Standing between intransient history and transient memories: The statue of MacArthur in South Korea

Introduction

Perhaps it was the end of the Cold War era that opened up the most intensive discussions about the iconic status that a statue holds in our symbolic world. The news about the demise of communism in the former Soviet bloc was often conveyed via compelling images in which the statues of Lenin and Stalin either were destroyed by voluntary crowds or were pulled down by new authorities. Occasionally, we were told about where these removed statues ended up: some as commodities of nostalgia were relocated to Soviet theme parks in former communist countries, many others were recycled by monument factories in order to cast new ones for the new era, while still others were bought by travelers and displayed on the streets of America—sites devoid of context. ¹ Such drastic transformations of Soviet statues seem to have inspired many scholars to ponder the ironic notion that a statue not only indicates our efforts to perpetuate historical accounts but also simultaneously reveals how transient these accounts are (James, 2005; Kruk, 2008; Popescu, 2003; Sabonis-Chafee, 1999; Verdery, 1999; Yampolsky, 1995).

More intriguingly, there is strong evidence that mnemonic objects in public places can trigger contested meanings even without undergoing any physical alteration or displacement. Many studies on postsocialist change in Russia as well as in East and Central Europe have illuminated how certain memorials and monuments survived the change of politics throughout history and how they have taken on new meanings that complicate, contest, or even reverse the originally intended meanings (Ladd, 1997; Levinson, 1998; Michalski, 1998; Olick, 2003, 2005, 2007; Stangl, 2007; Till, 2005; Tumarkin, 1994). As the most striking example, Nina Tumarkin (1994) in her book The Living & the Dead introduced how the dissolution of the Soviet Union has transformed heroic statues of World War II—without any alteration—from symbolic icons of patriotic war to evokers of contested memories. These scholars’ insights have suggested that memorials and monuments are not mere signifiers of the status quo. As much as they have the capacity to crystallize narratives in hegemony within a current political context, memorials and monuments also have the unique rhetorical potency to trigger contested meanings in an era of political turbulence.

Supported by such scholarship, this essay will elaborate upon the rhetoric of a statue with the case study of the MacArthur Statue in South Korea. General Douglas MacArthur was the Supreme Commander of the United Nations forces during the Korean War. Since the war ended with an armistice in 1953, the iconicity of MacArthur has been a robust signifier that has communicated the dominant narrative of the Korean War: America rescued South Korea from malicious North Korean communists. He has been remembered in particular as a hero in the saga of the amphibious Incheon Landing Operation on 15 September 1950 in which the UN troops recaptured the capital of South Korea, cut off the North Korean troops’ supply lines, and changed the course of the war that was nearly subject to a communist victory. Commemorating this heroic saga, the South Korean government erected a statue of MacArthur in 1957 at the Jayu (Freedom) Park in Incheon City. As a symbolic icon of both American benevolence and Korean veneration, this sacred image of MacArthur in Jayu Park has been revered in postwar South Korean society.

Yet memories, regardless of their forms, are subject to the ongoing reconstruction of the historical narratives within a continuously evolving present context. In 2005, the statue of MacArthur at Incheon City was targeted frequently by iconoclastic actions. Reflecting the recent liberalized political atmosphere in South Korea that began in the 1990s, many social activists and progressive historians have raised their voices to criticize both MacArthur’s indiscriminate military actions as well as Koreans’ uncritical perceptions of the US’ role during the war. Given this context, these activists began to claim that the statue, an official codification that had been generating misunderstandings of the war, either had to be demolished or moved to a less-notable location. During the summer of 2005 leading up to 15 September, the 55th anniversary of the Incheon Landing, tension around the statue had been intensifying: activists (i.e. unions, students’ organizations, dissident groups) frequently gathered to show their willingness to tear down the statue, while conservative groups (i.e. aged Korean War veterans, ex-marines, patriotic organizations) swore to protect the statue. Such tensions culminated in a violent clash on 11 September 2005 during which harsh hostility broke out among activists who were wielding long bamboo sticks (as part of their efforts to reach the statue), ex-marines, and police officers who were trying to maintain order around the statue. Despite such intensity, however, the 2005 protestors with their iconoclastic voices have never made any inroads into demolishing the statue nor have they been able to move it to another location. The untarnished statue of General Douglas MacArthur still stands firm today in Jayu Park of Incheon City. Yet changes have occurred in the symbolic world. Through the 2005 iconoclastic actions, the statue of MacArthur has been transformed rhetorically from a reservoir of dogmatic memories into a site of contested memories where history is recalled through inconsistent, contradictory, and tentative narratives.

