The violence of public art

In May, 1988, I Took What May Well be the last photograph of the statue of Mao Tse Tung on the campus of Beijing University. The thirty-foot monolith was enveloped in a bamboo scaffolding “to keep off the harsh desert winds,” my hosts told me with knowing smiles. That night, workers with sledgehammers reduced the statue to a pile of rubble, and rumors spread throughout Beijing that the same thing was happening to Mao statues on university campuses all over China. One year later, most of the world’s newspaper readers scanned the photos of Chinese students erecting a thirty-foot styrofoam and plaster “Goddess of Democracy” directly facing the disfigured portrait of Mao in Tiananmen Square despite the warnings from government loudspeakers: “This statue is illegal. It is not approved by the government. Even in the United States statues need permission before they can be put up.” ¹ A few days later the newspaper accounts told us of army tanks mowing down this statue along with thousands of protesters, reasserting the rule of what was called “law” over a public and its art.