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May Day Action—Plus a Confederate Monuments Takedown I Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: In the nation magazine, this is start making sense.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm John Weiner.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Later in the show, the monuments show in Los Angeles that Moca's Giffin contemporary critiques Confederate monuments that have been taken down in response to protests.
• 0:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Critic Christopher Knight has our evaluation to show closest Sunday.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: But first, winning some big battles against Trump, John Nichols has our political update in a minute.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: For our analysis of today's political news, we turn to John Nichols, of course, he's executive editor of the nation.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: John, welcome back.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is great to be with you, John.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, after the White House correspondence dinner on Saturday night was disrupted by that would be a sass and Trump told 60 minutes.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: The reason you have people like that is you have people doing no kings, close quote.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, you were one of the eight million people doing no kings.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: You went to St. Paul for the no kings three flagship event
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Bernie and Bruce Springsteen, Jane Fonda, Joan Bias, dozens of local and national leaders and grassroots activists, we talked about it here on the podcast.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: What would you say to Trump's argument that the reason you have people like the would be assassin is that you quote, have people doing no kings?
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I also took my daughter to say, Paul, and I want to tell you that.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have enough affection for her that I wouldn't take her at any place that I thought was overly dangerous or particularly disruptive and I have to tell you that frankly, I wish the president could really witness a no kings rally.
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: What he'd see is a tremendous number of hardworking kind of very mainstream Americans.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't mean that there are people at no kings events who are very angry, very upset with the direction of the country opposed to wars, opposed to staggering economic inequality that has emerged in this republic and critical of a lot of other things.
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if I can sum it up, I guess it would be in the response of Bruce Springsteen to the attempted assassination or to what happened at the White House Correspondence Center.
• 2:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I believe it was the next night Springsteen was performing at a, you know, one of these huge crowds, you know, tens of thousands of people.
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he literally took,
• 2:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: a reasonable amount of time to explain that he was very glad that the president of the United States was not harmed, that the vice president wasn't harmed, talked about how deeply important he thought it was, that we not hate our rivals or our opponents to such an extent that we wish harm to come to them.
• 3:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was a very sincere, very poignant statement of what I think
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: most of the overwhelming majority of people who attend no kings events would tell you.
• 3:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Meanwhile, the war in Iran continues.
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Trump, you will recall, did not seek congressional approval for his attack on Iran and he justified that refusal by claiming Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now,
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Of course, the CIA and the rest of our intelligence community said Iran did not pose an imminent threat.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the Republicans in Congress went along with this and agreed that Trump had the authority to launch the strikes under the 1973 War Powers Act, which is where the concept of the imminent threat as a basis for going to war without a declaration of war is found.
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the War Powers Act also says,
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: that 60 days after the start of a war the president has to stop unless Congress either declares war or authorizes the use of the military for that specific action.
• 4:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: That 60 day window closes on May 1st Friday.
• 4:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: What do you think is going to happen with Congress declaring war or authorizing the use of military force this week?
• 4:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have very bad news for you, John.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Constitution and the extensions of it that Congress has made, particularly in the Nixon era when they were trying to bring in presidential warmaking, these things do not seem to have taken hold in the current Congress.
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mike Johnson, who does not serve as Speaker of the House, but rather as Donald Trump's floor leader in the House, he's got the title of Speaker, but he doesn't play that role.
• 4:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's not particularly interested in doing anything that might check and balance or trip up the Trump administration.
• 5:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I would suggest to you that any effort to rain in presidential
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: you have forced a vote and in this you've got a complexity because while there are some Republicans who are opposed to this this war and most Democrats are opposed you have that obmix of a few Democrats who are somewhat sympathetic, most Republicans who are more or less on Trump's side so I think getting upending the house leadership and getting a real vote this week or even in your term is unlikely and that's that's something we should all be very
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: I want to talk about the movement to stop ice from building that string of detention camps that Trump wants, that would house tens of thousands of people picked up in raids.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Last Saturday there was a...
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: series of nationwide protests over 160 actions highlighted opposition to these new warehouse style detention centers that are being planned.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Saturdays actions were out of the way places I've never heard of Romulus Michigan, McHenry, Illinois, Sekoro, Texas.
• 6:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Trump's goal, of course, is a million deportations annually.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: In order to accomplish that, the Department of Homeland
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: uh... has purchased eleven empty warehouses across the country for about a billion dollars uh... and every one of these is facing opposition from uh... locals um... the flagship challenge happens to be in Maryland where the state
• 6:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: pushed by citizen activists sued the federal government in a federal judge agreed with the state of Maryland block plans to transform this warehouse into a prison camp for thousands of people citing the lack of an environmental review and now other cities and states are adopting the same
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: tactic in Jersey, Michigan, Arizona, Tennessee and a lot of these Republicans are joining in these efforts to kill these projects.
