Root and Branch

Hamza Walker’s father made sure to monitor his son’s television intake: Happy Days was acceptable, but Dukes of Hazzard, with its Dixie bluster, was not. Walker, director of the Los Angeles nonprofit gallery LAXART, delivered this anecdote while projecting a photograph of the Dukes’ “General Lee” Dodge Charger at the start of his lecture at Columbia. The orange muscle car appeared to have fallen from the sky, its plumb frame crinkling where the hood made contact with the earth. The Stars and Bars imprinted on its roof was clearly visible. But this wasn’t a production still from the show; rather, the image was of Suspension of Hostilities (2019) by Hank Willis Thomas, one of twenty artists to feature in LAXART and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’s forthcoming joint exhibition, Monuments. The eponymous effigies refer to the sixteen dismantled Confederate sculptures included in the exhibition.

If, as Walker described them, monuments are “furniture” that drift into the civic background of city life, then tributes to the Confederacy are active clarion calls. Since 2015, upwards of 200 such memorial markers have been removed, with around 700 still standing across the United States. Speaking with Columbia GSAPP professor Mark Wasiuta, Walker noted that cultural institutions are still developing a bureaucratic language for handling the purged public artworks. Walker joked that those on loan to LAXART and MOCA (and thus, in the process of being “re-signified as administrative objects”) might be on a “one-way journey,” even as he acknowledged the very real concern of security. (How, for instance, to get museum staff to feel comfortable guarding such evocative objects?) Asked about the afterlives of these Lost Cause columns, Walker cited the Southern Poverty Law Center’s stance that a monument is still active until the pedestal is removed, “root and branch.” Though many Lees, Jacksons, and Stuarts have come down, their marmoreal perches remain, thrones without occupants.