Collage – The layering of fragments of externally referenced meaning from the past and the present that re-casts narratives, juxtaposing the ordinary with the incongruous to create a new whole.
Under the curation of Ric Kidini Kashour, New Orleans,(Curatorial Fellowship 2021 Andy Warhol Institute for the Arts) working with Caroline Conway, Arts Programmer, Birr Vintage Week & Arts Festival with the support of the Birr Historical Society, 18 collage artists from across the world have researched, discussed, investigated and responded to the Cumberland Pillar in Emmet Square Birr, its history, and contemporary issues relating to place, context and colonial past. The selection is diverse in terms of geography, nationality, gender, and race, The works form an Open air Gallery in Birr, printed on A1 boards as part of Birr Vintage Week & Arts Festival 2021, August 13th -21st. Accompanying the exhibition are collage workshops with visiting artists, and an artists talk at Birr Theatre & Arts Centre, with representatives of Birr Historical Society, the Offaly Heritage Officer, Amanda Pedlow and artists, both in person and remotely. A book will be published to accompany the project. |
In 1747, a sandstone column was erected in the center of Birr, County Offaly, Ireland. Howley Hayes Architects describe the pillar: "The monumental column that stands in the centre of Birr, which was erected to commemorate the Duke of Cumberland is the first of its type to have been erected in Ireland. It consists of a monumental Doric column standing on a tall square pedestal that rises to a height of 13.5 m or just under 44 feet. It dominates the fine central square in which it stands providing an elegant urban landmark on the principal axes of the town. Constructed in 1746-7, to the design of a young Irish architect called Samuel Chearnley, it was commissioned by a local landowner Sir Lawrence Parsons of the nearby Birr Castle, to commemorate the English victory, under Cumberland, over the Scots at Culloden. In Ireland a number of monumental columns were built, mostly during the nineteenth century, of which several, like the Birr Column, were raised as Pillars of Victory following the Roman fashion dating back to the times of Hadrian and Trajan." (1) The column and its statue was an act of imperialism, a message to the Irish people that a similar fate awaited them should they too resist.
English physical and psychological conquest of the Irish formed the blueprint by which the British Empire would make its way throughout the world. Historian Ronald Takaki described the systems they used in Ireland as a forerunner to the conquest of Native Americans and systems of slavery in America. "The English colonizers established a two-tiered social structure: 'Every Irishman shall be forbidden to wear English apparel or weapon upon pain of death. That no Irishman, born of Irish race and brought up Irish, shall purchase land, bear office, be chosen of any jury or admitted witness in any real or personal action.' To reinforce this social separation, British laws prohibited marriages between the Irish and the colonizers. The new world order was to be one of English over Irish." (2)
Historian Nell Irvin Painter also notes this connection. "Before his time in Ireland, [Gustave de] Beaumont had figured that parallels between American people of color and the Irish poor would make good sense. Thinking he had seen unmatched degradation in the United States—he considered Indians and Negroes 'the very extreme of human wretchedness'—he was astonished to see in Ireland the worst of both American worlds: the impoverished Irish lacked the freedom of the Indian as well as the slave's relative security. Consequently, 'Irish misery [formed] a type by itself of which neither the model nor the imitation can be found anywhere else.' At bottom, Ireland lacked other countries' varied histories, in which poor and rich played a part. For Beaumont, as for many others unable to see beyond the famine, Ireland had only a single essence: 'the history of the poor is the history of Ireland.'...Beaumont located the roots of the curse of Ireland in its history of pernicious British policy. Since occupying Ireland in the seventeenth century, Protestant English settlers had dispossessed the Catholic natives, depriving them of ownership or even unfettered use of the land, reducing them to abject poverty. Irish natives lived on potatoes, and when the potato blight destroyed this staple food, more than a million died of starvation. Twice that number emigrated, many to the United States. In the grimmest irony, while Irish people starved, Ireland was exporting food from settler-owned farms. Beaumont investigated this colonial history and drew his own conclusions. Blaming politics rather than the Irish themselves, he contradicted the prevailing assumption that inherent racial defects caused Irish wretchedness." (3)
In 1915, Birr Town Council voted to remove the statue. William Laffan recalls the history: "Cumberland’s appreciation of the delights of garden buildings, so appropriate ina Birr context, did not, however, save his statue on Chearnley’s column. Scottish (presumably Highland) soldiers stationed at the nearby Crinkhill barracks took exception to his presence overlooking the square and in 1915 the statue was removed. A pretext for this action was found on safety grounds. Cracks had appeared, presumably those in the Duke’s leg which the Cheeres had dismissed a century and a half previously. The removal of the statue is documented in early photographs…Cumberland thus became one of the first imperial statues to be removed in Ireland, many years before Nelson was less ceremoniously toppled. There is no small irony, of course, in the fact that it was done to placate Scottish rather than Irish sensitivities…so the column is now bereft of the divisive figure of Cumberland…." (4) The removal of the statue being a result of deterioration in the lead sculpture or the agitation of Scottish soldiers from the nearby Crinkill Barracks is debatable, but it is noteworthy that the Council's action comes a period when the people of Ireland were asserting their independence from England. Gabriel Doherty describes the time: "What happened in these islands between 1912 and 1914 was a series of political seismic shocks that will forever register high on the Irish and British historical Richter scales. The almost daily confluence of dramatic developments experienced during these years simply has not happened very often over the centuries, and if, in this case, what was seldom may not have been entirely wonderful, it was certainly important—very important." (5)
Matthew Schownir says the question of Home Rule was deeply informed by English thinking about the Irish people. "Discussions of the Irish question often involved, in explicit or implicit language, an indictment of the Irish racial character, a topic that inherently involved comparisons with England's self-prescribed Anglo-Saxon lineage. This was especially the case among opponents of Home Rule, who sought to emphasise perceived racial differences between the Irish and British races as a political tool to combat Irish self-government and maintain British hegemony...What made Ireland unique from Britain's other imperial possessions was its proximity to, and historical dominance by, England, as well as its 'Celtic' racial heritage." (6) While it is impossible to know the hearts and minds of the members of the Birr Town Council, this historical context situated the statue's removal at a time when the Irish people were coming to terms with centuries of oppression, rejecting hegemony and subjugation, and asserting dignity and independence.
