File #23: "Confederate Memorial Hall Museum beside the Ogden Museum of Southern Art"

This artifact situated the museum in contemporary contexts with its sign, flags, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art next door. As the latter tried to evict the former in 2000, both museums waged an “eight-year court battle” until the Ogden conceded [1]. The public response to said legal dispute echoed back to similar militant rhetoric as the hall’s dedication used, with words like “battle” and “under siege” that were then repurposed under a “heritage” narrative. As its intrinsic politicization ran against the city’s cosmopolitan narrative since the Civil Rights era, the museum relied upon “heritage” for its Confederate identity retention and obfuscation thereof. The three flags and sign consequently represented said process in effect, especially how the Confederate national flag replaced the battle flag from the second artifact [2]. Nonetheless, the museum became indirectly involved with responses to the 2015 Charleston church shooting when Lee monument protestors burned a Confederate battle flag they bought from the museum for $22 [3]. As for the city’s memorial removals post-Charlottesville, the secretive Monument Relocation Committee had initially considered the museum a potential refuge for the Davis statue before the Beauvoir estate accepted it instead [4]. Whereas the demonstrators through their flag purchase unintentionally provided the museum financial support, the committee recognized it as a “guard” of objects like the statue despite insistences otherwise. Consequently, those events demonstrated the effectiveness of the museum’s obfuscation, which covertly reinforced its intrinsic politicization as repurposed within a “heritage” narrative.

1. John Bardes, “‘Defend with True Hearts unto Death’: Finding Historical Meaning in Confederate Memorial Hall,” in Southern Cultures 23, no. 4 (2017): 41; Cain Burdeau, “Few support Confederate museum,” in The Globe and Mail (Oct. 4, 2002); C. W. Cannon, “Offended by Confederate ‘cult.’” In the Times - Picayune (Dec. 5, 2001); “Confederates in the post-modern era,” in the Times - Picayune (Dec. 3, 2001); John R. Kemp, “Tempest in a tunnel,” in ARTnews 101, no. 1 (Nov. 2002): 100; Marlon Manuel, “Confederate museum fighting a new war; Artifacts’ home under siege,” in The Atlanta Constitution (June 28, 2001); “New Orleans museum puts Southern art on map, Dixie recreates itself as region cultivating fine arts,” in the Charleston Daily Mail (Aug. 16, 2003); Megan K. Stack, “Civil War Over Confederate Museum; New Orleans: Caretakers wage a courteous yet steely battle to keep from being squeezed out by university art center,” in the Los Angeles Times (June 19, 2001).
2. Giacomo Bagarella, “To Whom Does One Pray At the Battle Abbey of the South?” in “The Envoy,” in Medium (Sept. 3, 2017).
3. Maya Rhodan, “Protestors Throw a Confederate Flag on the Grill in New Orleans,” in TIME Magazine (July 4, 2015).
4. “Confederate statue vandalized in New Orleans,” in The Louisiana Weekly (May 7, 2018); Kevin Litten, “City should keep two Confederate monuments,” in the Times - Picayune (May 13, 2018).

Reference

• Reverence of the Past, Devotion to the Future. Directed by Claude Levet. New Orleans: Confederate Memorial Hall, 2013. Uploaded to Vimeo. 19 mins; per Bardes: "[d]espite asserting neutrality, the 'Battle Abbey of the South' treats [its] objects with quasi-religious veneration. Museum media refer to the heirlooms as 'relics.' 'Sacred,' 'hallowing,' and 'reverence' also recurrently appear, particularly in the museum’s introductory film Reverence of the Past, Devotion to the Future” (Bardes, "Defend with True Hearts unto Death," in Southern Culture, 32).