on caryatids and atlantes
Stasis, in Greek, has the ambiguity pertaining to all things “standing”… a verb that pivots on the grammatical tension between its stative and its dynamic usage, between the condition of standing and the act of standing up, between situation and event—steadfastness, constancy and stability on the one hand; interruption, instigation, initiation, on the other. It points to that which is stationary, static, persists, which stands up over time… for example the installation of a statue… But it also gestures to that which insists, takes a stand, stands apart or against, stands up to or rises up against the existing state of affairs, defies the status quo, desists from consensus, dismantles statues and institutions, defies laws and constitutions, introduces dissent, division, discord into the stable order of the state itself.
—Rebecca Comay, ‘Resistance and Repetition’1I used to sit down in front of the statue in the expectation that I should now see how it would start up on its raised foot, dash the Tables of the Law to the ground and let fly its wrath. Nothing of the kind happened. Instead, the stone image became more and more transfixed, an almost oppressively solemn calm emanated from it, and I was obliged to realize that something was represented here that could stay without change.
—Sigmund Freud, ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’2
Upholding the city
Glasgow is a city filled with late nineteenth and early twentieth century caryatids and atlantes: sculpted human figures that serve the function of architectural columns, subjugated load-bearing beings, tropes borrowed from Greek antiquity that re-emerged in the Renaissance and that later proliferated in the façades of buildings across European nineteenth century cities. The myths and ‘histories’ of these figures—Atlas, condemned to hold up the sky, and caryatids, figures condemned to hold up a building—were conjoined symbolically and incorporated into a Europe-wide architectural vernacular.
They became visible to me in the wake of states of exception in the city: the days of lockdowns, evacuations, disruptions, convulsions of 2020; the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, the contestations between fascists defending their statues, anti-fascist protesters and the police. In The Emergence of Social Space, Kristin Ross discusses how architectural signs become destabilised, contested and recognisable during periods of political upheaval: the destruction of racist, colonial statues across imperial cities
was the spontaneous (visual) expression of the 2020 uprisings. In Glasgow, Celtic FC’s Green Brigade ultras replaced street names across the city centre: Buchanan Street became George Floyd Street, Cochrane Street became Sheku Bayoh Street, Glassford Street became Fred Hampton Street, the material of the city’s fabric put to allegorical transformation. In the mass Palestine protests of 2021 and 2023, young demonstrators supplanted the statues of George Square, transforming the imperial monuments into images of anti-colonial resistance.
Over the next few months in 2020 I would glimpse caryatids and atlantes secreted or emergent everywhere: in the Merchant City, on the façade of the Mitchell Library, on the fringes of George Square, in the City Chambers, on Sauchiehall Street… figures made to bear a heavy entablature, sometimes with seeming ease, sometimes with expressions of burden in their faces and musculature. They appeared as frozen images of the defeated, incorporated within the grey-blonde, stucco-esque, porous sandstone blur of the façades across the rainy city, a city which, from the late nineteenth century, had seen a mass influx of proletarianised, often racialised labour to fuel its colonial circuits of capital accumulation: slavery, cotton, tobacco, sugar, shipbuilding.
I have counted 40 of these figures across Glasgow: a stone, surplus population, hiding in plain sight. They most often appear in twos, fours or sixes: doubles, twins, implying their own reproduction, variation, similitude, uncanniness, unoriginality or fated kinship. Their doubleness seems to exclude them from the concept of bourgeois individualism that so defines the statues of historical victors in the city, such as the statue of Lord Clyde in George Square. The character of their labour is ambivalently staged: necessary but unproductive, essential but surplus, human-stone, stone-human; like human sandwich boards, human labour reduced to its most passive form, no more useful than the raw material of extracted stone from which they are hewn. The conceit of statues lies in their staging of a seemingly eternal stasis, a cementing of the bourgeois status quo that erected them; but the caryatids and atlantes also seemed to me to convey the persistence of a stranger life force that could not be fully assimilated into bourgeois aesthetics, recalling instead histories of the oppressed. Figures of the bourgeois eternal, these statues seemed to form a category of a kind of second-order representation of coloniality, more subtle, unconscious, ambiguous and allegorical than the city’s constellation of explicitly imperial statuary. Unlike the latter, these sculptures also have a contradictory or dialectical quality that simultaneously suggests the possibility of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance.
Threshold figures
I began to recognise and think about the bourgeois sadism expressed in profuse deployment of caryatids and atlantes in Glasgow and dozens of other European cities: violent representations of the anonymised, enslaved, colonised, proletarianised, gendered of history, whose domination was relished.