This case study of MacArthur’s statue reveals two processes at work: first, how a statue, in a time of transition, transforms itself from a mere signifier of intransient history into a reflexive medium of transient memories of a past event and second, how a statue, in its surrounding space, can embrace conflicting gestures that audiences from two different generational and ideological positions simultaneously perform. I argue that the subversive transformation of a statue is not accidental; rather, it is predicated on a statue’s unique rhetorical existence across time and space. I also argue that the new media technology has amplified such a transformation not only because it can widely and promptly circulate the representations of counterhegemonic actions (i.e. iconoclasm) but, more importantly, because it can permanently exhibit subversive audiovisual texts in a virtual space for public view. A statue, reconfigured in time and space, has the strong potential to become a dissenting medium that effectively reemerges subversive memories to confront consensual notions of a past event. To elaborate upon this notion, I will begin a discussion here regarding how a statue rhetorically functions in our symbolic world.

The rhetoric of statue: contextualizing in time and space

A statue is an iconic sign that mimics a real-life figure. We know that mimesis causes the readers’ uncritical appreciation of what is signified (Barthes, 1977). Particularly, a statue increases the degree of mimesis by creating an effigy in a three-dimensional space where its relation to a reference (human body) appears to be “more direct and intimate than a painting’s” (Savage, 1997: 8). From the orthodox view of visual rhetoric, a statue appears as a conservative medium whose robust iconicity has the ability to crystallize, naturalize, and thus effectively communicate hegemonic messages without inviting much resistance from its audience. Yet, the rhetorical characteristics of a statue can be much more complicated when we look at a statue as a medium that operates in the dynamic context of time and space.

The passage of time has significantly influenced memory construction since human bodies were deemed mortal, yet exclusive vehicles of memories. As Maurice Halbwachs (1980) has noted, while the limited human life span has deterred the endurance of memories, it has contributed to vivacity: a distinctive quality that memory has when compared to history. With time, human beings have cultivated a variety of memory vehicles that have outlived the human life span. Accordingly, contemporary scholars have continued to study how such enduring memory vehicles have interacted with the passage of time in memory construction. Many have provided concrete evidence that historical sites that have lasted more than one generation tend to embrace contested meanings as new information and perspectives about the sites begin to emerge within a changing political and cultural context (Aden, 2010; Ladd, 1997; Olick, 2003, 2005, 2007; Roudometof, 2002; Stangl, 2007; Till, 2005; Tumarkin, 1994).

Time particularly weighs on a statue because it is composed of imperishable materials, thereby creating immortal signifiers of human beings in our symbolic world. Cast in bronze or stone, a figural monument “alters the temporality associated with the person, bringing him into the realm of the timeless or the sacred, like an icon” (Verdery, 1999: 5). A statue thus leaves the illusive impression of immortality onto a historical figure whose legacy strongly lingers even after his or her death (Tumarkin, 1983). Like mimesis, this seemingly immutable permanence also can blind us to the constructed nature of a statue. As James Young (1993) warned, the “taciturn exterior” of a monument can become a mask of “the monument’s inner life—the tempestuous social, political, and aesthetic forces” (p. 14). Such an unchangeable façade of a sign seems to act in opposition to fluidity, a quality that distinguishes memories from history. Lasting monuments and memorials in public landscapes therefore can effectively trigger the myth of human experience as opposed to its realities (Aden, 2010; Mosse, 1990).

Expectedly, there have been efforts to diffuse this reactionary impact that the endurance of mnemonic objects has brought into our symbolic word. Many artists have experimented with the vanishing forms of sculpture in order to prevent a monolithic idea from being perpetuated during the countless reproduction of an unchanging object (North, 1990). In the same vein, in commemoration of the Holocaust, young German artists created monuments that work against the rigid materiality of the media: they introduced invisible, vanishing, and negative forms of counter monuments. Through this ironic form of memorial, these German artists wholeheartedly resisted the fascistic propensities of monuments to be authoritarian, didactic, and demagogical tendencies perpetuated by political powers (Michalski, 1998; Young, 1992).

