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Monday, January 13, The preceding is an edited transcript. More on Theological Reflection. Tiffany Childress Price: Critical race theory isn't confusing. The conflicts surrounding it are. Being able to breathe requires keeping authority in context Emphasis on the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible suffocates those who function outside the construct of whiteness, writes an assistant professor at the McAfee School of Theology.
Link to author Angela N. Parker By Angela N. Parker Assistant professor. COVID has reframed how we grieve The church has traditionally been a place of solace, but the pandemic has made mourning rituals more difficult. More on Visual arts. Cards with character: A printmaker designs products that communicate the complexity of life The owner and founder of Heartell Press aims to build community with cards that can match the highs and lows of our life together.
Gretchen E. Ziegenhals: The holy work of collage Curating and assembling broken pieces in the time of COVID creates meaning and beauty for us all, writes a managing director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. Confederate monuments are unusual in that they celebrate not the victors of a war, but the losers. When Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered in , the South was in shambles. Beyond the defeat of its military, courts, law enforcement capabilities and local economies had collapsed.
It was a way to impose some sort of order on a society that risked descending into pure anarchy — and also a sham front to all sorts of dysfunctional things above all a nasty, codified racial hierarchy. Confederate statues, which were erected into the midth century, were an outgrowth of this attitude. For more than a century they stood mute, unquestioned and largely unnoticed in thousands of public squares. With a few exceptions, they take one of two forms — that of a standing foot soldier, or that of a colonel or general riding a horse.
Mutt — signed his name to it, and thereby transformed an ordinary object into a work of art. Similarly, the message attached to these Confederate statues has little to do with their visual appearance. The central factor in determining their meaning is the name we assign to them: Bragg, Branton and Bratley Confederate heroes , or Banks, Burnside and Butler who fought for the Union. But iconoclasm tends to almost entirely ignore visual and artistic considerations.
Instead, the monuments and statues are seen as assertions of political power. Mutilating a statue becomes equivalent to killing or mutilating an enemy.
Both major and minor works of art are destroyed impartially. In , during Hungary's October Revolution, anti-Soviet crowds tore down the Stalin Monument , a bronze statue erected in Budapest as a gift to the 'Man of Steel' on his 70th birthday.
All that remained were his boots. Fast-forward to and American troops in Baghdad toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein, cheered on by locals. Captured on film, the event became powerful propaganda. Not all attacks on art celebrate change — some seek to bring it about. The suffragettes famously slashed works in their fight for equality and the release from prison of Emmeline Pankhurst , founder of the Women's Social and Political Union. Among the works targeted were paintings of female flesh laid out for the pleasure of male viewers.
Vandalised 'Rokeby Venus', In a statement, Richardson said, 'I have tried to destroy the most beautiful woman in mythological history. That same year fellow suffragette Mary Wood took a meat cleaver to John Singer Sargent 's portrait of Henry James in the Royal Academy — a painting of an eminent male novelist by an eminent male artist.
At that time, there had been zero female Royal Academicians since Angelica Kauffman — and Mary Moser — , who were founder members in Henry James For the suffragettes, destruction was a creative force — and they were not alone. Artists themselves have been known to bin their work or, as with Erased de Kooning Drawing by Willem de Kooning 's friend Robert Rauschenberg — , mutilate it as part of the creative process.
In , Banksy stunned onlookers when he shredded his Girl with Balloon after it was purchased at Sotheby's New York. Whether or not he knew how high the value of the work would subsequently climb is open to debate, as is his motivation. Was he wagging a finger at art-world wealth?
Nodding to the vandalisation of graffiti out on the streets? He later claimed that the shredder malfunctioned: the work should have self-destructed entirely. Angel with Paintpot To destroy a work of art is to make a statement , whether religious, political, social, aesthetic — or all of the above.
Let's not forget, too, that some artworks fall victim to natural disaster and others — like us — were never meant to live forever. Today the toppling of historical figures is dividing opinion: some are cheering their belated removal, while others are up in arms about what they regard as historical revisionism. If this long line of destroyed and damaged art can teach us anything though, it's that knocking down a sculpture doesn't mean erasing history.
Rather, it means reconsidering the values we want to promote in the present. New stories, newly added artworks and shop offers delivered straight to your inbox every week. Created with Sketch.
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