Funerary statues

Like many great cathedrals, St Paul's in London has tombs and commemorative plaques honouring the country's heroes, along the side aisles and in the crypt. The more elaborate of these are adorned with sculptures or high reliefs, depicting the statesman or military leader himself. Some are standing, in commanding poses, others are shown mortally wounded, cradled by a servant or fellow soldier.

After a few minutes of wandering around, it struck me. There was a significant change in the style of the stone figures around the year 1800. From around that point on, the figures were sculpted in their usual, if perhaps slightly formal, dress. Often they were in the military uniforms of the period. Before 1800 however, all the fallen heroes were sculpted in Roman togas or with even less clothing, just a short cloak draping coincidentally over where the fig leaf would otherwise have been. The supporting figures in the scene, be they comrades in arms, weeping women or angels, were likewise in classical, nearly nude style.

Of course, nobody in 17th or 18th century England went around in togas or nude, but it seemed very much the convention to depict important people in that Roman style.

I had to suppress a chuckle when I imagined how one of them might have returned from the dead to gaze upon his own monument, only to turn redfaced, "Good lord, why I am represented nearly naked?" But of course, he wouldn't have been so aghast. From the cultural perspective of that period, it must have been a great honour to be elevated to the same level as heroes of antiquity.

With the beginning of the romantic movement just prior to 1800, the approach to art changed. Art began to depict how things actually were, rather than how things ought to be. Well, to be fair, it's a lot more complicated than that, but generally the trend was to celebrate the natural world as observed and experienced. Thus the statues were done as realistically as possible.

It took nearly two hundred years to see evidence of the next big break in St Paul's. The memorial to the 1982 Falklands War is completely different again. There are no leading heroes, no sculpture. The names of dead are inscribed onto a plaque, all equal in honour regardless of rank, reflecting the egalitarian ideals of the twentieth century.

A much more famous monument in this modern style is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. It is a long V-shaped wall of polished black granite, cut into a gentle hillside. The names of every one of over 50,000 US soldiers who died in the Vietnam War are inscribed, according to the year in which they fell. It was extremely controversial when it was first designed, by a 21-year-old Chinese-American architecture student, Maya Lin. Two years later, in 1984, to appease the critics, a more heroic sculpture of 3 soldiers raising a US flag was added nearby.

But when you sit on a nearby knoll and watch the visitors to the memorial, you'd realise the supplementary sculpture was a waste of money. All the visitors would head straight for the wall, ignoring the struggling tableau altogether. They would look at the long list of names and wonder what those soldiers were like, and what they felt in the war. More poignant were the families who had lost a son. They would search for his name, and on finding it, mothers, now perhaps arthritic with age, would reach to touch it on the granite, and upon that moment, all the years of grief would well up again. Knees weaken and the floodgates of tears give way once more. As mothers re-cry the months of anxious waiting while their sons served abroad and the anguish of the bad news, siblings might take a pencil rubbing of the inscription or leave flowers against the wall, and young nephews and nieces might leave a teddy bear for an uncle lost before they were born.

By today's sensibilities, any statue depicting the departed would be a gross caricature of the nuances of a real life and a crude excrescence on the memory.

Have humans really learned to be more sensible about the images we create of ourselves? Frankly, I doubt it. We're dealing with human nature here, the same stuff that enables Greek tragedies to speak to us 2,500 years later.

Perhaps photography has changed things quite a bit? Haven't we become used to, or resigned to, realistic pictures of ourselves? Hmm ... doubtful proposition.

Consider how people still try.

"Hey photographer, please give us a signal. We need to know when to take a breath and suck our tummies in."

And have you noticed how some women, posing for the camera, always stand with one foot half forward, but at an angle, in a Y-formation? They've been doing this for 2-3 generations, and some women are still posing like this. For the camera. They never stand like this in real life.

So why do paunchy gentlemen and svelte ladies do what they do? To conform to our latter-day ideas of beauty.

Wedding couples pose for photographs on the City Hall steps, or at the Botanic Gardens, when no part of the wedding ceremony takes place there, when neither place has any significance to their lives or courtship, and in fact, they hardly ever go there at other times. It is just the thing to do, to have romantic shots of the couples with these settings. It's actually very shallow, but few think critically about it.

That's the easy-to-see part, posing for the camera. Going even further, people remake themselves, consciously or unconsciously, to conform to their image of social status, or group belonging. That's true today as it has always been, I suppose.

Upwardly mobile professionals hang around the Boat Quay pubs after work with a beer in one hand and a cellular phone in the other, both arguably social ills. 12 time zones away, in Barbados, working class black men hang around their 'rum shops' with music so loud, your heart beats in rhythm with it. Everybody must surely find it painful to their chests (and ears) but nobody would admit it.

Some lesbian women, as they get comfortable with their sexual orientation and mix more and more with other lesbians, adopt the rather bad habits of smoking and drinking, as a symbol of their liberation and group identity.

Likewise, some gay men transform themselves by pumping their bodies and exchanging their wardrobe, remaking themselves into what is often called gay clones. This ideal of the gay physique and clothing style is a recent construct from the West, yet Singaporeans live this image as if it were their true and original self. More than that, they acquire certain speech patterns, and some of them add a touch of camp to their persona.

People remake themselves to belong and to gain status within a group. Yuppies become pub rats, lesbians do butch, cigarettes and drink, and gay males go in high camp to the dance clubs. All are conforming to the image they believe in. But images are not equal. Some are widely aspired to, others are minority ideals.

Being slim and tall (but not too gangly) is almost universally accepted as beautiful.

Making yourself into a pub animal pretending to love raw oysters and bluffing your way with wines, may be a minority habit, but is another unquestioned aspiration. It is unquestioned because the mass media beams it our way, and also because the evidently successful (read young, educated and moneyed) ones do it.

Other minority 'lifestyles' receive much less public approval. Body tattoos help you gain social status in certain restricted groups (e.g. triads). For other social groups, we have jade bangles, nose-rings, Rolex, or Swatch watches. Likewise, we have in other circles, being a submissive wife, being a country club member, or being a flaming-out gay person.

What elevates some images and relegates others, are the general assumptions by opinion leaders, moral and political leaders, about what's good and bad, what's desirable and what's not. Very often, these general assumptions are never examined critically. When we do, we may find surprising twists.

The golfing lifestyle is terribly harmful to the tropical ecology. All that pubbing isn't good for the liver. And is it really necessary to have a cigarette in hand as part of your lesbian persona?

So before we ridicule the 18th century English for portraying their generals in Roman togas, or the 19th century for erecting all sorts of heroic statues, it might be a good idea to look to ourselves. It's a richer lode to mine.

© Yawning Bread 

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