Yet, there is a twist in our symbolic world. Despite these fascinating efforts to diffuse the endurance of materiality, however, I argue that a statue has the potential to be antifascistic ironically because of the very permanence of the medium. Perhaps, we can be reminded of the paradox of a sign that Ferdinand De Saussure (1959) points out in his semiotic tenets: “The sign is exposed to alteration because it perpetuates itself” (p. 74). The idea that immutability becomes a condition for mutability has been hinted at in many scholars’ insights on memory sites (Blair, 1999; Dickinson et al., 2010; Verdery, 1999; Young, 1992, 1993). They have shared an idea that the material endurance of a medium influences the way in which memorials and monuments rhetorically work within the sites of commemoration. The meanings of lasting mnemonic objects and places are constantly subject to their new, present surroundings of space and time. Often, in the present, a caption that a creator (i.e. the older generation) once carved on the surface of a pedestal can conflict with the newly emerging captions that appreciators (i.e. the newer generation) will bring to make sense of the statue in the future. At this moment of transition, a mimesis that has naturalized the creator’s intention may no longer be potent in our symbolic interaction. In this case, durability transcends mimesis. The passage of time illuminates the dialogical quality of a sign in that meanings are constructed not solely through the features in a material form but also through the viewers’ responses to them (Young, 1993).

Along with time, space also significantly shapes our rhetorical experiences within the sites of commemoration. While a spatial proximity contributes to the solidification and the maintenance of memories (Halbwachs, 1980), a place (a space with finitude) has strong mnemonic powers to trigger both public and personal memories (Archibald, 2002). Thus, many scholars have noted political powers’ attempts to ideologically control (organize) public space to privilege certain historical narratives (Aden, 2010; Daum, 2005; Dickinson et al., 2010; Jacobs, 2008; Stangl, 2007). As the most conspicuous effort to reinvent public space, a new regime often involves the (re)naming of historical streets, a symbolic action that introduces its ideology into the mundane spaces of everyday life (Azaryahu, 2011). Designating new names to an old place can be “a censurable act of state-sponsored cultural silencing” (Levinson, 1998: 18).

Building a memorial is another common way of politicizing a public space. A memorial, “a social and physical arrangement of space and artifacts,” (de)saturates meanings in political landscapes (Mayo, 1988: 1). Uniquely, the fixity of a memorial creates a communal space wherein the audience experiences the presence of other visitors and witnesses their performances (Blair, 1999; Dickinson et al., 2010). Often, what is taking place in such a communal space (who is visiting when) becomes more symbolically significant than any material objects filling up this space. Memory studies on postwar Germany have provided much evidence that memorials can create semiotic theaters where political leaders attempt to normalize the past through both the organization of ceremonies and the performance of particular gestures (Hartman, 1986, Olick, 2003, 2005, 2007).

Besides politicians, ordinary visitors also can bring symbolic meanings into space. As many witnessed at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the Washington Mall, viewers’ spontaneous actions continuously negotiate, constitute, and counter meanings of the memorial (Blair, 1999; Sturken, 1997). More importantly, such audience gestures on the spot are often captured in a variety of representations, become embodied iconicity of the memorial in our symbolic world, and influence the ways in which we make sense of the memorial. At this moment of representation, when audience bodies are incorporated into the sceneries of a memorial, “the public becomes the sculpture” (North, 1990: 861). Without space, such a moment would not be possible. Likewise, an inert existence of a statue in a public location creates a subversive room where the public brings unpredictable audiovisual elements that can both reinforce and rupture meanings that the very iconicity of a statue provokes.

Looking at a statue in the context of both time and space may remind us of a ritual view of communication, a notion that James Carey (1989) eloquently elaborated in his book Communication as Culture. He argues that communication is not the act of merely transmitting information, but the process of constructing realities by which one can actively participate in reinforcing given meanings, in maintaining shared beliefs, and in engaging in alternative realities. Carey’s view reinforces our attention not only to what the iconicity of a statue signifies but also more importantly to what takes place surrounding the statue: both hegemonic and counterhegemonic actions. As an example of hegemonic actions, a statue often becomes a centrifugal location for ritualistic ceremonies—media events as Dayan and Katz (1992) would term them—that celebrate reverence, reconciliation, and royalty within a larger community. Contrarily, a statue can also trigger counterhegemonic actions—image events that Deluca and Peeples (2002) noted—that exalt violence, confrontation, and disobedience in the public’s eyes.

In this section, I will elaborate further upon the rhetoric of a statue by introducing a case study of the statue of MacArthur in South Korea, a country that has undergone a drastic memory transformation in its recent liberal political atmosphere. In what follows, I will first contextualize the iconicity of General Douglas MacArthur within the mainstream commemoration of the war. I then will discuss how this arbitrary linkage between the signifier (i.e. the iconicity of MacArthur) and the signified (i.e. the official narrative of the war) has been contested within the rapidly evolving context of memories in South Korea. This case study will ask us to look at not only how a statue over time transforms itself from a mere signifier of intransient history into a reflexive medium of transient memories of a past event but also how a statue, with conflicting audience gestures in its surrounding space, can simultaneously embrace conflicting meanings that have emerged from two different generational and ideological positions.

