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Larry and Debby Kline
"Reviews: West Coast: San Francisco"
in Art
Papers, March/April 2005
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ART
PAPERS MARCH/APRIL 2005
REVIEWS / West Coast: San Francisco
Monuments are repositories of
collective public narratives more than personal memory triggers. If our
interpretations of history and our memories of events differ, monuments
nonetheless strangely condense them through accessible representations
and public markers. Marking the thirtieth anniversary of SF Camerawork
Gallery, Monument Recall: Public Memory and Private Spaces is an
ambitious group show featuring works by twenty artists (October
26-November 24, 2004). If curators Paula Levine, Trena Norval, and
Laurie Blavin successfully crack open the collective cache of
generalizations and assumptions about monuments, they do not go much
further. The exhibition lacks focus and suffers from overcrowding.
Three pieces address the life and fate of monuments with sophistication
and depth. Mark Breast van Kempen's Monument to Forgotten Dead, 2004,
combines photographs and instructions for a self-guided walking tour of
sea-polished gravestones left behind in the defunct Golden Gate
Cemetery. The area is now home to both the Legion of Honor and a golf
course. The large, foreign rock markers along the shoreline are still
visible from the cliffs above. Manuel Piña also shows large
photographs of remnants of monuments. In On Monuments, 2000, memorials
live on, through the very traces of their removal, to outlast the
regimes that erected them. The artist masterfully captures vacant
pedestals and holes in the pavement where statues of past presidents
used to stand along the Avenida de los Presidentes in Havana,
Cuba. Jeannene Przyblyski and Mitche Manitou's Travels with Anza
and Carlos, 2004, a collaboration with the mysterious San Francisco
Bureau of Urban Secrets, displays materials concerning the nomadic life
of two San Francisco statues: eighteenth-century Juan Bautista de Anza
and his patron, Carlos III of Spain. Their walking map allows viewers
to retrace the ambulation of each of these inconvenient public
monuments as it was erected, moved, and erected again.
Documentation
of off-site works provides some of the most intriguing pieces in the
exhibition. David Maisel's Lake Project Billboards, 2004, are exquisite
aerial images of the ecological destruction at Owens Lake. Debby
and Larry Kline's Electric Fields of California Site #4, Encryption,
2004, are fluorescent tubes located under large electrical transmission
towers alongside a Sonoma County highway. Captured in photographs,
invisible electricity saturation becomes visible as it makes the plasma
in the tubes glow. Both projects beautifully expose our frightening
impact on the environment.
KW:a's Shroud of Memory, 2004, and Germaine Koh's Relay, 2004,
similarly call attention to the mundane objects we leave behind-de jure
monuments to our culture. Quotidian objects cast in clear resin, cut
into soap- sized pieces and patched together like a hard-edged quilt
are placed on a large floor light box in Shroud of Memory. Visible to
passersby, a light flashes intermittently from SF Camerawork's street
level entrance in Relay. The flashes visually translate SMS text
messages that, sent to its phone number, are then converted to Morse
Code. If these pieces seem out of place, venturing too far from the
meat of monument issues, they are nonetheless sufficiently complex to
keep us revisiting them mentally.
Many other selected works, however, dilute the issue. Some pieces are
too narrowly dependent on existing monuments or on the monumental
impulse; some also seem to confuse monument and place. Other selections
are still more puzzling. Too many works, tenuous connections, and
diffuse ideas make it hard work for the viewer to glean meaningful
ideas from Monument Recall.
I applaud the curators for tackling overdetermined and monolithic
concepts such as the monument and collective/public memory, and
attempting to renegotiate their boundaries. All the more so since an
anniversary exhibition could have been uselessly self-referential.
Ultimately, however, numerous lines of thought are indiscriminately
left open. This reflects a soft curatorial premise. This lack of
investment in a few, thoughtfully selected axes of investigation
delegates both too much and too little to the viewer. No position
needed here.
-Meredith Goldsmith
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