[On April
9th, 2003 a group of both Iraqi civilians and U.S. military
forces together toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos
Square, a hugely symbolic moment that highlights the role statues can play in our
communal spaces and identities. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and
four other statues, leading up to a weekend post on my own continuing thoughts
on Confederate statues like those in my
hometown.]
On the inspiring
messages and missing histories of two linked statues.
Sculptor Marshall Fredericks
(1908-1998) lived for much of the 20th century, and for much of the
century’s second half was the nation’s preeminent creator of public statues and
monuments. He created his first such public sculpture, the Levi
L. Barbour Memorial Fountain on Detroit’s Belle Isle, in the 1930s, but it
was after his time in the Air Force during World War II that Fredericks
completed the majority of his numerous, prominent public projects. These
include Christ on the Cross at the Indian River (Michigan) Catholic
Shrine; The Freedom of the Human Spirit for
the 1964 New York World’s Fair (now relocated to near the US Tennis
Association’s Arthur Ashe Stadium); the Man and the Expanding Universe Fountain at the US State
Department’s Washington, DC headquarters; and the two Midwestern statues on
which I’ll focus for the remainder of this post: the Spirit of Detroit at the city’s Coleman A. Young
Municipal Center; and the Cleveland War Memorial Fountain: Peace
Arising from the Flames of War (also known as the Fountain of Eternal Life).
Both of these
beautiful public statues/memorials feature inspiring, spiritual messages that
clearly reflect Fredericks’ perspective and voice. Spirit of Detroit, dedicated in
1958, features a plaque that reads, “The artist expresses the concept that
God, through the spirit of man is manifested in the family, the noblest human
relationship”; in his left and right hands the figure holds symbolic
representations of God and the human family, respectively. The War Memorial Fountain, dedicated
six years later in 1964, features a central figure escaping the flames of
war and reaching for peace, and surrounds him with (per Fredericks’ own
statements about the statue) symbolic representations of an interconnected
world: a bronze sphere that (like the sphere in the left hand of Spirit) reflects spiritual beliefs and
stories; and four granite carvings that embody the world’s civilizations. These
overarching messages and ideas would be important and inspiring in any setting,
but certainly especially were in the depths of the Cold War, the strife and
divisions of the 1960s, and other historical and cultural contexts of that
post-war period.
There’s nothing
wrong with public memorials and art that present such overarching messages and
themes, such universe images and ideals. Yet at the same time, my favorite public
statues/memorials, like the Salem
Witch Trials Memorial, link broader themes to specific, local histories and
conversations, and on that level I’m not sure these two Fredericks statues
quite succeed. The War Memorial did
include on its framing rim a tribute to the 4000 Greater Clevelanders who gave
their lives in WWII and the Korean War (and has since
been expanded to include casualties and veterans of other wars as well),
which is a definite and important local connection. But outside of those names
(and of course every city sent its own soldiers to those and other wars), I
would say that both statues could be moved to other sites or cities and have
precisely the same messages and themes, largely unaffected by the different
contexts. For a war memorial perhaps that’s fitting, as war implicates and
affects us all, and task of remembering and mourning is a truly shared one. But
for a statue named Spirit of Detroit,
I would argue that at least a bit more specific engagement with that particular
city’s histories and stories, community and identity, would be a positive addition,
one that could complement the inspiring overarching messages and present
viewers with a sense of this unique
American space at the same time.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other statues you’d highlight and analyze?
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