Rebecca Zorach, Temporary Monuments

Rebecca Zorach, Temporary Monuments – Art, Land, and America’s Racial Enterprise

In 2019, when I moved to Pittsburgh, I found a piano for sale on Craigslist and drove out to the suburbs to buy it. In a moment of unguarded innocence, I exchanged pleasantries with the vendor, responding to his questions and revealing that I had just started teaching art history at the University of Pittsburgh. Without hesitation he boldly retorted that ‘they are tearing down our history’. […]

In her captivating new book, written before and after the police murder of George Floyd, Rebecca Zorach reflects on precisely this point. ‘When such statues are removed,’ Zorach states, ‘history is not being lost. What’s being lost (for Whites) is an imaginary consensus around history. What’s being lost is the feeling of easy ownership of the public sphere’ and that ‘whatever it means to you, is what it means.’ Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America’s Racial Enterprise excavates deep into the nation’s art, culture and social fabric to examine the historical roots and enduring manifestations of white supremacy in the US. ‘White supremacy in this sense’, Zorach critically points out, ‘is not a matter of white hoods and burning crosses; it is the business of race-making central to the very constitution (and Constitution) of the United States.’ Across six chapters, Zorach reconsiders the evolution of the American museum, construction of nature, the garden, erasure and indigeneity, abstraction and land art to ‘open up new questions about these public sculptural traditions by situating them in the context of politics and histories of land, race, art and ecologies’.

[…] The intricate and circuitous narratives, which make ‘glancing, associative connections’ between cultural, social and corporate America, make this an exacting and riveting study. The chapter ‘Garden: Violence and the Landscapes of Leisure’, for example, presents a form of object biography on the gazebo, beginning with the one in a park in the city of Cleveland where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead by a police officer in 2012. Eventually, disassembled and reassembled as part of Gates’s Art Bank in Chicago, this tragic history of the gazebo assumes ‘deeper significance’. Once a venerated form of English architecture, re-imagined in the US by slave owner and garden lover Thomas Jefferson, and then an object of art instruction at the University of Chicago, Zorach shows ‘histories of aesthetic ideas that serve as cover for social agendas that maintain and promote White supremacy’. Following the onset of white flight and managed urban decline in the 1960s, the gazebo became a desirable garden feature of white suburbia in Cleveland.

[…] The chapter ‘Home: Color, Abstraction, Estrangement and the Grid’ offers new considerations on ‘characteristic preoccupations of modern art’ by taking the historically black South Side of Chicago as its ‘center and not a periphery’. Here, Zorach’s complex but gripping narrative debunks myths of American modernism’s apoliticism and firmly implicates it in the nation’s racial enterprise. For example, Mies van der Rohe’s celebrated 1956 modernist masterpiece ‘Crown Hall’ incorporated Chicago’s College of Architecture and emerged from the egregious corporate dereliction and demolition of the once state-of-the-art Mecca Flats, home to thousands of Chicago’s black citizens. Throughout Zorach’s nuanced and measured narrative, the author makes evident the shortcomings of academia. Kazimir Malevich’s inscription, ‘Battle of negroes in a dark cave’, found on the white border of Black Square has, since 1915, ‘barely caused a ripple on the surface of modernist art history’. As a counterpoint, painter Ben Shahn, once ‘accused of unimportance’ by Clement Greenberg, is reappraised through his powerful paintings and drawings that explored the ‘housing struggles of Black Chicago’. Equally, Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1968 poetry collection In the Mecca, and the Wall of Respect in Chicago, a progenitor of activist community murals like Williams’s Color(ed) Theory, are presented as exemplars of defiance and group action against repeated acts of social erasure.

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