Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters Volume 4, Issues 1 & 2 | Page 36

In Paris, Automatic weapons were substituted for blow torches. Bullets discharged
into human bodies from those weapons replaced flames applied to marble and steel.
Destruction of objects viewed as the offensive product of artistic imaginations were
replaced by the silencing of the artistic imagination itself.
On Sunday, January 11th, 2015, hundreds of thousands marched in Paris
including leaders of some of the world’s great modern Republics. These individuals
marched in support of the famous sentiment falsely attributed to Voltaire, ‘I [may]
disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
From my vantage point just north of Civic Virtue’s place of exile, the events in
Paris confirmed that battles that embroiled ‘Civic Virtue Triumphant Over
Unrighteousness’ and Tilted Arc are far from academic. They are elemental to how art
functions in human affairs and therefore subject to be resolved in clashes utilizing powertools or bullets. Butchering or banishing of artworks is the indirect exercise of the
butchering or banishing of the people who commissioned or created the artworks. The
Jihadis simply removed the ‘indirect’ part of the equation.
This essay includes drawings of three emptied plazas. In the spring of 2015, and
on three separate occasions, I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge from my home in Park
Slope to document Tilted Arc’s absence. Wandering past the Municipal Building and
across Foley Square, I shoved my cart up a set of short steps towards the plaza, unfolded
my chair and began drawing the reddish tiles and bright cubes that now decorate Tilted
Arc’s old home. I used a number of these cubes to hold my piles of pencils and pastels
and recorded the emptiness left in Tilted Arc’s wake and the vista revealed by its absence.
My efforts received curious stares from passersby. One woman turned towards me and
spoke approvingly of the scene that I was drawing. She had no idea that I was drawing a
ghost.
In the seventy years since Civic Virtue’s eviction, City Hall Park has undergone
numerous renovations. After using Google Images to find the approximate site of ‘Civic
Virtue Triumphant over Unrighteousness’, I endured a strong wind to draw MacMoinnes’
Nathan Hale from the back. The statue is small in my picture because it is surrounded by
a security cordon that barred my sitting in front of it or approaching it too closely from
the rear. A police officer stood sentry duty in a small vehicle at the edge of the path that I
set my materials down upon. A squirrel, believing my materials were food, repeatedly
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