Art Review - February Issue - (Page 53)
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/mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 10 FEATURE SAM
DURANT A rustic wooden bench shows crude and practical workmanship.
Nearby, on the ground, a rubbery ear of corn peaks from its husk. Upon the
bench, a couple of circular tape reels rest on a pile of the
mid-twentieth-century square boxes they presumably came out of. Opposite
this, on the other side of the bench, sits a foot. It’s brown and
rubbery, the sole exposed, and appears no more or less real than the corn,
the bench or the media technology. This Log Bench Still Life 2006 is among
the works Sam Durant has recently made out of the remnants of a defunct
Massachusetts history museum that cashed in on its real-estate potential.
This still life in three dimensions makes an old European art tradition
into the site of wacky American-style conflation. Recalling California
assemblage traditions as well as artist Fred Wilson’s institutional
critiques made from museum collections, Durant playfully redirects his
source material, liberating it from the dustbins of history literally
saving it from the garbage heap . Yet this simple group of
nothingimportant is the USA itself – from risky colonial project to site
of too many things that aren’t themselves – its technological and
ideological span all wrapped up in an arrangement of representations,
including the severed extremity of an Indian’s appendage. With
barbarians constantly collecting at the gates of the state, representing
the other has long been a preoccupation of Western image culture. In the
US, the history paintings that form the beginnings of a national style
portray Native Americans with European formal mastery. From Benjamin
West’s Revolutionary Era idealisations of peaceful, beautifully
decorated Indians in cross-cultural contact with colonists, to John
Vanderlyn’s The Death of Jane McCrea 1804 , in which hunky, beastly
savages violate the soft white flesh of the new nation, allegorising the
other through pictures sets the framework for the American self. This
tendency has mobilised the thrust of American history, through everything
from minstrel theatre to the disjoined images of radical Islam we now see
on our cable news. The protean conception of the American self, based on
some loose organising principles rather than any authentic autochthony,
would lose its shape entirely without the limits of otherness. Sam
Durant’s recent works have explored the memorialisations of otherness
that mark quirky American spaces with their histories. Durant, who grew up
in the vicinity of the mythic Plymouth Rock, site of the Pilgrims’
landing in the New World, assembled the figures and props he bought from
the museum into sculptural installations for his recent exhibition at
Massachusetts College of Art. Defunct bodies made of a reddish-brown
rubbery material come together in eerie and silly combinations. Mobilising
the uncanny look of a haunted wax museum, Durant’s project combines an
antique-store’s kitschy aura with deconstructed historiography, showing
us the tattered banality of colonial logic. The fraying costumes, the dead
eyes, the wear and tear of the decades that have passed since these objects
were made: all of these contribute to a material mash-up of the 1600s, the
1960s and now. Durant successfully disperses the mystical ambience of
these memorial objects, and consequently the superstitions they
memorialise. Rather than materialising as a sturdy foundation for a
national historical project, these broken-down myths in wax-figure form
appear particularly flimsy. Durant’s manipulation of these figures shows
how malleable such asserted natural histories are, whether in the hands of
hegemonic power or a clever Southern California artist. Emerging as a
sculptor interested in the aesthetics of social policy during the early
1990s, Durant has manoeuvred through an array of material and political
intersections with his impressive body of work. Durant and his longtime
partner, artist Andrea Bowers, share an interest in relating art
production to activism and locating art historical precedents within their
political contexts. These interests stand in contrast to the new-beauty
discourse that dominated much of the neoliberal 1990s. While Bowers’s
recent, notable projects have included work around abortion rights,
passive resistance strategies and the AIDS quilt, Durant, who has made
work dealing with protest movements in recent years, is now exploring
America’s troubled relationship with the indigenous population it
displaced. These projects reflect a broader cultural sense that history
may matter, and this is an approach that Durant and Bowers both bring to
their work as art instructors as well as > above: We Are the People, 2003,
installation view, Project Row House, Houston, TX. Courtesy Blum & Poe, Los
Angeles ARTREVIEW p 50-57 Sam Durant AR Feb07.indd53 53 9/1/07 00:11:19 Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - February Issue
Art Review - February Issue
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