Breaking Down Colston: Destruction and Transformation in London and Bristol
Abstract
This article investigates articulations of material and cultural affects in the deplinthing of the Bristol memorial to Edward Colston in June 2020, and Michael Landy’s destruction of his belongings in the art event Break Down in February 2001. In Break Down, as in the deplinthing of the Colston memorial, destruction changes and expands the plane upon which objects are intelligible by bringing to our attention their material composition. Moreover, in both events matter is processed and deployed in ways that work through the phases of severance, liminality, and reintegration, as proposed in Arnold van Gennep’s ritual theory. In the Colston memorial ‘heritage,’ defined by Stuart Hall as a discursive complex that produces an exclusionary iteration of national identity, is mediated through the material form of the monumental sculpture. The protesters’ action in Bristol and Landy’s project of systematic dismantling and granulation differ profoundly in epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic terms. However, both events confront us with the fact that matter is never entirely ‘gone.’ In parallel with the traumatic and violent histories that the statue reproduces and mediates, we are left with the question of how to respond to its material existence, both before and after its deplinthing.
Citation: Crisp, Lindsay P. “Breaking Down Colston: Destruction and Transformation in London and Bristol.” The Jugaad Project, 12 Mar. 2021, thejugaadproject.pub/breaking-down-colston [date of access]
Acknowledgement
I wish to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers, whose constructive and insightful comments provided an indispensable contribution to the writing of this article. Please note that some sections of this article first appeared in my doctoral thesis, Fragment / Part / Whole: Matter and Mediality in Michael Landy’s Break Down.
1. Deconstruction and deplinthing
Over ten days in February 2001, in the art event Break Down, the British artist Michael Landy systematically reduced everything he owned to fragments and dust. This discussion will bring the tonne bags of fragments produced during Break Down into conversation with the material form of the now-prone bronze monument to the Bristol slave owner Edward Colston, which was toppled on 7 June 2020 during global anti-racism protests following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020. While this article will discuss the ritual and cultural efficacy of moments of destruction, anti-racist protest in general and the deplinthing of Colston in particular have direct implications for participants’ lives. The stakes involved in protesting (or not protesting) during the Coronavirus epidemic in June 2020 were not theoretical but substantive, and far higher for Black people. Consider, for example, that in Britain, despite an extensive programme of reviews and enquiries into racial inequalities and injustices, their findings are, repeatedly not implemented, ‘the death rate for Black women in childbirth is five times higher than for white women’, and ‘85% of Black people are not confident that they would be treated the same as a white person by the police’ (Joint Committee on Human Rights, 2020, p.3). In this context, statues may seem beside the point: ‘you can take them down, but that’s not going to put food on people’s tables’ (Khanna and Locke, 2020). Yet it is in the ‘crucible of the ordinary’ that ‘representations, identifications and social practices’ (Lewis, 2007, p.868) combine to mediate the structures through which such conditions are allowed to continue.
Landy’s destruction of his belongings and the toppling of the Colston memorial vary at an epistemological level – quite simply, they are able to be understood in absolutely different spheres and differ, too, in almost every element of their conception, ethics and aesthetics. But despite these numerous and obvious differences, one current that runs between them is destruction as a medium that changes and expands the plane upon which an object is intelligible. To ‘destroy’ or ‘break’ a material object is to confront the persistence of matter. In the discussion that follows I will argue that, in parallel with the multiplicities of trauma and damage that the Colston statue reifies, we are left with the question of how to respond to its material existence, both before and after its removal. How might an analysis of destruction first developed in relation to Break Down reveal the materiality of the Bristol memorial and the productive ‘destruction’ enacted by protestors?
In this writing I endeavour – as a white British cultural studies scholar – to recognise and reckon with whiteness. I use the term in the sense defined by Gail Lewis; ‘a constructed category of belonging and social position [that] needs to be “outed” and dislodged as a position of dominance’ (2007, p.884). In particular, by examining my own relationship with the Colston statue and other, similar commemorative objects, I hope to understand more thoroughly the implications of material constructions of ‘heritage’ in Britain. My previous research (see Crisp, 2018) has centred on Landy’s work of destruction; this ‘break down’ has a certain plurality. Break Down speaks eloquently not only of the ways in which material belongings ‘hold’ constellations of personhood, family, and cultural memory, but of the exploitation and exclusion he experiences, via his father, an Irish emigrant and labourer who became disabled and virtually housebound following a serious industrial accident while Landy was still at home (Landy, 2001a, p.110). This lends a particular force to Landy’s rejection of his collected stuff. How might my previous conceptualisation of breaking as transformation, not only of matter but of an object’s meaning or significance, speak, if allowed to encounter other moments of productive breaking – here, the toppling of memorials such as Colston’s?
