[SPEAKER_02]: From the nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm John Weiner. [SPEAKER_02]: Later in the show, a new art exhibit in Los Angeles displays 10 decommissioned Confederate monuments. [SPEAKER_02]: Alongside the work of 19 artists responding or relating to them. [SPEAKER_02]: It's called Monuments. [SPEAKER_02]: Christopher Knight will comment. [SPEAKER_02]: He's art critic for the LA Times and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism.
[SPEAKER_02]: But first, our preview of next week's elections, with Harold Meyerson, in a minute. [SPEAKER_02]: The midterms are a year away, but voters are casting ballots this week in several key states, early voting for election day next Tuesday, which will provide a measure of the opposition to Trump right now with big implications for the redistricting battles that have begun. [SPEAKER_02]: For comment, we turned to Harold Meyerson.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's editor at Large of the American Prospect. [SPEAKER_02]: Harold, welcome back. [SPEAKER_02]: Always good to be here, John. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, people in California are voting this week on a referendum on redistricting. [SPEAKER_02]: Gavin Newsom's Prop 50 would create five new democratic seats in Congress if it passes.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, response to Texas, creating five new Republicans' seats, the latest poll from CBS has prop 50 well ahead, 62% to 38%, however, Trump announced that federal election monitors will be deployed to five counties in southern California and the Central Valley on Election Day.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a move Governor Newsom has called an intimidation tactic, [SPEAKER_02]: In one that California's Attorney General Rob Bonta warned may be used by Trump to file false reports of voting irregularities. [SPEAKER_02]: to challenge the results of the election. [SPEAKER_01]: How do you see this playing out? [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think it's going to get very far.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the aggregate vote totals are going to be so hugely stacked in favor of Prop 50 that those challenges are not likely to survive the court's rulings. [SPEAKER_01]: But if there are enough Trump judges who take the word Trump more seriously than they take the word judge, [SPEAKER_01]: It's theoretically possible, but I don't really think they're going to go anywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: Plus, these are state-run elections, the validity of which has to be dealt with in the state courts. [SPEAKER_01]: And I don't think the federal courts are going to be eager to overturn an overwhelming majority in California. [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, everywhere in the United States elections are run by states and then by counties empowered by states, not by the federal government.
[SPEAKER_02]: But Rob Bonta did suggest that this monitoring effort may be a kind of dress rehearsal for what Trump plans to do in the midterm elections a year from now.
[SPEAKER_01]: that that's a highly likely what he can do in the midterm elections a year for now is is rather unclear if you invalidate a state's return in most states you're dealing with republicans as well as democrats they'd have to be rather cautious in what and where they choose to challenge for instance in the five redistricted districts in Texas some of those districts are in play but if you want to [SPEAKER_01]: the state of Texas, you're also closing a risk to Republican members.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it gets a little dicey. [SPEAKER_01]: I think what you may see is the deployment of authorities around polling places to deter let us say Latino voters. [SPEAKER_01]: From voting in those districts in Texas, I think that is something that reasonably can be anticipated from the entirely unreasonable Trump administration.
[SPEAKER_02]: In early voting is also under way this week in Virginia, where the governor and the state House of delegates are up for election, polls have the Democrat Abigail Spanberger at 54% or Republican the opponent at 42, but the attorney general race there is tied in the polls.
[SPEAKER_02]: We certainly would like to have a Democratic attorney general in Virginia, Democrats are seeking [SPEAKER_02]: the house of delegates and gain control of the governor's office they want to expand their control of the house of delegates right now they have 51 of a hundred the plan is to create to do redistricting Virginia
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, they're already underway with this week and it has to be confirmed by a new house of delegates to create two or three more democratic seats and there's good reasons to think the Democrats will do well in Virginia when the votes are counted after Tuesday.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are and and just to clarify the Democrats recently announced that as long as the Republicans are going in for this, they want to redistrict the congressional districts as well and that requires a vote of the legislature held before the election and a vote held. [SPEAKER_01]: after with the new House of delegates and so they need to win both, you know, the houses of delegates and they need to win the governor's office both of those are probable.
[SPEAKER_01]: The federal shutdown in which Republicans have said they don't want to deliver back pay. [SPEAKER_01]: two federal employees who were currently not able to get paid does not exactly help Republicans in in Virginia, which has the largest number of federal employees certainly on a percentage basis of of of any state and and so there's a lot going in in favor of Abigail [SPEAKER_02]: Also coming up is the New Jersey Governor's race.
