Downtown Waterfall at Margaret Mitchell Square with sculptures by Kit-Yin Snyder
2016
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I am not a fan of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, and have always abhorred any romanticization and glorification of the antebellum south. Atlanta, of course, is not likely to let go its devotion to Margaret Mitchell and her overwrought, racist novel (that stole from Thackeray's antiwar Barry Lyndon but seemed to completely miss Thackeray's mark). She remains, at least for the majority of white Atlanta, its big claim to literary fame, and downtown has a Margaret Mitchell Square decorated with some sculpture that is the subject of this post.
That a Chinese-American woman, born in China, was chosen to create this site-specific art that by very reason of its subject must have to do with the apartheid south, and that she would choose to do so in steel columns (and arches, not shown here) supposedly meant to reflect back upon the architecture of the antebellum south, is is a puzzle to me.
Kit-Yin Snyder did nearly identical columns for a site-specific sculpture in New York called "Judgment". "Judgment" is said to evoke the Seven Pillars of the Temple of Wisdom of Solomon. It was installed in 1992. The work was for the Manhattan Detention Complex, successor to an original building known as the Tombs", in collaboration with Richard Haas, who did facade reliefs,.
In 1996 Kit-Yin Snyder was commissioned by Atlanta to create a work that would be expressive of Margaret Mitchell's life and work. The Atlanta sculpture is so decidedly reminiscent of the New York Judgment, that one could say it is the same with the exception of the addition of the joined arches--and I don't know about you but I don't so much associate arches with southern antebellum architecture. The message of the columns has been repurposed in the Margaret Mitchell Square piece so that they no longer have to do with Solomon's 7 Pillars of Judgment but instead are supposed to be modern interpretations of southern antebellum architecture. Which leaves me confused. Did Atlanta simply see in Kit-Yin Snyder's "Judgment" something that could be repurposed, or is there supposed to be ultimately a compound message with these columns first having graced the "Tombs". I have no idea, and it's something I've pondered to no avail.
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