School of War - Ep 143: Sabin Howard on WWI, Art, and Honoring Veterans

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

Sabin Howard, sculptor of A Soldier’s Journey, the central feature of the new World War I Memorial in Washington, DC, joins the show to talk about his work and the art of memorializing war and honoring veterans. ▪️ Times      •      01:50 Introduction      •      02:07 Becoming an artist     •      07:03 Spiritually classical     •     10:04 WWI      •      14:24 Getting it right     •      18:35 Daughter and father     •      21:37 The ordeal     •      25:00 The charging man      •      28:18 Modern methods     •      33:52 Aftermath     •      41:11 Return      •      51:00 Excite and engage Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Today we are going to talk about one of the most important pieces of public art to be unveiled in Washington, D.C., maybe in America, in some time. The magnificent sculpture just installed is the centerpiece of the World War I Memorial in the heart of Washington, D.C. I think it's a remarkable, emotional, original, powerful piece of work. Here's its sculptor, Sabin Howard, to discuss. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stay on it. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran.

The people who are not these buildings down. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Saban Howard. He is the sculptor of a soldier's journey, which is being installed here in just a couple of months, though I think we're recording this in July. We'll put this episode up right when it goes up at the National World War I Memorial here in Washington, D.C. Sabin is a sculpture. He grew up in New York and Italy, which I'm going to ask you about, study at the Philadelphia College of Art, New York Academy of Art, taught. It's been elected to the board of the National Sculpture Society, 50 solo and group shows, and now the man behind this. What I have to say, I've only seen pictures. I've not seen the thing itself, but what looks to be a really remarkable

work getting installed in Washington, D.C. Sabin, thank you so much for joining. Thank you, Aaron. I'm really pleased to be here and share this with your audience. So before we get to World War I in which you've spent the last several years of your life working on, How does one become a sculptor here in the 21st century? How did you grow up? How did this passion start for you? I got to differentiate myself from the art world. It's like I entered into a task and a mission.

On October 22nd, 1982, I was working in a furniture restoration shop in South Philly. And four o'clock that day, I decided I was going to become an artist. and I made a move by calling my dad asking him, you know, I want to be an artist and he said, how long is this going to last? And here we are. And I began that day from zero. I could not draw. And I ended up at a school in Philadelphia that taught traditional methodologies of creating figurative art.

And this is very different than what has been going on in the world. I learned how to make Renaissance-type figures from live models that, plays forward Western civilization and a rich lineage that is ours, rightly ours. And this sculpture was kind of what I envisioned from the very beginning. I wanted to make art and it was like Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo. And I had no idea when I started that there was this whole modern art movement that I would butt horns and be blocked until this project came into being. And so this is a really long 42-year voyage that will finally,

be unveiled on September 13th to the public. So there's a lot packed into what you just said, and I kind of want to get to all of it in time to include, you know, and I've seen you comment on this in other venues, but the profound irony of a World War I, a sculpture about World War I being classical as opposed to modernist. But we'll come back to that. So you spent a lot of time in Italy as a young man, and maybe later. How did that influence your aesthetic style or does it all come from that school or what's the mix? The mix, that's a really interesting question.

The mix is twofold. I'm bicultural. And that is, it plays a huge element in who I am, how my hard drive is set, how I perceive the world. I grew up with, you know, born New York City, boom, right on the boat, back to Italy. My mother's Italian. And so my first walking around of like city and urban centers are Milan, Turin, and I see all this stuff. And my first language is Italian. And so then all of a sudden now we're three and I'm back on back to the United States.

And where do I land? Vietnam War, anti-war marches, think outside the box, counterculture. And that's who I am. It's like I am someone who was really highly influenced by the beauty of Europe. and traditionalism and what that art is all about on a this, you know, philosophical level. And then on the other side, it's like, what do you do with your life, the United States, 1960s? How do you create your destiny, manifest your destiny? That's what the United States are about.

So that's who I am. And that's what this project's about. Well, let's talk about this project. How does a commission like this come someone's way? I know there were competitions involved. I also, you know, I'm speaking to you from, Washington, D.C. And for anyone who's not yet seen a picture of the work that you've produced and soon

we'll be able to go in person here in Persian Square and see it for themselves in in bronze, it's an incredibly powerful piece. And it's, and it is, you know, I'm going to move past my competence here in terms of my actual vocabulary to analyze these things. But it is modern in a way in the sense that you couldn't create what you've created in the 17th or 16th century. It's not possible. And yet it clearly is spiritually classical in a way that DC Memorial public sculpture is often not.

I mean, obviously, we famously have the Vietnam Memorial from Maya Lynn. We have the very, the less well-known, but quite unfortunate, in my view, Eisenhower Memorial. Garbage. Yeah. No, I totally agree. There's a great moment for anyone who has, and there's no reason why anyone would see this. It's actually kind of like tucked in a, it's downtown, but it's tucked in sort of a. out of the way corner of downtown DC.

You know, it's in front of this brutalist Department of Education behemoth building, and it's got this big screen. It's like metal mesh screen as part of the design. And during one of the, you don't doubt know all this, but during one of the design hearings, the designers,

this is Frank Gary, right, or his firm, the designers were asked to justify this massive metal screen. And they say, well, we have to hide, we have to hide this Department of Education building.

