Community Ghosts Memorialized

But I would contend that the statues have more power than just the function that they officially serve as an endorsement of the ‘Arts on the Line’ revitalization project. Deutsche argues that public art, even if it is used as a tool of the state, can nonetheless function in a more subversive category: “But like other institutions that mediate perceptions of the city’s economic and political operations—architecture, urban planning, urban design—[public art] can also question and resist those operations, revealing the suppressed contradictions within urban processes” (56). Tyler’s sculptures, by virtue of their more unique features—their engagement with the public, their temporality, and the emotional response that they evoke in a viewer—function not just to aesthetically revitalize the community that they were placed into, but also to question the very meanings and processes embedded within that process of urban revitalization. 

The statues don’t simply depict the Somerville residents that Tyler selected as his subjects for the artwork, they in many ways embody and become those residents. Their placement around the square, not elevated and removed on pedestals or platforms but seated on park benches or strolling through the walkway, forces viewers to confront them as real people more so than as statues. Deutsche notes that “‘revitalization’ conceals the very existence of those inhabitants already living in the frequently vital neighborhoods targeted for renovation” (13)—Tyler makes those residents eminently visible to the new gentrifying class who would rather forget them. However, these residents aren’t simply cast in bronze or stone as an enduring testament to a forgotten past: they are instead purposefully imbued with a disintegrating temporality that makes a statement about the continual, ongoing nature of gentrification. The aesthetic overhaul of Davis Square did not take place in one fell swoop in 1983, but is rather an ongoing process of development and displacement. Just one year ago, Sligo Pub, a neighborhood institution that has been in operation for over 75 years, officially closed its doors for business. The residents captured in Ten Figures are slowly fading away, testifying to the experience of real-life residents of Davis Square who still exist in the homes they have lived in for generations, but who are continually being displaced from their own community.  

One of the most striking features about the statues is the strong emotions that they provoke in viewers. For forty years, residents and visitors have walked away from an encounter with the statues feeling emotionally unsettled. This type of intense emotion surrounding the statues has existed right from their inception: the coverage of the statues’ unveiling, despite its cheerful nature, focused on feelings of melancholy, loss, and remembrance. 

John Kenney and his mother Mary were the only subjects who were deceased at the time that the statues were created. Tyler spoke about his choice to include them in the installation, saying “I wanted a connection with his life. I wanted to connect his neighborhood with the sorrow of his not being there” (Kaufman). The statues themselves are imbued with a sense of grief and remembrance, an awareness of what had been and would be lost within the neighborhood.

It’s interesting that Tyler chose, in the 1980s, to specifically highlight a loss resulting from the Vietnam War. It opens up his sculptures to a comparison with Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which opened to the public in Washington D.C. just one year before Tyler began work on Ten Figures. Lin’s memorial was greeted by massive public response and controversy, as Marling & Silberman covered for the journal Smithsonian Studies in American Art. Given the huge stir the memorial caused in the art world, it’s likely that Tyler was at least tangentially aware of the wall as he set out to craft his own public sculptures. Hilde Hein categorizes the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a seminal work of public art, which “manages to work as public art both in the traditional sense that it occupies public space and memorializes a public event, and in the current sense that it questions the meaning of that space and that event and draws the public into intelligent discourse with it” (4). In this way, it occupies a similarly subversive categorization as Ten Figures, resisting easy interpretation within accepted systems of power. 

The sculptures of Ten Figures are placed into positions more likely occupied by fellow residents than by works of art, and likewise invite a level of public engagement from their viewers. Ochsner argues that “the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is essentially incomplete without human participation … In this regard, the memorial is a powerful case of ‘space of absence,’ defined by Richard Etlin as a void in which we have the simultaneous experience of both the absence and the presence of the dead” (156). For the viewer of Ten Figures, Bill and Alice Mosho are standing right in front of us, present and material—but in truth the real-life Bill and Alice are absent, having already faded away. 

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial also provokes intense emotion. Marling & Silberman recount how many viewers, when first experiencing the memorial, were reduced to weeping or otherwise overcome with emotion (6). Just as Ten Figures has since its installation left community members with unsettled feelings of loss and fear, so too has Maya Lin with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial “produced a work that evokes profound emotions in viewers” (Hein 4). Both artworks also commemorate a loss. “Bill Mosho” in the Northern Lights Production promotional video remarks that “this park is filled with memories,” and indeed Ten Figures centers around remembrance, creating a space to confront the loss of residents who have already left that memory-filled park behind. On its face, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is more obvious in the type of loss that it commemorates—but it is more subversive than typical war memorials in the way that it questions the assumptions surrounding the war itself (Hein 6), and in the way that it forces the viewer to confront the particularity and banality of that tragedy (Ochsner 155). Both artworks bring the viewer face to face with a particular name or a particular face—the real people behind the abstract loss. 

However, despite their on-the-face similarities, I actually argue that Ten Figures functions more similarly to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial than to Tower of East Cambridge Faces. In its more traditional obelisk shape, Tower is removed from the viewer, who has to crane their head upwards in order to view the faces. There is no danger of a viewer mistaking any of the figures captured in Tower for a real person, as they might with Ten Figures: instead, the faces peer out from their stone tower enigmatically, held at a distance from a viewer who can’t reach out to touch them. Unlike his choice of material for Ten Figures, in this installation Tyler instead utilizes bronze, creating a monument which will last for decades to come. By contrast, in its concrete impermanence, Ten Figures’ purposeful fading away produces a memorializing effect, forcing the viewer to confront the loss of a community that is similarly fading out of view. In this way, Ten Figures functions as a memorial, forcing its viewers to for a moment remember, and mourn, the ghosts that exist beyond the newly constructed office spaces and chain restaurants. 

For the last forty years, these statues have provoked, unsettled, frightened, been defaced—and have been shown great care. Kaufman reported voices of residents at the statues unveiling: “‘A lot has changed,’ said John Brian, a 50-year resident of Somerville, his Irish accent still present, his arms folded and shoulders sloped as though he too were ready to pose for a sculpture. ‘But these, these [the statues] are a thing of beauty.’” Somerville residents are filled with love and grief for the statues, just as they are filled with love and grief for their neighbors who have been forced to leave the square. Despite not being memorials in the traditional sense, the statues function as memorials all the same—a monument to the neighborhood, community, and residents who used to exist at the intersection of Elm Street and College Avenue, and who, like their impermanent concrete counterparts, are gradually fading away.