Facade Figures

Next week we will start conserving the figures on the facade of a major museum. These limestone guardians, 18 ft tall repositories of the virtues of our culture, frequently look gangly or insignificant from the ground but, up close, their forms, stretched to overcome the viewer's perspective, have a power and surprising intimacy. On their lonely perches for so very long, these forlorn souls look to be crying for the company that we will provide them for the few weeks we are there. Its a sweet task, despite the pigeon crap and accumulated atmospheric soiling, but I am approaching it with dread.

The last time I did this was on the Brooklyn Museum of Art. I worked on all of the pieces, many allegorical figures posed by Audrey Muson before she went mad, and many by the fine sculptors of the period. Daniel Chester French's program for the 30 figures and pediment group included images representing the cultures whose contributions to world culture were ensconced within the building. There are figures that represented in the Beaux Arts mind the cultures of exotic foreign lands and times on one side of the central group, and those that represent the Classical tradition and our culture on the other. Its a ambitious and expansive program for a lot of sculpture while remaining remarkably innocent in its underlying beliefs. From many sources, times and peoples, a common thread of art, science, creativity; humanity, can be found and these silent giants literally embodied the hopeful sense that the then dawning 20th Century was reaching the culmination of this glowing past in a hopeful American future.

It was from there atop the scaffolding, at what was the highest point in the borough, that I watched the World Trade Towers burn and fall. On that September day I was working on the figure of Mohammed, a blasphemy I know but, in the context of the program meant as an homage. An innocent tribute to a foreign culture, an open hand of admiration, yes in a colonialist context, but no less honest for it.

Now that culture was killing thousands of innocent neighbors and friends while I watched. I won't go into reliving the horror of that day and the days afterwards but, instead want to consider the meaning of that innocent tolerance for a religion and culture which, still, we hold as a legitimate difference from our own. After 4 years of study has shown the arrogance, perfidy, lies and cruelty that underlies much of the current expressions of Islamist culture; the death cult celebrations of violence, the beheading pornography, the insane cruelty of sending children to blow themselves to pieces in order to kill other children, we still carry a delusion that there are admirable cultural differences that we should respect.

Well, whether there are those admirable traits, and no one will gainsay the lasting virtue of the poetry and mathematics that has came from Islamic cultures, what I am mostly struck with is the nobility of OUR culture to find virtues where they may or may not lie. I can guarantee you that there are NO figures celebrating the awesome beauty of Jesus’ teachings, or the majesty of Moses’ stern directives, not to mention monuments to Confucius, Buddha or Plato erected in a Moslem country. Nor will one find the celebration in another culture but its own anywhere but in America. We have always sought the good in others because the essence of ourselves is the seeking of the good within us.

So, ok, perhaps I will overcome the lingering dread and say "Yes" let me polish the ideals of our American hope that these sculptures represent. Innocent, wrong-headed perhaps, certainly naive, we do remain a people of infinite goodness and optimism. And it is why we also remain the beacon of the world. And why I think that these slowly dissolving limestone piles MUST be kept whole, at least for the bit of time I can help to give them. They represent enough to warrant all the care I can give.