And then some wag just asked, well, what's going to hide the screen? But anyway, the point of my question, to get to the question, is this is not the trend in Washington, D.C. No, not at all. This kind of sculpture. So what was the process like? How do you get selected?

Why is this off trend? I want to link this up to the Eisenhower Memorial because I was actually called by Frank Gehry out to his offices in Los Angeles. And I asked him very bluntly, do you want me to be your in-house sculptor or just? Do you want me to tell you what I think with my 35 years' experience? I told them exactly what I thought, that it was a very natural history-type museum experiential thing where there was no cohesive focal point. And I'm well-versed and educated in how to make monuments, because that's what I learned. That's my education.

Frank didn't know a damn thing about making monuments. And I don't think he's a bad guy, except he's a modernist. And you can't use that information of modernism to actually elevate. and make art for we the people. It kept me on and fired me after three months because I was stylistically, in quotation marks, not the correct sculptor that put the bug in my ear. That's why I'm telling you that.

And that moment then led to this competition where Justin Shubow reached out to me from a civil art society in D.C. And said, hey, Sabin, you've got to enter this project. This is a good one. I entered it. I got into the final. with Joe Wyshar, and we won this January 22nd of 2016.

It was a global competition, blind, global competition, because the Centennial Commission wished to do the same thing that Maya Lynn did. It's like they wanted to give a chance to anything and not know to who it was tied to. And it was in response to the Eisenhower Memorial, which was done because of, favoritism. Frank was hired by somebody in government and this was not at all that. This was, I was hired for specifically my drawings and Joseph Weishar, the architect in training at that moment, 25 year old kid who stuck to the directions of the competition which were create an urban park with a national memorial in it and his vision of the architecture was as closely tied to the

structure and the bones of that original Friedberg design. So then we win this and we begin, and I have to spend now the next nine months with Centennial Commission coming up with a whole new iteration. And I did that over 25 iterations, shooting 12,000 images of models in actual uniforms with a drawing. Then we went to the Commission of Fine Arts. And then we were in the mud of Washington, we got out eventually. And in 2019, I started sculpting. How did you come to learn about the First World War? How much did you know when you got into this? What was the process that you followed? What did you read? What was that learning side of this for you? Like, I'm going to be very honest with you. I have a very good education in history. My dad is a PhD historian. My mom is a PhD

historian. And I had a not a deep understanding of World War I, but I had a deep understanding that you needed to know our past because it's the umbrella that unifies nations and people and communities and groups. So I had a tremendous amount of value for you need to know what you're doing. There's a weird thing here. You get a project like this and you get brought to Washington and then all of a sudden you're dealing with 100, 100 plus sculpting experts from D.C. I'm being facetious. I was told, do this.

More horses, more barbed wire, more machine guns, more trench war, you know, no man's land. Can you put dogs in even, buy planes? And I have smoke coming around my ears. And you're just like, you want to please everybody. You're an artist. You got a great job. It's like, but you've got a vision.

And so how do you manage this? There was a moment in my studio in the South Bronx where I looked at a poster on the wall. It's the last judgment by Michelangelo. And there was this moment, an aha moment where I was like, do what you know. And that's what I know. I know how to make figures that are interconnected, intertwined.

And that last judgment shows all of us meeting our maker. That's the humanity of that project of his work, the energy of those figures, you know? And I took that, and that was kind of, of like the path than to be on moving forward on the project. And that gave me back the grounding that I needed to play forward the vision. And the iterations that we did kept getting better and better. There were many iterations that, you know, some of them were just too over the top and how

destructive World War I was. And this is a long way of saying that I did not read that much about World War I after the first week because I realized that this project was about human beings. and humanity was not about governments and what happened at the higher level of the elites. It was, I had to make a project that was about what happens to human beings. And I got that because I started looking at images of the war on Google. And I'm seeing these things of like soldiers in trains saying goodbye to their fiancés and their moms and dads.

And all of a sudden, I'm struck with the fact that, oh, my God, those, they look like kids. looks like my daughter. And that, this is, you got to do something that is not about the buttons or the guns. This is about the human feelings and emotions that happen to people when they are thrown into battle and war that crushes and grinds to death. It's an industrial warfare. It's the first one on the world, the planet, and it's just 50,000 people dying in an afternoon. And it's like, what is this about? It's about human beings, not about governments. So I'm sorry to disappoint. a lot of people. I read a little bit about World War I, but ultimately I returned to humanity, and that's what I'm portraying in this project. Yes, the thing that every war movie gets wrong,

of course, is the age of the soldiers. Almost every war movie I've ever seen the actors are, you know, in their 20s, maybe their 30s. In reality is the soldiers, I mean, my Marines back in the day were 19, 20 years old, almost to a man. Yeah. You know, your point about being encouraged to put in, you know, dogs and no man's land, that points to something about the piece that I wouldn't have been able to articulate without you saying that, without you pointing out that there's none of that in there. Is while, I mean, it's, I mean, the uniforms and everything is, it's obvious if you, it doesn't have to say World War I on it for you to know that it's

World War I. And then obviously, I want to go through it with you in a minute. The scenes depicted are, you know, there are, there, there's sort of these archetypical scenes of departure and battle and so forth. But it is free of period cliche in a way that, like, if you go to the FDR Memorial, which actually is not the worst. It's not the worst memorial and you have a curious to know your review.