[SPEAKER_02]: There is no independent poll that shows the Republican Jack Chitorelli over 45%. [SPEAKER_02]: All the polls show Democrat Mikey Sherrill at 50% or above. [SPEAKER_02]: So why are Democrats there so nervous? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, the state has been becoming closer in electoral contest, including very much so in 2024, where Harrison Lee beat Trump and New Jersey by five points, which is a great deal less than Biden's margin over Trump in 2020, and which was 16 points.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so there is that. [SPEAKER_01]: There is the odd fact that the two media markets in New Jersey are New York cities and Philadelphia's. [SPEAKER_01]: And so they're seeing more ads against Zoron Mondami than they are seeing for the Republican candidate for governor. [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, there are a number of New Jerseyites for some like Long Island Republicans.
[SPEAKER_01]: They fled the city, everything in the city is bad and dangerous, and getting the mandami adds probably reinforces that perception among those inclined to vote that way. [SPEAKER_01]: So, that has to be, you know, a centella of suspense about the New Jersey elections because of that. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, New Jersey is the most in many ways, [SPEAKER_01]: media misaligned state.
[SPEAKER_01]: They hear a great deal more about New York and Pennsylvania and Philadelphia than they hear about anything in New Jersey. [SPEAKER_02]: And in Pennsylvania there's a election that's sort of under the radar, but immensely important. [SPEAKER_02]: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court. [SPEAKER_02]: has currently a Democratic majority of five to two, but three of the Democrats face retention votes next week.
[SPEAKER_02]: Up or down, yes or no, should these Democrats be reappointed to another 10-year term? [SPEAKER_02]: And if the Democrats lose two of those, then Republicans will take charge of, [SPEAKER_02]: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court during the next presidential election when it may prove to be decisive. [SPEAKER_02]: There's no more important state than Pennsylvania in terms of its electoral cloud as a swing state.
[SPEAKER_02]: Losing a retention vote for state court judge is rare, but it does happen, especially when millions are being spent by both sides in on TV ads. [SPEAKER_01]: I can personally attest to this. [SPEAKER_01]: The same law occasionally states the Supreme Court justices are up for yes or no retention elections, applies in California.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in 1986, it applied to three of then Governor Jerry Brown's appointees to the Supreme Court, the best known of whom [SPEAKER_01]: was his chief justice rose bird. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, as events would have it, this is my last gig as a political consultant before I embarked on my journalistic career. [SPEAKER_01]: I actually managed the independent campaign on behalf of all three justices, all three of whom went down in a heap, who had given control of the California Supreme Court.
[SPEAKER_01]: to Republicans for quite a long time thereafter. [SPEAKER_01]: The main cause behind the attack on the justices was the then Republican governor who was Brown successor, Georgia, major determination to have Republicans in control of the Supreme Court. [SPEAKER_01]: For the next decennial redistricting this gets us back to redistricting because the Rose Bird Court had upheld the 1980 redistricting which the legendary liberal democratic congressman Phil Burton referred to as my.
[SPEAKER_01]: contribution to modern art, a slew of democratic districts. [SPEAKER_01]: But that didn't come up. [SPEAKER_01]: That wasn't the basis of the attack. [SPEAKER_01]: Nor was the fact that Agra business basically funded that campaign because bird had been browned.
[SPEAKER_01]: Secretary of Labor and the other two justices had headed the agricultural labor relations board and founded Californians for rural assistance, all of which led to Caesar Shahvez and Dolores Watt as United Farm Workers gaining real power over the 1970s.
[SPEAKER_01]: However, what the campaign was about, given the, according to the advertisements funded by the millions of dollars coming in against the justices, [SPEAKER_01]: was the fact that at a time when every death sentence had to be run by the Supreme Court, Rose Bird had voted to overturn 59 of all 59 deaths and since it came before her. [SPEAKER_01]: At the time, the death sentence had about 83% popularity in the state. [SPEAKER_01]: Today it would be under 50.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the justices got swept out to see. [SPEAKER_01]: So you don't want that to happen in Pennsylvania, obviously. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, control of the state during the 2020-28 election. [SPEAKER_01]: The courts control of. [SPEAKER_01]: state rules and state laws will be hugely significant, but like the court's role in redistricting in California, this is not the basis of the attack on the three justices in Pennsylvania.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, of course, New York City will elect a new mayor next Tuesday, Zoran Mombani. [SPEAKER_02]: Poles of the latest polls show Mombani 44% Andrew Cuomo 34% Republican Curtis Leeua 11% undecided.