Case study: the iconicity of General Douglas MacArthur in South Korea

In 1957, ² Syngman Rhee, the first President of the Republic of Korea, erected the statue of MacArthur in the Foreign Park to remind the public of the nation’s gratitude toward this US general’s legendary action. Since then, the name of the park has been changed to Jayu (Freedom), signaling a message that “freedom was restored owing to the success of Incheon Landing Operations” (Jung-Gu Office of Incheon City, 2008: 49). President Rhee came to power in South Korea in 1948 with the support of the US military government. As a strong adherent of anticommunism, he was extremely hostile toward communistic ideas to the point that right before the Korean War, American advisers in Seoul argued for “limiting the types of weapons provided lest an overconfident President Rhee invade the north” (Schaller, 1989: 183). The erection of the statue therefore could be viewed as a symbolic gesture on the part of South Korea that reflected not only Rhee’s political aspirations to build on his ties with the United States but also his intention to legitimize the hostile policies against communism in the Korean Peninsula. Rhee’s regime publicly announced the conception of the statue, sent an invitation to MacArthur to come to the ceremony, and widely raised funds from the South Korean people (Cho, 2005). The words inscribed on a stone in front of the statue could not reflect Rhee’s political ideology more:

There is no boundary in justice nor is there any obstacle to struggle, mountain or sea. A man who executed such a struggle in the spirit of justice … It was here at Inchon that we knew the incaloulable [incalculable] height of his genius. With the infinite capacity of his vision he conceived, and on September 15, 1950, he personally executed an almost unbelievable landing operation which instantly turned the course of the war to the triumph of freedom and the salvation of this Republic. … We shall never forget what he and his valiant officers and men of the United Nations Command did here for us and for freedom. And until the last battle against the malignant infection of communism has finally been won may we never forget it was also he who said. “In war, there is no substitute for victory.” (Words inscribed on the stone base)

Anyone who reads this caption has to step back in order to view the actual statue that is mounted on an elevated pedestal. The prominent location of the statue high above the ground creates a significant distance between viewers and the statue, “a sacred zone” that brings a sense of awe to one’s viewing experience (Yampolsky, 1995). This 15-foot tall, bronze effigy of MacArthur, mounted on a stone base, looks further to the Sea of West, an ocean that meets the port of Incheon. His right arm holds a pair of binoculars that evokes the moment of Incheon landing when MacArthur put his vigilant eyes behind the binoculars as his ship approached the first landing site, the Green Beach of the Wolmi Island. His left arm, as if it were a lever for his vigilant body, is firmly placed behind his back. His profile exposes a sharp nose, which not only is an immediate signifier of his being a Westerner but also is an evocation of his air of confidence because in Korea one who has extremely high self-esteem is referred to as having “the high ridge of the nose” (Picture 1). The statue in South Korea strongly echoes the US public memories of MacArthur: a charismatic general who had both grandiloquent oratory on as well as indomitable presence in public arenas (Carpenter, 1992; Schaller, 1989).

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Picture 1.

The Statue of MacArthur photographed by the author (2008).

In the United States, MacArthur has been commemorated through a variety of forms of memorials, including MacArthur’s memorial museum in Newport News, Virginia; MacArthur Drive in Arlington National Cemetery; and MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Although MacArthur was a controversial figure in US history and was even dismissed by President Truman in the midst of the Korean War due to his insubordination in a changing political climate (Cumings, 2010), he nonetheless has been remembered as one of the greatest war heroes in US public commemorations. Even the moment he returned home after the president’s dismissal, MacArthur was ardently welcomed with a public parade. This zealous reception contrasted with a reality in which returning ordinary soldiers from the battlefield of Korea met only with public ignorance and silence. The heroic image of MacArthur in the United States, which defies the historical controversy over him, seems to owe both to his fame during World War II and to his subsequent heroification in the official commemoration of World War II: “the museum perfected an imperfect man” (Mayo, 1988: 40).

