The Brooklyn Rail

I find myself approaching the destruction of Shahzia Sikander’s sculpture in Houston as a contemporary ruin. Alois Riegl said in “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Origin” that a ruin is a moment for reflection. Since the work’s desecration, Sikander’s Witness (2023) is now an unintended monument through ruin—a space to consider what is severed and what, in this moment, seems to be impossible to mend. It is astride both what it is and what it was supposed to be—a sculpture that revealed a deeper strength now also reveals what that strength threatens. It now forcefully remains, betraying the prejudice of the society it exists within. The action that was intended to hollow out its meaning has resulted in the hallowing of its presence.

This is its second dislocation. It was originally a part of Sikander’s 2023 exhibition Havah…to breathe, air, life at Madison Square Park. It has fueled fear and now has given into it. It was met with resistance from the beginning of its move to Houston. For right-wing groups, it became what they needed it to. It was a site of transmogrification for each of their obsessions and fears. They seized upon it as both a Satanic altar and a pro-choice memorial. What we know for certain is that its defacement was intentional. The university publicly released the footage of the event. The camera was limited, only able to record light and dark, taking images at half second intervals. You can barely see the act of it—let alone who did it. Its spectral flickers mostly catch the strength of the wind, before you see a small dot of light moving its way up the steel crinoline dress before the head falls to the ground.

It is hard to know what of the constellation of paranoia and grievance that ultimately led a person to do it, whether they saw the devil or a democrat. Sikander had already been asked by the University of Houston not to come to her artist talk before the piece was destroyed. The anti-choice group Texas Values used the sculpture’s destruction to encourage the rest of the sculpture to be removed. The irony is that the sculpture was never intended to be permanent. In a way, it reveals the anxiety of a funded political movement, rudderless and without much to do; but also more broadly it shows our culture’s need to be distracted and enraged at trace affects; the ease of destroying the idol that you’ve made to contain your deeper fears and hostilities.

I think of the self-valorization that went into destroying Sikander’s sculpture. Someone was able to leave that night telling themselves “I’m doing something” for a cause that has already resulted in thousands of deaths. Over twenty-six thousand rape victims were forced into carrying their pregnancies to term in the sixteen months since the abortion ban was implemented in Texas. It is far easier to destroy a work of art than to deal with the deaths associated with horrible politics. Six to eight percent of pregnancies are high risk, meaning that two thousand women were further traumatized after their horrific experience with the very real fear of dying. The number of women who have died during their pregnancy has risen by 56 percent since the Supreme Court has handed down its abortion ban.

The reality is the destruction of Witness feels like the convergence of psychosis, a need to misplace discomfort onto something that can’t respond. It was meant to alleviate something personal for the person who did it and I would imagine still feels like a superficial achievement for them. I would imagine that this all gets down to some deeper resistance to experience shame. At the very least, it seems like an effort to externalize a deeper feeling of vulnerability or doubt rather than having to grapple with it. You can see a culture by how they treat their vulnerable, and we have a country that is proud of its callousness. It is a culture that retreats to binaries because the complexity of situations requires too much attention, nevermind that Charlie Kirk can’t recognize a dolphin fetus from a human, or understand the viability of embryos or fetuses outside of the mother’s womb.

It is not shocking that this was handled symbolically. To the symbolist every mirage is a reality to confront. The right wing of this country has strategically operated through distraction since the neo-conservative moment, believing that the culture war must be won before their deeply unpopular policies can pass into law. Aesthetics are easier to rally against than the lives and the material realities affected by the imaginary that collectively writes them. The New York Times published a piece by Ross Douthat in 2023 that referenced Sikander’s work. It is something that could have been written during the Salem Witch Trials, and it is difficult to understand how the New York Times could see it fit for publication. The Times’s need to both-sides each argument pressured them to publish a clanging argument that drew connections between psychonauts, Sikander, and paganism, among many other unrelated things. Douthat is just another person looking for scary words in the Ouija Board rather than dealing with the violence his ideologies allow. The unfairness of suffering forces this escapism, to other worlds and heavens beyond.

There is also no point in understanding the demands here. We have already seen the drift from twelve-week abortion bans to total bans and now to embryos, and we are seeing that the movement’s ultimate goal is to silence anything, even the presence of things without the ability to speak for themselves. It is towards the eradication of anything that questions them. The impulse is complete iconoclasm, the full erasure of dissent, the removal of anything that might cause shame or the ability to see the other side. It is anti-discourse.

But the destruction of the piece is also a testament to the power within Sikander’s work. It was never meant to be a permanent installation, and yet it stirred up so much that was there just below the surface. Witness now, importantly, holds a space that was never truly given to it, making its rupture permanent. Is it now about containing the shame of who desecrated it? Or is it a testament to its ability to survive it? It is its own scaffold in the public square. Maybe now the dress is more brutal, more the hanging cages of St. Lambert’s Church in Münster than a fantasy. But ultimately, I am left thinking of Sikander’s work as a kind of caviardage, the blackout poetry of resistance and censorship. It is the erratum of culture and its prejudices resisting the opacity of the void out. It was intended for students to internalize this, having seen what happens in the night to those who stand up or stand out. Hopefully they will see its strength and Sikander’s refusal to recoil from it. Hopefully they will see the work of the fantastic arriving too soon and upsetting the world around it. Hopefully it evidences the reality that keeps it within the imaginary, so that one day it can be realized.