[SPEAKER_02]: 7%, how came Jeffries finally endorsed Mamdani the day after early voting began, but Senator Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand are the last people in the state democratic leadership who continue to withhold their support from Mamdani, even though he is the the elected candidate of the Democratic Party, and I can't help noting that Bill Clinton has
[SPEAKER_02]: who's spending the last days of his political career indulging in kind of racist Islamophobic attacks that we'd expect from Trump. [SPEAKER_02]: What do you make of the failures of Schumer and Gillibrand to continue to refuse to endorse the Democratic candidate? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, as Bill Clinton's endorsement makes clear, they're not really totally alone.
[SPEAKER_01]: I should add that the state share of the Democratic Party, who was appointed state share by Andrew Cuomo, is also supporting Cuomo. [SPEAKER_01]: Schumer and Gillibrand get a great deal of their funding, a hot much higher share of their funding than Hacking Jeffery's gets from New York-based big donors. [SPEAKER_01]: that New York-based big donors are, you know, on the whole, just a petrified of mandami and they don't want to offend those folks as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have long-standing ties to what I would call the Jewish establishment in New York and with some exceptions. [SPEAKER_01]: the organizational Jewish establishment and the class of Jews that they represent are also apprehensive of that mandami and backing Cuomo's. [SPEAKER_01]: Jeffrey's really A has a district where in theory he could be challenged by a challenger to his left.
[SPEAKER_01]: And B is concerned with national funding for House Democrats, which comes from a very diverse base, whereas Schumer and Jelibrand mainly raise most of their own money from the New York wealthy, who are definitely in Chrome almost camp on this one. [SPEAKER_02]: And in the reason that New York's wealthy opposed man, Donnie is only because he proposed to raise their income tax by 2% on their income. [SPEAKER_02]: This is not their wealth.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is on their income over a million dollars. [SPEAKER_01]: If they make, you know, if they make, [SPEAKER_01]: $1.1 million. [SPEAKER_01]: The first million dollars, the taxes remain the same. [SPEAKER_01]: That $100,000 difference has its tax raise from 11% to 13%. [SPEAKER_01]: And that would go to funding universal affordable childcare in the city.
[SPEAKER_01]: which is a huge economic issue for parents of young children and their families and their grandparents like me who help kids pay for my grandkids child care then it is for those people who make over $1 million a year. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, Mom Donnie had a big event at the Forest Hills tenest stadium in Queens on Sunday night. [SPEAKER_02]: Sounds like it was a great event from people who've been there 13,000 people showed up for this event.
[SPEAKER_02]: The speakers included AOC, Bernie, the governor, Kathy, Hockel, [SPEAKER_02]: And Mombani himself, of course, not many candidates could pull off a rally with 13,000 people on the eve of their mayoral election. [SPEAKER_02]: My friend, Mikha Sifri, was there. [SPEAKER_02]: He concluded that, first of all, with Mombani, we're seeing the first major fruit of Bernie's to presidential bids, Mombani apparently has 90,000 volunteers at this point.
[SPEAKER_02]: not since Obama has there been this kind of enthusiasm for a candidate among the grassroots. [SPEAKER_02]: And you have to wonder what will happen to this massive volunteer army once he becomes mayor. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we remember Obama basically disbanded his support movement and [SPEAKER_02]: ruled as a conventional president.
[SPEAKER_02]: What's coming to New York, assuming mom Donnie wins on Tuesday, will be a big clash with Trump who could make life in New York pretty complicated and miserable if he wants.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this, of course, would have national implications in the current battle against authoritarianism could also make mom Donnie himself stronger and more important as [SPEAKER_02]: is a national leader because the only way we're going to defeat the populist right is with a more compelling vision of a better America and that's certainly what mom Donnie is is putting forward how do you see the next weeks and months.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Montami is much more of a movement person than Barack Obama ever was. [SPEAKER_01]: So just in and of itself, I don't think he'd ever consider disbanding the legions that have poured out of their doorsteps to
[SPEAKER_01]: uh... to work for his election and he's going to need that not just as uh... maybe ground a ground presence uh... opposed to a greater uh... infestation of ice agents and national guards but in pressuring uh... hoko on the legislature to raise the taxes that we spoke about earlier that need to be raised if he's going to find affordable child care now
[SPEAKER_01]: one of the long-term legacies of the city's fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s is that its own taxing power has been taken away and is put at the state level. [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, he needs the pressure of that group not just as a way to respond to Trump, but also as a way to essentially compel the legislature to enact those elements of his program which requires state action. [SPEAKER_02]: I was like to keep track of how Trump is doing this week's polls.