Incorporated into a bourgeois regime of representation, the caryatids and atlantes present an image of a patched-together regime of the accumulated spoils of bourgeois victory over an eternal now. On Union Street are two caryatids: one wears a proletarian’s cloth cap, the other wears a classical Greek helmet. Combining old cloth and new, they elide antiquity with modernity, slave labour with wage labour, race with class; they also function as sites of aesthetic and social overdetermination or punning, the elision between sculpture and architecture: are they columns ornamentalised as humans, or humans disguised as columns? Anthropomorphised or petrified?
The contradiction between bourgeois aesthetic and proletarian subject contained within these sculptures was also sharpened in my imagination by their position at the fault line between inside and outside, presiding over the membranes of architectural space most charged by artifice: façades. The figures seemed overdetermined, bearing not only an entablature but a surplus of meaning.
Walter Benjamin identified the caryatids and atlantes of his fin de siècle West Berlin childhood as protective and prophetic beings, figures of the threshold, from the margins of architecture:
Among the caryatids and atlantes, the putti and pomonas, which in those days looked on me, I stood closest to those dust-shrouded specimens of the race of threshold dwellers—those who guard the entrance to life, or to a house. For they are versed in waiting. Hence, it was all the same to them whether they waited for a stranger, for the return of the ancient gods, or for the child that, thirty years ago, slipped past them with his schoolboy’s satchel. Under their tutelage, the Old West district became the West of antiquity.3
He also imagines them as secretly sentient, inanimate but suggestive of motion:
Nothing has fortified my own memory so profoundly as gazing into courtyards, one of whose dark loggias, shaded by blinds in the summer, was for me the cradle in which the city laid its new citizen. The caryatids that supported the loggia on the floor above ours may have slipped away from their post for a moment to sing a lullaby beside that cradle—a song containing little of what later awaited me, but nonetheless sounding the theme through which the air of the courtyards has forever remained intoxicating to me.4
Benjamin goes on to say that the air those maternal caryatids ushered into courtyards was the external impetus for his later allegorical readings of the city. As well-wishers to the child born of wonder, Benjamin’s caryatids are ciphers of the city’s allegorical transformation and seem indexed to historical redemption. In this, they reverse the role of that played by the imperial monument discussed by Benjamin in another vignette from Berlin Childhood, ‘Victory Column’, which reflects on the column at Königsplatz commemorating the Prussian victory over France:
It stood on the wide square like a red-letter date on the calendar. With the coming of the anniversary of Sedan, the calendar page was supposed to be torn off. When I was little, it was impossible to imagine a year without Sedan Day. […] With the defeat of the French, world history seemed to be safely interred in its glorious grave, and this column was the funerary stele.5
If the caryatids evoke the involuntary memory of the past, then the imperial monument positions itself as if to end history by declaring victory in the present and sealing the past off forever. Kristin Ross similarly notes of the Parisian Communards’ relationship to the Vendôme column:
For the Communards, the existence of the column freezes time: “a permanent insult,” “a perpetual assault.” Whose time is it?6
Captive forms
In email correspondence about caryatids with my friend Maria Howard, she draws attention to the political force of architecture in its relation to the human body: “the link between architecture—which comes from the Greek arkhitektōn, from arkhi, ‘chief’—and hierarchy—arkhēs, ‘ruler’—there are interesting links to the body in architecture with the capital of a column deriving from the Latin word caput which means head and also gives us the term capitalism.”
