October 24 Friday roundup

In this week’s “Next Comes What” podcast, I report on what happened at the No Kings protests nationwide Saturday and ponder what 7,000,000 people showing up for democracy might mean for our future. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you’d like to check out the linked material or the written post from Tuesday, you can read it here.

For today’s post, I want to write about Kara Walker’s multi-ton bronze sculpture, “Unmanned Drone,” which went on display yesterday in Los Angeles. The Brick acquired the statue and commissioned the piece from Walker as part of a larger show, MONUMENTS, that runs through April 11.

Walker’s work has always been unsettling—beautiful, sad, and horrifying. She has big, dramatic works and smaller, quiet pieces, characteristically loaded with tension that builds and builds the more you sit with them. I haven’t yet seen “Unmanned Drone” in person, but photographs of it fill me with awe.

The new sculpture is a transformation of a statue of Stonewall Jackson installed in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1921. As the date reveals, it wasn’t a Civil War-era memorial, but instead part of a nationwide effort to spark nostalgia for the Confederacy during a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the long decades of Jim Crow. Paul Goodloe McIntire—a true Virginia philanthropist who also funded a tuberculosis hospital overseas and an arts endowment at the University of Virginia—commissioned the Jackson piece as part of a series of four works, with each subject playing a key role in subjugating Native Americans or fighting to defend slavery.

When cities and towns around the country began removing monuments in the twenty-first century, particularly statues of Confederate heroes, what to do with them became a civic and archival issue. In some cases, they were melted down into ingots. In other cases, they were brought to museum settings, to be displayed with educational information in historical context. In the case of Charlottesville’s Stonewall Jackson, the city wanted the statue to go somewhere that would showcase its history as a symbol of white supremacy.

Kara Walker has reconstituted a new monster from an old one, reanimating the corpse of a slave-owning traitor riding into battle on his horse as a death-dealing zombie crossing scorched earth. After dismembering her source material, she reassembled legs and haunches, hand and hoof, all out of order, binding them to one another as if by a dangerous spell barely keeping everything intact. And it doesn’t, quite: one arm lies separate from the rest of the beast, blown half off the base of the statue. This angel of Death carries the seeds of its own destruction—and ours.

Walker’s statue is a amalgam of formerly living creatures from the natural world reduced to a killing machine. It looks like Goliath, a haint, or some jointed, stop-motion escapee from a fairy-tale horror movie.

Caught midway in rearing or grinding its way across the landscape, at first it seems no longer part of the natural world but something alien. Yet some elements of the horse and the man, even in their torturous, tortured state, retain a shadow of their prior existence. Just enough remains to inspire, if not quite pity, then at least tragic dread, as if Jackson himself was still trapped there with the horse, but has somehow taken the whole country with him. Staggering across the globe, it’s doomed to an eternity of murder as long as the same evil from which it sprang still throws off sparks.

Even in a photo, the first impression of Walker’s new piece is shocking—not scandalous, but provoking an almost physical startle reflex. For me, this is one way that powerful art can make itself known, a feeling of witnessing the birth of something new: recognition combined with surprise.

Walker brutally reworked the original piece while staying true to its underlying character. The devotion once visible in the forward energy of the Jackson statue, though his specific crusade was doomed to defeat, is reflected in the soul of a military drone, laid bare in its unflagging, unquestioning journey in service to the same broader cause. This new creature takes the country’s past evils and delivers them back across the very seas whose passage centuries ago marked the opening of our nation’s twin foundational abysses.

No piece of art or music or writing arrives entirely without precedent, but the way it wears its inspirations and source material matters. Jasper Johns’ celebrated quote “Take an object/Do something to it/ Do something else to it. [Repeat]” have become a kind of mantra for me in thinking about how art is made.

I’m always interested in how it’s possible to see the shadows of the original object or idea that was transformed into a finished work of art. Does it go someplace that you never could have imagined? Does it now exist in the world, walking on its own feet—or ruptured blasted-bronze limbs—somewhere outside the confines of the artist’s mind? Does it haunt you? When it does, I feel I’m in the presence of making that summons magic.

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