Architecture and art: a reflection of history?

Harry Craig, Music Editor,

FOR what is essentially a piece of metal, statues never appear to be out of the news in our culture war-driven society — from the now-infamous drowning of slaver Edward Colston in Bristol in June 2020, to debates over statues of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford and South Africa. This has even permeated Exeter, where the statue of Redvers Buller outside Exeter College has been the subject of heated local debate due to Buller’s racist, imperialist past.

This is not a new phenomenon, however. Statues, and more widely art and architecture, have always been a fundamental part of memorialising, reflecting and even creating history. Think of the iconic images of Saddam Hussein’s statue falling in Baghdad in 2003, or statues of Stalin pulled down by revolutionaries in Prague and Budapest in the mid-twentieth century. Our urban landscape is a manifestation of changing history, of which statues are just one component. A walk down my home town’s high

Discusses The Legacy Of Statues And Imperialist Surroundings In Our Society

street, for example, reveals churches hundreds of years old, a sparkling 21st century shopping centre, and a century-old department store. Ordinarily, most people don’t pay much attention to this. However, it captures our attention when, like the many aforementioned statues, architecture is the subject of controversy for its depiction of history. Sadly, this controversy is far too often presented as a binary between good and bad. Media organisations and politicians, keen to stoke culture wars, frequently deride those who call for a more nuanced debate about artistic depictions of historical wrongdoings as ‘woke lefties’.

In reality, the purpose of art, particularly of a historical and/or political nature, is to provoke these debates. Problems arise, however, when this art is not given proper context, and thus venerates controversial figures. This is why statues are often found at the heart of culture wars: there is no space for nuance in a statue. They are erected to idolise someone, but as we have reassessed our history and moved away from ‘Great Man’ theories, figures like Rhodes, Colston and Buller are now rightly seen as unworthy of this depiction. In 2021, Guardian columnist Gary Younge was criticised for arguing that “every single statue should come down… from Cecil Rhodes to Rosa Parks”. However, he made a very valid point: statues are a very bad way of reflecting history as they don’t consider how societal attitudes evolve. Beyond statues, other forms of art are better reflections of our history. Museum exhibits can be appropriately contextualised, for example. More generally, art provides a crucial, visible way of representing the past — when I think of the French Revolution, my mind visualises liberty leading the people, as in Eugène Delacroix’s iconic painting.

Most of the art we encounter, however, is not in a museum. It is the architecture that we see and use every day. We are accustomed to the famous architectural sights like Athens’ Acropolis, Rome’s Colosseum and even London’s Houses of Parliament, but even on a local level, architecture reflects our history, and is worth considering as we debate our history.