On Colston's Statue Falling
This month an exhibition has opened at M Shed Museum in Bristol: The Colston Statue: What Next? It calls to mind an image from last summer, which encapsulated the UK’s Black Lives Matter protests: the statue of a slave trader, bound with rope, tumbling from its podium, dragged through the streets of Bristol and then sent toppling from the edge of the city into the waters of the Avon.
Edward Colston was a 17th century philanthropist who paid for a lot of stuff in the city with the money he made in the slave trade, so going to school there two decades ago his name seemed to be on everything, the Colston Hall music venue, Colston’s School, even the Colston bun – a glorified bread roll stuffed with dried fruit – and we were debating it even then, whether it was right for the city to appear so proud of its foundations in a ‘trade’ that was, in fact, a means of genocide. The pain of walking past the plaque on that statue that read, “Erected by Citizens of Bristol as a Memorial to one of the Most Virtuous and Wise Sons of Their City”, when we had learnt that this man was responsible for enslaving around 84,000 people, 19,000 of who died in transport, was not mine, but I could see it in my friend who took the piss, her anger flashing beneath her barbed jokes.
Twenty years on you could still take a trip to Bristol and walk down Colston Road, go to a concert at the Colston Hall, pass a group of pupils from Colston’s school, and end up at the statue a stone’s throw from where we gathered to smoke weed on College Green. Looked at in retrospect the ending was inevitable all along. Sections of the British press were furious about this. They cited Colston’s philanthropy, and insisted that the decision to remove it should be left to democratic processes that had so far failed. They missed something fundamental about the nature of art. Which is that the act of creation is never complete until it has met its audience. No artist can demand what attitude their audience should assume to their art, although their work might imply their hopes. So what happened on Bristol docks was the completion of the artistic act begun in 1895 by sculptor John Cassidy and his commissioners – the audience only fulfilling what was asked of them: to experience the artwork, to attend to the emotions it elicits in them, and, in responding, to complete the art. As Bristolian writer Vanessa Kisuule, who witnessed the event, put it: ‘there is no poem more succinct than that’.
The empty plinth is an invitation to imagine: what takes the place of the slave trader? Who, now, do we elevate? The likenesses we place upon pedestals matter, because they express the values of our culture, and teach our young people how to focus their gaze.
Banksy came up with a sketch for what should fill this spot – Colston’s statue returned, but tilted - accompanied by a sculpture of the protesters who stood at the base, tied ropes and toppled him. A month after Colston fell a new sculpture appeared in his place: Jen Reid, who on 7 June 2020 had stood on the plinth after Colston fell, clad in black with a beret, her first raised in a Black Power salute. Now immortalised in black resin, the statue, crafted by the artist Marc Quinn, was brought to Bristol in the dawn hours and craned into place. “Jen created the sculpture when she stood on the plinth and raised her arm in the air,” Quinn said. “Now we’re crystallising it.” But his actions were criticised by some, notably the sculptor Thomas J. Price, who saw it as an evidence of the white male artist’s readiness to centre himself and use Black stories to find relevance. He believed that Quinn had: “quite literally created the votive statue to appropriation”. Less that 24 hours later it was removed by the mayor of Bristol, who said: “the future of the plinth and what is installed on it must be decided by the people of Bristol”.
The Colston statue: what next? The actions of the protestors have given it a new meaning, no longer a monument to a horrifying episode in British history and a man who profited from it, but a symbol of that history reviled, an insistence that it never be repeated – and the demand that we fight against the ways in which the same racism that enabled Colston to dehumanise those he enslaved echoes today. To find a way to hold that in the heart of the city seems right. But I’m not Black so it’s not my question to answer, just as it wasn’t Marc Quinn’s.
While a group called ‘The People’s Platform’ have launched a search for a new statue to fill it, the plinth, for now, remains empty. It carries potential and uncertainty, and that feels apt. Black Lives Matter, it suggests to me, has opened something up – the outcome is not guaranteed. And because I’m writing about resistance at the moment, I realise that this is the perfect symbol of it: not the revolution, yet, where everything is transformed, but the bit that comes before it - when a gap is opened between reality and what has long seemed destined. Room for change to come.