This coming week, the University of Houston will be displaying the sculpture “Witness,” a massive (18 feet by 13 feet by 13 feet) nude woman with braids shaped like rams’ horns, tentacles for arms, and a large hoop skirt marked with Arabic writing in stained glass.
Although the description on the UH website claims, “The large-scale sculpture Witness (2023) is a grand allegorical female figure that allows for multiple meanings and possibilities,” the group Texas Right to Life has deemed it “satanic imagery to honor abortion and memorialize the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” For her part, the artist Shahzia Sikander affirmed this interpretation in an official response, explaining that her work was intended to express justice for nonwhite women, protest the reversal of Roe v. Wade, and celebrate the pro-abortion Ginsburg.
On a different occasion, Sikander has said, “I have always had an affinity for the anti-monument within my practice.” Thus, to properly judge “Witness,” one must see it as an “anti-monument,” not a monument.
But what is an anti-monument? Presumably, it’s the opposite of a monument, which is an object that embodies the values or spirit of a particular community and usually abides by the highest aesthetic and moral standards. So while a monument will usually bring a community together by its beauty, goodness, and truth, an anti-monument divides a community through its ugliness, evil, and falsehood.
If so, then “Witness” definitely succeeds in being an anti-monument. Even without knowing the artist’s inspiration, one can observe that the
