some new work

Public monument is the encasement of a history, it is a beacon of that which has happened, and which potentially has had affect on the city and the people within. A monument of Vladimir Llyich Lenin posed in Russia has captured my interest as of late. What strikes me about this image is the authority to which Lenin stands on his structure of history pointing into the landscape.

I have adopted some gestures found in public monuments into my own landscapes as way to displace the prescribed history it represents into an alternative form of remembering. To take a step back from the monument and address what is actually there one would see stone and bronze. The man represented in bronze has no power to govern his history or his narrative, he is a reminder and it is up to the citizens or spectators to fill this structure with meaning. With that in mind, it seems to me that there is the potential for monuments to mean nothing, that without the human consciousness approaching the structure and deeming it one thing or the other it is simply bronze and stone.

Suggesting that a monument represents nothing but the materials it is made of is problematic.  I want to implement a connection between the meaninglessness of objects as markers of history in order to postulate that it is the spectator who cloaks the object or monument with meaning, history, and memory.

The landscape that surrounds the monument of Lenin is filled with experience, memory and history, and is deemed meaningful by those who live within it, and approach it as such. Lucy Lippard discusses the difference between space and place in her book The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society.

Most often place applies to our own “local” – entwined with personal memory, known or unknown histories, marks made in the land that provoke and evoke. Place is latitudinal and longitudinal within the map of a person’s life. It is temporal and spatial, personal and political. A layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there.

In this way Lippard encompasses the personal in the experience of space by creating a multilayered perception of its history and therefore its memory. The structure of public monument does not do this. Public monument marks a specific history and asks to be remembered in a particular way, while the landscape pertains to an open conceptual script of experience and memory for each participant. There is a contention here that resides between the monument and the landscape, and it is within this contention, I believe, that creativity can spark great invention. Chantal Mouffe states in her essay, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces”, that “…public space is the battleground where different hegemonic projects are confronted, without any possibility of final reconciliation.” Perhaps the contention that resides between public monument and the landscape is what Mouffe is suggesting; where the monument represents the hegemonic device while the public space tries to negotiate the structure with no reconciliation. In a space absent of reconciliation the authority of public monument collides with the multifaceted expanse of landscape.

The photograph has always been significant to me. My practice has used archival images from a personal collection, as well as a bank of images and footage that I have created. The photograph to me is of a form of monument, it is a marking of time, it is an object of the past, and it represents a particular history or memory. Therefore, the video projects I am currently working on perform a breaking down of the image, exposing its fallacy and its vulnerability. In breaking down the quality of the image I am also affecting the sense of memory and history within it.