The significance of statues and art

Campus works can help reveal the values that shaped the nation

ANYONE WHO HAS walked through the Peace Garden here on campus cannot have failed to notice the statues of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez and Jane Addams.

All these people held great ideals and were committed to their causes, and I think their statues are an excellent addition to our campus.

Nevertheless, I worry that some people pass by these works of art every day and fail to ask just why they matter and what they accomplish.

Over the next few weeks I will be writing about these particular statues, but this week I would like to take on some questions about art and sculpture in general. Hopefully, this article will help you to start considering the art you find around campus in a new way.

To start, what is a statue? It is obviously a piece of art, and as with any piece of art it is an attempt by an artist to communicate certain values by imitating objects by means of some medium.

In this particular case, the object imitated is the image of man (“man” used in the most liberal sense of the word) and the medium is often bronze, marble or some other durable material.

But what are the “certain values” that statues try to communicate? That really needs to be taken case-by-case, but we can make a few assumptions just based on what we already know that will give us an idea of what sort of values we should be looking for.

First, the fact that the image of man is the thing imitated implies that the artist believes there is some sort of aesthetic value to man as man, i.e. man may be depicted as an object of art because man has some intrinsic value, whether that be in human form or in human character.

Second, it seems fitting that the values communicated by the statue should be enduring values, just as the materials from which it is made are durable materials.

The artist is trying to capture something that is at all times true about the character of the person depicted.

How we can judge what is true of a person’s character is debatable, of course, but the fact that statues render a single moment of a person’s existence in a more-or-less permanent medium implies that if we freeze a person in time we can still learn something about who he is from what he is doing, what he is wearing, how he is holding himself and so on.

The very manner in which statues are rendered implies a unity of character and action — or fate, as the Greeks would call it.

Third, the statue is an art form that is incredibly difficult to master and one of the highest artistic traditions in Western culture.

We can generally assume that it is made in praise of the character of the person depicted simply because that is what statues have been used for throughout the centuries in both civic and religious settings.

Literature, drama and music are rich media of expression, but since they are relatively inexpensive, easy to learn and readily reproduced, they are well suited to satire and have a history of being socially subversive. But an artist who has taken the time to painstakingly mold the image of another human being in metal or stone isn’t going to be satirical.

Statues have as their function the praise of civic, moral and religious virtue, and they dwell in a realm of expression set apart.

So over the next few weeks we will be looking for those enduring values that the artists who created the statues in our Peace Garden may have been trying to praise.

In addition to critiquing art, however, I am going to be asking how well these values actually reflect our social and political ideals as Americans.

There are some who believe that there is no good or bad art, that art exists for its own sake, and that art is made for the expression of personal beliefs and therefore cannot be judged; I am not one of those people.

Art is able to express everything within us, but the purpose of art is to express what is great and beautiful and true in us. The artist who doesn’t marvel at the greatness and beauty and enduring truths of humanity produces inferior art.

A people that doesn’t know what it means for art to be great and doesn’t demand greatness from its artists will lose what it takes to be a great people.

There is still a greatness that endures in America and its people, but we are losing sight of it more and more because we have become intoxicated with our own prosperity and power, and I fear that we won’t be able to find it again when sobriety is finally forced upon us.

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