But there are, it's full of that kind of stuff. It's been a while since it's been there. So I'm just, you know, there's the dog. There's, you know, it's crowd pleasing.

It's crowd pleasing and familiar. Yeah. I did something that was more an on-the-job training. The project really changed. The first half of the first almost 30 feet are very different than the second 30 feet. I began with college boys and women. And it fits because the people that left our soil were inexperienced at war.

And so their faces show that they have a Victorian era type look. And there is not that horrible quality of how a face picks up the history of what that person's been in. So I get to the midpoint on the figures. It's like something needs to change here. And I had a few conversations with people and I brought veterans in. And this is, I'm bringing this up to you because, Aaron, this is, this, I learned something really deep on this project. In service of is so significant for military, but it should be more significant for civilians.

I became in service of something way larger than myself on this project. And I learned this from the veterans. I use six veterans from Marine Corps, Navy SEALs, Rangers, both from Iraq and Afghanistan Combat Tours of Duty. And each one of those soldiers, we became very close friends. And the reality happened that I am actually part of that group now because I became in service of their story. and their faces are indelibly sculpted in bronze,

beating mortality and showing what they went through, and their faces are contorted and show a weight and a damage from being in battle that college boys do not have. And I did something that I don't think other people have done. It's I redesigned on the fly. I redesigned these figures at over life-size scale. As I went along, that's kind of like unheard of. You've got to have a lot of confidence.

And it brought a lot of vitality to the sculpture because it's not a finished piece, so to speak, the surface is still in process. But it's a process that shows how I added the clay. So it's very modern and very Mars-like, aggressive. It's very active. And that actually is really fitting of war. The ground is swirling with mud.

There are shells. There are helmets of the dead on the ground. There is a handprint of a child. We will find it. There is a lot of humanity in that wall. And that is what I learned. And I can speak about it now without crying, but it is horrible what people were forced into doing,

charging towards like machine guns. Come on, think about it for a sec. You know, those things just rip you apart. You're done. And this is to honor. It has preserved the memory of those people, but it's also a universal story of all soldiers. So that's my contribution to the planet, you know.

So this is, it's a remarkable piece of work in a number of ways, not least just most basically. I mean, the plain scale of it, You were alluding to it just now. There's, what, 38 figures. Yeah. And it's 58 feet long, give or take. Correct.

And it tells this, it tells a story. I want to, if, you know, why don't we try and we'll do our best. I mean, if listeners, don't do this while you're driving your car, but if you, if you can, you know, you can pull up images of, I guess what are, you know, clay models of this. And soon you'll be able to pull up images of the, of the thing itself installed. Let's go through it. If you, if you wouldn't mind, there. left to right. We start with this scene of, well, of departure.

And there's initially, what, three? Well, I'll let you describe it, but there's a soldier on a knee holding up or receiving a helmet. What's, what's this first scene? The first scene, the first figure is the daughter. The alpha and omega of the project is the daughter. And it is to show the next generation are the book, the bookends. The next generation is what suffers the most from war because they are left with war. And so the first scene is the daughter is handing her

kneeling dad the helmet. The helmet is right side up so you don't see the insides of that helmet. And the wife is behind the kneeling dad with her hands on his shoulders comforting him. And that scene is calm, peaceful, and it is the world before World War I, which is the divine order to harkens to the Victorian era. Should I proceed? I can run down the line. Yeah, well, let's go. So then it's an issue, and I just want to understand, I mean, I'm looking at an image right now as we speak. And then these characters, the main

character repeats. Does he have a name? Do you give him a name? Yes, I call him the father, and he is the allegory for the United States. In the studio, we call him the dad. And the dad

appears five times in this wall. He is the hero's journey. And in short, in one sentence, the story is a dad soldier, Allegory United States, leaves home, enters into battle, and is transformed only to return home in hand, his daughter, the next generation, his helmet. That is the story in a nutshell. And then this next scene is the dad is now in a tug of war

between the heroic mom and the Brotherhood of Arms. He's being right in the middle, right there, pulled from one, arm and each way. And the heroic mom is an allegory for the United States because we were, you know, reluctant to enter into a combat on the other side of the Atlantic. We were an agrarian nation entering into this battle. And I looked at the $20 gold coin and thought about you need to create a woman here that is larger than life. So she is really out there on the edge of the podium of this sculpture. So she is right in your face as a visitor and a viewer.

You're going to see a very heroic, noble, powerful, graceful woman, equally as energized and as strong as the soldier on the other side of the dad, pulling him forward with the brotherhood of arms in service of one's country. And then we move from there to battle, right? This is ordeal is what it's called. Exactly. And the motion, everywhere, this whole. The motion is always sort of to the right as the eye looks at it, right?

And he's the gentleman, the father is the gentleman in all three scenes is the one without his helmet. Yes, correct. And this, you have a gap now, right after the initial home front scene, you have a gap, which is the Atlantic Ocean. And then you jump into almost this school of fish, which is these men in battle with this bestial energy, huge. aggression, anger, it's Mars. This is Mars at war, advancing forward, and it's a unit. But they're not marching the way. This is done very creatively.

