Home • Abstracts • Biographies • Readings • Schedule
The Rhetorical/Visual Culture of U.S. Mountain Carvings
Carole Blair
In the mid-twentieth century, U.S. commemorative art was eclipsed by public works projects and other functional structures. Rather than raising memorials, the nation lapsed into a period of "functional" commemorative practice, naming freeways, bridges, auditoriums, civic buildings, streets, pools, tollway rest stops, etc., for prominent events and persons deemed worth of commemoration. It was not until the 1980s that national commemorative art would made a comeback.
This paper explores how memorial mountain carvings--Stone Mountain, Mount Rushmore, and Crazy Horse--figure into the shift from commemorative art to commemorative engineering and back again. Crafted by dynamite and pneumatic drills, and seemingly worked more for the lens of a camera than the visitor's eye, these monumental works have been deemed artworks by their makers and supporters. But they bear a strong kinship with the functional projects whose time period they collectively span. The paper draws on the resources of both rhetoric and visual culture literatures to explore the articulation of the mountain carvings with the shifts in cultural preference between "aesthetic" and "functional" memorials.
<- Return to hompage Read paper (password protected) ->