Prologue: The Day the Wall Came Down (American Surreal)

Abstract

On the College Station campus of Texas A & M University, in the courtyard of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, stands what must be one of the oddest monuments in the world. A plaque on the plinth informs us that Veryl Goodnight’s sculpture commemorates ‘the sudden and unexpected collapse of the Berlin Wall’ on 9 November 1989, a ‘moment of joy, felt around the world, when Berlin was reunited.’¹ Thirty feet long, eighteen feet wide, and twelve feet high, the seven-ton memorial is made up of ‘five horses, one stallion and four mares, running through the rubble of the collapsed Berlin Wall’ (Goodnight 2013).² The sculpture incorporates graffiti copied from the western side of the wall, and according to the plaque, ‘At President Bush’s request, the names of 15 people killed at the Berlin Wall are written on the “Dove of Peace.” These names represent over 900 people who were killed trying to escape to the West.’ The gender of the animals, the artist’s website tells us, is not incidental: the wall ‘had separated families and loved ones for over 28 years. Veryl represents this separation by placing the stallion, symbolic of man, entirely within what would have been East Berlin. The mares, symbolic of family, are passing the “death strip” and entering the West — to a new life of freedom… ’ (Goodnight 2013). Goodnight is known and loved in and around Texas for her ‘traditional realism style’ (Western Art Collector 2008), but here ‘realism’ serves as a vehicle for transmuting the imaginary into the symbolic.