Atlanta Public Television Archive Clip: Capitol Grounds, Episode 4, “General Gordon & Cotton,” 2012

Atlanta Public Television Archive Clip: Capitol Grounds, Episode 4, “General Gordon and Cotton,” 2012 is a single-channel mock-documentary presented as a local public-television segment about Lieutenant General John B. Gordon’s monument at the Georgia State Capitol and Cotton, his alleged pet rabbit and wartime companion. The video grows out of a public intervention and later gallery installation I first created in 2009. Using the language of civic education, it combines staged documents, altered photographs, public-history narration, and a fabricated preservationist letter to build a believable historical record around an absurd missing rabbit statue. Cotton’s disappearance is treated not as a punchline, but as a matter of monument integrity, public memory, and state pride. The fiction of Cotton points back to the fiction already operating in the monument itself. Gordon’s statue belongs to a tradition of Confederate commemoration that softened racial terror, celebrated white political power, and turned historical violence into civic honor. By adding a rabbit to that story, the work makes the existing distortions easier to see. Cotton is ridiculous, but the monument was never neutral. Since the original 2009 intervention, Confederate monuments have become even more visible as sites of conflict, removal, defense, and reinterpretation. What began as a satirical addition to a public statue now reads differently after the public debates and removals that followed Charleston, Charlottesville, George Floyd, and the protests of 2020. The video presents itself as a recovered broadcast artifact. It asks what makes a historical claim believable: a photograph, a plaque, a letter, a narrator, a public pedestal, or simply the confidence with which the story is told. Cotton becomes a small, impossible figure through which public memory, state authority, and the performance of history can be reconsidered.