When the President Decides What Art Should Say About a Nation

José de Rivera, Infinity, outside what is now the National Museum of American History in Washington, 1974. Photo: Richard K. Hofmeister / Smithsonian Institution Archives. No Copyright – United States.

DOKUNST Editorial Team

Donald Trump wants one of the most distinctive modernist sculptures on the National Mall in Washington to disappear. José de Rivera’s Infinity, installed in 1967 outside what is now the National Museum of American History, is, according to the US president’s wishes, to make way for a roughly nine-metre-high “Washington Colossus.” Trump described the abstract stainless-steel sculpture as a “strange modernist sculpture,” arguing that it tells visitors nothing about America and honours none of its great heroes. At the same time, he is calling for a five-year exhibition devoted to George Washington, running through the 300th anniversary of Washington’s birth in 2032, as well as the more immediate installation of another Washington figure, approximately 3.4 metres high, inside the museum. Whether, and to what extent, the Smithsonian will comply with these demands remains unclear; the institution has its own independent governance structure, while at the same time facing considerable political and financial pressure.

It is precisely Infinity that makes the demand so significant from an art-historical perspective. De Rivera’s curving ribbon of stainless steel, slowly rotating on a black granite base and changing its appearance according to the viewer’s position, was inaugurated in 1967 as the first permanent abstract work of art installed on the National Mall. Its openness is not an absence of meaning but part of its artistic principle: the work does not prescribe what the viewer is supposed to see in it. This is precisely where aesthetics and politics intersect. A monumental George Washington would by no means be less legitimate as public art; figurative monuments belong to the history of public space just as abstraction does. The decision becomes problematic at another point: when an existing artistic language is expected to give way because it does not articulate an unequivocal national message.

The issue, then, extends beyond the question of whether Washington or Infinity is better suited to the National Mall. Trump has for some time pursued a cultural policy that favours classical architecture, figurative monuments, and a more heroic presentation of American history; his administration has also criticised Smithsonian exhibitions for what it regards as an excessive emphasis on oppression and social conflict. More recently, Joel Shapiro’s abstract sculpture Blue was removed from the Kennedy Center. One need neither defend abstract art as a matter of principle nor reject monumental representations of history to recognise a decisive distinction here: a museum may debate which history it chooses to tell. The situation becomes more difficult when political power begins to determine the aesthetic form that history should take.

Perhaps this is why Infinity, of all works, possesses a remarkably democratic quality. The sculpture has no single prescribed front and offers no definitive explanation of what America is supposed to be. It changes according to the viewer’s position. George Washington can, of course, be part of the nation’s collective memory—and already is within the same museum: Horatio Greenough’s monumental Washington of 1840 is housed there. The real question, therefore, is not whether Washington deserves a place. It is whether a democratic culture is strong enough to accommodate, alongside its heroes, images that do not tell it what to think.

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