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of these are in red states, it may be right now not a single one of these projects is getting anywhere.
• 7:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: it may be that none of these new detention camps will ever be opened.
• 7:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: ISIS actually being defeated in this battle, at least right now, and it's not taking millions of people in the street.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's just taking some popular opposition.
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: What do you make of this?
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, same thing that I make of the protests against data centers, AI-related data centers across the country.
• 7:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are in a moment in America where economic and political power assumes that much do it at once.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when you have a level of inequality that we have, and when you have the dysfunctional Congress that we have, and all these other things, see?
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's
• 8:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe not crazy that they make that assumption.
• 8:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: However, when you take things out to the grassroots, right, when you go to where people live and you say that I put a data center here and they're like, well, what about our water?
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: What about our utility rates?
• 8:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: What about all of these other issues?
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And...
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: What about AI?
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: We'd like to have a discussion about that.
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Similarly, if you put an attention center by people, they're going to initially say, do I want this near me?
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is this something, do I want that to be the single quote unquote best use of a major warehouse or of a industrial park or something in my area?
• 8:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then beyond that, there are the deeper questions related to it.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, do we should we be letting ICE kind of guide us through a response to immigration that is that is so cruel and so built-on and so irresponsible and frankly at odds with, you know, so many of the historic values in the United States and the goals of a country that has been built in so many ways by immigrants.
• 9:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so it's not surprising that you see this pushback
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: at the grassroots level.
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think it is, to me, a fascinating and encouraging reality.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the federal level, we have dysfunction.
• 9:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But boy, when you get this near close to the people, you see a pushback.
• 9:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: My sense is that what we ought to be looking to are those moments of intersection, right, where those people pushing back at the local level might figure out that the one place where they could say no to the federal government comes in November of a midterm election here.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: last Saturday was the communities not cages protests against the Ice Detention Center Project.
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: This Friday is going to be the biggest Mayday protest in our lifetimes in the United States, over 1100 locations.
• 10:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: are going to declare no work, no school, no shopping.
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: People united against the billionaire agenda.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is being organized by 500 labor unions, community organizations, immigrants, rights groups, racial justice groups,
• 10:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Huge alphabetical list.
• 10:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: I took a look at it.
• 10:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: It begins, you know, in the A, A, A, U, P, F, me, A, F, T, and at the end of the list, working families, young Democrats, Yuba County Democratic Central Committee.
• 10:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: No zeas yet, but the ones, I'm concerned about the lack of zeas, maybe Zoran Mombani will win.
• 10:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe he should, he should not sponsor one.
• 10:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of very specific things in the North Carolina, a dozen school districts will be closed for educators to join a massive statewide protest that the
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: to get the legislature to raise the budget for public schools in North Carolina.
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: In Chicago, the Chicago teacher's union in the school district reaches agreement to declare Friday, Mayday, and official day of civic action where thousands of students will participate in field trips to
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: places like the historic operation, push offices, the district will provide buses and bag lunches to the kids.
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: This sort of thing is going to be happening all over the place and indivisible in the other participating groups.
• 11:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: See this made a event on Friday.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: not just as another protest, but as a kind of rehearsal for what they call the kind of peaceful action we'll have to supercharge if Trump tries to sabotage the midterms.
• 11:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a quote from Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: No work, no school, no shopping, a rehearsal for what we'll do if Trump tries to sabotage the midterms.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's based on an idea which was first put into practice in Minneapolis a single day of protest, tens of thousands of people taking to the street, remind us about that day in Minneapolis.
• 12:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I will remind you of that day, but I'd be remiss if I didn't know it and I know this is gonna shock you that Madison Wisconsin, my hometown, will also be having a day off from school so that students and their teachers can join the demonstrations.
• 12:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, in Minneapolis, yes, in fact, there was a day of protests.
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have to say that they, they were not as smart on their scheduling as some of the folks are on May Day.
• 12:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: They scheduled it for one of the coldest days of the year.
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I mean, it was literally, you know, way below zero, incredibly brutal cold, and yet they came.
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the tens of thousands filling the streets of Minneapolis,
• 12:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: there are those will say well what's the point of a demonstration right you put a lot of people in the streets you get some maybe some TV images but what comes to that I can tell you that what came of that in Minneapolis having been out there was a deep into commitment people went to those demonstrations and they went back to their neighborhoods and I think they felt they weren't alone anymore and in Minneapolis in those early days of
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of people felt isolated, they were deeply concerned about what was happening to their neighborhoods, to their friends, and having seen the size of the demonstration and the energy of it, I do think it strengthened the project.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: of resisting.