[SPEAKER_02]: The most recent one is the weekly economist, the U.G. [SPEAKER_02]: of Tracking poll, which we just saw in the last couple of days. [SPEAKER_02]: Trump's job approval. [SPEAKER_02]: is this week, according to the Economist, 39% approved, 58% disapproved. [SPEAKER_02]: That's now two points just in the last week. [SPEAKER_02]: It's the lowest result for Trump since he took office in this poll.
[SPEAKER_02]: Especially amazing, what they found about young people, 43% of young people disapproved of [SPEAKER_02]: Now it's 75% disapprove. [SPEAKER_02]: Just 10 months later, the other huge change was Latinos, 47% of Latinos disapproved of Trump when he took office. [SPEAKER_02]: This week it's 65% and of course this was a key constituency that helped them win in 2024.
[SPEAKER_02]: So Trump is doing terrible things but it's [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, I think a lot of what's making him more and more popular is the economy in which corporations are doing some layoffs, but certainly doing no hiring and to a working class constituency which like Latinos who are also, you know, seeing friends and relatives afraid of going out of doors for fear of deportation.
[SPEAKER_01]: and to young people who were bearing the brunt of everything that's rotten about the current economy, all of this is something that would sour Trump's reputation.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I think the public's perception of his spending money even if it's coming in from donors trying to buy him on the White House Ballroom project, not to mention [SPEAKER_01]: the twenty-billion dollar loan guarantees to Argentina, the extent that either of those stories is getting through, it ain't helping them.
[SPEAKER_02]: We've been talking about the elections currently underway, which conclude on Tuesday, Trump keeps saying, 2028 is the big one and that he wants to run again. [SPEAKER_02]: He's selling these hats that say, Trump, 2028. [SPEAKER_02]: Of course, he can't run in 2028. [SPEAKER_02]: He can sell them at least. [SPEAKER_01]: But at least he can pocket the proceeds from the sale of the hats. [SPEAKER_01]: It shouldn't be out of it. [SPEAKER_01]: It shouldn't be out of the loss.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I've been thinking like, what is really going on here since, you know, he's not going to be able to be a kid. [SPEAKER_02]: They've been 2028. [SPEAKER_02]: It seems like [SPEAKER_02]: He is telling the Republicans, especially in Congress, that they should not treat him like a lame duck, which is of course what happens to presidents in the second term, especially after their midterms.
[SPEAKER_02]: And some Republicans already are treating him like it's time to think about life after Trump. [SPEAKER_02]: Marjorie Taylor Greene being the most prominent. [SPEAKER_02]: And of course there's his own ego. [SPEAKER_02]: He can't stand the idea that he's soon going to become irrelevant and uninteresting.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, I don't think he's going to stop talking about running in 2028 because he's going to become more desperate and more needy, and so we're going to hear more from him about running for a third term, or am I missing something here? [SPEAKER_01]: I think you're right about Trump, but as far as the Republican reaction, they are still scared of deviating from him by a margin of a single comma.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's completely abandoning their institutional power and essentially trashing article one of the Constitution, which is what gives Congress a power to do what it's supposed to be doing. [SPEAKER_01]: So I think the Republicans will remain thoroughly cowed and then don't trump in this fantasy because how many fantasies of they indulge trump in thus far, how many pernicious fantasies, how many big lies. [SPEAKER_01]: The answer is a lot.
[SPEAKER_02]: Harold Munterson, really mid prospect to have a word. [SPEAKER_02]: Harold, thanks for talking with us today. [SPEAKER_01]: Always good to be here, John. [SPEAKER_02]: Now it's time to talk about the new art exhibit in Los Angeles called Monuments. [SPEAKER_02]: It's a display of 10 decommissioned Confederate monuments in the work of 19 artists responding or relating to them. [SPEAKER_02]: It's at Mocha, the Museum of Contemporary Art in the Brick and Arts at Non-Profit.
[SPEAKER_02]: For comment, we turn to Christopher Knight. [SPEAKER_02]: He's art critic for the LA Times, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. [SPEAKER_02]: He's appeared on 60 minutes, PBS NewsHour, NPR's Morning Edition, and all things considered, and then CNN. [SPEAKER_02]: Christopher, welcome back. [SPEAKER_03]: Hi, John, happy to be here. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, there are so many ways this show could have gone wrong.
