A massive monument of General Robert E. Lee that once sparked riots in the Virginia city of Charlottesville is now a pile of melted-down bronze, artfully displayed in a Los Angeles museum.
Next to the sculpture are barrels of toxic slag leftover from the melting process. Around the corner, there is a massive, graffitied equestrian statue of Lee and Thomas Stonewall Jackson – the two most famous Confederate generals in the US Civil War, which the Confederacy lost in 1865 and ultimately led to the end of slavery in the United States.
They fought for slavery, says curator Hamza Walker, who has been working for eight years to acquire and borrow the massive monuments amid lawsuits and the logistical challenges of moving tens of thousands of pounds of bronze and granite to Los Angeles. The idea of lionising those figures. What did they believe? They believed in white supremacy. Period.
Coming at a time when President Donald Trump is ordering statues and paintings of Confederate generals to be reinstalled, the warring narratives of American history are at the heart of Monuments, which opens 23 October at The Brick and at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
The 18 decommissioned Confederate monuments are displayed alongside pieces of contemporary art. The massive, graffitied statue of Lee and Jackson, for example, stands next to a giant replica sculpture of the General Lee car from the iconic TV show, The Dukes of Hazzard.
President Trump has often spoken of General Lee's bravery and he and others have criticized the removal and toppling of Confederate monuments, saying it's revisionist history. White nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, triggering deadly clashes, to keep the statue from being removed. In the aftermath, similar statues sparked clashes in cities across the US.
Jalane Schmidt, an activist who campaigned for the statue of Lee to be removed from Charlottesville, stands in front of the sculpture the statue has become. Under this historical revision, our Nation's unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed, she stated.
The centerpiece of the show is Unmanned Drone – a completely reconstructed sculpture of Stonewall Jackson by artist Kara Walker, who transformed the horse and its rider heading into battle into a headless, zombie-like creature, representing the toxic legacy of the Confederate symbolism.
Most of the monuments on display will be returned to the cities and towns they've been borrowed from when the show closes in May. But Walker's sculpture will need to find a new home. And the bronze ingots from the melted down Lee sculpture will be transformed again into a new work of art. Schmidt asserts: It's a toxic representation of history, this lost cause narrative, and we're purifying it.\
