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MONUMENTS, THE MONUMENTAL, AND US “MONUMENTality” at the Getty Research Institute
“MONUMENTality,” at the Getty Research Institute, looks at the human desire to create grand monuments to our ideals—monuments that may endure, but may also fall to time or new regimes or new ideals. The exhibit also places contemporary Los Angeles squarely within the context of humanity’s ongoing obsession with monumentality. The exhibit shows us that monumentality, designed to evoke strength, can really be a fragile thing. The city of Palmyra, Syria, shown here through the photography of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, for centuries hosted monumental ruins that dated from the third to first centuries BCE—towering tombs and the entrance to a massive temple that could once accomodate thousands of worshipers. But in recent years, the structures have been destroyed by ISIS. Los Angeles puts a spin on the concept of monumentality. In its deification of the concept of sprawl, it lays the monument on its side. Ed Ruscha’s 25-foot long accordion book from 1966 depicts every building along the fabled Sunset Strip. Sixtyfive photographs shot at regular intervals from a low-flying helicopter by Lane Barden, depict water, rail, and automotive arteries that define Los Angeles. “The photographs in ‘Linear City’ seek to establish a new iconography about Los Angeles—an iconography that describes how Los Angeles functions, how it grows, and why it looks the way it looks…”, says Mr. Barden. Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966 The monuments depicted in MONUMENTality serve as frames to focus our attention—be it the life of one small human remembered after death or something so vast as a slice of the cosmos. “The task of land art…,” writer and critic Lucy Lippard is quoted as saying, “is to focus landscapes too vast for the unaccustomed eye to take in, or to give us views into the cosmos, connecting the places where we stand with the places we will never stand.” The implications inherent in the exhibit are vast as well, as they potentially speak to questions in the world today. Sometimes a monument should stand for centuries, and we might justifiably condemn those powers such as ISIS that would presume to take it down. Sometimes a monument needs to be looked at with new eyes, as depicted in artist in residence Theaster Gates’ “Dancing Minstrel,” in which a monumental version of a toy depicting a racial stereotype pervasive in American culture lies toppled and disassembled on the gallery floor. The criteria for decision-making are an on-going issue. MONUMENTality Curated by Frances Terpak, Maristella Casciato, and Katherine Rochester, with input from Getty Scholars in Residence Through April 21 Getty Research Institute, Getty Center www.getty.edu
The toppling of the Vendôme Column, Bruno Braquehais, 1871. The Getty Research Institute.
Theaster Gates, Dancing Minstrel, 2016 and 2018
Lane Barden and The Linear City, 2004-2005
Crossing Under the 134 Freeway from photographic project The Los Angeles River as Sunken Garden in the Linear City portfolio, Lane Barden, 2004–2005. The Getty Research Institute. © Lane Barden, 2018
OTIS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN CELEBRATES ITS 100TH ANNIVERSARY, NOVEMBER 2018
LA ART NEWS