books in his other hand. It’s another tableau of wider possibilities.

Meanwhile, there happens to be a rare memorial willing to immortalize a star athlete’s infamous moment. In 2012, six years after French soccer hero Zinedine Zidane was ejected from the World Cup final for headbutting an Italian opponent, that confrontation was cast in bronze and placed in Paris. Zidane had been ejected from the game for his misdeed and France lost the match. The statue was christened “Coup de tete”—“Headbutt.”

Its sculptor, Algerian-born French artist Adel Abdessemed, said the aim of his work was to promote conversations about “stress on athletes…and the importance of dealing with issues of mental health.” Real-life stuff.

What if—in the spirit of sports’ (and human) imperfection, of the undeniable temptations to win-at-all-costs—the new Tom Brady statue had showed, in his upraised hand, an air-deficient football, recalling the January 2015 AFC Championship controversy over allegations that Brady had ordered deliberate removal of air from game footballs to aid his passing in New England’s victory over Indianapolis? Brady wound up being suspended for the first four games of the following season and his team was fined $1 million and forced to forfeit two 2016 draft picks. That’s part of his record, too.

They could call the piece “Uninflated.”

Thinking about statues

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If we haven’t learned something in the last few months—about U.S. history, the inadequate health care system, economic inequality, flags, racism, policing—we haven’t been trying hard enough. These days there are lessons everywhere, and among them is the fact that our public education system pretty much fails us.

Take statues. Please.

That one topic is now covering a lot of ground left unearthed in our school-days history books. What do grandiose public statues mean? What are they for? Who are they for? When did they become fundamental pillars of the Constitution, as some have suggested? Are they really a preservation of our heritage amid the uprising that mostly is targeting Confederate symbols and sculptures of prominent slave owners?

One benefit to this uproar—as with the daunting coronavirus presence, Black Lives Matter protests, the Mississippi flag’s official rejection and Defund the Police rallies—is being forced to think about matters previously too easy to ignore. And learn a thing or two.

In a recent post on Medium.com, Australian Claire Baxter, whose master’s thesis was titled Conflict Archaeology & Heritage, argued that “the value of statues is not what they tell us about the individual being memorialized, but what they tell us of the society that created the statue and erected it….”

If these bronze and marble memorials “have the power to write history,” New York Times art critic Holland Cotter asked, “who, in any given case, is wielding that power? Was the history true when written, and has that truth changed over time? Does the history serve positive or negative ends? Promote inclusion or divisiveness? If monuments are, like history, intrinsically complex, not easily defined as ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ is complexity alone enough to justify a contested monument’s continuing presence?”

My past thoughts about statues never got much beyond the frivolous. During a long-ago assignment in Muleshoe, Tex., it was a giggle to be confronted in the main town square with the massive statue of a mule. Amid a reunion of University of Missouri newspaper pals, I made the trivial pilgrimage to the campus statue of Beetle Bailey—the comic-strip character created by Mort Walker when he was a Mizzou student.

This is different. Robert E. Lee, Andrew Jackson, Jefferson Davis and the like were not cartoon characters, and the toppling of images of blackguards and cads moved Yale history professor David Blight, in a New Yorker magazine essay, to compare such dramatic developments to the fall of the Berlin Wall 31 years ago.

Blight wrote of “some awe in seeing, during these past few weeks, Confederate monuments in America likewise reduced to pieces, relics of the collapse, after a hundred and fifty-five years, of the public vestiges of the Lost Cause tradition. The summer of 2020, like the autumn of 1989, could mark the death of a specific vision of history. If so, it has taken a long, long night—to borrow from Robbie Robertson and the Band—to drive old Dixie down.”

In a New York Times interview, art historian and John Jay College professor Erin Thompson noted that humans have been “making monuments to glorify people and ideas since we started making art, and since we started making statues, other people have started tearing them down….It’s not surprising that we are seeing people rebelling against ideas that are represented by these statues today.

“It’s not the statues themselves,” she said, “but the point of view that they represent. And these are statues in public places, right? So these are statues claiming that this version of history is the public version of history.”

What it feels like, to employ a terrible pun, is that these memorials have reached a statue of limitations. Cotter wrote: “Most of the commemorative statues now under attack across the land…have little visual charisma. They’re generic period images of white male power. You’re tempted to think: If they go, small loss. Let’s move on.”

As for “erasing the past,” Blight reminded that the “statues are being toppled, but the story that built them remains.” (He mentioned that he has bits of concrete from the demolished Berlin Wall. So do I. They still exist.) Just as true: Those statues weren’t going to leap from their pedestals. They needed a little push.