This Saturday I embarked on a trek to the Boston Common through the biting cold wind that drove temperatures below zero. Naturally, I dragged a couple of friends along with me. We decided that we would be able to see a very large assortment of sculptures if we took a convenient route along Commonwealth where myriad monuments stood.
The statues along the walk form a collective beauty that is greater than that of any one of the statues alone, composed as they are in a park-like, linear space running down the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. As one walks inbound, one is met with a solemn line of dark monuments, lined up one after another. Passing one, the eyes are drawn upward and forward to the next. This collectively-achieved trait cannot be isolated from the other appeals of the work when one looks with intelligent eyes, and this inseparability of all of the separate pieces acts upon and changes, for better or worse, the piece's overall appearance to the observer.
When looking at the array of statues along Commonwealth collectively, I began to see a pattern that surprised me to some extent. With one exception, all of the statues depicted men as the subject; which is to say, only one statue featured women that were of more than just aesthetic importance. Out of eight monuments along the route toward the Common, seven were dedicated to men. Granted, the Boston Women's Memorial commemorates the lives of three women, but it seemed strange to me that only three women were present along the way, among a very large number of men (honored both individually and in groups), to the Common. The city signs posted at the entrance to the park explain that the statues were commissioned to commemorate important Bostonians, and the walk is dedicated to their collective honor. This, for me, begs the question, in all this city's history, only three women deserve commemoration? It is important to point out here that I am not trying to call into question the value of the other statues; rather, I am trying to discern whether or not this slight skew is the result of a simultaneous skew toward maleness in a sample of important people from Boston's history.
I soon had my answer. I asked a passerby, as we looked up at the woman (unspecific, though; not commemorative of a particular woman) perched on top of the Soldiers and Sailor's Monument, what he thought the reason for the under representation of women in the statues on the walk toward the Common was. His swift reply rang poignantly, "That's history. Men have always been more important than women in history because it was written by men."
The explanation was so simple, I adopted it before he had finished the end of the second sentence.
It is important to consider this fact when looking at the composition of the subjects within each work. The men are framed as... well, masculine. The women, as shown below, are unassuming. Some of the sculptures of the men have rough, abstracting aesthetics, whereas the women are depicted in a realistic way. This contrast can imply that the women are more ordinary than the men, less unapproachable; though it is important to note that the artist clearly wanted the women to appear normal, and to be approachable. I believe that the absence of "approachable" sculptures of males implies an "overshadowing" of females by males accidentally when one looks at the entirety of the statue collection, thus making the artist's choice somewhat of a bad one.
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| The Boston Women's Memorial was designed so that the viewer could walk through the piece, reducing the ego inflation that the viewer generates through empathy with the subject. This aim of paradoxically de-objectifying the subject of the piece is not present in the other pieces, ones depicting men. |
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| The execution of the sculpture can lend itself to a cartoon-like interpretation, a stylistic choice that the artist made that I disagree with. The images are realistic, but not enough so, and in place of reality whimsicality flows in. |
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| Contrast the poses of the human forms in the Boston Women's Memorial with the posture of William Lloyd Garrison, depicted here. This sculpture is of a typical 19th century, realistic style. |
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| The Vendome Fire Memorial probably comes closest to expressing a facet of the human condition, without a human subject. The silent hat and coat on a wall that seems to be inspired by the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. instantly communicate the message that this piece was done to commemorate firefighters who died performing their dangerous job, while writing on the wall tells a fragmented story of the specific incident being memorialized in the piece. |
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| This critique should not be misconstrued as saying that arranging a male form in an overtly-male way within a composition is a poor artistic choice, or that the artists can be blamed for making this choice. In many ways, subject dictated to artist how it would be presented to the viewer. To suggest that General John Glover should be remembered in anyway other than upright, proud, and brash is foolish. Commanding men deserve to be remembered as such. |
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| The size, the space, and the height of George Washington's edifice here all add to this piece's grandeur. Situated at the front of the Boston Public Garden just beyond the main entrance, this impressive piece is always first seen silhouetted against the Boston skyline, a right and proper way to frame the likeness of this great man. |
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| Dedicated to the Bostonians who fought in the Civil War, The Soldier's and Sailor's Monument towers over the Common on Flagstaff Hill. There are no men depicted here, only women; however, these women are visual metaphors for the cardinal directions and the Genius of America, not actual humans. The decision by the artist to only use women to express abstract concepts visually adds a slight hint of objectification of the female form to the piece. |
