Today’s text is from November 2020. It’s a response to the artist Luis Camnitzer’s CALL FOR IDEAS FOR MONUMENTS HONORING TRUE UNKNOWN HEROINES AND HEROES.
The call was as follows:
The image usually associated with the word “hero” is of a male in military garb. Monuments celebrate individuals perceived as having done a significant service, too often in dubious causes, for powerful interests. Yet most heroic acts are anonymous and performed as help to fellow citizens, often with implications that call into question the legitimacy of those financing monuments.
This project is designed to fill a cultural gap and celebrate those members of society who are not memorialized in spite of being indispensable to check abuses of power, nurse our mental and physical health, and in general help maintain our well-being as a species and a livable environment.
There is no chance of having any submission built. There may be the possibility of exhibiting or publishing the projects, but these are yet unexplored options. If opportunities arise, they will be selective and curated events.
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Tomorrow a 12-ton statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee will finally be removed from the capital of the state of Virginia. This statue was erected in 1890, decades after the end of the Civil War, as whites continued to dismantle the rights of Black citizens through state and local laws enforcing segregation. During this time, and well into the 20th century, cities, towns, and municipalities erected hundreds of monuments to the Confederacy. The Jim Crow period only ended (in a legal sense) with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since those laws were passed, these hard-won rights have been consistently attacked and eroded in this country. But you know this already. In 2020, 160 monuments to the Confederacy have been removed. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Whose Heritage? report, there are still over 2100 Confederate symbols across the United States at this time.
Since I could not figure out how to draw or render what I wanted to do I wrote instead. It seems the right time to publish it. The monument is complex. I leave it for you to ponder here. Thanks for reading.
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Monument to the Unknown Elementary School Music Teacher.
Actually, this monument is very specific. It’s to my elementary school music teacher. His name is Mr. Lee. He was my hero, making music and all kinds of learning full of joy and wonder. We used colorful painted wooden sticks to learn rhythms, arranging them on the low-pile carpet and clapping them out with funny phonemic accompaniment. Later I learned this was music theory. We rehearsed and sang endlessly long concerts of 1970s rock tunes in third grade choral arrangements. When a student came in to class with the frightening news that the Beatles had put Satanic lyrics into the White Album and you could hear them if you played it backwards, Mr. Lee brought the album in and the record player and we all strained our ears to no avail as he pushed the record around the wrong way.
Mr. Lee didn’t have a wife. Or kids. He was the first gay person I knew of, as far as I knew, but of course no one said anything about it because those things weren’t said. This was a small town in Southwestern Ohio in the late 1970s. Mr. Lee had two pets: a tarantula and a giant white cockatoo, both of which he brought in for us to meet. He chose some of us to sing in the children’s chorus of the University choir and we performed Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana all over the region with grown-ups, seeing for the first time real concert halls that were different from the temporarily converted basketball courts or tinny-acoustic lecture rooms we had been used to hearing classical music in. I felt proud that Mr. Lee’s last name was the same as my middle name, which I otherwise despised.
I knew, in fact, that his name was Robert Lee. Robert E. Lee, to be exact. I had no idea who that was at the time. I had no idea the burden he experienced in his life with that name or the burden that his name imposed on others around him. I went back to visit Mr. Lee in the early 2000s and filmed him talking about music pedagogy. We talked about Elliot Carter, John Cage, and he clapped some rhythms for the camera the way he had taught us 40 years prior. I made a film called Dust of Snow and in it you can hear Mr. Lee’s voice and rhythm clapping and see Cuisenaire rods—an innovative math tool he repurposed in order to teach us musical concepts.
Mr. Lee was the best teacher I ever had. He taught me to love music, and how to feel it as a living experience in mind and body. He taught me how to understand learning as a site of curiosity and ongoing exploration. I never asked Mr. Lee about his name or his family.
This monument will be represented as a series of large-scale Cuisenaire rods bright and colorful on the ground spelling out the notes and rhythms of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. Kids can use the rods as balance beams and teens as places to do skate tricks. Some of the rods will be higher up and can be used as seating or places for people to lean and talk while sharing conversation and coffee. A bird’s eye view will reveal the patterns and those at higher elevations can choose to sing along.
Jenny Perlin
November 2020