Good news, everyone!
I didn’t realise it was carved in the '60s. I had assumed it was older than that.
I’ve wondered about Stone Mountain for a long time. I’m curious about it, myself, and would like to visit it as a historical artifact. After all, it has the largest bas relief in the world.
On the other hand, it’s inextricably tied to racism and the worship of the Confederate side of the Civil War. It lionizes three Confederate war leaders. Even if it doesn’t depict a crowd of hooded Ku Klux Klan members (as it was originally going to do), we live in an age when people are pulling down such statues. I’m surprised that no one has tried to pull a “Buddhas of Bamiyan” on it.
The Park was owned by a family into the Klan, who opened the park as a monument to the Confederacy on the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. For a long time, the park was a gathering site for the reconstituted Klan. Anything they do to move the park away from its racist roots is welcome, but there’s no way they can completely dissociate from it. I hope that it’s preserved, if only as a reminder not of the glory of the Confederacy, but of what it really meant and led to.
I have been there. I was 13 or 14, staying with my father for the summer and there was a concert there; Doobie Brothers, IIRC. The carving is impressive: it is enormous and the mountainside truly is like a gigantic room wall.
Even back then I was really uncomfortable being there, tho.
They should leave it, but also include a giant plaque – “This carving commemorates some evil, white-supremacist traitors to the US. It was commissioned by evil white supremacists in order to celebrate one of our nation’s darkest moments, because they are traitors at heart, and also to push back on our fellow Americans gaining a little more equality and freedom. There is no way to defend the mindset behind the people who commissioned this tribute to evil, but it is a striking carving, the world’s largest bas relief, and so in the interest of art, it will remain.”
Well, Gutzon Borglum did start working on the idea in 1915 (he was a member of the Klan), and started carving it in 1923, with Lee’s head unveiled in 1924. But he disagreed with the committee in charge, and all his work was ultimately removed. (Borglum escaped after smashing his models, and went on to start the carving on Mount Rushmore) Then they started all over again in 1964 and didn’t finish until 1972.
I hadn’t realized there were recent events related to removing the relief. From the Wikipedia page:
I like that – The Not Fucking Around Coalition. You know they mean business.
They should compromise - leave the carving but put giant googly eyes on all the figures.
Ideally, someone would carve an even larger bas-relief of Civil Rights leaders, so this one would lose the incredibly small status it has, and it could be blown to smithereens as it actually deserves.
Here is a good article I read a few days ago.
Someone probably would have, but high-explosive rockets are (suprisingly) harder to get in the US than Afghanistan. (I’m of the view that destroying the artwork because of the subject would be an equally sickeningly sad crime against humanity as the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas.)
Swap places with the carving and the gum pole. Put up a little totem pole with Lee, Davis & Jackson perched on each other, and fill in the scab on the mountainside with chewed gum.
equally? The destruction of 1500 year old statues of one of the greatest figures in human history would be equal to the destruction of 50 year old statues of three traitorous racist shitbags, put up by other traitorous racist shitbags?
How about the destruction of the statues of Stalin or Saddam Hussein? Are those equal?
If there were gigantic statues of them that otherwise might last thousands of years, yes. Some of the greatest art we have from the ancient world is of terrible people. (Every pharaoh, for example.)
And the remarkable thing about the Buddhas being 1,500 years old? That it took that long for someone to come along and destroy them. There is always, always some iconoclast with a hammer that comes along and decides that they must do the right thing and destroy the art that they don’t like.
Interesting piece on Stone Mountain by the Southern Poverty Law Center;
If the people of Egypt decided thousands of years ago that it wasn’t right to put up huge egotistical mountains celebrating the shitbags who ruled over them, I would support their right to do so, even if it means I don’t get to experience the Pyramids of Egypt. I mean, they’re cool and all, but I don’t have to live with the memory of being enslaved by the person it celebrates.
I’m sure this carving is also cool, but my country would be a better place if it had never been made, if the people empowered to make it were taught as children that this sort of thing will not stand.
I’d question whether it was even art. It’s not that attractive or well carved to me. It’s just BIG.
Indeed! Nothing that a summer of art critics with bazookas can’t improve.
Clearly, you have never seen the Stone Mountain Lasershow Spectacular in Mountainvision®.
It is even more tacky than it sounds. Basically, they should sandblast the ‘monument’ and replace it with a Ren & Stimpy sketch to be less tacky, notwithstanding the explicitly racist undertones of the whole presentation. I’m still cringing from having to explain to British tourists that they hooded figures demonstrating at the site were not “neo-Druids”.
Stranger
I see a big money-making opportunity there.
Srsly, I would not want to celebrate racism in any form, but I don’t think we should pretend it doesn’t exist/never existed either. If this, and other, ‘monuments’ can be used to teach future generations anything, perhaps we can use it for that purpose. Otherwise, get rid of it.
My Tandy Color Computer club hosted the guy who did the laser show back in the Oughts. Seemed an appropriate mix of obsolete technology and philosophy .