Discussion Summary
 

Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Faith Davis Ruffins, "Culture Wars Won and Lost: Part II" Radical History Review.
 
 

• Where does statuary fit in?
• Public vs. private statuary/funerary statuary
• Such as differences in sculptural language

• What is the nature of the public sphere?
• How is the public sphere constructed around memorials and vice versa
• In a physical sense, how do memorials structure public space?
• How do particular memorials make it into the public space?
• Statuary is a conservative medium

• How does that affect public spaces?

• African-Americans’ role in forming American society

• Savage approached his topic in a historic manner and does not appeal to art history as much as Wood.
• He uses the tools (terms, etc.) of art history but remains a historian.

• Reasons for lack of African-American portrayal
• Whites did not know how to portray the form. Therefore, they took the easiest path: they didn’t represent African-Americans at all.
• Conflicts with the Classical model of male beauty

1. Classical model used Whiteness as the basis of beauty
2. The Apollo Belvedere is an example
3. The Greek Slave, despite being a slave, was White and embodied the highest form of beauty. The slave also was portrayed as being sold and therefore had not been defiled by slavery and fallen to a lower state of being. The female slaves of Greece were also not used for physical labor. Also, the slaves in Greece had some social origins while the African-American slaves were deprived of any social origins before slavery.
4. Classical sculpture needed heroic power to display male beauty and slavery was non-heroic.

• The African-American slaves could not be depicted as agents of their own liberation. Ward’s Freedman was the closest sculptors ever came to making an African-American his own liberator.
• Problems with the portrayal of the African-American form with Lincoln
• Lincoln was an individual who did specific things
• The African-American form is a representation of an institution
• Figurative (Lincoln) vs. allegorical (slavery) sculpture
• Difficult to represent institutions in a singular human form

• African-Americans never utilized sculpture as a means of expression
• Story-telling was a common form of expression for slaves
• There is no pre-existing model for the portrayal of slavery
• American-Indian vs. African-American Portrayal
• Indians were seen as heroic? Why?
• Indians were removed from White society, therefore no conflicts. What conflicts did African-American’s participation (role) in White society present for their portrayal in sculpture?

• After the war, the goals of putting the Union back together may have been threatened by sculptural representations of slavery
• The White power structure was not an outcome of the Civil War; therefore the Civil War did not create social reasons for the lack of African-Americans in works of sculpture. Those power structures were already in place.
• But, is Savage’s book really about African-Americans and their lack of sculpturalrepresentation? Is it actually just about race theory and the invention of Whiteness as seen in 19^th century American sculpture?

• In the late 19^th century race became a biological category
• Invention of racial imagery
• Fewer choices for classification
• Historical process of inventing Whiteness
• Images of Classical statuary became the American ideal of Whiteness and masculinity
• African-Americans were somewhat included shortly after the Civil War, but were quickly forgotten and left out of statuary
• The Lincoln Memorial in D.C. and the spread of common soldier memorials were proof of the forgetting of the African-American form and slavery in memorial statuary

• Savage says that pre-Civil War America prefigured the choices made concerning statuary remembrance in the late 19^th century
• But, Post-Civil War monuments and memorials also prefigured mid and late 20^th century monuments

• Conceptualization (idea)
• Commissions/subscriptions (patronage)
• Sculptor’s biography
• Production itself/formal analysis of the medium
• Inaugural ceremonies and its place in public space
• Continuing commentary
• How the sites are ritualized or re-appropriated
• Landscaping and intertexuality

• Can hegemonic memories only enter the public sphere through a conservative medium?
• Politics of memory can be very violent, were these monuments in the late 19^th century objects of violence, products of violence, or incite violence?
• What role does violence play in the creation/destruction of art and symbols?
• Is there a possibility for radical change in public memory?
• What are the paths not taken in the post-Civil War American society?
• What do we as historians and citizens do with these unrealized paths?

Nicholas Mendoza
Sam Lawson