Monumental Acts: American Public Sculpture and the Representation of Race, Gender, and Class

Melissa Dabakis, Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 1880-1935. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Americans are rather conflicted and contradictory in their attitudes toward public monuments, memorials, and statuary. Lacking radical changes in political regimes, we tend to cast a blind eye or ignore monuments from earlier decades, rather than bomb or discard them. While Robert Musil's observation that "nothing is as invisible as monuments" describes popular indifference toward extant works of art, it does not explain our desire to build further monuments and memorials. ¹ Perhaps our indifference to historical monuments comes from having already absorbed, and at points resisted, their messages. We know who makes up the pantheon of worthies, an elite club limited by membership requirements for race, class, and gender. Two important recent books by art historians Melissa Dabakis (Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 1880-1935) and Kirk Savage (Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America) discuss the patronage and reception of public statuary and monuments from the antebellum period up through the New Deal era. Both Dabakis and Savage have produced tightly conceptualized, convincingly argued, and beautifully written books. Focused on the representation of work and industrial labor (Dabakis), and on race and the Civil War (Savage), the authors examine nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century aesthetic and ideological debates on sculptural realism and idealism, the representation of class, gender, and race, and the preservation of social hierarchies through public statuary. Dabakis's and Savage's books will encourage readers to take a much closer look at the monuments that surround us and provide a greater understanding of the contexts in which the statues were made and originally viewed.

The interdisciplinary scope of Dabakis's and Savage's texts clarifies the dynamic interdependence of aesthetics and sociopolitical function, which led James Young to point out, "We cannot separate the monument from its public life . . . the social function of such art is its aesthetic performance" (quoted in Dabakis, 5). By examining American statuary in relation to other forms of visual culture (broadsheets, photographs, paintings), contemporary political debates, and historical events, Dabakis and Savage establish that American sculpture was part of a tightly woven discourse of images, ideas, and policies on labor, race, and gender. The function of representational statuary and commemorative sculpture is a prescriptive one, writes Savage (64). ² Public statuary strove to uphold dominant national narratives, maintain the status quo, and solidify cultural values. As John R. Gillis notes, statuary most always is intended for, but not of the people; workers, racial and ethnic minorities, white women, and women of color have "gained admission to national memories at an even slower pace than they were admitted to national representative and educational institutions. . . . Women and minorities often serve as symbols of a 'lost' past." ³ The selection of a worker, a slave, or an immigrant as the subject matter of statuary does not free the subject from dominant ideologies and stereotypical representation. The American slave, as the title of Savage's book indicates, remains forever on bent knee in subservience to the white master, and Dabakis's worker will never show fatigue or throw down his tools in protest.

Savage provides several clear directives to his readers: We must acknowledge America's origins as a slave-holding country, and we must examine whiteness as a racial category that is mutually dependent on blackness as a category. Slavery and racial thought have shaped nineteenth-century public statuary, and in turn such statuary has continuously informed the public discourse on race. Savage's sophisticated critique of whiteness surpasses recent art-historical studies that have focused solely on the representation of African Americans. Savage writes that "in the public sphere...