In an email from my friend Yasmin she writes that she had “a lingering thought also about la ‘colonne’ et le ‘colonial’.” What forms of power does architecture enshrine in its columns? I wonder whether it is possible to see the vertical column as a sublimated image of immobilised humans, of labour reified as commodity. As Marx writes: “In the course of the labour process, labour passes continually out of a state of unrest into a state of being, out of the form of motion into the form of objectivity.”7
In A Glasgow Mosaic, Ian R. Mitchell comments on the surprising lack of public art and artistic representations of labour produced in Glasgow at the time of industrialisation.8 Perhaps these absent figures find their sublimated counterparts in the city’s recourse to Greek allegory. Do the bodies of the caryatids depict the labour of the stone-masons and sculptors that carved them? A question like this is posed in Peter Weiss’ epic novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, volume 1. Weiss shows that the subject of the sculptures of bodies in the Pergamon frieze in Berlin observed by the novel’s protagonist are the very labouring bodies of those who carried and carved the stone:
Prior to the genesis of the figurations, there had been the bondage, the enclosure in stone. In the marble quarries on the mountain slopes north of the castle, the master sculptors had pointed their long sticks at the best blocks while eying the Gallic captives toiling in the sultry heat. Shielded and fanned by palm branches, squinting in the blinding sun, the sculptors took in the rippling of the muscles, the bending and stretching of sweating bodies. The defeated warriors, driven here in chains, hanging from the ropes of the rock faces, smashing crowbars and wedges into the strata of glittering, bluish, white crystalline-like limestone, and transporting the gigantic ashlars on long wooden sleds down the twisting paths.9
The stone is liberated from its enclosure, only for the workers who transported it to be held captive forever in its aesthetic handling. Weiss’ text opens the possibility through art of a historical reconstruction of the aesthetic object by considering the labour that is covertly depicted within it, hidden by a layer of representation that only a materialist history can unsee.
The interplay between bodies and stone, the theme of captivity in stone, and the eroticized overtones between sculptor and subject makes me think of Michelangelo’s late so-called ‘slave’ sculptures, a series of unfinished male forms, originally intended as atlas-figures for the planned elaborate tomb structure of Pope Julius II. They were to depict the racialised, colonised people conquered by Julius’ papal regime. Michelangelo’s reticence towards these imperial intentions itself becomes the theme of these famously unfinished sculptures, in which struggling bodies seem semi-submerged in marble, the unhewn stone dramatising the condition of captivity of an isolated form, held captive but with a secret impulse to liberation. Michelangelo’s treatment of these figures depicts the suffering of bodies in torsion at their most beautiful but without somehow glamorising suffering. Detached from their architectural function as atlas-columns for a tomb, Michelangelo’s feat in the slave sculptures is also a generic one, resisting the earlier virtuoso elision of sculpture, architecture and painting through trompe l’oeil as he had in the Sistine Chapel, wherein he depicted architecture and sculpture in paint, made real architectural elements and painted ones hard to distinguish, and the most populous figures were small putti caryatids and atlantes (hidden among the figures of the biblical pantheon). Here, however, he separates sculpture and architecture; the figures refuse their prescribed political-architectural function, they disfigure the aesthetic schema, become freestanding objects, depicting the condition of enslavement itself, indexed towards rebellion and freedom.
A detail from one of Michelangelo’s slave sculptures reminds me of the sandals of one of the granite atlantes on Argyle Street in Glasgow.
The so-called caryatids
Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession.10
—Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’
The Roman historian Vitruvius’s first-century BC treatise De Architectura marks the founding work of western architecture: its official inauguration as a discipline. I am surprised to find that the caryatids appear at the very start of this work, hidden in plain sight within the discipline of art history just as they are in the modern European city. For Vitruvius, they are illustrative of the function of history in architecture, something he declares as his pedagogical intention in evoking them from the outset:
A wide knowledge of history is requisite because, among the ornamental parts of an architect’s design for a work, there are many the underlying idea of whose employment he should be able to explain to inquirers. For instance, suppose him to set up the marble statues of women in long robes, called Caryatides, to take the place of columns.11
Not only do they demonstrate the function of history in architecture, but they also simultaneously demonstrate the function of architecture in the discipline of history, for they demonstrate architecture’s historicising function. These figures mark the triumphalist imperial city-state of
fifth-century BC Athens’ ascent following its defeat of the Persians.
The caryatids of the Erechtheion, Vitruvius states, are representations of enslaved women of Caryae, a state which sided with the Persians over the Greeks in war. After the Greek victory, they were incorporated into the architecture of the Acropolis as representations of racialised and gendered spoils and as a public display of their eternal punishment “so that they might be obliged not only to march in the triumph but to appear forever after as a type of slavery, burdened with the weight of their shame and so making atonement for their state.” As ritual processions moved up the Acropolis, these women, with their dynamic poses in contrapposto would, have seemed to synchronise with the victory parades, as if they too were walking in the procession. Both spoils and participants in the victory parade which carries them as spoils. Mantegna’s painting ‘The Triumphs of Caesar’ dramatises the living victors parading booty: vases, ornaments, wagons, living captives and also statues of humans. The different materials of the spoils are conveyed as a visual collage in paint.
