Vindicatrix, The Refusal of Beauty, The Disfiguring Myth

I’ll let Horace D. Ballard’s positively vibrating review of MONUMENTS and his description of filmmaker Cauleen Smith’s installation, The Warden (2025) speak for itself. Just google him and Vindicatrix. Vindicatrix, which slipped right by me when I read Carolina Miranda’s earlier piece in the NY Review of Books, maybe because my brain was overloaded by her take on Kara Walker’s “aberrant chimera” of a de-reconstructed Stonewall Jackson sculpture at The Brick. Miranda’s description of the Lost Cause, though, it sticks with me as I think about Smith, and about Vindicatrix: “Walker’s surgical reimagination of the Jackson statue instead dismantles the pleasing aesthetics of white supremacy to reveal the ugliness within: the disfiguring myth of the Lost Cause, which has papered over the racist cornerstones of the Confederacy with romanticized stories about sacrifice and bravery.” I can’t find a video of her whole conversation, but the student paper at Occidental gives an account of Smith’s…