Art Review - February Issue - (Page 53)

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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 characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - February Issue

Art Review - February Issue

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