This history that played out in Ireland a century ago is repeating itself. African Americans have renewed conversations about race in America in response to sustained levels of violence against them. Since 2017, monuments to the Confederacy have been flashpoints in this debate and provide an opportunity for communities to confront the history of racism in the United States as it is physically performed by the geography and architecture of those communities.
Monuments are a particular type of public art that plays an important role in the psyche of a community. A stitch that binds geography to history, monuments express community values. They say, “This is who we are. This is what we want the future to remember.” They commemorate the dead and recall the past. But unlike headstones, monuments are communal by design, collective expressions of grief and remembrance. Throughout 2017, America engaged in a national conversation about the role of monuments in culture. Since Dylann Roof’s murder of nine parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 15th, 2015, the removal of powerful, hurtful symbols has been a national obsession. The conversation centered on the role Jim Crow-era statues played in society with groups of white people making the argument that they served as beacons of history, to remember dead ancestors. Grief taught me to be kind and forgiving of how other people respond to death, but it also honed my sense of veracity and authenticity. The argument that memorials to Confederate soldiers, erected 60 years after the conflict, had anything to do with commemorating the dead was remarkably disingenuous. In New Orleans, construction workers in masks and bullet-proof vests removed four prominent monuments in the middle of the night, starting with the one that was originally dedicated to the “national election of November 1876 [that] recognized white supremacy in the South.” Monuments in Maryland, North Carolina, Florida, Wisconsin, and Texas followed. After white supremacists violently rallied in the city, Charlottesville, Virginia covered two of its statues with black tarpswhile a decision to remove them made its way through the courts.
Aamna Mohdin and Rhi Storer reported in The Guardian, "Scores of tributes to slave traders, colonialists and racists have been taken down or will be removed across the UK, a Guardian investigation has found, with hundreds of others under review by local authorities and institutions...In what was described by historians as an 'unprecedented' public reckoning with Britain’s slavery and colonial past, an estimated 39 names—including streets, buildings and schools—and 30 statues, plaques and other memorials have been or are undergoing changes or removal since last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests." (7) Over the Summer of 2020, activists successfully moved the City of Albuquerque, New Mexico to remove a statue celebrating the brutal Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate but only after protests turned violent and an anti-monument protester was shot by a member of a white militia group. Monument removals remain divisive flashpoints for communities in part because we lack a shared sense of history.
From Lenin to Saddam Hussein, the scene of people taking down a large statue is a manifestation of change, a sign of revolution. Removing these symbols of white supremacy are important acts, but small steps in the larger journey of truth and reconciliation that America has yet to undertake when it comes to the legacy of slavery and the over one hundred years of segregation, mass incarceration, and oppression that followed. Remedy of past wrongs alone does not a future make. The urgency to throw out the old and offensive is rarely matched with an equal desire to replace it, particularly when the hotness of grief has cooled and the dead are a distant memory. “What to replace monuments with” routinely appears as a cheeky footnote in articles about their removal, but little serious attention is given to the monuments we should be erecting.
Howley Hayes Architects noted the challenge of making new monuments in their report about the Cumberland Column: “In more recent years there have been several proposals for the replacement of a statue on the column...In more recent times, William Laffan also speculated on the matter in his essay ‘From Paper to Pillar’ mentioned above. Following his account of how the Duke was removed by the disgruntled Scottish soldiers in 1915, he suggested another interesting alternative to the divisive figure of Cumberland, which was to leave the column unadorned as a symbolic memorial to the tragic early death of its young designer: ‘Perhaps then, like Pearce’s [Edward Lovett Pearce] column to his own memory, the truncated pillar, that evocative emblem of a life cut short, may be far better seen as an appropriate memorial to the elusive, but delightful, figure of its architect Samuel Chearnley.’"