[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. [SPEAKER_02]: And now Trump has issued an executive order instructing the interior department to restore statues that had been removed and to bring them back.
[SPEAKER_02]: And coincidentally, after years of preparation, [SPEAKER_02]: Moka is bringing some of them back to a space where art is displayed, and lots of people would say that's wrong. [SPEAKER_02]: On the other hand, the curators here know all about this, they know the challenges they face, their smart and talented people, how did they do with this show? [SPEAKER_03]: They did extremely well. [SPEAKER_03]: It's a brilliant exhibition.
[SPEAKER_03]: I do think it's a very complicated situation. [SPEAKER_03]: 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. [SPEAKER_03]: When in fact what is happening is it's being treated 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's important to look at these monuments in a historical sense. [SPEAKER_03]: 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. [SPEAKER_03]: And a number of the artists who made them work, [SPEAKER_03]: were formally speaking really talented.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 wanted carried. [SPEAKER_03]: And we have a chance to see that in this exhibition. [SPEAKER_03]: It's about paying attention to [SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: The history of this show really begins with the movement to remove Confederate statues and the opposition to that movement. [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, let's say her name, Zayana Bryant.
[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. [SPEAKER_02]: Let's say her name, Heather Hire.
[SPEAKER_02]: This was a 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. [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.
[SPEAKER_02]: The Robert E. Lee statue was given to a group called swords into plow shares which had proposed melting it down and the bronze ingots that resulted [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. [SPEAKER_02]: It was his idea to invite the artist Kara Walker no relation.
[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. [SPEAKER_02]: How would you describe what Kara Walker did with the Stonewall Jackson, the Question Statue? [SPEAKER_03]: It's astounding, which she did with it. [SPEAKER_03]: And the other work that's at Moca, the disassembled Lee piece is also a total eye opener. [SPEAKER_03]: And it was a big surprise when I saw it.
[SPEAKER_03]: When the group that was given that sculpture decided that they were going to melt it down, the idea of what's called a conical atom, [SPEAKER_03]: the destruction of icons has always been controversial. [SPEAKER_03]: But what they did when they melted it down, they melted it into into these bricks that are stacked up like ingots. [SPEAKER_03]: And they have a vaguely gold color.
[SPEAKER_03]: It looks like, you know, you're looking in Fort Knox here, which is a really strange visual connection to have. [SPEAKER_03]: But what's really interesting is that by the end of this year, [SPEAKER_03]: 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. [SPEAKER_03]: And that idea of transformation is really interesting, I think.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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. [SPEAKER_03]: Another active iconoclasm, and she reassembled it in a really interesting way [SPEAKER_03]: When you look at this very strange figure that she's made by combining fragments of Stone All Jackson and a fragments of his famous horror, so as known as Little Sorrow, it's a kind of man-beast.
[SPEAKER_03]: The original sculpture was in a question sculpture, which is an ancient motif of the hero of the man on a horse. [SPEAKER_03]: And it's a horizontal orientation of the figure kind of riding across the landscape. [SPEAKER_03]: It implies a certain dominance over the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: And she took that horizontal [SPEAKER_03]: configuration entered 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. [SPEAKER_03]: And interestingly enough, well, they're two, I think, really interesting aspects of this. [SPEAKER_03]: One is that it has no head. [SPEAKER_03]: It's clearly a figure.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like this kind of a tomaton in a way. [SPEAKER_03]: It's clearly a figure, but it has no head. [SPEAKER_03]: 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. [SPEAKER_03]: And I can't think of, I can't think of a better description of white supremacy than that. [SPEAKER_03]: It's his monster that refuses to die. [SPEAKER_03]: And it is torturing us right now.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is writing through our landscape right now. [SPEAKER_02]: And this sculpture kind of embodies me, while back at the Giffin contemporary space of Moka in little Tokyo, there's these [SPEAKER_02]: 10 decommission Confederate monuments. [SPEAKER_02]: The striking thing about them is they are not on pedestals. [SPEAKER_02]: They're not 25 feet high or 50 feet high. [SPEAKER_02]: They're at human eye level.
[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. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's, I mean, what, one of the words I've used to describe it is thrilling. [SPEAKER_03]: 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, you see them on the way.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that kind of one step removed quality was, [SPEAKER_03]: I think part of what made them powerful, they sort of existed in the environment as almost like a watchman. [SPEAKER_03]: They were keeping an eye on things.