The work of Michael Landy, and Break Down in particular, has a political significance that encompasses a critique of consumer capital (see for example Harvie, 2006; Hawkins, 2010; Perry, 2013) the necessity for which has only increased in the twenty years since 2001. Existing accounts of Break Down—not least by Landy himself—tend to position the work as a response to practices of consumption and disposal, entwined as they are with human expression or identity formation. In previous work on Break Down (Crisp, 2018) I have built upon these existing accounts to explore Break Down in terms both of its concrete form and its mediality (that is, the ways in which it can convey information and ‘tell stories’). I concern myself with the iterations of fragment, part and whole, metaphor and metonym, that emerge through the work. My analysis of Break Down draws upon conceptions of assemblage and affect to investigate articulations of the material with the cultural. I follow Deleuze and Guattari in treating a cultural artefact such as Break Down (and indeed, the Colston statue) as an assemblage, enquiring not after its meaning, but its doing or becoming: ‘what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in what other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013, p.2). As such, I suggest, Landy’s labour of dismantling and granulation potentiates a turn toward the fragment as matter that, through its form, tells the story of its own becoming. These questions - of damage, transformation, and the impunity of matter - acquire a new urgency in the light of ecological destruction, racial injustice and a thinning of democratic discourse and process that have been intensified and magnified in the course of the Covid 19 pandemic. [1]
Fig. 2: Documentary: Breaking Down. Video of Break Down, London, 2001. Video by Artangel, courtesy of Michael Landy and Thomas Dane. https://vimeo.com/144144220
Situated in a temporarily empty department store at 499 Oxford Street in London, Break Down was organised and contained by an enormous, blue, industrial conveyor belt system on which Landy’s entire collection of belongings, whole, dismantled, and shredded, circulated around the space. In total 7227 objects were taken apart, sorted into their constituent materials, then fed through shredding machines. Break Down discloses the tenacity of stuff – which is to say that however thorough Landy’s systematised processes of dismantling and granulation, matter itself persists. Material objects communicate, through their very composition, the events that formed them. As such, the fragment arises as an object that possesses its own discreteness while nevertheless freighted with its indexical association with an originating whole. In photographs from Break Down the remains of Landy’s stuff, newly revealed in its materiality, acquire an odd charisma. Metal shards lie twisted together, their edges bright from recent cuts. In a box of china, fractured edges show biscuit against the broken glaze. White paper falls in even spools. Red plastic granules form an alluring sea; faceted, glamorous, with a giddy density of colour.
While Landy’s belongings become strangely alluring in their fragmented state, Colston’s broken-down statue embodies a ‘zombie whiteness’ whose ‘claims to exceptionalism have metastasized around the world for centuries’ (Dreskin, 2020). Colston’s gaze is made strange by red paint; prone on packing cases instead of staring down from his pedestal, it is as though he lifts his head from where he lies. My account of the Colston memorial and its deplinthing, like my analysis of Break Down, will focus on workings between material and cultural affects. Following Stuart Hall (1999) I take the latter category to include the complex of cultural activities, institutions, and artefacts that are often described as ‘heritage.’ It is essential to acknowledge that the Colston memorial is one of countless similar examples of bronze statuary that, as Jason Arday (2020) observes, provide an apposite expression of ‘[t]he populist symbolism associated with valorising and eulogising Britain’s racist past’ (Arday, 2020; see also Pinkston, 2020 on the memorial as archive). Commemorative bronzes of this type gained predominance during the mid to late nineteenth century to the extent that dedicated ‘statue foundries’ existed to meet the demand (Simon, 2017). [2] ‘Histories of slavery and the legacies of colonialism […] are deeply interwoven into the material fabric of the British Isles’ (Huxtable et al, 2020, p.3), and public art such as the Colston memorial forms a significant element of this dubious heritage. [3]
Fig. 3: Tweet showing image of Colston statue after retrieval from Bristol Dock, M Shed Museum.