For Vitruvius, the caryatids serve to warn of the importance of education in history as a prerequisite for understanding architecture, and they also align the function of architecture with imperial history (Vitruvius’ text contains a dedication to Caesar at the start): “Hence, the architects of the time designed for public buildings statues of these women, placed so as to carry a load, in order that the sin and the punishment of the people of Caryae might be known and handed down even to posterity.” With this sleight of hand, a focus on architectural education per se becomes the surreptitious means of conveying Roman (based on Greek) imperial propaganda.
The Erechtheion caryatids, which became archetypal of the genre in the nineteenth century, can be seen throughout Europe.In Glasgow they appear in the City Chambers as well as in the top architrave of the Mitchell Library (originally part of St Andrew’s Hall), where the graceful caryatids contrast with the struggling atlantes at the ground-floor entrance… I see them in London, at St Pancras Church on Euston Road. In the Louvre, they appear in the ‘Salle de Caryatides’ (1692). They became so archetypical that the modernist Lubetkin deployed them as a kind of architectural joke in his Highpoint II building in North London. One of the original caryatids from the Erechtheion resides in the British Museum, transported by Elgin alongside the Parthenon marbles, a further extension of the imperial continuity that carries them as spoils.
Agnès Varda’s film The So-Called Caryatids (1984) questions Vitruvius’s account of the origin story of these women, as if to call into question the victory of the rulers as an historically settled patriarchal narrative. Her film ends with the angel-caryatid of rue Turbigo in Paris, a site commemorating a military victory of the Second Empire:
This rarely noticed strange angel is on rue Turbigo, facing the office for improved housing and small-home owners’ aid. Its neighbours seem unaware of this giant caryatid, don’t even wonder about it. For them, Turbigo’s victory in 1859 gave the street its name…The Lady with a Bag or Fortune with Myrrh or the Odd Angel. No one knows who made her nor what she represents.
Varda opens these forms out to an enigmatic source or alternative history. When I visited rue Turbigo I noticed that the angel faces directly onto Place Theodor Herzl.
Petrified unrest
The face of modernity itself blasts us with an immemorial gaze. Such was the gaze of Medusa for the Greeks.12
—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Throughout The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon uses the metaphor of petrification, literally turning-into-stone, to describe how the coloniser oppresses through immobilisation, performing the role of a Medusa-like figure. He argues that settler colonialism aims to produce the “petrification of the individual.” He sees anti-colonial struggle as a resistance to the stasis and restrictions imposed by the colonial order:
“The immobility to which the native is condemned can only be called in question if the native decides to put an end to the history of colonisation”. The vitality of bodily movement is revealed in the dreams of the colonised that resist colonial entrapment, which Fanon gives voice to. Paradoxically, it is the docile, sleeping subject who most intensely registers the possibility of unencumbered movement:
The first thing which the native learns is to stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits. This is why the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and of aggression. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing; I dream that I burst out laughing, that I span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motorcars which never catch up with me. During the period of colonisation, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning.13
The role of colonial statues, Fanon sees, is to physically instantiate in the urban environment this colonial order, characterised by hardness, control and immobility:
A world compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified, a world of statues: the statue of the general who led the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge. A world cocksure of itself, crushing with its stoniness the backbones of those scarred by the whip: this is the colonial world.14
Colonial statues act as a reminder of the supposedly fixed and immobile fact of violent colonial domination:
Every statue, whether of Faidherbe or of Lyautey, of Bugeaud or of Sergeant Blandan—all these conquistadors perched on colonial soil do not cease from proclaiming one and the same thing: “We are here by the force of bayonets…”15
The language of petrification recurs in Fanon’s discussion of the psychopathologies linked to colonial conditions in the book’s final chapter, ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’. Just as Fanon describes how the colonial subject resists in dreams, he also shows that the colonisers’ attempt to fully control or petrify the colonised is never complete: “the settler can only achieve a pseudo-petrification as disorderly rebellion never ceases from breaking out.”16 The “motionless, petrified world of colonization” is always at risk of being disturbed. The cocksure statues are always at risk of cracking.17
