Sir, – While it is tempting to destroy anachronistic monuments and statues, as Don Mullan suggests (Letters, June 10th), it arguably brings us down a pathway of rewriting history and toward the potential destruction of important works of art.
Taken to an extreme we might logically eliminate the Great Pyramid and the Taj Mahal, both of which appear to be monuments to slave owners from distant history.
The same can be said of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, former US presidents and slave owners, whose names are widely commemorated in place names as much as in visible memorials. Eliminating these may be as difficult as eradicating the Colston bun, a cake, popular around Bristol which commemorates the subject of the recent iconoclastic gesture there.
The artist Banksy has suggested an alternative approach. His proposal is that the offending Colston statue be removed from the water, where it will no doubt be a hazard, and replaced on its plinth but secured there, frozen in the angle of toppling backwards. Sculptured below it would be those who pulled it down, with their ropes secured to the offending statue. It would be an arresting and thought-provoking image, an artwork combining old and new, and commemorating an act of destruction.
Eliminating antiquities and irreplaceable artworks when we identify something we disapprove of is becoming more popular, from Palmyra to Oxford University. There is, however, much to disapprove of in many important lives, and commemoration need not imply total approval.
Highlighting the individuals faults, so indicating how morality evolves, and bringing us face to face with the values of our ancestors, may be more useful. If this caused the viewer to reflect on their own life, and more importantly, on how their current choices and values might be viewed centuries hence, such works, modified Banksy-style, might be highly effective pieces of art and instruments of change. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN O’BRIEN,
Kinsale,
Co Cork.
Sir, – The recently toppled statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, listed as a Grade II protected structure in 1977, was designed by Irishman John Cassidy (1860-1939), born in Slane, Co Meath, who emigrated to Manchester in the 1880s, where he would spend the rest of his life.
The Slane History & Archaeology Society, which has worked to raise awareness of the accomplishments of Cassidy in his native country with exhibitions of his work, describes him as “a formidable artist with a prodigious output of a wide variety of high-quality pieces”.
Examples of his artistic output during his years in Ireland include two paintings relating to Drogheda – The Wooden House and A Street Scene in Drogheda 1880, both currently hang in the Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda.
The toppling of his statue of Colston and the defacement of its plinth is not the first time his work has been vandalised; the original bust for Harry Houdini’s crypt in Queens, New York, crafted by Cassidy in 1926, was destroyed in 1975. – Yours, etc,
STEPHEN OLIVER
MURRAY,
Ballsbridge,
Dublin 4.