As Hall suggests, the term ‘heritage,’ generally used to relate agendas of ‘preservation and conservation,’ should also be seen as a discursive force for ‘the active production of culture’ (Hall, 1999, p.3). In Britain, ‘heritage’ ratifies a narrative of citizenship that is only accessible to ‘those who “belong” [in] a society which is imagined as, in broad terms, culturally homogeneous and unified’ (Hall, 1999, p.6). This is usefully read alongside Gail Lewis’s essential intervention on the ‘ordinariness’ of ‘the complexities […] of “race,” ethnicity and religion in contemporary Britain.’ This ‘ordinariness’ demonstrates the extent to which racist structures, and in particular a centralisation and naturalisation of whiteness, are ‘[embedded] in the tolerant/moderate fabric of contemporary culture’ (2007, p.870). For Hall, individuals are deeply implicated in the operation of ‘heritage,’ since ‘[i]t is through identifying with these representations that [we] come to be its “subjects” — by “subjecting” ourselves to its dominant meanings’ (Hall, 1999, p.5). While exploring how to interpret the Colston memorial, therefore, it is salutary to ask what it makes of us.
2. The (in)visibility of Colston
Vanessa Kisuule captures the incongruity of the Colston memorial in the poem ‘Hollow’ (2020) when she enquires, ‘And who carved you? / They took such care with that stately pose and propped chin.’ The sculpture seems intended to convey an impression of gentility quite at odds with the fact that he presided over, and profited from, the abduction, trafficking, torture, and death of an unthinkable number of human beings. Indeed, between 1680 and 1692, a conservative estimate suggests that Colston presided over the abduction of ‘approximately 84,500 Africans,’ of whom ‘in the region of 19,300’ died at sea (Ball, 2020a). As Hew Locke says, the Royal African Company ‘shipped more slaves from Africa to the Americas than any other. And thousands of slaves were branded DY, for Duke of York, on their flesh. He was Colston’s boss’ (Khanna and Locke, 2020). Yet, unbearably, Edward Colston’s brow is furrowed; his head modestly inclined. His right hand rests upon a long cane; his left, fingers curled, rests softly against his cheek.
The effects of this bogus benignity are uneven, amounting, for some, to a trauma-laden daily encounter, while others benefit from its almost-invisibility. In a formulation that strongly recalls Gail Lewis’s ‘ordinariness,’ Madge Dresser (2020) observes that for ‘many white Bristolians’ the memorial ‘was one where they perhaps have met friends […] and so has associations of place and a sense of belonging.’ Likewise, to reflect on my own experiences of and responses to bronze, municipal statuary of this type has been, quite simply, to see it at all; to notice it for the first time. Contrast this unearned ease with Kisuule’s powerful summoning of the daily dread of living alongside the Colston memorial: ‘Countless times I passed that plinth, / Its heavy threat of metal and marble’ (2020). Similarly, David Olusoga (2020) reflects that on moving to Bristol, ‘seeing Colston every day, there on his pedestal […] made me feel that this was a city I would struggle to ever call home.’ It need hardly be said that this doubling (in)visibility amounts, itself, to a reification of racial oppression.
Fig. 4: ‘Colston’, Bristol, 2009. Photograph by three-dee-head, flickr.com (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
The prominence of the plinth in the words of both Kisuule and Olusoga, underlines the importance of this element of the memorial, which places Colston ‘aerially above Black people as a permanent reminder of the overarching reach of Whiteness’ (Arday, 2020; see also Locke and Wood, 2006, p.283). Indeed, in an echo of Hall’s account of ‘heritage’ as a discursive entity that can place us, the downward gaze of the statue, intended perhaps to signal introspection, reinforces this effect, creating a moment of apparent eye-contact that brings passers-by into a field of visibility (see Fig.4). In this context, there is an overwhelming power in the moment of reclamation immediately after the statue has toppled, when two Black protestors climb onto the plinth and stand, raising their fists (see Fig.5). As Ann Phoenix, Afiya Amesu, Issy Naylor and Kafi Zafar observe, in its now-vacant state the plinth itself appears as ‘both a metaphorical and physical platform for the BLM [Black Lives Matter] movement’ (Phoenix et al, 2020, p.522).
