I once wrote on how I believed statues of confederate soldiers, such as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis should be taken down and my opinion on the subject hasn’t changed. So it would stand to reason that my opinion regarding the Stone Mountain controversy would follow a similar course and it would be more than reasonable for you to assume that I would agree with those who wished for the 90-foot tall carving of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis at Stone Mountain State Park in Georgia to be altered. But you’d be wrong. Well, you’d be wrong in the long run anyhow; I will admit that upon doing initial research for this article I was all for the argument that this “monument” was a travesty and that it was immortalizing confederate ideals in a post confederacy world. However, the more I read and the more I questioned one thing, the less I seemed to find myself rooting for the social justice movement’s success in changing Stone Mountain.
I found myself questioning one thing in particular regarding the monument and it led me down a funky rabbit hole of museum paintings, vandalism, and Eminem rap music. These things may not seem like they have a lot in common, but I assure you they do. The thing is, something doesn’t have to be showcased in the MET for it to be art, Eminem raps about some pretty salacious things- sleeping with women, making money, Dr. Dre and hating his mom- but it’s still art. So is vandalism, although please don’t mistake me for advocating for the ilegal defacing of another’s property, that is certainly not my intention. But that’s just it- art can be controversial and by most critics’ definitions, it’s supposed to be controversial.
So I found myself asking this. Is this monument the work of white supremacists working to idealize confederacy or is it art? There are plenty of paintings of the civil war, and both sides at that. There are plenty of portraits of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson but we don’t remove those from history books or google’s search engines because that type of erasure would be a travesty. There’s even art depicting horrible, heinous, murderous, sickly, and evil things yet we do not prohibt that art like we don’t ban books with sensitive content in this country. When statues are erected they are to thank, celebrate, and immortalize the subject of that statue, they are not really a symbol of history or of art. In a way, they are more akin to headstones at cemeteries, in poorly chosen places, almost like making an insensitive and ill timed joke.
I said earlier that I believed statues should be removed and I’m not negating that now, but I do believe there is a difference between what a statue stands for and what this monument is. Statues immortalize people, true, but art immortalizes itself. When you paint a scene, you immortalize the painting more so than the art in it, and if not, well then that Picasso guy was one ugly dude. That’s because art isn’t absolute, it’s merely what the artist wanted it to be, and more importantly, it’s interpretable. We’ve all been to a museum and overheard some weirdo in a sweater vest look at a painting of a tree and saying some weird sh*t like it represents sexuality or something like that. No one’s ever looked at Stonewall Jackson and gone “look at the pensive arch of his left brow, this man was contemplating the meaning of life.” This isn’t to say that the Stone Mountain monument doesn’t clearly depict three confederate men, because it does, but it doesn’t represent confederacy itself- it simply represents art.
I’m guessing that right about now you are questioning how something could depict a person without representing what that person most famously represents, and you’d be right to do so. If I mentioned to you Elon Musk I would probably assume you would be thinking about his company, Tesla, and that would make sense. However, ask yourself this: Is Elone himself Tesla? Not really. I also want to point out that this carving is not from way back when the south was still forcing slaves into labor, it was completed in 1972 so it stands to reason that the artists of this work did not have slave holding or southern confederate ideals when they formed the piece. No battles of the civil war were fought at or near Stone mountain and none of the men carved into the stone’s face are from Georgia where the art is located- in more discerning words, no man’s legacy is being celebrated by this piece. So no, I do not believe Stone Mountain should be changed. I do not believe that the government should ban the sale and purchase of the book 1984 or The Fifth Risk and I do not believe that this is a country so fragile, so immature, as to allow the change of Stone Mountain. Is this the America you really want? Because it’s not mine.