It's like a force of nature, like a tornado. Those figures, I don't, you, I can't find another figure that shows somebody running like that in sculpture, like does a charging guy there? He is full tilt run leading over very, very violently with the bayonet drawn. this is supposed to look like something that you're like out of hell. This is like manner transformed. And think about it. You are told, get out of the trench and charge forward.

You're going to be pissing in your pants. And you're going to have to turn into, you're just going to have to like become an animal to do this. It's like this is what I learned. I was a rock climber for years. you get into a place that you are going to die and you get real calm and you make it happen. This is what is forced upon these men. And they are led now, the very center of the composition by the dad, who's reminiscent of a pose of the Marine Daily, Dan Daly,

who yelled. You sons of bitches want to live forever. Yeah, sons of bitches you want to live forever. And that is reminiscent of that man. And it's also reminiscent. of an image that I took from a, I think a Russian man, I found that on the

internet, and I reversed the image, but I like that. I want to talk to you a little bit about that figure, because I want to give you this symbolism behind it. The heart is very open. It's like he's almost, he's not in the crucifix pose, but his arms are outstretched and his head is rotated,

advancing forward, screaming, come on you sons of a bitches, do you want to live forever? He is full on. And he is one leg is, bent and the other leg is pushing off. And I did this, how do you make something so kinetic? What I did is I started taking bursts with the camera. So I take 12 shots and I'd say, okay, Paul, he was a model. I want you to act out this movement from calling and advancing forward. And I'm going to run the camera and boom, we find the one image where it's back foot's lifting up the ground and it's a

kinetic movement. You can't hold that for more than a millisecond. And so I captured that. And I had to change my whole style of working. I'm doing this esoteric stuff for 35 years. It's too still and too Greek looking. It's not going to work for general public. They're coming here to get, you know, something visceral, something that's exciting. And so I had to change my style. And this battle scene, I really learned how to do it. So that's the dad again. And that's the very, very middle of the whole wall. And then so for each one of these figures, then, I presume there's some similar story. Like the charging man that you were just talking about, it is an incredible pose.

Does that come from an image that you found, your imagination, some combination, some pose of the model that you've recorded? Like, talk about that one. Interesting, you asked me. Great question, Aaron. That figure comes from a man, James Mansfield, who is a friend of mine from UK. I've known for years in New York City. That guy came to me. He said, I want to be a model.

I'm like, James, come on, man. You're doing very well in your construction, contracting business. Why the hell do you want to be a model for me in South Bronx? He's like, please, it's important to me. So he poses and he brings me this massive energy. And he's getting everybody else juiced and all the models are like starting to get into it because he's bringing a game. And so I say, James, you got to tell me, why are you so excited about this project?

What brings this? Why are you bringing such light? You're like a catalyst for this project. You're getting everybody emotionalized, and I'm getting great poses out of everybody because of you. And he said, all right, I'll tell you after we work today. So we sit down on my ratty, dusty couch in the studio after work, and he goes, hey, I got to tell you, it's kind of serious story.

It's like my great-great-grandfather and my great-great-uncle were in World War I. and my great-great-grandfather never returned from battle. My great-great-uncle came back and with his service revolver proceeded to shoot his wife, his daughter, and then himself. And I grew up in that very home. And it has haunted me since that moment. And that is why I am so adamant on bringing my game to your project because it is so important to so many people.

There's a ripple effect from what happened, from our relatives in England who died, and then I am that progenitor, that I am that generation of today that is still affected by that on a deep visceral level. And that, to me, was the beginning of an understanding on a deeper level that this project is about human beings and people.

And you have to do a really good job in showing the emotions in their bodies and in their morphology and in their faces. And that charging figure was a breakthrough figure for me because it's so loaded with just energy. It's like, bam, it's like superhero, but human. So you keep making reference to faces. And I'm going to offer an observation. And again, this is not my field.

So take this for what it's worth. But I am curious to hear your response, which is something about the faces, something about the combination of what I will crudely call the. the photorealism of the expressions and then the energy that you're making reference to, the extraordinary sort of feeling of movement that one gets, even though it's obviously literally, you know, immobile is what makes it feel so modern.

That is to say, maybe you'll tell me I'm wrong, but I can't imagine, you know. No, you're right. You're right. Yeah,

either a Greek or a Renaissance sculpture conveying the same thing. And art is, is it a style? Where in the balance of elements here? Is it your stylistic decisions? Is it literally the technology and what you're able to do with photos and the models that allow you to do this? How does this come about now and it hasn't come about before? You're 100% right.

It's not, it is modern. What I did is I looked into the past and I didn't see it as something of the past. Remember, I'm European by descent. So I don't feel like I have to recreate the wheel at every turn. So I problem solved by looking at the past, and I looked at like Canova, he's a sculptor, neoclassical. He did these two boxing warriors that are at the Vatican. Thought about that for a second and the lunging forward. And then I thought about like, okay, let's do, let's take some pictures to get the action and grab the moment.

And then you can figure out how you're going to sculpt the model in parts. But you got an idea of how the whole pose is working. And I've created something that is following through with the tradition of figurative art from Western civilization, but it is not archaeological. It is completely innovative. It's out-the-box thinking. It's completely new. And this is what modern art is. It's like, break the wheel, make something new.

