Quote:
Originally Posted by Sidney Crosby's Hat
It’s supposed to be a bust of Ronaldo which is at an airport in Portugal but as you can see it is pretty awful haha.
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That's interesting, and this sort of speaks to the point I am getting at. In this instance, is this particular likeness of Ronaldo bad history because of how poorly it resembles him? Is it bad art because of that? Or is it redeemed by trying to say something else?
I don't know, because I know nothing about this particular example, but these are the sorts of questions that it inspires, which I think is good.
A good example of what I am talking about is the "Footsoldiers of Birmingham" monument:
*Images are spoilered for size.
This statue was erected in 1995 to commemorate Martin Luther King's famous march in Birmingham in 1963. It is a testament to the fortitude, virtue and perseverance of the Civil Rights movement, and it is based on this famous photograph:
The sculptor has clearly taken some liberties with the photograph in his immortalization of the event, and in so doing has produced something that by conventional measure is "not historic." At least, the depiction is a fairly judicious exaggeration of what was happening in the photograph: the police officer appears to be less concerned about restraining his dog in the statue than he does in the photograph; the dog itself is substantially more vicious looking and frightening; and to say nothing for the man apprehended by the officer, who has been replaced by a teenage boy with his arms outstretched like a crucified martyr.
So, is this "revisionist history"? Is it "whitewashing" or "sanitization"?
(* I am giving another shout out here to one of my favourite podcasts,
Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, which devoted an episode to the story behind this statue.)
I would argue that the reason this is such a good monument is precisely because of the exaggerations. The story it tells IS historically true, even if it had to over-dramatize a snapshot of the event that was captured on film. While the historical actors in the photograph are not the focus, I think this is the sort of thing we should look to be achieving in our efforts to commemorate the past. Embellishment is not always "wrong." On timely occasions it provides a sharper lens to seeing a greater truth.
I would hope that part of the plan for the "recontextualization" of the John A MacDonald statue outside of Victoria's city hall will follow a similar course.