Heroification in collective memories can take various forms and nuances depending on the cultural, political, and historical context (Michalski, 1998). Overall, statues in Korea have been recognized as sacred objects. In the custom of Shamanism, people have worshipped varied forms of three-dimensional objects, including stones and trees, as the hallowed icons of unknown Gods. Furthermore, since the fourth century, when Korea adopted Buddhism from China, Korean people have been acquainted with godly statues in the form of bronze or stone effigies of Buddha in sacred temples. While statues in the former Soviet bloc grew out of an Eastern Orthodox tradition in which an iconic sign is not a mere representation but rather “the incarnation of holiness” (James, 2006: 166), statues in Korea have been viewed similarly with a sense of awe, linked both to the tradition of Buddhism as well as to the customs of Shamanism. In this context, Rhee’s political codification of MacArthur in the 1950s seemed to achieve great success. Even demonstrators against the Rhee’s dictatorship in 1960s left flowers in front of MacArthur’s statue to express their gratitude, and there were even shamans in South Korea who believed in the God of MacArthur (Cho, 2005).

Over time, however, the iconicity of MacArthur has no longer been considered as a mere signifier that enables the authoritative regimes of South Korea to promote the notions of both anticommunism and the United States–Republic of Korea alliance. The durability of bronze has preserved the physical reality of the statue for more than half a century during which time it inevitably has interacted with newly emerging narratives of history in our symbolic world. Although many South Koreans, like the Filipinos and the Japanese, still have been willing to pay deep homage to this foreign general whom they believed provided gracious protection from the North Korean troops, they also cannot help but witness the emerging counter memories within the evolving contexts of politics, culture, and demography. In brief, the statue has been subject to choreography of history and memory and in the process has manifested the transience of the past in our acts of remembering.

A contested hero in the new context of memories

Since the spring of 2005, activists occasionally have gathered around the statue in the Freedom Park and demonstrated their desire to demolish the statue. These demonstrations provoked another group to be present in the park. Aged Korean War veterans (mostly ex-marines), who publicly had sworn to protect the statue from any iconoclastic actions, surrounded the monument at these times. Riot police also were present not only to protect the statue but also to keep order between those who tried to demolish the statue and those who wanted it to survive. Tensions intensified in the Freedom Park. At a culminating point on 11 September 2005, 4 days before the day that marked the 55th anniversary of MacArthur’s landing at Incheon, about 4000 demonstrators armed with metal pipes and bamboo sticks attempted to tear down the statue. The collision between the demonstrators and police officers seemed to be inevitable, and subsequently, there were wounded members on both sides. Not surprisingly, such tense and turbulent actions around the statue drew intense media attention. A variety of news media, including television networks, newspapers, the Internet, and radio programs captured and disseminated provocative images and words, poignant by-products of iconoclastic actions.

Feeding the media with intense sound bites, many progressive civic groups voiced their critiques against the Korean people’s uncritical perceptions of both MacArthur’s actions and the role of the United States during the Korean War. They claimed that US troops were not liberators but rather occupiers who since 1945 had oppressed Korean people’s legitimate desire to build an independent country devoid of its colonial legacy. In their view, the statue of MacArthur appeared as an imperialistic icon that needed to be removed not only from public sites but also from the public consciousness as well (Jang, 2005; Kim, 2005). Some of the protestors even called MacArthur “a war criminal.” As part of an effort to make sense of such provocative claims, the Korean media introduced a variety of remarks critiquing the roles that both MacArthur and the US military government had played in the Korean Peninsula before and during the war. As the most subversive text, the following remark of Kang Jeong-Koo, a leftist Sociology Professor at Dongguk University, entered into the media sphere:

The Korean War was a civil conflict started by Kim Il-Sung for national unification. It would have ended in a month if American forces had not intervened. The statue of Gen. MacArthur, the war monger, should be thrown into the gutter of history. MacArthur is not a person who saved Korean lives, but an enemy who snatched away Korean lives. MacArthur was a war fanatic. The favorable perception of the war maniac who caused a great tragedy to the Korean people should be scrapped. His statue should also be destroyed. (Kang Jeong-Koo, cited in The Korea Times, 25 October)

Regardless of the public’s response and the officialdom’s backlash against Kang’s account, the introduction of such a subversive voice into the legitimate media reflected the liberal atmosphere of South Korean politics that had begun to emerge since the beginning of the 1990s with the election of a democratic government for the first time since the Korean War had ended. This new political light unfolded a large amount of counter memories of the Korean War that had been suppressed under the military dictatorships. As the best example, in 2003, South Korea’s popular TV history program series We Can Talk Now (Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC)) featured a surprisingly critical biography of MacArthur. The program presented American historian Schaller’s view that MacArthur saw the Korean War as an opportunity to further his ambitions for the presidency. The program also made a case as to how his ambition prolonged the war, which needlessly destroyed many lives, including those of Korean civilians and American soldiers, and how his obsession with victory may have resulted in an atomic bomb set off on the Korean Peninsula.