The statue, made by the artist John Cassidy, was cast in bronze by the Coalbrookdale Company, probably using the method of sand casting as was standard at this time (Simon, 2017; 2020). Colston’s ensemble – the frock coat with its wide sleeves; the billowing shirt beneath; the rows of small buttons on his coat and the waistcoat just seen below; the buckled shoes with their block heels and square toes and the hair flowing to the shoulders – would, by the time the statue was commissioned, have been a matter of period detail. As Ada Pinkston (2020) suggests, ‘Monuments are archives. They are architectural objects that reinforce hegemony.’ Indeed, the Victorian construction of Colston’s reputation as a great philanthropist seems to have been determined by a singularising nostalgia as described in Hall’s analysis of ‘heritage.’ The installation of the Colston memorial in Bristol in 1895, 174 years after his death in 1721, formed part of a drive to ‘assert a common civic identity that would unite Bristolians irrespective of growing class divisions in the period’ (Dresser, 2020). As a construction of a monoscopic ‘past,’ the memorial enables ‘the object of commemoration [to] be understood as a completed stage of history, safely nestled in a sealed-off past’ (Savage, 1999). This ‘fixing’ arises from the material affordances of the object, which appealed to a fabricated public and moral consensus through the Portland stone of its plinth and pedestal and the durability of its medium, bronze.
Perhaps ironically, it is this pronounced monoscopy that has made the Colston monument such an interesting host for interventions in its form, which, like its eventual toppling, have challenged its ‘fixing’ immutability in a variety of ways. Before its removal, Bristolians employed a range of strategies to resist or reframe the memorial, including direct action such as the addition of unauthorised art and ‘protest plaques,’ and unsuccessful campaigns for its removal to a museum or for a new plaque to provide context (see Ball, 2020b; Historic England, 2020). In the heavy form of the Colston memorial, ‘heritage’ is revealed as encumbrance. Its material form and (in)visibility effect its apparently unassailable occupation of public space that obliges some, but not all, to negotiate violent and traumatic histories in order to occupy such spaces themselves. This heavy weight, and the sheer mass of unearned wealth accrued by Colston are articulated in the sharp hyperbole of Hew Locke’s work Colston (2006). This work is in some sense speculative, since it is both an artwork and a proposal for a ‘statue-dressing’ intervention, were it ‘allowed’ (Locke and Wood, 2006, p.282). Here, an aluminium-mounted photograph of the Colston memorial is festooned in gold to the extent that the form of the statue is obscured, in a reference to ‘those Madonna figures in Seville [that are] layered with encrusted jewels’ (Locke and Wood, 2006, p.286). As the artist says:
I've made [Colston] into a, kind of, fetish, covered in the, kind of trinkets, the trade beads, which were used at one point to trade in African slaves in the continent there, and cheap jewellery. In a sense the cheap jewellery in this case which is encrusted on this photograph, so it's literally screwed to the photo […] he's encrusted in the gold that he's acquired, but the gold is fake, it's cheap (Locke, 2015).
Locke refutes the wilful dullness of municipal statuary by covering it with gold. This process, too, incorporates destruction, since Locke is ‘attacking the preciousness of the photograph as well as the preciousness of the object that I’m actually proposing to cover’ by ‘drill[ing] holes into it and […] just dangl[ing] and fix[ing] stuff all over it’ (Locke and Wood, 2006, p.286). The grotesque veiling of gold seems to weigh Colston down, or to drown him.
In protestors’ breaking down of the Colston memorial, as in Landy’s Break Down, it is through material processes that the seeming immutability of material objects is revealed anew and punctured. Processes used might be characterised as ‘ritual’ since in both, material passes through stages of abstraction, liminality, and finally, reintegration (van Gennep, 2019). [4] Van Gennep’s liminality speaks to the moment described by Simon O’Sullivan in which the interruption of an existing system of signification makes a caesura – a gap in meaning – which is, however, inevitably repopulated by ‘new forms of representation’ (2006, p.73). Both ritual and art can create an interregnum that ‘transforms, if only for a moment, our sense of our “selves” and our experience of our world’ (2006, p.50). In Break Down, Landy’s belongings are separated from their usual, domestic space and set apart, as an element in an art performance. In this in-between space, Landy and his operatives intervene in the function, meaning, and value of his collected belongings – in other words, the ways in which they can be understood - first by cataloguing them in the Break Down Inventory (Landy, 2001b), then by taking them apart, sorting them according to their component materials, and granulating them. Their reintegration comes at the end of Break Down. On their return to a ‘non-art’ status, as shredded matter, they are reterritorialized by another ‘knowing’ of matter and its uses (and taken to the dump).
