RECONSTRUCTED

In "Monuments," the Confederacy surrenders to nineteen artists.

- BY JULIAN LUCAS

Kara Walker's "Unmanned Drone" (2023) transforms a Stonewall Jackson statue.

The first thing you see is a horse's ass, protruding, upside down, from the thorax of a monster. A man's arm descends from the beast's stomach, his gloved hand clutching the blade of a fallen sabre. There's no sign of a rider's face, but a head of well-coiffed hair dangles from the creature's eyeless muzzle. Every part of the work comes from a statue of the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson that was removed from Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2021. It was subsequently given to the artist Kara Walker, who carved it up in accordance with a butcher's diagram. The finished sculpture, “Unmanned Drone”—on view at the Brick, in Los Angeles, as part of a joint exhibition with MOCA called “Monuments”—is at once an act of carnivalesque retribution and a recognition of the Confederacy’s zombie-like persistence. A rebellion defeated more than a hundred and sixty years ago refuses to stay dead; between the creature's legs, a horse head emerges from a gape in the bronze, like a new Jackson already foaling.

In March, Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for the reinstatement of monuments “removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.” Chief among them were nearly two hundred Confederate memorials forced from their pedestals over the past decade, when they became lightning rods in a mass movement for racial justice. In 2017, the imminent removal of Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue provoked Unite the Right, the largest white-supremacist rally in a half century, and the start of a backlash that has only intensified. Last November, a private park in North Carolina celebrated its “rescue” of three previously toppled statues—not from destruction but from preservation in the county museum, where they might have fallen prey to “a narrative that didn’t honor Our Confederate Dead.”