CHANGE: Deconstructing American Values

“Unmanned Drone,” the sculpture by Kara Walker [1], is stunning in its grotesquery. Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight called the artist’s remix of the bronze memorial of General Stonewall Jackson and his famed horse, Little Sorrel, “a monstrous mutant.” Jason Farago, culture critic at large at The New York Times, described it as “a disordered new centaur: an American centaur, American in its bones and in its burdens.” (A description that, as a Sagittarius, I have some ambivalence about.) In a piece about the making of the sculpture [2] that appeared under the headline “Kara Walker Deconstructs a Statue, and a Myth,” Walker described the piece’s effect: “What it starts to do in space when it’s looming over you, it really is this ghostly apparition, this Frankenstein’s monster of itself.”

Arguably Tilt West’s call to discuss “Deconstructing American Values,” along with the current administration’s embrace of corruption in service of the few and violence, asks us to wrestle (yes, again) with the monstrosities of the United States, with its mashup of aspiration and cruelties.

“MONUMENTS” — the current, lauded exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the Brick in Los Angeles [3] — feels achingly germane to the work of asking unsettling questions of America and its values (professed and in practice). Curated by MOCA’s Bennett Simpson, the Brick’s Hamza Walker and artist Kara Walker, the show places works by contemporary Black artists nearby decommissioned statues of figures of the Confederacy (some of them altered). The proximity and the artworks themselves interrogate the racism that underpins the look-back-in-resentment-and-confabulation ideology of the Lost Cause [4] and its commemorations. For example, a statue of Robert E. Lee from Charlotteville, VA, the site of the 2017 deadly “Unite the Right” rally, was melted down and refashioned into a pile of ingots: the material of a future artwork. The mass of bricks is identified as “Swords into Plowshares.”

While it’s awkward to focus on a show that we can’t partake of in-person, there’s enough material online to give us a fuller sense of the exhibit, specifically Walker’s contribution. And, of course, Denver is not without its own vexed memorials. After the killing of George Floyd, the public art department of Denver Arts and Venues stored two statues, one honoring Kit Carson and another Christopher Columbus, and began wrestling with what should happen to them. They remain in storage.

Donna Chrisjohn, co-chair of Denver’s American Indian Commission when the monuments were taken down in 2020, told the Colorado Sun in 2024 that perhaps there was a way to create with the community “something that can help us remember what we’ve been through as a people, as a country, and that we are capable of change and capable of getting on the other side of harm.”

Returning to Walker and her terrible beauty of a takedown, we grasp in her practice a mighty representation of what deconstruction and reforging might look like: a beheading, maybe, but more a dramatic rearranging of the horrible-known, in order not to look away but to see anew. As writer Siddhartha Mitter suggested in his profile of the artist, instead of letting Lost Cause memorials live in public or hide sequestered, “[Walker] proposes its artistic transformation as a third option.”

Or as Walker told the writer: “How can we be less draconian about culture in America?” …I’m just wishing that we could be more open and speculative, and derive learning and knowledge from all the exercises that are in play.” Later adding, “I feel like I just want to invite somebody into the space and take their skin off — laughingly, lovingly, we will remove each other’s skin,” she said. “That’s the provocation for me. It’s to say, can we be people here for a minute? We can put this stuff back together again and it’s not going to go on as neatly and fit as well as before, because maybe we have to trade some bits.”

Let Walker be our guide — along with a few other civic-engaged voices — as we attempt to deconstruct, reconstruct and imagine renewed values and shared space in which they might reside.

Speaking of shared spaces, we do well to consider Bad Bunny’s recent halftime show during the Super Bowl (and that of Kendrick Lamar’s at last year’s [5]) a commentary-in-motion on the past and the present. But also, a vigorous imagining of, if not our assured future, an ethos that challenges hypocrisies and lies while also pointing us in a better direction: unapologetic critique, joy and love.