Furthermore, various channels of the Korean media, mainstream as well as alternative, recently have begun to cover the problematic role that the US military played during the Korean War. With the introduction of the articles about the “No Gun Ri Killings,” the Associated Press’ 2001 Pulitzer-prize award story, South Koreans became familiar with the subversive accounts of the Korean War that progressive historians persistently have tried to convey but were suppressed by official narratives(Choi, 2008; Conway-Lanz, 2005; Hanley and Mendoza, 2000). Such accounts illuminate, in particular, the civilian casualties that both the US and South Korean military troops inflicted during the war. Much of this commentary claims that the attacks by the US Air Force, including the discharge of a myriad amount of napalm, resulted in the killing of countless innocent South Koreans (Burchett, 1968; Conway-Lanz, 2005; Cumings, 1997; Schaller, 1989). Correspondent Wilfred Burchett lamented that the United Nations, the world’s most universal peace-keeping organization, had destroyed almost everything that the North Korean people had inherited from their ancestors. Historian Bruce Cumings (2003) has gone as far as to term this a “genocidal war” (p. 13).

Such an influx of new memories from “old history” in a time of political transition in South Korea has transformed the statue of MacArthur from a mere signifier of intransigent history into a reflexive medium of transient memories in our symbolic world. The passage of time has changed the nature of space surrounding the statue. While the statue still functions as a centrifugal location for old generations to practice hegemonic actions (i.e. reverence for the hero), it simultaneously provides a subversive space for new generations to perform their counterhegemonic actions (i.e. downplay the hero). In fact, iconoclastic actions that took place against the statue of MacArthur in 2005 contributed to expediting the migration of counter memories “out of the closets” of dissidents’ dialogues and academic discourses into and onto highly accessible public sites. In the following section, I will discuss this paradoxical role that the statue of MacArthur has begun to play as a facilitator of both official and counter memories of the Korean War.

Consequential monument: the representation of iconoclasm

As many scholars witnessed during the collapse of the communist statues, the consequences of iconoclastic actions may result in symbolically formidable effects in the context of both time and space. If actions actually remove a statue, such removals can be “a powerful interruption of the flow of time because of their intended durability” (James, 2006: 159). By depriving a statue of its permanence and sacredness, iconoclasm unwraps the symbolic work of a statue: “The person it [a statue] symbolized dissolves into an ordinary, time-bound person” (Verdery, 1999: 5). Furthermore, actions ultimately can end up in the erection of a new statue on the same space, which in fact happened many times in the former Soviet bloc. In this case, a statue functions as “a double semiotics” by becoming “the signifier of two signifieds: itself and what is absent, its demolished predecessor” (Yampolsky, 1995: 100). Yet, iconoclastic actions do not always succeed in creating a stark visual signifier, either in the absence of an old statue or in the presence of a new one. Many actions, often deterred by the status quo, remained incomplete and subsequently disremembered by a seemingly untouched statue afterward.

Likewise, the statue of General Douglas MacArthur in South Korea remains untarnished. Without previous knowledge, a visitor to the Freedom Park in Incheon City could hardly imagine any of the violent actions against the statue that occurred in September of 2005. Somewhat ironically, after the turbulent season of the iconoclastic actions, the local governmental office of Incheon City thoroughly cleaned the statue for the first time in the 48 years since its completion. This historical cleaning has provided a new look to the statue from a greenish dark bronze to a yellowish bright effigy (Hanguk Il-bo, 2005, December 6). The flow of routine around the statue also has continued. One can still witness that South Korean citizens, especially those of the older generations, visit the statue and willingly express their gratitude toward MacArthur with various types of body gestures such as saluting, offering flowers, and pausing for pictures.

While visiting the Freedom Park at Incheon in the autumn of 2008, 3 years after the iconoclastic actions, I accidentally witnessed an old gentleman who voluntarily offered his salutation to MacArthur’s statue (see Picture 2). His saluting lasted long enough so that I, an unprepared witness of this scene, could snatch a camera from my backpack and succeed in taking a picture of his back. The light from the sunrise resulted in an unintended silhouetted image that illuminates the solemn moment of reverence in the sacred space of the statue. In our brief conversation afterward, I learned that he was a South Korean Marine veteran who has been jogging in this park for the past three decades and has saluted the statue every morning that he passed by it. Certainly, the statue has unfailingly provided this veteran with a safe zone in which he has continued to fulfill his daily routine of encountering his hero with the most respectful body gesture.

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Picture 2.

The Freedom Park photographed by the author (2008).

