Race and slavery-obsessed American artist Kara Walker has created a hideous sculpture out of the remains of Charlottesville's decommissioned Stonewall Jackson equestrian statue.
Her activist monument shows that politics is where art goes to die.
Walker was given the Confederate statue by an LA art group after it was torn down by Charlottesville, along with the statue of Robert E. Lee, following the 2017 Unite the Right rally.
She treats her subject with disgust, and the product produces revulsion.
Walker dissected Jackson's likeness into dozens of pieces and recreated it as a horror movie mutant, a headless, soulless Frankenstein that stands as the centerpiece of the Monuments exhibit.
The point of the exhibit is to fight white supremacy, and for Walker, the vandalized, dismantled Civil War statues have "a healing aspect" and that the "act of reclaiming the sculpture required an act of butchery.”
She mashed together steed and man, welding Jackson's body parts violently inside his horse, arms and legs protruding. The beast rears up on its hind legs, headless, useless reins dangling like mandibles, while bits and pieces of Jackson's stick out at odd, broken angles, dismembered, digested, spit out.
His form is contorted into that of a fallen soldier, trampled into the muck of a battlefield, unrecognizable as a man or creature deserving of love or even pity.
Walker makes a mockery of the former general, whose death was already a farce.
His arm was amputated after he was shot accidentally by his own men in the Battle of Chancellorsville and he died shortly after.
In Walker's rendition all Jackson's limbs have been amputated, and again these wounds were made by a countryman only this time it was deliberate.
Walker's mission is to erase the fact that Jackson's legacy was ever honored.
The original 1921 statue was erected for the memory of those men who died in the mud of the battlefield, their lives given up for an unjust cause.
Memorials to their memory have been removed from Charlottesville, Richmond, and Arlington National Cemetery, where protesters demanded they be torn down.
Removing those statues from the public eye wasn't enough for artists and curators who decided that Jackson and Lee—who were melted down into lumps of bronze— must be desecrated as well.
Fallen, vandalized statues populate the exhibit that bears witness to the deep need of the left to punish conservatives for believing the Confederate portion of American history was worth remembering.
The Stonewall statue was a gift to Charlottesville from a philanthropist in 1921 as part of the effort to bring pride back to the descendants of those defeated in the Civil War.
The nation needed to come together not just on paper or in law but in heart and deed and these statues were a way to bring dignity to southerners who had lost everything.
America carries the weight of twin crimes, slavery and the enduring reverence for the side that attempted to preserve it.
The nation has done penance for slavery through social programs, laws, reparations committees, and changed social attitudes that will never be enough for those who view history through its lens.
Removing Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson during the anti-racism enthusiasm that blossomed under Trump's first term began with a 2016 high school petition and ended with Virginia's Supreme Court rejecting appeals.
Walker's intent was not to create something beautiful but something ugly, and now that ugliness is revered.
Unmanned Drone has been fawned over by cultural critics from coast to coast, called with praise a "monstrous mutant," a "haunting sculpture," a "carnivalesque retribution."
The display of these desecrated statues shows a critical left elitism that does not want any memories to remain of the Civil War, Jackson, or the Confederacy that are not tinged with disgust.
Even 160 years later, unity is not possible.
Walker seeks to excise the history of how the south regained their pride of place as partners with the north and made a new nation after the Civil War.
Leftist ideologues who repudiate the demolition of the East Wing have also ripped history apart, retconned the founding dates, and think it progressive to deface historical artifacts.
Monuments attempts to "historicize" the national debate, but it proclaims that parts of American history must be cut out of our fabric for good.