• 13:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think the same is true at this point.
• 13:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is easy to focus on distant battles and all that.
• 13:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when you come out in your hometown, whether it's a big city or a small town, and you're out there with your neighbors, and there's a lot of you.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think you feel emboldened.
• 13:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: You feel like, okay, there's so many things happening that we don't want to see.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can often feel the downtrump just isn't going to listen to us, and there's Congress.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: if we can get the crowds out, you know, maybe that gives people the energy that sees them through to November.
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I will just remind you that the nation magazine has nominated many
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: was possible as regards resistance and protest and assembling a petition for the redress of grievances.
• 14:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think the Minneapolis lesson is a huge one and we are on Friday, very likely to see it mirrored in much of the United States in some very profound ways.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Friday may first, may they know work, no school, no shopping, find the protest near you at indivisible.org.
• 14:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you can read John Nicholsip the nation.com.
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: John, thanks for talking with us today.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's great honor to be with you.
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I hope the speakers on Friday will remind people that Nobel Prize nomination.
• 15:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: This weekend is the last chance to see what has been described as the most important art exhibition of our post-2020 era in the landmark moment for American museums.
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm talking about the monuments show at Mocha and the brick in Los Angeles.
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a display of 10 decommissioned Confederate monuments and the work of 19 artists responding to or relating to them.
• 15:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: For comment, we turn to Christopher Knight.
• 15:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's one of the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and the former art critic for the LA Times.
• 15:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's appeared on 60 minutes, the PBS NewsHour, NPR's Morning Edition, and all things considered and on CNN.
• 15:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Christopher, welcome back.
• 15:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: John, happy to be here.
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, there are so many ways this show could have gone wrong.
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Most obviously, lots of people work very hard to get these monuments removed from public places, because, of course, honoring the defenders of slavery is unacceptable.
• 16:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now Trump has issued an executive order instructing the Interior Department.
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: to restore statues that had been removed and to bring them back, and coincidentally, after years of preparation, Moka is bringing some of them back to a space where art is displayed, and lots of people would say that's wrong.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: On the other hand, the curators here know all about this.
• 16:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: They know the challenges they face.
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're smart and talented people.
• 16:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: How did they do with this show?
• 16:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: They did extremely well.
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a brilliant exhibition.
• 16:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do think it's a very complicated situation.
• 16:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: People have the assumption that if a sculpture or painting is brought into the context of a museum, that that sculpture or painting is being honored.
• 17:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: When in fact, what is happening is it's being created seriously and the monuments that were produced to honor the Confederacy really do need to be taken seriously, especially now with the return of white supremacy into the halls of power.
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: it's important to look at these monuments in a historical sense, and we've tended, I think, to regard these monuments strictly in terms of their political role and their subject matter at the time, but not as works of art, but they are works of art, and a number of the artists who made them work
• 17:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: were formally speaking really talented.
• 17:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they were able to carry the message, the corrupt message, that the daughters of the Confederacy who sponsored many of these, that they want to carry.
• 18:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we have a chance to see that in this exhibition.
• 18:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's about paying attention to
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: the scourge of white supremacy which this country has had to deal with from day one and sometimes deals with well and at other times it comes to it a really horrific way which is what's happening now.
• 18:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: The history of this show really begins with the movement to remove Confederate statues and the opposition to that movement.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And all of this focused on Charlottesville, Virginia, where in 2016 a high school student started a petition calling on the city government to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee, standing in one of the city's parks.
• 18:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's say her name, Zayana Bryant.
• 19:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: When the city government voted in favor of removing it in 2017, white nationalist and neo-Nazis seized on the issue as a rallying point, and then there was the famous unite the right rally in August 2017 when a self-described neo-Nazi ramped his car into a crowd of counter protestors, leaving many people injured and killing one person.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's say her name, Heather Heier.
• 19:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: This was the point at which Trump, in his first year as President, said about the United Right rally, that there were, quote, very fine people on both sides, close quote.
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: The city council, eventually, put out a request for proposals from organizations interested in obtaining the old monuments which had now been removed.
• 19:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Robert E. Lee statue was given to a group called Swords Into Plowshares, which had proposed melting it down, and the bronze ingots that resulted are on display in the Monuments show at Mocha.
• 20:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: The other statue of Stonewall Jackson on a horse, the city council voted to give to an arts organization in L.A. today called the brick headed by Hamza Walker.
• 20:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was his idea to invite the artist Kara Walker no relation.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: to transform that statute and she accepted and that the work that resulted is on display now in Los Angeles at the brick.
