Detroit's Michigan Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument

Detroit's Michigan Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument
Text and photos: Samuel D. Gruber


I was just in Detroit for a few days and spent a lot of time walking around Downtown - an area of grand architecture and monuments - as well as many under-utilized, neglected and derelict buildings.  But some areas,  like the Campus Martius, have been re-developed.  Now the Michigan Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, designed by sculptor Randolph Rogers and dedicated in 1872, has a modern back-drop, and watches traffic.  I love Civil War monuments.  They so earnestly embody nineteenth century values and aesthetics, and they are also invariably public minded.  They are often commanding, even imperious in their size and strident positioning, but they invariably engage the viewer.  Some, like this monument and ones I've seen in Troy, New York and Providence, Rhode Island, are very busy.  These are the early monuments, they have to be careful to acknowledge all the heroes.  Layer examples get simpler, grander; and often more remote.

The Detroit monument is built up like a wedding cake, constructed of a series of rising octagonal sections. The lowest  are topped by eagles with raised wings;  the second section  is surmounted by four male figures depicting the navy, infantry, cavalry and artillery of the United States Army.   Above, four female allegorical figure rest on pedestals, and represent the big themes:  Victory, History, Emancipation, and Union.  There are also four reliefs of the Union leaders Lincoln, Grant, Sherman and Farragut.  Randolph's figures are dignified, even brittle, and very stiff.  It will be almost a generation before the Saint-Gauden's introduces robust and energetic forms in American monumental settings.

At the monument's apex is the heroic Michigania, or Victory, brandishing a sword in her right hand and raising a shield in the other.   She is magnificent, though today she might be conducting traffic.

Re-Introducing The Discover Syracuse Freedom Trail

 Cross-posted from My Central New York

Re-Introducing The Discover Syracuse Freedom Trail 
by Samuel D. Gruber

In July 2007, while President of the Preservation Association of Central New York, I had the privilege of unveiling with then-Mayor Matt Driscoll and others the 11-sign Freedom Trail through parts of the City of Syracuse designed to commemorate and teach the important history of Underground Railroad, Abolitionist and African-American historic and cultural sites in the city. Syracuse was a center of the Abolitionist Movement and the Underground Railroad.  The famous Jerry Rescue had already been commemorated in a striking monument on Clinton Square erected in 1990, but there was little else to tell the story of people and places throughout Syracuse.

The Discover Syracuse Freedom Trail project was a partnership of the City of Syracuse and the Preservation Association of Central New York and celebrates momentous events in the Syracuse that took place mostly between 1830 and 1860. The signs also remember abolitionists – white and black -who helped make Syracuse a center of the anti-slavery movement in America. Individuals commemorated included Jermain and Caroline Loguen, Prince Jackson, Samuel May, George Vashon, Thomas Leonard, Stephen Smith, Hamilton White, George and Rebecca Barnes, William “Jerry” Henry, James and Mary Baker, and many others. The primary research and much of the writing for the project was done by esteemed historian Judith Wellman.

Syracuse, NY.  September 2006 unveiling of design for Freedom Trail signs. Parks Commissioner Pat Driscoll, PACNY President Sam Gruber and members of the Network to Freedom.

Syracuse, NY.  July 2007 unveiling of  Freedom Trail signs.  PACNY past-president JAE Evangelisti, Councilman Van Robinson, Mayor Matt Driscoll, PACNY President Samuel Gruber and others.

Syracuse, NY.  July 2007 unveiling of  Freedom Trail signs.  PACNY president Samuel Gruber, Parks Commissioner Pat Driscoll and Glen Lewis, Parks Department project coordinator.

I'm afraid that these signs are still too-little known, and that those who do know them now take them for granted.  It took a lot of research and hard work by many people (mostly volunteers) to create this project - and now, during Black History Month I want to remind people of its existence.  It was mean, too, to be only the beginning.  There are still more places to mark, and this trail can be and should be the basis of a local history curriculum for schools and civic, community and church groups. 

I look forward to walking and biking the full Freedom Trail route when the weather warms up.  


Read the entire post about all the sites and signs here, and see pictures.

Kosovo: Pristina Partisans' Memorial Offers Lesson in Forgetting

Kosovo: Pristina Partisans' Memorial Offers Lesson in Forgetting
by Samuel D. Gruber

Pristina, Kosovo.  Partisans' Monument. Photo: Ivan Ceresnjes

I recently wrote about the bad state of the New Jewish Cemetery in Pristina, Kosovo. This is hardly the only neglected memorial site in the new country.  Not far is the large memorial to Kosovo's partisans who died fighting the Germans in World War II. The once-grand site in now forlorn; vandalized and stripped of the names of the dead it was built to remember. Ivan Ceresnjes has sent photos, and more can be found on-line.

The monument complex erected to remember Kosovo partisans who died in world War II was built at Matičansko Brdo in 1961. Designed by architect S. Lichina, it consists of several curved concrete arms, surround in a central plaza.On the concrete walls were originally set 270 stone medallions with the names of the fallen, including a number of them Jews. The memorial has been vandalized, stripped of all medallions and covered with graffiti.   Once a grand lesson of socialist history and nation building, it is now a erased text, a course in forgetting.  Only its stark forms remind the viewer of something lost, and dimly recalled aspiration. 

