Statues

THERE IS A BRIEF and fascinating article on a group of people involved in toppling and vandalising statues:

For a year-and-a-half, this anonymous group from Melbourne has been going after colonial statues – toppling, breaking or defacing them in the night. While there has been more than one group going after these statues, this one is the most active.

Attacks on Australia’s colonial statues often ignite intense debate. Are these colonial figures the people we should commemorate in our cities and towns, or it is time to check in on their legacies?

The article seems to place the origins of statue-toppling in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, which were notably characterised by the removal—formally and less formally—of statues of Confederate figures in the United States, and of slave-owning figures like Edward Colston in Bristol, in the UK. In fact statue toppling is as old as statues.

Admiral Lord Nelson used to look down at Dubliners before he was blown up in 1966. Ireland also systematically got rid of its Victorias, one of them to Sydney. Saddam Hussein used to gaze out over Baghdad before he was toppled by Iraqis in 2003, kind of, well it's complicated. When the PLA cleared Tianenmen in 1989 one of their targets was the Goddess of Democracy, who now lives on in replica outside China. So many statues of Lenin were toppled in the aftermath of the 2014 Revolution in Ukraine there's even a word for it, and with vicious and conscious symbolism, and no historical belief whatever in Marxism-Leninism, the Russian occupiers are now putting him back.

What's notable is that all of these, in every case, are active engagements with heritage. You can tell because there are other quite similar activities that are immediately identifiable as different and wrong in another order: it's a different, and much more enormous act, to topple a grave or personal memorial, or to vandalise a religious statue (of the Virgin Mary, say, or the Buddha). Karl Marx's massive memorial in Highgate remained relatively unmolested throughout the Cold War. Without the context of death or faith, a statue is just a statue and a pure referent to a specific interpretation of the past, which is inherently arguable; taking them down or putting them up is of the same order of simple heritage management as the frequent renaming of streets, or towns. Ask any Eastern European what that street used to be called.

All of these topplings or replacements are merely arguments displaced into the physical world about significance (PDF). This is all, in the end, a question of heritage, and therefore a contest of different visions of what a society values.

Cultural significance is embodied in the place itself, its fabric, setting, use, associations, meanings, records, related places and related objects. Places may have a range of values for different individuals or groups.