Yet, we also know that the very space that graciously embraces this old man’s royal gesture (i.e. a hegemonic action) allowed the acts of violence and confrontation toward the iconicity of the hero (i.e. counterhegemonic actions) to take place in the public eye. Unlike the gestures of reverence, the iconoclastic actions are unfamiliar and provocative while abruptly interrupting the flow of routine. In many ways, the 2005 anti-MacArthur actions at Incheon City in South Korea echo the 1999 protest activities surrounding the World Trade Organization (WTO) Conference at Seattle in the United States. Activists in Seattle largely performed provocative actions (i.e. confrontation, agitation, and coercion), which in turn created compelling audiovisual texts for mass media dissemination. Unique at the time, this “unorthodox” rhetorical activity contested the hegemonic discourse surrounding the status quo via “critique through spectacle, not critique versus spectacle” (DeLuca, 1999: 1–22).

Likewise, the images of 2005 iconoclastic actions against the statue of MacArthur were selling in the commercial media of South Korea not only because they possessed the spectacle of violence—“necessarily ingredients” for compelling viewers to watch (DeLuca and Peeples, 2002)—but also because they contained extremely novel gestures toward the hero. The actions of confrontation and disobedience may have been viewed as astonishing to South Koreans who had been accustomed to seeing only gestures of reverence toward the statue of MacArthur. Contextualizing the sacred iconicity of the statue within chaotic motions, the images of iconoclasm have thus made the familiar statue unfamiliar. Furthermore, these rebellious actions around the statue have symbolically contested the arbitrary, yet uncontested link between the signifier (i.e. iconicity of MacArthur) and the signified (i.e. America, as savior, deserving of Koreans’ gratitude) within the official memories of the Korean War. Such subversive symbolic works can be further identified when one looks closely at visual cues within the images of iconoclasm.

In the process of photographing the 2005 protest surrounding the statue of MacArthur, many media practitioners in South Korea seemed to have chosen their positions behind the demonstrators, locations that allowed them to capture not only the dynamic vectors of conflict but also the statue itself that such conflicts targeted (Picture 3). As a result, many pictures that the media have introduced seem to have three distinctive layers within the frames: (a) the demonstrators in the foreground, (b) the police in the middle ground, and (c) the statue of MacArthur in the background. While the statue in the distance appears to be static and tranquil, thereby evoking a sense of certainty and continuity, the mobile presence of demonstrators in the foreground unbalances such equilibrium by creating somewhat chaotic visual cues (i.e. unparalleled vertical lines of bamboos, inconsistent colors of outfits, and various heights and angles of postures). The police officers—symbolic icons of authoritative power with their uniformed outfits and movements—create a horizontal line, a seemingly impenetrable wall that divides the sacred zone of the statue from the zone of resistance. As the most intriguing visual cues, some of the demonstrators’ long bamboo sticks appear to cross such an impassible line in the picture. Although their sticks—unsophisticated armaments of the protestors—never reach the statue, their intrusiveness in the picture appears to create a subversive visual cue that symbolically undermines the unquestioned sense of awe and reverence surrounding the statue. Ironically, such pictures have created a déjà vu kind of memory of the Korean War: that South Korean police before and during the war harshly oppressed their own citizens who raised any critical voices against the American military government.

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Picture 3.

Downloaded from Naver news on 29 November 2009.

These compelling, yet illusive moments of iconoclasm have been vividly captured through various representative tools, including sound recorder, photography, motion picture, and so forth. In the process, the mass media have immediately included a larger viewership in the spectacle of these fleeting iconoclastic actions, which otherwise would have been consumed solely by participants, authorities, and local viewers. Such mass circulation, however, is not the only collaboration that the media have made with the protestors of the 2005 iconoclastic actions. The modern media, equipped with digital technology, have also immortalized the illusive moments of protest, which were halted by authorities in hegemony. Since 2005, the typing of the words “MacArthur Statue of South Korea” in search engines of either Google or Naver (the most popular Internet search site in South Korea) has brought up not only official or vernacular information about the statue of MacArthur at Incheon City but also a variety of audiovisual texts expounding the 2005 iconoclastic actions against the statue. Through such collaboration with the media, the 2005 anti-MacArthur protest has thus created a lasting exhibition of counter memories on virtual sites.