And I'm taking that literally, I'm like making a war memorial that has never been. done before. You have never seen anything so loaded with action, except maybe the Shradie Memorial, but that's the one the Grant Memorial for the Capitol. And that was also what the commission, Centennial Commission, Edwin Found, and said, hey, go look at that. And I like that. I like that emotional drive. So he was like, you got the job. Now, give me something that's active, that people that are not in the art world were going to get and appreciate. And remember, you're making a sculpture for visitors to Washington, D.C. to understand the history of our country. You can't make it like the Geary thing that's not exciting to people.

You have to make it a sculpture about we the people, populist art, but that doesn't mean that you go low-based because people want to see real art. And this is a problem in the art world. Modern art is very, elite oriented. You need to read a book to understand what you're looking at. It's no longer visual because the concepts in the book explain what you're looking at and then all of a sudden it's like an aha moment. But it's not really working as a piece of art in itself because you got to read the manual. I'm telling you, go look at the art that I made. You're going to get the art directly

looking at it. You don't need to read a damn book about understanding it. But you can if you want to. I wrote one. It's going to come out in a spring. You can read it if you want if you want to know more about it. But I made a piece that I want a six-year-old to get. And that's, this is why I'm making a movement now called American Cultural Revolution that we're going to play this forward into the future. And I believe that this is the only place in the whole world, the only country that you can actually do this where you can be so creative, that you can actually invent things and play forward without, and I'm a little different because I'm saying, hold on to tradition, conserve what is sacred.

And to me, Western civilization is sacred. I'm going to go do something else now to play forward. But I'm also going to be inventive and be modern. And so that's a cool thing that you notice the faces. Those faces would never be seen in classical art. Maybe some of the paintings of Caravaggio in Rome, where you see people being beheaded in the models that were used by Caravaggio, the painter, were horrors and street people.

with dirty feet and dirty nails and reality. But he got a, you know, a lot of flak for doing that. Yeah. At a, at a more prosaic, less aesthetic level, just I want to also praise your young colleague, the architect of the, of the park, because in a way that that I think is not true, for example, of the World War II Memorial,

which, you know, my dad was World War II veteran. I've been there many, many times. It's not, it's not, you know, it's not bad like the Eisenhower Memorial is, I think just bad. It's got its merits. But it, you know, I've walked around in the World War I Memorial is open now. It just lacks the centerpiece sculpture.

It is fantastic as a, as an educational experience without feeling, you know, without, without you feeling sort of condescended to or demeaned in the way that some museums can do. It's got, for example, those amazing maps inscribed on the walls in the same way that overseas American cemeteries do, showing the campaign history of the wall. I mean that the World War II Memorial lacks, when you really could take a young person there and learn about the war. And then, as you point out, at a deeper level, be moved by the centerpiece art, which again, I don't hate the World War II Memorial,

but I don't think I've ever been, you can be sort of, when you start to think about the stars that represent the fallen, I mean, that has a kind of emotional impact, but it's still kind of abstract. Yeah, cerebral. Is that visceral? Not in your gut. Yeah. Yeah.

So just we've been moving from left to right. So let's keep going. So after after ordeal in the center of the piece, we go to aftermath with to me, just visually, you have the dad sort of standing. It's sort of breaking the, breaking the fourth wall. He's just staring out at us. And to me, this is this. I don't know if you think of it this way, but to me it seems like it's the off center center of gravity of the piece. It's where my eye goes to. You spot on. It is the focal point. This is my favorite part of the whole wall. This is the part where I really had to rise to the occasion as an artist and do something super creative. I was shocked one morning as a little kid. I walked out to my hallway. I lived in an apartment building in New York City.

And I had to pick up the newspaper every morning and bring it to my dad breakfast table. So I go out and there was this picture of a girl that had just been napalmed out of Viet. And it's black and white and she is running dark naked right at the viewer from page New York Times. Six-year-old sees this. I'm that six-year-old. That image got indelibly seared on my brain. And you will not meet another human being on the planet more anti-war than myself as an artist. I hate war because I was brought into this early on in my life.

I had to, my parents were obsessed with Vietnam. They want, and I mean, a fact from not being in a military family and not having lost relatives, my dad, my grandfather was in World War II and he was in the Italian army. And he raised me and he, he was captured by the British in Libya. He escaped as a P.O.W. And then walked across the Sahara at night, got across all the way to the Straits of Messina and walked and hitchhiked all the way back to Torino, all the of Italy in three months. And so he raised me. And so I have a very human heart towards us, humanity. And I guess I'm the right guy for this job because that image stuck in my head until the cost of war is loaded with those images. It begins with a gap. And in back of the wall, there is a crucifix, actually, that has, it's not standing upright. It's, it's, it's

tilted on an angle and it is falling apart and it is the end of God. That is the statement that I have made. I snucked that one in. Didn't ask for any authority with the Centennial Commission or the Commission of Fine Arts. I just put it in while I was in New Zealand doing the 10-foot model. Went rogue on that one. And then the next scene is a Pietas scene. A Pietas scene comes from the Renaissance where Christ is lowered from the cross

and usually is held by his mother or two, you know, disciples. And in this case, they're disciples, and it's a triptych with three soldiers. And it is a man who is, it's very Christ-like, because he's in a crucifix type pose. So he has now sacrificed his life for his country and for his soldier, you know, peers. And above him is a chaplain. The chaplain's head is just. Joe was a 23-year service Marine rose to captain. Three tours of duty in Iraq, combat duty.

