THE BICAMERAL Los Angeles exhibition “MONUMENTS” was always going to be an epochal must-see. Nothing less than the memorial ecology of the country was (potentially) at stake.
Divided between the Brick and the Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, the show’s two halves are calibrated quite distinctly in pacing and tone. At the Brick, the versatile gallery space becomes an abattoir where the base, plinth, socle, and aggregate parts of Charles Keck’s 1921 equestrian statue of Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson—removed from its perch before the Albemarle County Courthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2021—have been transmogrified into sites of reuse and reconstitution by the artist Kara Walker, who serves as a cocurator of the show, along with Bennett Simpson and Hamza Walker. At MoCA, ten twentieth-century sculptures dedicated as monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy commingle with a range of modern and contemporary works by nineteen artists and two collectives. These “conversation partners” for the monuments range from a selection of photographs made from glass-plate negatives by the itinerant portraitist Hugh Mangum (1877–1922) to new commissions animated by questions of memory, memorial, and site.
Walker’s Unmanned Drone, 2023, at the Brick, is the synecdochic node around which conversations about “MONUMENTS” have revolved. In the work, Keck’s statue is gouged and exploded into a voided mutiny of forms impossibly reassembled. The metaphoric infrastructure of white supremacy is being bucked and overthrown in this excavation by the patinated revenant of Stonewall Jackson’s fifteen-hand Morgan gelding, Little Sorrel (né Fancy). Here, the sado-sensual yearning of the Confederacy to instantiate itself through the fetishes and reliquaries of figurative sculpture is shown as hollow, impotent, all too discomfiting, and very real. Walker’s work offers a nonpareil example of how sculpture operating as monument is designed to be existentially heavy. Sections of the granite supports of the Keck statue are cannily manipulated and embellished with stars and swirling vortex-forms in Lithichrome paint into works of art themselves. Collectively, they operate as a chorus of exploded forms, as if the statue was once buried and broke free of its subterranean vault, mutating into its new, xenomorphic guise.