MONUMENTS @ Geffen Contemporary

Continuing our journey through first-class art exhibitions last week, The Girl and I also took in MONUMENTS at Geffen Contemporary, a special exhibition of Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA LA).i

It wasn’t initially on our radar – certainly not near the top of the list after Huntington, Broad, LACMA, and Getty Center – but the week before we arrived in Tinseltown, my Dear Mother forwarded me the NYT agitprop review for this seemingly tragic belittlement of foundational American history, knowing full well that it would trigger my more traditional sensibilities.ii Indeed, reading Jason Farago’s article – complete with lowercase “white” and uppercase “Black” racially-coded moral inversions – I was suitably incensed. For in my apparently heterodox view, even if loving our ancestors might be too much to ask of this holier than thou generation, asking to merely respect those who laid down their lives for our freedoms and prosperities isn’t unreasonable;iii and the fundamentally ingracious premise of MONUMENTS’ just seemed entirely too baseiv for my tastes.

But eventually I calmed down, and after taking a Waymov from LACMA on Wilshire to the Broad/MOCA area downtown, The Girl and I figured that, worst case scenario, we go to the Geffen and have some fuel for spirited dinner-time conversation. So with that we dragged our relatively pasty complexions to the special exhibition in Little Tokyo, just 20-minutes walk down the hill from MOCA.

On a relatively peaceful Monday afternoon, there were no lines getting in: we just paid our entry fees and stepped into this Big White Cube Of Aggrievement. Blood ready to boil, teeth pre-set on edge, the initial impressions actually did surprisingly little to spike my adrenalin or cortisol. The red splattered paint on Frederick Wellington Ruckstull’s 1903 commission for the Maryland Daughters of the Confederacy commemorating fallen soldiers just looked lazy and cheap, which of course the “contemporary art” aspect of it was, even while the underlying sculpture impressed its quiet and lingering poeticism upon the viewer. In a weird way, the Sherwin Williamisation of the bronze figures failed to invoke guilt but did manage to mask any sense of pride, as if Christo had wrapped it with cloth and twine. Perhaps that was mission accomplished?

Relatively less diluted, and possibly even less dilutable, was the larger-than-life dual equestrian figures of General Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson by Laura Gardin Fraser to commemorate the Battle of Chancellorsville. Originally erected in 1948, and contrary to NYT/Farago’s ignoble claims, in no way did “the white cube of MOCA have a powerful neutralizing effect.”

Au contraire! Divorced from the distractions of parks and plants in its original home at Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore, the caesurian blank canvas rather uplifted and glorified the work, apocalyptically unveiling its civilisational monumentality and revealing the relative spiritual poverty of its surrounding contemporaries. Though to give curatorial credit where credit is due, the nose-dived Dodge from Dukes across room was delightfully cheeky, even smile-inducing.

Other statuary serenities included J. Maxwell Miller’s 1917 Pièta-inspired depiction of a mother cradling a dying soldier beneath a far-sighted female gaze. Originally installed in Bishop Square Park in Baltimore, it now sits across the exhibition floor from a wannabe Whiteyvi kid in the form of a 10′ tall “Descendent” by Karon Davis, as if plywood, paint, and children’s toys could somehow thumb their noses at bronze, beauty, and godly sacrifice. Because zero-sum cultural pissing contests are totally the same thing as positive-sum civilisational monuments donchaknow.

Tragically deconstructed but admittedly somewhat powerful in the resulting message was the “(s)words into plowshares” ingots. Bullion is very de riguere at this phase of the debasement cycle, and the missing “s” on one of the stamps was perhaps unwittingly chic. The only thing missing were really Virgilian “quotation marks.”

Elsewhere, Andres Serrano photographs of crisply hooded klansmen attracted some of the larger groups of visitors, and rightly so. The esoteric symbolism have so many layers of meaning to reveal beyond the explicitly pro-racial connotations, if only we give them the time. Anonymity, divine light, avenging spirits, sacred orders, ironic antichristicism… Just ask Clayton Bigsby.vii

I had to put my blinders on when walking past the utterly grotesque physique of Nona Faustine and her unwittingly retarded reobjectification of the black, the female, and the obese… oh well, some people never learn. And no, I don’t have the stomach to reproduce images of it here.

But overall, very much in spite of the claims of “audaciousness” claimed on the show’s posters and previews, the lasting impression of MONUMENTS was one of elision and lacklustreness. Not enough was actually said by the 19 mostly black artists assembled by co-curators Hamza Walker, Kara Walker, and Bennett Simpson. The subtler message therefore was one merely of projected envy and managed decline. In the US at present – as dynamic and relatively deregulated states like Texas, Florida, and North Carolina continue to capture talent (ie. youth) and grow their economic pies relative to crumbling California and dilapidating New York – it does indeed seem like “The South Will Rise Again”viii is the clear directional trend in the Americas.

One might therefore expect new flags to emerge in the future, but no less tension between the civilisation-loving Confederates and slave-lovingix Union.

[photo credits: author, except for Ruckstull paint party by Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times]

 

  1. MONUMENTS runs through to May 3, 2026 at MOCA LA. It’s probably the 10th most interesting art exhibition on now in Los Angeles, but if you’re there for enough days, it probably deserves to be on the list. ↩
  2. Even still, I probably wouldn’t have written this article had not my artist friends Jorden and David asked us if we’d seen the MONUMENTS exhibition in LA while they were over at our new shack re-installing “i feel u“. So I guess the exhibition was sufficiently noteworthy?

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  3. Honour thy mother and father… sound familiar? ↩
  4. Not “base” as in “based”, but rather as in “mean” or “low”. Big difference.

    Insert “your history means nothing to them” meme here, which is to say that it’s not the janky artists that I besmirch, but rather the hostile institutions that host them. ↩

  5. Waymo was 1/2 the price of Uber for this trip and essentially just as quick. While the back seats in the Jag i-Pace weren’t particularly luxurious or even all that supportive, the sense of privacy imparted to our conversational topics – whether lamenting third worldification or sharia-ization or what have you – was worth the price of entry alone. The novelty value was also very high, and the discount from the otherwise egregious costs in that city was not without appreciation either.

    But seriously, LA is pretty much one big Erewhon at this point? Hard to see the ROI on living there anymore, which probably explains the exodus…

    That being said, visiting LA once or twice a decade is still fine by me. But a bit of useful consumer advice: don’t bother staying at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills… Great location, well-designed rooms, decent little fitness centre, but badly understaffed at this price point. It’s no Cheval Blanc Paris, or even Janu Tokyo, but maybe this poor service was actually downstream of ICE deportations. ↩

  6. You thought Michael Jackson and Beyonce were the only ones who wanted to be better and lighter than when they were born? Hardly. From ghettos to geishas, the superficial impetus for personal improvement is ever the same. ↩

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  8. Dr. Arliss Loveless in Wild Wild West (1998) said it best! Will Smith just played his part. ↩
  9. What else do you call the Democrats’/Uniparty’s love affair with illegal mexicans and somalis? ↩