As such, destruction is an epistemological intervention. In the interstices between abstraction and reintegration, when Landy’s belongings are taken apart, or the Colston memorial is pulled from its plinth, it becomes possible to ‘know’ these objects in new ways. This, I suggest, relates specifically to objects’ material effects, and especially the quality of ‘broken-ness’. As Locke observes of the moment when Colston is toppled, ‘what’s interesting is the materiality of the statue. It’s just a piece of metal, it’s not important’ (Khanna and Locke, 2020). A fragmented or broken object affords the inscription of meaning from without, while also conveying narrative through its form. Matter is always from somewhere, and is always in process. Stuff rots or corrodes; textiles wither or are eaten by moths; glass in a window pane narrows at the top and thickens at the bottom; rubber hardens and flakes apart; paper yellows and stiffens. Without the council-funded protection of its routine coating of wax (Coles, 2020) the Colston memorial itself would have succumbed to degeneration, corroding green.
Material, process, and time
Matter fundamentally challenges fixity. As the artist Gustav Metzger specifies, ‘auto-destructive art is material that is undergoing a process of transformation in time’ (1996, p.42; emphasis added). Metzger’s work on auto-destructive art [5] connects precisely with my own conception of the creative and transformational potentiality of broken stuff. His discussion of ‘the aesthetic of falling bodies’ accords strongly with a Deleuzian concept of affect (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013) ̶ that is, the extent to which an entity shapes and/or is shaped by other external forces or objects:
Different materials in various stages of transformation have differing speeds, rhythms, convolutions though space. Some forms are ejected and describing an arc, hit the ground. Forms may slide. Materials may liquefy and reach the earth as drops. Falling bodies include aerosols, dust, smoke, water droplets. All these forms are potential aesthetic phenomena (Metzger, 1996, p.43).
Here matter is apprehended in terms of its capacity to change. Energies, densities, and velocities of objects, materials, and substances are revealed anew as they afford different methods of destruction. Similar encounters occur in Landy’s project of returning objects to their component parts. His family photos afford tearing and shredding; canvases must be prised from their wooden frames with pliers; his lentils have merely to be emptied into the hopper, the foam from his furniture submits easily to the shredders; his car is so difficult to destroy that it must be dismantled by a qualified mechanic (Artangel, 2015).
In Break Down the act of opening up an object and revealing its workings discloses and dispels the myth constituted by the consumer object that is always already complete. As these dislocated components are sorted by material and put through the shredder, their inherent material properties are brought into focus. Landy’s deconstruction incorporates a kind of grace, almost of justice, in which configurations imposed by human beings are erased in favour of the physical affects of the material he handles. In a similar way, through its deplinthing on June the 7th 2020 the Colston statue acquires a new kind of visibility, and the capacity to tell a different kind of story.
3. Toppling and transforming the Colston memorial
Fig. 5: ‘Edward Colston statue: Bristol protesters dismount statue of slave trader’, Bristol, 2020. ABC7, online at https://youtu.be/4GpP8r9mzNA
Seen as a moment in this longer negotiation, the act of destruction figured by the deplinthing of the Colston memorial is a transformative response to the materiality of this troubling artefact. The actions or phases involved in the statue’s removal are described by Ann Phoenix and her students:
the statue of Edward Colston was torn down from its plinth by a crowd of passionate activists. The body of the bronze statue was smeared in red paint representing the blood of slaves murdered under Colston’s authority and dragged through the city in disgrace. A corpse representing slavery was thrown defiantly into the river Avon (Phoenix et al, 2020, p.521).
The first phases of the toppling of the Colston memorial enact a moment of ritual detachment, as the object is removed first from its plinth, then from its previous site on Colston Avenue. Online video of its toppling shows protestors climbing the memorial to secure ropes around it. It is oddly shocking to see people climbing on the ‘body’ of the sculpture. The strangeness of its scale – monstrous (Dreskin, 2020) because just a little bigger than a human being – is brought sharply into focus, as, climbing it and tying ropes, protestors divest the sculpture of its borrowed humanity. It is a thing. It takes surprisingly little for the statue to fall from the main plinth. Three ropes pulled by around 20 protestors bring it down. As it hits the ground one tail of its frock coat falls away revealing a hole in its side. Kisuule (2020) contemplates this moment of transfiguration from apparent impunity to ephemerality: ‘But as you landed, a piece of you fell off, broke away, / and inside, nothing but air. // This whole time, you were hollow.’ There is an incredible eruption of feeling and noise – a cheering weeping screaming – as protestors flow forward to jump on Colston’s form.