Like the removal of British monuments, the removal of Jim Crow-era monuments is an important part of a national conversation about race in America. They are revolutionary, but they are also acts of destruction. What we replace monuments with, how we understand the role monuments play in our community, will say more to the future about what kind of people we are. It is important to acknowledge our collective grief, be it for the loss of a notable person or the loss of an idea which can lead us to pursue higher ideals, to be a better people.
What it means to become a better people is fundamentally different in the 21st century than it was at the beginning of the 20th century when the Cumberland statue was being removed. Birr Town Council made their decision at a time when national identities were forming, before technology and economically driven globalization, and before the 20th century scientific revolution. The problems facing the world today are not ones of science. We learned fairly early in the COVID-19 pandemic that the way to flatten the curve was to avoid contact with others and wear a mask when we could not. In less than a year, science created a vaccine. Historically, hunger has been the world's greatest challenge and yet science has figured out how to produce more food than humanity needs. Science fundamentally explains climate change and what we need to do to stop it. Discovering the technological solutions to our problems is not our greatest challenge. We have to care enough about each other to carry out the solutions: to wear a mask, to make sure food gets to those in need, to change how we live and work so that we are more in harmony with the planet.
This is as true for the pandemic, hunger, and climate change as it is for racism and inequality. Science tells us that every human being
is essentially the same. Long dead are the scientific justifications for seeing racial inequality. What makes us unequal is not our biology, but our unwillingness to see ourselves in others. We treat racism like an incurable disease, an impossible problem. When we do that, what we are saying is that we don't want to do the work of truth, reparation, and restitution that makes reconciliation possible. That goes for income inequality as well. It is not impossible to imagine a world where people are fed, housed, and educated; where health care and safe communities are a given. It only feels impossible, in the face of so much callousness and uncaring, to imagine that others will share these values; that dragons will not hoard their gold.
Progressive-minded people often turn to a phrase made popular by Martin Luther King, Jr: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Often lost is the importance of doing the bending. As the site of one of the first imperial statues to be removed in Ireland and because of Ireland's history as a racialized people, I believe the story of the Cumberland Column has much to offer the world as we move into the 21st century with a growing awareness of how the history of colonization and oppression has shaped present-day social fabric. The bending of history started in Birr. I also believe collage artists have unique skills that are particularly useful in our historical moment. They understand that something beautiful, something meaningful can come from chaos. They understand that destruction is easier than creation, which takes patience, precision, thoughtfulness, and intuition. They know how to bring things together; to work towards harmony.
From Birr to New Orleans to Alexandria, Egypt to Trafalgar Square in London to Santa Fe Plaza in New Mexico, our world is filled with empty columns. More importantly, humanity at the start of the 21st century has a deep need to imagine a world where all people enjoy safety, security, well-being, and dignity on their own terms. We need to imagine how to be more kind to one another and how to be more fair with one another. The past is brutal. History is tearsome. We need no more cenotaphs and shrines. We need Gongshi
SOURCES
1 Howley Hayes Architects. (2009, February). The Cumberland Column, Birr, Co. Offaly Conservation Report.
2 Takaki, R. (2008). Different mirror: a history of multicultural America. Little Brown & Co., p. 28
3 Painter, N. I. (2010). The history of white people. W.W. Norton & Co., p. 134
4 Laffan, W. (2005). From paper to pillar: Miscelanea Structura Curiosa and the Cumberland Column. In W. Laffan (Ed.), Samuel Chearnley’s Miscelanea Structura Curiosa. Churchill House Press.
5 Doherty, G. (2014). Introduction. In G. Doherty (Ed.). The Home Rule Crisis 1912-14. Mercier Press.
6 Shownir, M. (2014). The politics of comparison: the racialisation of Home Rule in British science, politics and print, 1886–1923. In G. Doherty (Ed.). The Home Rule Crisis 1912-14. Mercier Press.
7 Mohdin, A. & Storer, R. (2021, January 29). Tributes to slave traders and colonialists removed across UK. The Guardian.
MacCabe, F. (2020, July 25). Unmoving statues: Public sculpture in Offaly. offalyhistoryblog.
Battersby, E. (2005, August 13). Darkness by design. The Irish Times.
Jackson, T. A. (1970). Ireland her own: An outline history of the Irish struggle for national freedom and independence (2nd ed.). International Publishers.
Kadour, R. K. (2020, December). Bending history. Kolaj 31, 6-7.
Kadour, R. K. (2018, January 19). What a year of grief taught me about monuments and memorials. Hyperallergic.
Bridgwater, D. (2016, August 3). Statue of the Duke of Cumberland, by John Cheere formerly on a column at Emmet Square Birr Ireland. English 18th Century Portrait Sculpture. http://english18thcenturyportraitsculpture.blogspot.com
Fanning, D. (2009, November 22). No place on Birr’s pillar for ‘butcher’ Pillar of Society: The column in Birr is due to undergo restoration. Independent.ie.