If You Thought The Ronald Reagan Statue Was Bad…… by Nick Bryans
Brassy. I mean, classy.
This week a statue was erected outside the London US Embassy of former President Ronald Reagan. This has caused some outrage amongst people, as Reagan’s tenure as President of the United States of America oversaw the Iran-Contra affair, the rigging of housing grants, the savings and loans bail out, leaving office with the highest deficit of any peace time president (despite massive cuts on government spending) , his ‘neo-conservative’ revolution which decimated the state sector, and in general being a bit of a heartless and compassionless p…person. However, for all Ronald’s failings, worse statues of worse people have been made.
Statues of dictators are now very much ‘old hat’, and often categorized under ‘An interesting use of bronze’. The Saddam Hussein statue torn down following the allied invasion of Iraq is one of the most famous images from the the Iraq War, whilst 2 years ago a statue of Joseph Stalin was moved out of central Tibilsi into a museum. Furthermore, just this week this video emerged of Syrian protestors destroying a statue of president Basher al-Assad’s inner family.
You see, statues used to be THE SHIT for totalitarian dictators; unless you had a flattering representation of you in bronze or stone, you weren’t a big enough mental bastard to run a country. Now with democracy spreading to all corners of the world, these statues are being ripped out, leaving marble landfills and soulless, money driven sculptors unable to feed their kids. And because of this, busts and sculptures are now becoming a bit, well, gauche. Once the preserve of autocratic dictators, you’re more likely to see statues erected now of semi-famous TV Personalities and sports stars. And apparently in Hollywood, it’s the thing to have.
The Los Angeles Staples centre is home to statues of ‘Chick Hearn, Wayne Gretzky, Magic Johnson, Oscar De La Hoya and Jerry West’. Former LA Lakers player (though perhaps best known for him cameo in Airplane! Well, to me anyway) Kareem Abdul-Jabaar is NOT happy about it. Not that the Staples centre is plagued by mawkish, ego boosting manifestations of athletes and in the process devaluing other Western statues representing war struggles and feats of human advancement; but that he doesn’t have one!
“I don’t understand (it). It’s either an oversight or they’re taking me for granted…I am highly offended by the total lack of acknowledgement of my contribution to Laker success. I guess being the lynchpin for five world championships is not considered significant enough in terms of being part of Laker history.”
Agree or disagree, this:
In marble would look awesome in any lobby.
The decline of the modern statue may be to down to the moving away from most people’s idea of them being 8ft ‘bastard indicators’, but it may also just be people’s general reticence to statues these days. There are swaths of them in my home city, yet I haven’t got a clue what any of them represent. The modern statue is mainly a heady mix of eroded stone and bird shit, that is simply used as a meeting place for kids on a Friday night, before they go off and attempt to convince a tramp to buy them alcohol, or smoke laughably rolled jazz cigarettes on a park bench.
A good statue is largely pointless, whilst a bad statue can lead to laughter, outrage and the sacking of whichever councillor commissioned it. And again, it’s within the realm of sport that has reaffirmed the rule that football + any sort of art or culture DOES NOT MIX. Ted Bates’ statue outside Southampton FC’s home ground was pulled down, after fans complained the statue looked nothing like the former player. At a cost of £120,000, this was erected outside the ground.
Now the first thing you must ask is, why was it 4ft? Surely Southampton didn’t have a 4ft footballer? Not just this, but the fact that the entire thing is out of proportion, has no face likeness to the player, and has a closer resemblance to the man off the Toby’s Carvery emblem. Saints fans were divided on the issue, with some claiming that “It’s an absolute abomination”, whilst the player’s daughter stated that “Dad’s statue represents an artist’s impression of Ted.” However, one fan put it best, when they simply said “Ted deserves better”. *Wipes tear from eye*
The Ted Bates statue was unequivocally pants, but at least it sounded good in theory. At no stage however, would a “let’s build a Michael Jackson statue – during his ‘one glove’ phase – outside the front gates”, sound like the musings of a sane and sensible member of society. However, for Mohammed Al Fayed, it was just what Fulham’s Craven Cottage needed.
Looking like a disused prototype from the Madame Tussauds ‘Skegness’ branch, the statue was erected to a baying crowd of horrified spectators and journalists trying to stifle their laughter. Al Fayed told fans who didn’t like it to ‘go to hell’, which would surely include a tacit invitation to fan Joe Roberts, who described it as “One of the worst things I’ve ever seen”.
So with the recent spate of statues being built in the name of out of proportion footballers and that bloke what sung Dirty Diana, can we assume that the days of dictators blasting cash on bronze nonsense is over? No, not quite.
Like Take That, statues commissioned by leaders in corrupt countries are back – and bigger than ever! Last year in Senegal, President Abdoulaye Wade unveiled the African Renaissance Monument;
A 49 meter, bronze statue that is taller than the statue of Liberty and cost £17M to construct. It represents a man, woman and child emerging from a volcano.
Now somewhat unsurprisingly, spending £17M of money generated in a 3rd world country on a pointless statue managed to piss just about everyone in Senegal off. It was described as a ‘vanity project’ and a ‘waste of money’, whilst president Wade faced the brunt of the criticism.
Wade has faced criticism for spending so much money on the structure when Dakar residents living in its shadow endure regular power blackouts and flooding. He has angered both Senegal’s Christian minority and some within the Muslim majority population.
Wade apologised to the former group after likening the monument to Christ, while some imams have condemned the Soviet realist-style statue as idolatrous. Other have expressed concern at the thigh-length hemline skirt worn by the female figure.
Smoooooooooooooooth.
So despite the Reagan statue causing some outrage, in a sense the whole farce is rather futile. Firstly, I don’t know why people are so annoyed about the Ronald Reagan statue. I thought he was awesome as Eddie Kent in “Tugboat Annie Sails Again” (IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE HE USED TO BE A RELATIVLY UNKNOWN ACTOR!). But also, as the president who orchestrated a neo-conservative quasi-revolution in the United States, that saw the state sector decimated and taxes curtailed, wouldn’t Ronald Reagan describe the Ronald Reagan statue as ‘Unnecessary Government Expenditure’? Alas, it will be filed away along with the others as ‘an interesting use of brass’, and once the first pigeon has taken a dump on it, people will slowly forget about it. Possibly.
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There’s a statue at the foot of the Wallace Monument, in Stirling (that already has a statue of Wallace half way up it) of Mel Gibson as William Wallace.
It had to get this cage fitted:
http://static.onemansblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/braveheart-freedom1.jpg
after local “art critics” did some “improvements” using a sledge hammer.
i think you mean ‘tacit’ not ‘tasset’…
i should say that everton fc have an ace statue of william ralph dean. on the whole, though, i’m totally with you on the statue front: vanity projects at best, and mediocre art at worst.
Turkmenbashi – a lunatic dictator of Turkmenistan, who changed the name for bread and Thursday to his mother’s name – mate a 30ft statue on top of a 30m high column.
The statue was made of gold and rotated SO THAT IT ALWAYS FACED THE SUN.
Now THAT is how you do it!