Pristina, Kosovo.  Partisans' Monument. Photo: Wikimapia
 

Pristina, Kosovo. Partisans' Monument, detail of vandalism. Photo: Ivan Ceresnjes

Pristina, Kosovo. Partisans' Monument, Detail of removed stone plaques with names. Photos: Ivan Ceresnjes

The Pristina monument is just one of thousands of memorials erected throughout (the former) Yugoslavia during Tito's long rule (many can be seen documented on Flickr), especially in the 1960s and 19760s when, after Yugoslavia's break with the Soviet bloc, it strove to forge a unified and dynamic national image.  Of these monuments there are score of large strikingly modern - even futuristic - designs that are architectural in their size and massing, but sculptural in the plasticity of their form.  The best photos are those of Jan Kempenaers (found in his book Spomenik,  Roma Publications).  They commemorate the past dead, those heroes who laid the foundation for Tito's socialist federation; but they were also forward looking, among the most radically different architectural designs off the 1960s and 1970s.  perhaps the best know of these monuments is the one dedicated in 1966 at the concentration/death camp of Jasenovac (Croatia). Today them seem to belong to sci-fi landscape from Star Trek rather post-war Europe. It was a period an enormous architectural and sculptural optimism.

Jasenovac, Croatia. Monument at Concentration Camp to victims of genocide during World War II.  Designed by Bogdan Bogdanović and dedicated in 1966.  Photo: Bern Bartsch (2009)

Robert Burghardt offers a selection of these monuments in the The Form und Zweck Zwei fanzine, and writes evocatively of their haunting, often looming modernism 

"Those monuments have an abstract, often monumental, but always unusual and peculiar formal vocabulary in common. They are located in the centre of Yugoslavian modernism, because they mark its starting point and they announce the modern outlook. In doing so, they still proclaim a future, which already has become past.  They are expressions of this future and they refuse to stop epitomising its coming. They keep calling: Ahead!  Spectres still inhabit the monuments, but their context, their audience has been lost."  

Burghardt goes on to say:

"As War-monuments they are unique: They do not express the fighting and death, but life, resistance and the energy by which they were carried. They are directed forward while they mark the starting point for a new society, whose products they are. In their abstract vocabulary they allow for an appropriation of meaning that bypasses official narrations, especially today, after their context has become invisible. They open the scene for numerous associations; they could be ambassadors from far-away stars, or from a different, unrealised present. The openness which originates in the abstract language of the monuments is a visual manifestation of the emancipation from the Stalinist dominance of socialist realism in the eastern bloc, in which future is represented only in a happy-overreaching form of the present. The monuments invoke a utopian moment, stick to aniconism, and translate the promise of the future into a universal gesture.

Martin Luther King Monument in Washington

Washington, DC. Martin Luther King Monument. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2011.

Martin Luther King Monument in Washington

The Martin Luther King Memorial on the Tidal Basin in Washington, DC. was dedicated in September 2011. The monument was designed by Devraux and Purnell/ROMA Design Group Joint Ventures which engaged Chinese artist Lei Yixin as the sculptor. The selection of a Chinese sculptor, the use of Chinese granite and Chinese masons, as well as color and style of the monument, aroused much protest during the planning and construction phases. The controversies are well documented on Wikipedia.

See an album of images of the monument here.

This monument, like the World War II monument located nearby on the mall and dedicated a few years ago are testimony to the historical amnesia and limited artistic imagination in Washington. The MLK monument - which some have dubbed Martin Luther Mao - comes straight out of 1950s social realist copybook. Such statues of Lenin, Stalin and Mao were once in no short supply. But the Communist sculptors were not original either. They looked to the Pharonic statues of ancient Egypt for their models. Maybe Lei Yixin looked a Karnak and Luxor, too.

Still, I have to admit that visiting the monument on an early December morning was a powerful experience. And the massive statue was perfect for tourist photo ops. But the humanity of the King's words in the inscriptions that line the monument wall inevitably strike one as in sharp opposition to the gigantic egoism embodied in the statue of King himself. The fact too, that the monument, like the upcoming King holiday, pulls MLK from his context.  It makes it seem that the Civil Rights movement was entirely of his making and his achievement, when there were so many other strong leaders at his side. I'd like to see them mentioned, at least by name. No doubt that King led and embodied the movement, and maybe he was its Moses. But as books like Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters make clear, the reality of the effort was so much richer and complex than this monument.

But this is always the problem of monuments. If they are too detailed and require too much work, they are ignored. And if they simplify, then they are seen - but at what cost to history? Are they doorways to the past? Or only scenic backdrops for the present? It will take several years to assess the overall effect of this monument. It is supposed to be the last great monument on the (greater) Mall. I hope so.

Washington, DC. Martin Luther King Monument. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2011.

Berlin, Germany. Lenin Monument at Leninplatz (now Platz der Vereinten Nationen -United Nations Square). The statue was removed in late 1991 or early 1992. Photo: Wikipedia Commons.