Certainly, this case of the MacArthur Statue has reaffirmed the notion that the relationship between media and activism can be symbiotic. While activists provided media practitioners with compelling audiovisual texts of iconoclasm, media practitioners in turn have allowed their media to preserve as well as disseminate dissidents’ critical messages. Furthermore, this symbiotic process has created unique by-products in our symbolic world: representations of iconoclasm. While actions are temporal, the representations of iconoclastic actions are permanent, leaving a lasting impact on our memories of a statue even after the statue disappears. As many witnessed the demise of the Cold War era in the former Soviet bloc, film technology has been able to immortalize “the moment of destruction, transforming it into its own brand of monument” (Yampolsky, 1995: 100). With digital technology, the durability of this new monument (i.e. the representation of iconoclasm) can easily surpass the life of a statue that is made of stone, bronze, or iron. What is more remarkable is that the iconicity of this new monument embodies not only the public’s response to a statue but also the statue itself. Michael North’s notion that “the public becomes the sculpture” therefore becomes manifested literally in this consequential monument of iconoclastic actions.

Concluding remarks

The case study of the statue of MacArthur has encouraged us to look at how a statue rhetorically functions in the dynamic contexts of time and space. With the durability of bronze, the statue has survived for more than half a century as a benign iconicity that evokes gratitude among South Koreans toward American benevolence during the Korean War. Such durability has provided the statue with a substantial life span that allows newer members of the society in a transition of time to provoke questioning about the intended significations of the statue. With the emergence of counter memories in such a liberalized political atmosphere, South Korean activists engaged in drastic iconoclastic actions that called for either the destruction or the relocation of the statue. Activists failed to destroy the physical reality of the statue, yet nonetheless succeeded in shaking up the symbolic world within which the meanings of the statue are renegotiated. For future studies, I would like to examine that this case study of MacArthur brings up critical implications about how the roles of public memorials can be influx in the continual process of legitimizing the mythical ethos of a nation. In a way, a statue echoes the very constructed and incomplete nature of a nation. As a nation—itself a constructed entity based on historical and cultural myths—continuously (re)constructs the narrative of past events to accommodate ever-changing power relations, a statue too—one of the popular national symbols—accordingly triggers alternating meanings of the past in public minds in the present (Anderson, 1991; Geisler, 2005; Roudometof, 2002).

Like time, space also significantly weighs on a statue. Yet, the relation between space and memory seems to have been only somewhat monolithically explored in the given scholarship of memory studies. For example, a confined space (spatial proximity), though not a prerequisite for building collectiveness, is considered as an element that enhances the solidity as well as the intensity of collective memory. In particular, the attributes of a monument’s relation to space—its fixity, inertia, and immobility—are deemed to be constituents that facilitate a consensual notion of the past among audiences who make pilgrimages to the site. The case study of MacArthur’s statue in South Korea, however, has provoked us to look at the space surrounding the statue not only as a symbolic boundary that anchors our perception but, more importantly, as a performative stage that invites the audience’s actions toward a statue. Thus, the space surrounding the statue may contribute to its subversive transformation in a time of transition by becoming a publicly open platform where audiences from different generational and ideological positions confront each other through conflicting gestures.

After all, a statue—reconfigured in time and space—has a strong potential to become a dissenting medium that triggers counter memories against hegemonic narratives of the past event. Furthermore, I also argue that such potential of a statue for being a subversive medium has been increased within the context of the introduction of the new media. Nowadays, momentary gestures surrounding a statue can be captured immediately by digital recorders and displayed permanently on virtual sites for a larger spectatorship. Within this media milieu, the 2005 iconoclastic actions against the MacArthur statue in South Korea yielded a provocative representation of iconoclasm that has entered onto public websites. This consequential monument that embraces the iconicity of the public’s rebellious actions against a historical war hero illuminates the paradox that a statue can be both a perpetuator of official memories as well as a facilitator of counter memories in our acts of remembering.

For the first time since the war, the South Korean public has witnessed counter memories squarely confronting the official narrative of the Korean War at the widely open public site of the statue. Subsequently, the constant display of audiovisual texts of iconoclasm at virtual sites has signaled a message that the imagining of a past event by means of solely one isolated account is impossible. While the untarnished statue of MacArthur (i.e. the old signifier) in the prestigious public park has continued to be present, evoking the official thesis of the war, a newly entered set of representations of iconoclasm (i.e. the new signifiers) has drawn the public’s attention to the ongoing construction sites of memories where history is recalled through inconsistent, contradictory, and tentative narratives. The irony here is that such continual, open-ended reinterpretations of the past have been triggered by the long presence of a statue, a signifier that was initially meant to bring forth a closed history. From this new perspective, MacArthur’s statue, once a signifier of intransigent history, now calls out to South Koreans to resist the grand narratives of official memories, to engage with the demystification of history, and ultimately to resist the absolute.