One of the worst ones was 150 days of taking shells. It's on his face. He came back, had a heart attack, drove himself to the hospital. That's the kind of man Joe is. The other man is a Turkish man who carries also military history. And the other guy has an Italian face, so you see his skull really well. And they are all together.

The next scene now, you go to the next one, it is a nurse. The nurse is holding up a gas soldier who has been blind in one hand, is grasping his eyes, covering his eyes in the other hand. He's blind. He's reaching forward into nothingness. And his mouth is wide open in a scream. The gas mask is open and dangling in front of him. It's the gas mask itself.

is like a skeleton, vertebral skeleton going up to the skull. The gas mask looks like a skull. And I used my older daughter. She's 34 years old and she's a doctor for the nurse. And the outfit is a real nurse outfit from the Smithsonian Museum, which we tattered because that piece took around 800 hours to make. So it saw a lot of duty. She is very large and very powerful.

And if she were to stand, she would breathe, is seven foot two. So I did what Michelangelo did in the Pietà in St. Peter's in Rome, where the Virgin Mary is overscale, over Christ, because she is so large and encompasses such an important idea. And now we're going to move to the Shellshock soldier, which is the dad again. And this is the principal figure at three-quarter mark on the wall, and it is where the light will shine it. night and illuminate him popping off the wall. He is a very interesting figure because World War I is the transformation of the globe in terms of how we see ourselves as human beings. I told you, we move from a divine order to modern alienation, nihilism. Sartra Camus are the French philosophers that come out and write about this idea that we are no longer ruled by order

who have now moved into a moment of chaos and alienation. And he is walking directly off the platform at you. His foot is off the platform into nothingness. And I used a veteran for the body, Ricky Zambrano, who was a Marine in Afghanistan. And we talked a lot about that pose. And the head was Chris, who is a army ranger. and Chris had seen a lot of combat clearing stuff in Iraq, very, very powerful face.

I said, Chris, what is it like to be shell-shocked? And he did this face and it just came naturally. The distortions, the asymmetry of his mouth, the fear, the anger, the confusion. It's like a flood of all these different things. This is a humanity showing up on that face. and it's a big figure. That figure is the one that I spent the most time on that whole wall, 1,100 hours.

I really struggled with that one because you got to get it right because it's so important to these guys that are going to come see this piece and this piece is for them. Yeah, I predict, Saban, that this particular piece is part of the overall work is going to enter the, this sounds like it's not high praise,

but that's not intentional, but it's going to enter the DC highlight reel. that is to say when images of what you see when you come to DC are strung out, this will be one of them. I can't. It's hard. We're doing our best. You obviously are the most qualified person to describe this piece and words.

But it's not the same as looking at it. So I do encourage people to visit or at least in the short term take a look at the actual pictures. Okay. And then the return, the return. We have the soldier and his daughter, the father and the daughter again. Yeah. the next scene is very interesting. I called the next scene the superhero section,

and I went out and got a bodybuilder to do the legs of that nurse. So bear in mind that Shilchak soldier is flanked, right and left, by nurses. The nurses are most females that are sculpted today are not powerful the way they should be portrayed. Women in my life are very powerful, and they're not like cutesy Barbie types. I did something here where I made this nurse like driving forward. And again, she's carrying.

She's stronger than the soldier she carries. He cannot get home at all. And the head is Jessica, who's the wife of my assistant Charlie Mastow. And she, her dad is a colonel was in Afghanistan. and her sister, Jessica's sister is also, you know, Army and so military family. And she's driving forward, very powerful figure, raised up on a bunch of rocks moving at a diagonal down. I spent a long time on that figure, three models, get that figure right.

And the wounded soldier's head is going up. It's like pitched up. And what's right in front of them? Like the American flag. And that's the next scene. The next scene, I call it the three amigos. So there are these three men. And I used a Marine, Ricky Zambrano, again, for the head and the body on that figure.

You know, the next guy is on the outside. He's driving forward, but his heads turn backwards, and he's looking at what he just left, which is a shell shot guy in the battle scene. And he's going forward, and his chest is out, and he's driving. And he has been changed by the war. He is the definition of a warrior. He's the definition of what we saw with Donald Trump being shot. Like the same thing.

Fist in the air, except his body is pushing forward. That's what I did in that figure. The next figure is a wounded soldier that is, he's being carried by this heroic figure and the internal figure, which is a black soldier. And he is in almost a crucifix pose again. He's hanging listless and one leg is dragging behind. But he's looking forward as his chin's just. Judding forward. And I used a mat who is a Navy seal for the head of this, who had also seen a lot of stuff.

And then the inside figure is a black man, Amari, who's a young kid, and he's wearing a French helmet. Because what happened is that blacks were handed over to the French and given to them, and that's where they got their uniforms and their equipment that entered into combat. And in the next scene, you're looking at the parade scene, and this man is marching, and the flag is on a diagonal, the pole. So it goes over the previous scene, the superhero section. And that figure carrying the flag is in very large kinetic energy. A ranger was used for the head, and a marine was used for the body. It's very powerful, interlaced now with another figure driving forward. a Korean soldier who was a Marine as well, Afghanistan duty. And the inside, I used a female

wearing a Salvation Army nurse's uniform. And the reason I did that is because there was a change. We were no longer the agrarian nation. It looks like a very powerful group of figures, but very human. They're not in sync. They're all pushing and pulling together to move home. This is the superpower, the industrialized superpower that we become the future. And now we're at a very, very final scene. And this is the father returning the helmet to the daughter, but now upturned. Yeah, that's right. The dad is now returning home.