• 20:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: How would you describe what Kara Walker did with the Stonewall Jackson Equestrian Statue?
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's astounding, but she did with it.
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the other work that's at Moca, the disassembled Lee piece is also a total eye opener.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I was a big surprise when I saw it.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: When the group that was given that sculpture decided that they were going to melt it down,
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: The idea of what's called iconoclasm or the destruction of icons has always been controversial.
• 21:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: But what they did when they melted it down, they melted it into these bricks that are stacked up like ingots.
• 21:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they have a vaguely gold color, it looks like, you know, you're looking at four blocks here, which is a really strange visual connection to have.
• 21:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: But what's really interesting is that by the end of this year,
• 21:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: The group that melted it down expects to have chosen an artist who will take those gold bricks and melt them down again to make a new piece.
• 21:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that idea of transformation is really interesting, I think.
• 22:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Meanwhile, over at the brick carawaker has been involved in a completely different kind of transformation with the Stonewall Jackson sculpture, which she cut up.
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Another act of iconoclasm, and she reassembled it in a really interesting way
• 22:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: When you look at this very strange figure that she's made by combining fragments of Stonewall Jackson and a fragments of his famous horror, so as known as little sorrow, it's a kind of man beast.
• 22:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: The original sculpture was in a question and sculpture, which is an ancient motif of the hero, the man on a horse.
• 22:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's a horizontal orientation of the figure kind of writing across the landscape.
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: It implies a certain dominance over the world.
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she took that horizontal
• 23:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: configuration entered it into a vertical into this monolithic figure in which the limbs of the horse and the limbs of the man and the torso of the horse and the torso of the man and they're all like kind of match together and smashed into each other.
• 23:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And interestingly enough, well, they're two, I think, really interesting aspects of this.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: One is that it has no head.
• 23:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's clearly a figure.
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like this kind of a tomaton in a way.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's clearly a figure, but it has no head.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a headless horsemen, and the headless horsemen is an old European American folklore story about a corpse that will not die that continues to menace the living.
• 24:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I can't think of, I can't think of a better description of white supremacy than that.
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's his monster that refuses to die and it is torturing us right now.
• 24:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is writing through our landscape right now and this sculpture kind of embodies.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Meanwhile, back at the Giffin
• 24:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: 10 decommission Confederate monuments.
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: The striking thing about them is they are not on pedestals.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're not 25 feet high or 50 feet high.
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're at human eye level.
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: They are monumental, but it's an amazing experience to be so close to something so huge and this actually, as you say, pretty well sculpted.
• 24:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's, I mean, in what one of the words I've used to describe it is thrilling.
• 24:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's thrilling to see these things that are, as you say, usually up on pedestals, 10 feet up, 30 feet up, and in one case, 50 feet up in the air, and that are usually experienced as a drive-by.
• 25:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: You see them on the way.
• 25:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that kind of one step removed quality was,
• 25:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think part of what made them powerful, they sort of existed in the environment as almost like a watchman.
• 25:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were keeping an eye on things.
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: We refer to them as Confederate monuments, but they are really the subjects are Confederate, but as monuments of their Jim Crow monuments.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, they were put up precisely to let everybody know whether you were white or black or something else that white power still was in charge and so to see them down on the floor and to be looking at the face to face, it's like disturbing and confusing and exciting because some of them are very beautiful.
• 26:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: The subject matter is often horrifying.
• 26:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is a sculpture by a guy I've never heard of named Jane.
• 26:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Jay Maxwell, Miller of Confederate Women of Maryland, and was meant to honor the women who many poor nurses who took care of Confederate soldiers and so on.
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there are three figures in the sculpture.
• 26:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a woman standing in the back, and in front of her seated is another woman who of cradling in her lap, a dead confederate soldier who's wrapped in the confederate battle flag.
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's essentially a P.A.
• 26:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: ta.
• 26:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like the dead confederate traitor is Jesus.
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the woman holding the nurse holding you is the Virgin Mary.
• 26:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the woman standing behind them is Satan, her mom.
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's an incredibly offensive image because the whole philosophy that Jesus was attempting to put forward was one of radical equality, the equality of all people and here is this ridiculous monument to anything but radical equality.
• 27:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And one of the kind of unexpected things about the installation of this show is that that piece, Confederate Women of Maryland, is facing
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: a white plaster sculpture commission for this show by Karen Davis called Descendant.
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: It shows her young black son playing with a toy soldier on a horse and that's a very striking juxtaposition of two realistic pieces with very different ideas.