The danger that Fanon perceives is that the petrifying impulse of the coloniser can present as symptoms of petrification in the colonised. Working as a psychiatrist during the Algerian War of Independence, Fanon described patients suffering from forms of muscular stiffness and rigidity. He claims that one patient described himself as being stiff like a corpse. He described him as looking like he was made (like a statue) “all of a piece.”18 The task of the anti-colonial “man of action”, then, is “not only to hunt down the enemy forces but also to overcome the kernel of despair which has hardened in the native’s being.”19
The statues that stand on the plinths and pedestals in George Square in Glasgow with their weapons aloft resemble the cocksure bayonet holders described by Fanon. But looking at the caryatids—the strained musculature, the tension in the bodies, the strain that comes from holding up the entablature, the buddleia and other plants growing around some of their limbs—they could instead be embodying a struggle between dynamism and stasis. Rather than embodying the permanence of colonialism they seem instead to convey something of the dialectical tension between petrification and movement, colonialism and anticolonialism that Fanon also perceives in the bodies of his patients: “The patient does not seem able to ‘release his nervous tension.’ He is constantly tense, waiting between life and death.”20
In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin continually notes the brittleness of nineteenth-century Paris, a city whose wealth, like Glasgow’s, was built on colonial plunder and extraction converted into a phantasmagorical urban experience. “With the Haussmannisation of Paris, the phantasmagoria was rendered in stone. Though intended to endure in quasi-perpetuity, it also reveals its brittleness.”21 Brittleness conveys a hardness that is revealed to be fragile. Mirrors especially reveal the brittleness of the bourgeois city. They function as an illusory expansion and repetition of bourgeois space but this illusion occurs on a plane whose material is imminently shatterable: “And while these things are petrified, the masonry of the walls above has become brittle. Brittle, too, are mirrors.”22 Something that appeared solid and permanent is revealed to be vulnerable. Benjamin’s “quasi-perpetuity” echoes Fanon’s discussion of “pseudo-petrification”, a condition relating to the achievable destruction of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
The city unseen
Liz Stanley observes that the hypervisibility of monuments and statues in our cities paradoxically pertains to an invisible or unseen dimension in normal times:
Their presence mainly in urban settings is no accident, for that is where they can be both unseen and can mark the cityscape in ways that become part of the fabric of how things are. They come to shape flows of people and vehicles, demarcate public space, and also mark how a city or town is seen and understood.23
In an extension of this logic, Walter Benjamin writes that the long boulevards of Haussmann’s Paris—the negative space that tore through the working-class quarters of the city, insuring against barricade warfare and urban insurrection—were themselves unveiled as if they were monuments:
The temples of the bourgeoisie’s spiritual and secular power were to find their apotheosis within the framework of these long streets. The perspectives, prior to their inauguration, were screened with canvas draperies and unveiled like monuments; the view would then disclose a church, a train station, an equestrian statue, or some other symbol of civilization.24
The boulevard-as-monument reveals that the deeper function of the monument is not to be seen but to dictate the gaze. The etymology of the word ‘monument’ is monere, to warn. A city’s monuments form an exoskeleton of imperial unconscious, the fabric of a kind of imperial realism, a “phantasmagoria rendered in stone.” Glasgow’s caryatids gaze out at the city unseen. They are part of the taken-for-granted fabric of how things are, but they also perhaps recall the figures of the city’s labouring and oppressed inhabitants and their colonised counterparts whose immiseration contributed to the city’s wealth who threaten to tear that fabric to shreds.
Notes
- Rebecca Comay, “Resistance and Repetition: Freud and Hegel,” Research in Phenomenology 45, no. 2 (2015): 237–266, p. 240. ↩
- Sigmund Freud, ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIII, trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 228. ↩
- Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland, (Belknap, 2006), p. 57. ↩
- Benjamin, Berlin Childhood, p. 37. ↩
- Benjamin, Berlin Childhood, p. 46 ↩
- Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, (Verso, 2008) p. 7 ↩
- Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1., (Penguin, 1990) p. 287 ↩
- Ian R. Mitchell, A Glasgow Mosaic: Uncovering the City’s Hidden History (Luath Press, 2013)p. 61. ↩
- Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume I: A Novel, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 9–10 ↩
- Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940) in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 389–400, p. 391. ↩
- Vitruvius, The Ten Books On Architecture, translated by Morris Hicky Morgan (New York, Dover), p. 5 ↩
- Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 23. ↩
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 52. ↩
- Fanon, p. 51. ↩
- Fanon, p. 84. ↩
- Fanon, p. 54. ↩
- Fanon, p. 78. ↩
- Fanon, p. 292. ↩
- Fanon, p. 293. ↩
- Fanon, pp. 292–3. ↩
- Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 204. ↩
- Fanon, p. 292. ↩
- Liz Stanley (2020) ‘Remaking memory: on statues and memorials’, Whites Writing Whiteness, www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/Reading-Lists/memory-statues/ ↩
- Benjamin, Arcades Project, 24. ↩