And, okay, this is difficult. This was very, very challenging. Okay, so let's think about it for a second. You have this freight train of the parade scene coming straight down. on this little kid. Kids like older, she's now 14. She's developed. She's pre-pubescent.

Before she was 11, now she's 14. I used my daughter who was 14 in the first scene. Now my daughter is 19. So I used her as a model for the head. And the body now is it's not fully developed, but it's very challenging thing. How do you make this figure become a bookend, but still maintain the childlike quality?

and the allegorical symbolism that she is the next generation of World War II. So the dress is the same as the first figure. It was a dress that I took from a template from a 1917 dress designer. I fabricated that in New Zealand, historically correct, and then it has bands on the chest and bands below the waist that give it almost like they're almost shackles at weight. The figure with the head is looking directly down into helmet. She's divining the future, World War II.

And there's a stress on her neck because it's like, it's a stressful position. She's bearing the weight of what she's been handed. And the dad is kind of looming above her a little bit. He's a little bit, it's not like a joyous scene. It's not like a lot of smile. He's looking down on her. His gun is still in his hand, which wouldn't be going on. You know, you don't come home with your gun.

Service weapon is down, though. And so it's a way of showing the man returns from battle reenters and meets his kid and he's carrying his load that's still in him. It's still a part of him. And it's an uncomfortable meeting

but there's also a lot of love there because he's letting go of the helmet. He doesn't hold it. He releases the helmet. She holds the helmet. It's open. Pandora's box is now open. The war to end all wars

is the beginning of a time, 104-year history where there has never been a moment away from wars. I also took it to be, and you tell me if this is right or wrong, but he's a citizen. He's a citizen soldier. So there's something about receiving the helmet.

He was not raised in a warrior cast, and he will not continue as a professional warrior. This was a period of his life. Exactly right. It's the return. Yeah, and the head is exactly the same as when he was, believe this or not, It's the same head.

I used the same head as the departing dad. But I resculpted the neck and certain parts of the cranium to make it fit the sculpture. So changing the tilt of the head and having them look down, it's the same. It's exactly the same sculpture. I just, I cast it in clay. I poured clay into the mold that I had sculpted in the first one. So there would be no confusion that that was the same man. But changing the head to the core, to sternum, changed.

changes the story. You can tell from my line of questioning that I'm not a regular consumer of, it's a terrible phrase, observer of sculpture. And this piece really, just images of it have really moved me. I'm looking forward to seeing the thing itself. I want to, in the few minutes we have left, I kind of want to give the devil his due and sort of hear your responses to what strike me as sort of obvious lines of question or criticism of a piece like this. The first which we've been sort of, you've alluded to numerous times,

we haven't really encountered it straight on, but it is deeply ironic, as you point out, that, you know, this piece of sculpture, which is about the onset of modernity. It's about Pandora's Boxes, is the myth you made reference to. It's about the beginning of the long, dark 20th century. You know, it's sort of the proof to, I mean, these forces were already unleashed, right? You know, Nietzsche's writing before World War I, you know, modern, modern is starts in art before World War I, but something about World War I that proves that they're all on the right track, that actually this whole modern project has gone awry.

It's all falling apart. And that produces kinds of art that are anti, I'm going to make some editorial comments now, anti-civilizational, not in a, not in a, you know, simply a moral way, but in an effort, I mean, I was always, my understanding of modern art is heavily colored by an essay by Guy Davenport. called the symbol of the archaic, where he taught me that, you know, what Picasso and others are after is to wipe away civilization, such as it's come down to us from the Greeks and go back earlier and find sort of deep animal motive forces early in human history and return those to the center of aesthetic appreciation.

And that's modernism. That's, this has all been a mistake. It's a terrible mistake. Don't believe me, go to the no man's land at the Psalm. and you'll see what a mistake all of this, all of modern human history has been. So let's try to do something new and better. And yet your piece, well, obviously, you know, you can't make this piece earlier. It is of its day. It obviously is deeply in homage to a classical tradition. I could imagine a critic saying that there's something wrong with that, that there's something untrue to the war.

It's contradictory. Help respond to it. to that person, respond to that line of criticism. I love your question. Let's look at what my mission was. I'm going to tell you what I was told. This is what your mission is, Saban Howard Sculptor. I want a sculpture that will excite the visitor when they come and see it,

show them what World War I looked like and make it interesting, so they want to know more about what World War I was about. So I took that imperative and I also was told we liked the Shradie Memorial because a Shradie Memorial is so active in kinetic. Shradie Memorial, the Grant Memorial is the best piece of sculpture in the United States. It was done by a man and took him 20 years and then he dies two weeks before the unveiling because of the stress. And I'm not going to die two weeks before the unveiling. I'm here to make another thing. You seem very healthy. You seem very healthy. Yeah, I'm like I'm ready to go. I have been fighting for 42 years against an narrative that has become now redundant.