• 27:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
• 27:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the one of the things that I thought was really interesting about the Karen Davis is that the figure of her son who, you know, who's like a kid, he's just presented as a kid and he's dressed and he's holding up this toy of a man on a horse, you know, who the man on the horse is we don't exactly nobody looks vaguely like.
• 28:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: and could be Robert E. Lee or something like that.
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's a toy to be played with.
• 28:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's not something to be feared and given reverence to.
• 28:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the figure that Davis made is a direct reference to a very well known sculpture by another Los Angeles artist named Charles Ray.
• 28:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm called Boy with
• 28:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: of a naked young boy who is holding in exactly the same way the Davis is holding the man on a horse is holding a frog.
• 28:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the kind of reference to youthful fascination with the natural world and with experience in the world and the Davis refers to that and at the same time this fascination
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: history.
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I thought it was a really interesting reference.
• 29:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: The show does include some very powerful video.
• 29:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's one made by Julie Dash featuring a sink singer named Devon Tine singing this little light of mine.
• 29:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to let it shine.
• 29:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Tell us about that one.
• 29:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's about 10 minutes long.
• 29:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tines, divine tines is a base baritone with an incredibly powerful voice.
• 29:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: It begins at the mother manual church and moves from there to a site just out outside of town to a 400-year-old tree, a spectacular,
• 29:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: ancient tree that was just a little sapling in the 1619 when the first slaves arrived in Virginia, and the song concludes there, and it's an amazing, it's an amazing, again, another transformation over the course of ten minutes from a place that was built as a refuge, a church that was
• 30:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: and assassination to history, to a beautiful place of history, and I don't know, I found it really enthralling.
• 30:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a really good 10 minutes to spend.
• 30:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there's one other artist in this show that I want to mention, this is one who is not commissioned Hugh Magham.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was an unknown, a tender and portrait photographer working in the south in the early 20th century.
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: I had never heard of him, I'd never seen his photographs before, but they come from that period of Jim Crow when these statues were all commissioned.
• 30:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: These are portraits of ordinary black and white people in the South, and they offer the sharpest possible contrast to the grandiosity of the monuments.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: These people are dressed up, they're sitting for their portraits.
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: I found it really moving.
• 31:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very moving and they do they come across as, you know, just folks.
• 31:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: These are just folks who, oh, I'm going to have my picture taken.
• 31:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to look good.
• 31:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to summer black summer.
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why some of them are double exposures, which are really, I mean, really turn your head around where a white woman in her chest has the face of a black person.
• 31:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's, you know, from the, from the double exposure in the, in the film.
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: It becomes a kind of pictorial record of an artist who, as you said, I was not aware of, I did not know of him, but who was clearly a great human being.
• 32:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: he knew what he was doing and he wanted to take pictures of people and it didn't matter who those people were.
• 32:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: He did for them what he would do for anybody and it becomes this kind of resonant series of pictures that are the opposite of what the monuments are doing.
• 32:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: The monuments were put up in order to normalize white supremacy in order to make white
• 32:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And these photographs are involved in normalizing normality, normalizing, you know, people, that's all just people, and that turns out to be a really powerful thing.
• 32:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: This show, as I said at the outset, was conceived its origins lie eight years ago in the era of,
• 33:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: the unite the right rally, the first Trump administration and then the George Floyd protests, it's been a long time coming and I worried as the date approach for opening that this was going to seem like yesterday's issue.
• 33:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: You think that's the case?
• 33:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a show that meets the moment.
• 33:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's exactly what we need now.
• 33:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's also, it's the kind of a show that needs to be seen, I think, several times.
• 33:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot to think about and a lot to see in it.
• 33:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Christopher Knight, his review of the Monuments Show in LA at Moca and the Brick is online atla times.com.
• 33:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for talking with us today.
• 33:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was great to be with you.
• 33:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: We did that interview with Christopher Knight when the Monument show opened in October 2024.
• 33:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have a post-cript, Kara Walker's piece unmanned drone, now at the brick, which they call the conceptual full-crum of the show, has been acquired by Mocha for its permanent collection.
• 34:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll now go into short-term storage, but it will certainly be displayed again in Los Angeles and soon.
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: You've been listening to Start Making Sense, a podcast from The Nation magazine.
• 34:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Renée Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minsky is our producer, Jack Merkinson is Executive Producer.
• 34:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Baskar Sunkara is President of The Nation, Katrina Vandenhuvul is editor and publisher of The Nation.
• 34:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Our theme music is from Barcelona, Afrobe, License by Creative Commons.
• 34:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can find out more about Start Making Sense at The Nation.com.
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you can subscribe to start making sense on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts on John Weener.
• 34:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for listening.