Art report / Denmark 3

Before we went to Europe this spring, I read a story in the New York Times about a statue in Copenhagen commemorating a black woman, called Queen Mary, who led an unsuccessful revolt against harsh labor conditions in the Danish island of St. Croix in 1878.  It was described as the first statue of a black woman anywhere in Denmark, and I thought it would be nice to see it in person -- and I did get that chance.

The statue sits outside an 1797 warehouse (Denmark's Caribbean possessions had sugar plantations, and the building, now preserved as very high-end waterfront real estate, originally handled slave-grown sugar and rum).  The warehouse is now a museum of sculpture and a replica of Michelangelo's David has stood outside for many years.

The statue of Queen Mary was made by La Vaughn Belle, an artist from the U.S. Virgin Islands (Denmark sold its islands to the U.S. in 1917) and Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers.  It's placed symmetrically at the other side of the museum and was designed to be exactly as tall as David.

The statue shows Queen Mary sitting on a wicker throne, holding a torch in one hand and a cane-cutting machete in the other.

The statue is installed only temporarily, and in fact the statue itself is temporary -- our guide said it was made of some kind of styrofoam-like material.  Eventually the artists would like to raise enough money to cast it in bronze; not sure if it could stay in this location if that happened.

Paranoid feminism

Is it just me being paranoid, or is there something strange about a monument to women that doesn't include a single woman?

On Whitehall, London, in front of the British Cabinet Office, around the corner from 10 Downing Street.

Berlin museums 3 – Berlin Wall Memorial

The last time we visited Berlin, almost 40 years ago, the cold war was in its full paranoid stage and the wall was an ugly presence slicing through the city. We had memories of clearing Checkpoint Charlie in a tour bus, complete with mirrors on wheels for the border guards to slide underneath cars to make sure nobody was clinging to the axles.

This time, two decades post-wall, we visited the Berlin Wall Memorial to see how Berliners have commemorated that sad chapter of history. A section of the wall and the surrounding neighborhood have been made into an outdoor memorial/museum area with excellent signage in German and English. A huge amount of information has been crammed into unobtrusive kiosks that stand in the former no-man’s land between the actual wall and the inner perimeter.

At this site the no-man’s land included a portion of a cemetery. In the day, most of the graves remained in place and mourners were still allowed to visit, but only with permits and under heavy armed guard. One of the kiosks played a clip from an East German training film that showed two vigilant soldiers patrolling the cemetery at night. Look! A man hiding behind a gravestone – sic the dogs on him! The dogs got him by the wrist, the guards ran over to arrest him! And so, the narrator intoned, a happy end to the story of another Western spy trying to infiltrate the communist paradise. (We laughed out loud.)

The area included some remaining sections of the wall and an old guard tower. But the highlight was a memorial with the names and photos of the 136 people who died at the wall. They ranged in age from two to over 90, although the majority, as you might expect, were young men with the physical strength and nerve to dare an escape.  Some were East German border guards who saw opportunities while on duty.

Throughout Berlin, at the site of the wall, you can find memorial kiosks with details, sometimes photos, of escape attempts, successful or unsuccessful. Because this particular area included a border crossing, there were many attempts noted on the kiosks and brochure.

Right across the street from the memorial area is an old subway station, one of the “ghost stations” where western trains continued to run through portions of East Berlin. These stations were closed, doors and exit shafts were filled with cement, and guards patrolled the empty platforms (no doubt to prevent spies from leaping off the trains to infiltrate the communist paradise).

Just to make this art-related, a couple of days later we saw this picture, made many decades earlier but strikingly evocative of the horrors that later were visited upon this beautiful city.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Mauerer II, 1922 (Wall builders)