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Recombinant Sculpture and An Optimistic Violence, On The Occasion of Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone at The Brick, Los Angeles

Geof Oppenheimer 



Installation view of Unmanned Drone (2023), bronze, 134 ✕  153 1/2 ✕ 55 inches at The Brick. Photos by Ruben Diaz. All images courtesy of Kara Walker, Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, and The Brick

The essential meanings of sculpture are found in the method of its construction. This tends to be made true at the joints. The way things come together, to make natural its state of things. Whether it be through our id or our ego, how we read the sculpture—a statue in this case—is based on how someone made decisions into it. The genius of Unmanned Drone (2025) by the American artist Kara Walker, recently featured as part of the Monuments exhibition in Los Angeles, is that it makes this conceit both formally—through cutting and reassembly—and politically, in its demand for a refashioning of the social contract imposed by this new work of art’s previous incarnation.

        Public sculpture is a historically radical tradition. In the ebb and flow of racial politics in the United States of America, the early 1920s were a particularly pernicious period. The adage of memorials erected so that we always remember and a monument formed so that we never forget is inherently an imposition of power onto our public spaces and mind. Both sculptural languages of the monument and the memorial serve as constant, obdurate reminders that the medium of sculpture can shape memory and value as much as embody them. This is certainly the case with the majority of the sculptures in Monuments. The exhibition consisted in large part of early to mid-twentieth century public works that were a material manifestation of American white supremacy. To recite the now common understanding, these sculptural forms of the Jim Crow era were impositions, using the past as an arbiter of an ever-present violence. They were meant to reassert a hierarchy, rectify the insecurities of a white populace, and to intimidate everyone else. This was perhaps incidental to the mediocre formal qualities of most of these public sculptures turned monuments, which is certainly true of the backstory and raw material of Walker’s drone.

        Slavery is one of the central narratives of the American experiment, an original sin. It has been a preoccupation and pathology of American culture since the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and a perennial subject of popular culture. From D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation in 1915, on to Abel Meeropol’s poem Strange Fruit and Billie Holiday’s iteration in 1939, many have intersected with the subject. In our time, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained in 2012 or Jordan Peele’s Get Out only five years later worked to reprocess the legacy. One could keep going; the narrative, in both its facts and fictions, have become part of the American canon. I like to think of Monuments as less uniquely an endeavor of the visual arts, but as part of a broader, ongoing conversation within mass culture.

Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson Memorial dedication October 19, 1921 from Hollinger Studio, Charlottesville, Virginia. Statue sculpted by Charles Keck, commissioned by Paul Goodloe McIntire. From the Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library


        The backstory around Unmanned Drone is instrumental to the emotional labor of the statue. Its prequel was a cast bronze statue of General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson who fought and killed for the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War (1861-1865). Installed in 1921 and authored by the sculptor Charles Keck, it was, it could be said, visual domestic terror. As the Klu Klux Klan was ascendant throughout the United States in the 1920s, works like this were commissioned and produced not as monuments of nostalgia but as warnings, installed throughout the country but especially in the states of the former confederacy. During this reactionary time, this particular statue was commissioned by the patron and white supremacist, Paul Goodloe McIntire, who had made a small fortune in coffee on the Chicago Stock Exchange. The bronze casting stood in Charlottesville, Virginia until its removal by civic decision in 2021—not long after the white nationalist Unite the Right Rally of 2017. Keck’s sculpture was then acquired by The Brick, a high-profile nonprofit visual art space nestled into what is slowly morphing into a post-Hollywood Los Angeles. 

       Monuments was organized by The Brick, an institution with a somewhat physically small space just north of Koreatown in Melrose Hill, Los Angeles along with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles where another part of the exhibition was held. In its near eight month run, the exhibition commanded an outsized share of attention from mainstream media. Coverage and criticism spanned The New York Times, The Guardian, and Vanity Fair, all having devoted in-depth reviews and editorial coverage of the exhibition in a tone not typically seen in recent displays devoted to contemporary sculpture. The exhibition crossed the border of the art industry shtetl into a larger cultural conversation. And for good reason. 

