The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> That Smashed Sculpture

That Smashed Sculpture
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Wednesday, December 5 2007, 21:33:23 (CET)
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What Mumbo is referring to is the monument of Hammurabi I began in 2000. It was supposed to go to Detroit. The Ashurbanipal Monument installed in San Francisco in 1988 took four years to complete at a cost of $170,000…raised mostly through the sale of my own sculpture; small models of the proposed monument. I started work on the Shumirum Monument that same year but by then word had gotten out that we were actually creating something Assyrian having nothing to do with the Church and the long knives were drawn and waiting. Maybe it was because this time I was making a female figure instead of another male, but it took 13 years to complete, mostly because getting funds turned out to be difficult and because Narsai had gone on to head the AID society and hadn’t the time to raise funds. It’s always bad form when the sculptor himself has to sell a project, especially among our people.

Fortunately I was asked to meet Helen Nimrod Schwarten in San Francisco at the Ashurbanipal Monument for a bit of a tour, after which we met Narsai at the café he still had then at I Magnin’s in Union Square. Helen wound up buying a casting of the head of Ashurbanipal from the monument for her museum in Chicago. A year later she commissioned me to make portraits of ten Assyrian kings and there followed other commissions. She was a remarkable lady…very successful but no push-over. When she found out how much trouble I was having completing the Shumirum she volunteered to pay what was needed to complete it. She was as good as her word which drove her brother John crazy because he’d been used to being her only charity case. Individual Assyrians, and one Englishman, gave a total of $80,000…with $120,000 coming from Helen.

In 1996 the city of Chicago accepted the Shumirum Monument and gave us a wonderful location a block and a half from the world famous Oriental Institute which was soon to undergo three years of renovation and expansion. Helen was able to see the completed plaster monument in Chicago where I carted the whole thing for an AANF convention. She was pleased and two years later she unveiled the upper half of the torso in bronze…commenting to me afterward “She a little BOSSOMY”! Unfortunately her brother stepped in at that point and threatened to sue the city of Chicago if they dared install the monument…he said he wanted a better location: too many “Blacks” he said…but that was an excuse to stall. The city gave him three years to suggest an alternate site and after hearing nothing more from him decided to go ahead with the installation in time for a gala unveiling at the AANF convention that year. Nimrod renewed his threats and the city sent me a letter saying their legal staff recommended holding off until our community muzzled this asshole. From 2000 till today the monument has sat in storage at a foundry in California…Nimrod has demanded it and I’ve responded by telling him to date Mumbo.

Unfortunately Helen died waiting on her brother to get out of the way.

The Shumirum is now slated to be installed at a recently completed library in a California coastal city which I won’t mention yet because several assyrian nationalists will threaten mayhem if an “enemy” of Assyria makes us proud for a change.

Needless to say no Arab, Turk or Kurd denied us our identity in Chicago…it was one of us…a demented Christian who blocked a move to place our heritage before all eyes as every other ethnic group in Chicago has proudly done. I did what I said I would; I spent however long it took, raised whatever sums were needed and in the end got our monument accepted by a city with one of the greatest collections of public art in the world. Sure, I felt badly for Helen and I would have preferred to have the second monument in Chicago…I mean what sculptor wouldn’t want his work on display in two such attractive cities where millions of tourists go each year?…but it was better this way…someone had to kick these christo-nationalists in the arse. California gets two Assyrian monuments…that’s okay by me.

Never one to say die I started on a monument of Hammurabi; flying back to Detroit several times to meet with the Chaldean community. To our credit the first three donors to buy a maquette of the monument didn’t even know what it looked like…because I didn’t either. But the trust built up over the years was such that three Assyrians, who didn’t even live in Detroit, were the first to sign checks, sight unseen, for a total of $18,000. That was a high point in all this work: the trust. We could have built on that.

But…rumors started flying: I was in it for the money…I was cheating people…I wouldn’t keep my word etc. The usual sorts of envy at anyone of us getting somewhere, especially gaining any recognition as an Assyrian, resulted in emails being sent until gradually, after having raised $90,000…donations tapered off and then came to a halt. I put two years of work into the Hammurabi only to find my dear people were again shooting themselves in the foot. The mayor of Detroit even mentioned the proposed monument in a teevee show and there would have been no difficulty getting it installed…except our own people got in the way again.

We’re funny. When I first started people told me we could never do it…they probably meant we’d never get the bucks, but I suspect there was a hint that we, as a people, couldn’t qualify…weren’t worthy. We’re so used to singing the praises of martyrs and adding up our losses and bragging about how this is all a test from yahwe to find us worthy, that we haven’t much confidence in competing as a culture…in the higher realms.

Before the first monument was installed people thought it couldn’t happen…how could a sculptor, from our community no less, decide for himself what kind of public art he was going to make…select a city, one that has little space and is very jealous of its skyline…and put his monument right smack in the what has to be one of the best locations we could have found. And yet, after we’d done it, the sentiment now was that it was no big deal…why? Because Assyrians had done it…that’s why. We thrive on self-loathing and an inferiority complex that’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy…we act in inferior ways and then are dismayed to find we suffer the effects of a complex of inferiority….it’s a cycle we could break, if we had actual faith…I don’t mean faith in Isaiah…I mean faith in US.

Since I was set to move to Mexico at the time…and since I wasn’t about to haul the Hammurabi down there if there were no funds to complete it…even though there had been nine donors pending before members of the community got to work. But they never came through in time….so, not to leave the monument to be tossed out by the next tenant…I joyously took a sledge hammer to it myself…after pouring a libation of Merlot over it, and downing the rest after. If god can destroy his creations why can’t I?



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