Retaining the Fall: a museum’s task

Abstract

In this paper, I cling to the recent torn downs by the Black Lives Matter movement of statues of slave holders and colonialists to investigate its effects both to the arts and its institutional grounds. I suggest that the performativity of such torn downs not only consolidates a political activism but also that its affirmative nature may pose an aesthetic turn to the very representational function of statues, as we know it. Through the scope of experimental and vanguardist movements of the last century, sculpture draws back from the figurative tradition, and towards minimalism, and social sculpturing, as well as a number of other different procedures, which, hence, lead Lucy Lippard and John Chandler to denominate them as the dematerialization of the work of art. However, rather than using art theory to bring the antiracist upheavals to peace, I intend to assert their investing against statues as a trembling to art history that makes us realizes the aesthetic operation at play goes further beyond identitarian representation. Throughout this proposition I rely on the writings and concepts of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Achilles Mbembe, James Baldwin, among others. In parallel, I also cast photos by Brazilian performance artists whose works raise issues regarding race, coloniality and white agency.