In a moment when a nihilism of the opaque, deft gesture is seemingly a house style in the field of art, Monuments is fertile with meaning. Contested meaning(s), for sure, but it is clear that the materials and forms in the room are meant to put pressure upon history and an American present in ways that have become scarce in our current cultural lethargy. If anything, there is an overabundance of ways to think about Unmanned Drone but almost all of them come back to one’s thoughts around the ownership of human beings. 

        The sculpture was presented in the middle of a mostly empty room at The Brick. The object of the figure holds a particular stance. Intersecting the roiling, thick flesh of an animal and something less man than statue. The organic, well sculpted form of a warhorse has been cut apart and seemingly forced into relation with an awkward, somewhat generic reproduction of a man who has been split asunder. Very few people know what he looked like in this day and age, but in photographs, Thomas Jackson was quite an elegant man. Thinner and smaller than I imagined, with a svelte body—a dancer’s body. And with beautiful blue, cold eyes. Instead, in Unmanned Drone, along with the statue which forms its DNA, the human is rendered as plodding—slightly too thick and would not be termed graceful. This works to the advantage of Kara Walker’s sculpture. The newly recombinant figure is full of a conflict and tension between the violence of its new form and a heaviness—in both its history and the raw weight of its given material—the highly refined earth of metal.

        The soft patina of the aged modeling that was the former skin of the equestrian statue is now interrupted with the bright bronze of newly exposed sections of fresh metal. The welds follow a logic, helping the viewer understand what is old and new, making its debut within this newly fused figure. And Unmanned Drone, persists as a figure through its reconfiguration. Joints and flesh are separated, taking transgressive liberties with the pure viscera of material that forms our bodies. Of importance is that even with this radical separation and reassignment within the statue, it is still a statue. A horrid rendering—holding the stench of a man of the carceral state, mixed with the source of power that sat underneath him. In this, Kara Walker unmasks the human animal as a potentially dangerous animal. The work looks terrifying. It's a scary statue. Unmanned Drone has been Frankensteined. 

Kara Walker, Unmanned Drone, 2023 (detail) The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Purchase with funds provided by Beth Swofford by exchange. © Kara Walker. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen.


        Within this body horror, there is an embedded optimistic proposition and it is here where the nature of Unmanned Drone transcends that of simply clever to become critical to the work at hand. This optimism is also the aspect of the work that I am so taken with. The artwork quite literally refashions fragments of the older narratives we live under to make a new monument, and with that, a proposal for a new narrative. In this violent separation, reassembly, and eventual reassignment with the material evidence of our social history, our pathologies can become more clear, and with that we can see how stories of strife and the refusal of American community could be refashioned. If only all we needed was a blow torch. 

        It’s obviously a lie, but one of the spatial consequences of a monument is its ability to masquerade as the truth. Its stability and overt publicness fools the heart and mind in a naturalness of its social authority. But this is a truthiness and not a factual given. If the way a work of art is put together reveals a belief system—of its maker and its time—it is by exposing and making self-conscious that the syntax of its beliefs and the structure of its ideology is made apparent. Materially, this “truth” of the monument is typically about a quarter to a ½ inch thick. Values and people change—making no form natural or neutral—and as such, always subject to reconfiguration. With Unmanned Drone, Kara Walker has made a positive gesture with the material darkness of the American predicament. 

        If most of the work in the exhibition are meant to be looked at in the rear view mirror, with a jaundiced eye at their obvious nefarious intent, Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone, with its optimistic violence, truly is a monument of today. It holds a turn (a transgressive turn) from the liberal anxieties around the aestheticization of politics to something more essential, maybe archaic. The old orthodoxies around art’s role in political seduction may no longer fit these times of the affective, post logic politics we live under today. It rightfully locates the pathologies around race as a regime of thought that is at home in the darker psychic energies of the animal mind we all carry around within. 

        In Unmanned Drone, the modernist fixation of the human animal as a rational (and perhaps perfectible) actor has fallen away, unmasking our id alone. In its recombination of man and animal, the liberty of disregard it takes between the boundaries of flesh, interior and exterior, and a violent intersection of the ruled and the governed, it redefines the history of its ancestor. While most twentieth century public works attempted to appeal to our higher natures, Unmanned Drone might be the twenty first century monument to our animal selves. 



Geof Oppenheimer is an artist living in Chicago, Illinois.