The Monuments Project: Power, Meaning, and Identity

Power and art are inseparable. At its most basic level, a work of art is testimony to the artist’s power to create: out of nothing, there is something, brought into being by the artist.

Prehistoric cultures interpreted creative power literally; the power to create the imate of THE HUNT was the power to posess it. [1] Over the millennia, this simple bond between power and art has given rise to countless ideas and theories, some remarkably insightful, others just plain sad (recall the now-classic blunder of the artist who mistook “notoriety for influence”).[3] At the critical center of many of the theories addressing power and art of the last century, and foundational to the Monuments Project is the work and thought of Marcel Duchamp.

As early as 1914, Duchamp’s first READYMADES signaled a breakdown in the power of the linguistic sign by directly addressing the arbitrary nature of meaning.[4] This aspect of Duchampian ‘primacy of the intellect’ has resurfaced in the work of artists and thinkers of the last 50 years in various ways; Adorno, Althausser, Anderson, Benjamin, Barthes, Baldessari…and on down the line.

In fact, it can be said that the majority of movements which have dominated this century–Dadaism, Surrealism, HAPPENINGS, Fluxus, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and Arte Povera–have directly or indirectly expressed this skeptical attitude toward the nature of power and meaning.[5]

In the last 20 years, within the context of sprawling multi-national capitalism, rising consciousness of feminist and minority issues, and deepening pessimism about technology and media, power and meaning ave undergone new and profoundly skeptical examination, often in the intense light of the issue of identity (or just who represents what/who and why).

Within this general area of investigation, artists of the last two decades–Cindy Sherman, Sherry Levine, JENNY HOLZER, among many others–have successfully, if problematically conducted serious critiques of received notions of power, meaning,a nd identity within a broad political context.

In a similar manner, the Monuments Project negotiates the realm of power, meaning and identity. But while it is historically rooted in such investigations, it must not be seen as simple mimicry or parody of these inevitably didactic “serious critiques” which all too often become narrow, moralizing pedagogy. Rather, Monuments is a studio project employing an extended allegorical exploration in which many of the specific concerns of the past decade–perception, repetition, imitation, memory and conscience–all seem to come to a head.

Three elements dominate this work however; one, an apparently ironic self-mocking narcissism addressing personal identity as represented/dictated by this image. Monuments represents me as I know I am often viewed or interpreted, but the very absurdity of the representation reveals the simple-minded thinking which often masquerades as politically-correct indictment; simultaneous irony and revelation.

The more interesting second and third elements, power and meaning, rely on the exponential distribution of this image which extablishes an allegorical microcosm of society in real time; the Monuments Project mirrors the dynamics of post cold war multi-national capitalism and the global electronic environment. The political and economic power of late capitalism and ints eventual global domination as a foregone conclusion is mirrored in the proliferation of this image, providing the viewer a myriad of opportunities to reassess these assumptions.

Considering the means by which this image is spread–global electronic/digital communications and information networks including computer, facsimile, telephone and television–provides another opportunity for reflection on the ramifications of the pervasive power of such technologies.

In fact, these technologies enable the proliferation, or repetition of this single image to a nearly incomrehensible degree, pointing to the “exhaustion of images and the need to deplete them through repetion until they become arbitrary and ultimately bear new meaning.”[8] On this level, the Monuments Project points not simply to “layers of meaning but to the exhaustion of images, of originality and ultimately of meaning; for if nothing has its own identity how do we know it?”[9]

Implicit in this project then is not a simple accusation or indictment, but many points of departure for evaluation of realities often hard to see in daily life, but hard to miss in Monuments.

Notes

1. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (New York: Vintage, 1958), vol. 1, p. 7. See also Theodore Adorno, “Thoughts on the Origin of Art-An Excursus” in Aesthetic Theory (London and New York: Routelege & Kegan Pool, 1984).

2. H.W. Janson, History of Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), p. 27.

3. For further discussion see Terry Eagleton, “The Marxist Rabbi: Walter Benjamin” and “Art After Auschwitz: Theodor Adorno” in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

4. See Rosalind Krauss, quoted in Craig Owens “The Allegorical Impulse; Toward a Theory of Postmodernism”, in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism; Rethinking Representation (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art/Boston; David Godine publisher, 1984), p. 21, [essay originally published in October, No. 12 (Spring 1980) pp. 67-86 and No. 13 (Summer 1980), pp. 59-83].

5. The obvious omission of Abstract Expressionism from this account , while admittedly open to debate, is in keeping with the well-rehearsed practice of its categorization as the belated capstone of impressionism, which itself culminated some 400 years of artistic development. See Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol. III, pp. 226 – 236 and Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p.1. See also Bernice Rose, Allegories of Modernism (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992).

6. Johanna Drucker, “Happenings [as collaboration]“ in Art Journal (Winter 1993), p. 51.

7. Jenny Holzer, quoted in an interview with Michael Auping, Jenny Holzer (New York: Universe, 1992), p. 106.

8. Bernice Rose, Allegories of Modernism (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992), p. 106.

9. Ibid, p. 87.