What you have talked about with Picasso and others was a reaction to the past. In physics, there is a law of physics for every action. There is an equal and opposite reaction. I am that equal and opposite reaction. I am the next wave on the beach. And my wave is a wave of beauty like hitting that platform in Washington, D.C., like a tsunami. And this will, I'm going to do like Joe Namath. You can see I'm dated.

I'm going to guarantee that this will change the art world. This will redirect where we are going because the art world has now collapsed to become only important to its investors, the academies and schools, the academic approach, the critics in the newspapers. And like a lot of other things on the planet, we're getting a revamp. I'm pushing the reset button, and I'm saying people matter,

what people think matters, and how we are represented matters. And frankly, I don't want to be represented by cinder blocks on the floor. I want to be represented by something that elevates our spirit. And my mission, as a human being, this is what I was taught by my parents,

is to leave the planet a better place than when you came in. And so that's what this memorial does. And I'm giving the gift of culture to this country because we are pretty low on the art appreciation culture level for quite a long time. Modern art was brought up in this country by the Rockefellers and the Modern Art Museum and Double Day Books. And it was an answer and a reaction

to what happened in World War II in World War I. It's like, let's make our art. Let's make an art that is purely American. They didn't bear in mind that the public needed to have an art that represented what their thoughts and sentiments were as well. I'm saying, let's take a look at that again, and let's make an art that is purely American and also represents the needs of we, the people.

So it's a return to making a populist-driven art that is not saccharine like the last formation of classicism that brought on the modernists. I'm saying, let's change and here's what I am offering. Well, I'm looking forward to and I'm rooting for you in your upcoming battle with, you know, for example, Philip Kennecott, the architecture and art critic for the Washington Post.

There's no reason why any listener to the show should know who that is. I, you know, and I'll also say, I don't dislike many people just because of their opinions. And Philip Kennecott, for all I know, I've never met the man, maybe a perfectly nice, you know, a family man, good owner to his dog and everything else. But I have disliked that guy since he reviewed the 9-11 Museum when it opened, whenever that was, probably actually about 10 years ago now, almost on the nose. And I still remember reading that review. And if anyone listening hasn't been to the 9-11 museum, you should absolutely go.

It's an amazing place. And I think a very fitting memorial to the thousands of people who are murder. You're on the site. The museum is in the footprint. the towers. And he, he, I'm not going to be able to do justice to the sneering quality of his commentary, but it's to the effect of, you know, the old, the Norm MacDonald joke, like, God forbid, al-Qaeda sets off or ISIS sets off a nuclear bomb in America, because imagine the Islamophobic reaction that's going to cause. That was like the Philip Kennecott review at the 9-11 museum,

but, but not as a joke, but in real life, you know, like this, this place is just designed to manipulate your emotions and make you feel jingoistic. I'm pretty sure he actually uses the word jingo estic in the review, which if you go to the beast, it's just not true. It's not fair at all. If anything, the museum is restrained in ways when it could really go over the top. And your piece, I could imagine him. I mean, it, it would be flatly false to say that your piece somehow glorifies war, flatly false. Nevertheless, because it is classical, because it depicts courage, you know, it depicts, you know, it's not, it's not, it's not myel Lins, you know, say what you will about the Vietnam War Memorial.

It's a statement. I mean, it's a clear aesthetic vision. It's actually very powerful. You can kind of only object to it on political grounds. You can't really, I mean, as a work of art, it's very powerful. But I could see you say, you're still keeping some of the old lie alive, some of the Wilfredo and old lie alive by just the way you've done it. And I look forward to that battle.

Thank you. I just want to add to that. I think I don't really care what the art world thinks. I didn't make this thing for the art world. And somebody like Kennecott, I would say to him, Kennecott, show me your 60-foot wall that weighs 25 tons with 38 figures. That's my calling card. Where's yours, bro?

And secondly, I would say, I made this piece for the guys and women that have lost things that will never be given back to them, like the 13 that lost her life at the airport in Afghanistan. This is who this sculpture is for. so I don't give a bleep about the art world. They never helped me, and I'm certainly not going to help them. I'm making a piece for the people that actually deserve to get a memorial made for them. That's what it's about. Saban Howard, it's a remarkable work.

People can come see it right here in Washington, D.C. on Pennsylvania Avenue, right near the White House. I'm looking forward to seeing it. What's the name of your forthcoming book? Tell people what it's called. The book does not have a title yet. It's a 750 page volume. him about what I went through and how we made this memorial.

But my wife, Tracy Slatin, has made and is in the process of making a documentary called Heroic. You can look at Doctuary.Heroicdocumentary.com. And that will come out in the spring. And we had a camera in our face for the whole time. So you're going to see what humans look like when they're struggling to make something like this. Yeah. It doesn't, it looked physical from the pictures that I've seen. Howard, fascinating conversation. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, I can see you just, yeah, we're on,

just so folks, no, we are on video as we talk, even though we only record the audio. And it looks, would you break your thumb? What is that? No, that's from all of the clay I put on the wall. It's got, might have huge calcium deposits on, in my, oh, wow. Tons of clay. Yeah. That's dramatic. Physical human thing. Thank you so much. Great conversation and good luck with the unveiling. And the battles to come. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.