As Esther Pereen (2007) suggests, echoing O’Sullivan’s account of interruptions to established discourse in art and ritual, protest enacts a deterritorialization of public space. That protest works spatially (challenging conventional understandings about who can occupy what public spaces, for how long, and how they should behave) is highly pertinent since, as previously discussed, memorial sculpture acts specifically in public space. Using the ropes, protestors tenaciously drag and roll the statue around half a mile through the streets from Colston Avenue to Bordeaux Quay. Its clatter and scrape against the tarmac sounds tinny and brittle. This feels like a procession of some kind; the protestors moving the statue are obliged by its weight and size to move together, and some of those walking with them walk backwards, recording on mobile phones.
Fig. 6: ‘Black Lives Matter Protest’: image of Colston statue being dropped into the harbor, Bristol, 2020. Photograph by Keir Gravil, flickr.com (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
At Bordeaux Quay the statue is lifted and levered over the railings, and then Colston plunges into the water of the harbour where slavers’ ships used to sail; as Phoenix et al observe, ‘a symbolic act […] since many slaves brought over from West Africa by the Royal African Company, under his command, perished in the Atlantic Ocean’ (2020, p.522). Yet despite the apparent finality of deplinthing and submerging, the materiality of this object prevails. In a moment of latency, it waits in the in-between space below the water, ready to be brought to the surface where it will insist that we decide what kind of thing it is and how it should be treated.
But if the materiality of the memorial is still with us, demanding to be dealt with in some way, its legibility is radically expanded through protestors’ interruption of its plinthed form. In the moment of reintegration, as it is pulled up from under the water, a new order territorialises the form of the Colston memorial which is, as it happens, that of museum conservation. The figure was retrieved from the harbour early in the morning two days after the protest and moved to a nearby warehouse. Fran Coles (2020), the conservator at Bristol Culture, describes the work both of ‘stabilising’ the form of the statue by removing harbour mud from the inside, and gently cleaning and drying its surface while conserving the red paint that ‘represent[s] the blood of slaves,’ (Phoenix et al, 2020, p.521). As Coles explains, the paint is now regarded as part of the history of the object, to remain in place when the statue is eventually displayed again, perhaps in a museum. The rope used to pull it through the streets was removed, but not until the knot used had been recorded so that it could be remade later and even a bicycle tyre pulled from the dock with the statue has been kept, alongside a collection of placards left by protestors around the plinth, which are also being conserved (Coles, 2020).
The protesters’ intervention deplinthed the statue, removed it from public space and interrupted the downward direction of its gaze. Prone on a packing crate on the floor of a warehouse, the statue is revealed in its materiality; divested of its authority. As Indra Khanna says, ‘it’s literally a hollow man’ (Khanna and Locke, 2020). But in its material persistence the memorial provides both a metaphor and metonym for the burden of living alongside and within institutions and histories that are wound up in and carried along by violent, racist oppression. If the Colston memorial reveals heritage as encumbrance, it also makes visible the need for people like me, who might have walked easily and obliviously under its gaze, finally to take the weight.
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Endnotes
1. This confluence of emergencies is captured by Ken Lum, Seph Rodney and Mirjam Zadoff who provide an outstanding reflection on strategic self care in this time of, as Lum says, ‘turmoil, of Covid, of racial reckoning, of social justice reckoning’ (Lum et al, 2020).
2. Work is underway globally to document racist and colonialist monuments and to institute new practices in relation to public art that relates to memory and identity. The diversity of these ventures and their methods can be glimpsed in the UK in the crowd-sourced mapping by Topple the Racists (2020) an audit by the National Trust (Huxtable et al, 2020) and in the US, the Civil War Monuments Database (Treen, 2020) and an array of projects facilitated by Monument Lab (2020).
3. Another facet of the industrialised processes that produced bronze statuary is suggested by the discovery, by conservators, of an 1895 edition of the magazine ‘Tit Bits’ rolled up in the folds of the statue’s coat, inscribed with the names of four foundry workers (Coles, 2020).
4. While van Gennep overwhelmingly discusses rites that are undergone by human beings, it is clear that material objects can also undergo ritual; see for example discussion on ‘[t]he transfer of relics’ (2019, pp.186-7).
5. Auto-destructive art is specifically art that destroys itself; this distinguishes Gustav Metzger’s vision from both the destructive art of Landy’s Break Down, and the deplinthing of the Colston memorial.