[SPEAKER_03]: We refer to them as Confederate monuments, but they are really the subjects are Confederate, but as monuments of their Jim Crow monuments, [SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: The subject matter is often horrifying. [SPEAKER_03]: There is a sculpture by a guy I've never heard of named Jane. [SPEAKER_03]: Jay Maxwell, Miller of Confederate Women of Maryland, and was meant to honor the women who many who were nurses who took care of Confederate soldiers and so on. [SPEAKER_03]: And there are three figures in the sculpture.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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. [SPEAKER_03]: And it's essentially a P.A. [SPEAKER_03]: ta. [SPEAKER_03]: It's like the dead confederate traitor is Jesus. [SPEAKER_03]: And the woman holding the nurse holding you is the Virgin Mary. [SPEAKER_03]: And the woman standing behind them is Satan, her mom.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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. [SPEAKER_03]: And here is this ridiculous monument to anything but radical equality.
[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 [SPEAKER_02]: a white plaster sculpture commission for this show by Karen Davis called Descendant. [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. [SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_03]: And 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. [SPEAKER_03]: It could be Robert E. Lee or something like that. [SPEAKER_03]: And he's a toy to be played with.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's not something to be feared and given reverence to. [SPEAKER_03]: And the figure that Davis made is a direct reference to a very well-known sculpture by another Los Angeles artist named Charles Ray. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm called Boy with [SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 [SPEAKER_03]: history. [SPEAKER_03]: I thought it was a really interesting reference. [SPEAKER_02]: The show does include some very powerful video. [SPEAKER_02]: There's one made by Julie Dash featuring a singer named Devon Tine singing this little light of mine. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to let it shine.
[SPEAKER_02]: Tell us about that one. [SPEAKER_03]: It's about 10 minutes long. [SPEAKER_03]: Tines, divine tines is a base baritone with an incredibly powerful voice.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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, [SPEAKER_03]: 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 it's an amazing it's an amazing again another transformation over the course of ten minutes from a place it was built as a refuge a church
[SPEAKER_03]: and assassination to history, to a beautiful place of history, and I don't know, I found it really enthralling. [SPEAKER_03]: It's a really good 10 minutes to spend. [SPEAKER_02]: And there's one other artist in this show that I want to mention. [SPEAKER_02]: This is one who was not commissioned. [SPEAKER_02]: Hugh Magham, he was an unknown, a tender and portrait photographer working in the south in the early 20th century. [SPEAKER_02]: I had never heard of him.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'd never seen his photographs before, but they come from that period of Jim Crow when these statues were all commissioned. [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. [SPEAKER_02]: These people are dressed up. [SPEAKER_02]: They're sitting for their portraits. [SPEAKER_02]: I found it really moving.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's very moving and they do they come across as, you know, just folks. [SPEAKER_03]: These are just folks who, oh, I'm going to have my picture taken. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to look good. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to summer black summer white. [SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's, you know, from the, from the double exposure in the film. [SPEAKER_03]: 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. [SPEAKER_03]: He knew what he was doing and he wanted to take pictures of people and it didn't matter who those people were.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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. [SPEAKER_03]: The monuments were put up in order to normalize white supremacy in order to make white [SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_02]: This show, as I said at the outset, was conceived its origins lie eight years ago in the era of, [SPEAKER_02]: the unite the right rally, the first Trump administration, and then the George Floyd protests, it's been a long time coming. [SPEAKER_02]: And I worried as the date approached for opening that this was going to seem like yesterday's issue. [SPEAKER_02]: You think that's the case? [SPEAKER_03]: This is a show that meets the moment.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's exactly what we need now. [SPEAKER_03]: It's also, it's the kind of a show that needs to be seen, I think, several times. [SPEAKER_03]: There's a lot to think about and a lot to see. [SPEAKER_02]: Christopher Knight, his review of the Monuments Show in L.A. at Moca and the brick is online at L.A. times.com. [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for talking with us today. [SPEAKER_02]: You've been listening to Start Making Sense, a podcast from the Nation Magazine.
[SPEAKER_02]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer. [SPEAKER_02]: Alan Minsky is our producer. [SPEAKER_02]: Jack Merkinson is Executive Producer. [SPEAKER_02]: Baskar Sunkara is President of the Nation. [SPEAKER_02]: Katrina Vandenhuvul is editor and publisher of the Nation. [SPEAKER_02]: Our theme music is from Barcelona. [SPEAKER_02]: Afrobeat, licensed by Creative Commons. [SPEAKER_02]: You can find out more about Start Making Sense at the Nation.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you can subscribe to start making sense on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm John Weener. [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for listening.