The Brooklyn Rail

In The Monument, The Monster, and The Maquette, multi-media artist Michael Rakowitz takes the historical monument as his subject, holding our mythologized heroes—and the notable sculptors who cast their personas into public art—accountable for the coverup of historical truth. American Golem and Behemoth (both 2022), the two large sculptures dominating an exhibition that also includes a selection of drawings, confront us with humor, extensive research, and a long reach into cultural and personal diasporas.

The ancient monster Humbaba, the demon in the epic tale of Gilgamesh, presides over American Golem. Rakowitz surrounds him with a mixed-media brood of original, reproduction, and commercial antique sculptures, maquettes, and found objects, all displayed in seeming disarray on a stand constructed from Jeffersonian-era mantles. He treats these objects not as venerated symbols related to American public art, but as writing surfaces for correcting the misleading mythologies public monuments were meant to convey. He also raises questions about entitlement: Where did that copper come from? Who now owns that ancient Iraqi artifact?

Humbaba’s head, for example, a copy of an 1800–1600 BCE Babylonian mask acquired by the British Museum, is set upon a wooden church bell mold. Rakowitz’s handwritten notes on the wood surface reveal that this mold came from the Meneely Bell Foundry, a Troy, New York foundry that provided many mid-nineteenth-century southern churches with bells. He further documents that the Confederate army ultimately melted most of them to make Civil War cannons. And notice the stack of stone slabs forming a plinth base for Humbaba: they’re labeled to indicate the Indigenous tribal lands from which they were extracted. Copper and cassiterite ores used for metal sculptures, among the American Golem artifacts, were likewise mined from seized native territories.

How, one wonders, can you separate racist content in art from racist attitudes of the artist who created the work? It is among the larger questions Rakowitz raises in hand-written notes scrawled across the surface of Thomas Ball’s Portrait of a Young Child (1874), the white marble bust included in American Golem. Ball designed the Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Freedman’s Memorial (1876), in Washington DC, a work paid for by the wages of freed slaves. It portrays a standing Abraham Lincoln holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, an unshackled but still supplicant Black man kneeling at his feet. In documenting this history on the surface of Ball’s marble portrait, Rakowitz informs us that Ball fired the Black model for the memorial because “of the ‘unpleasantness of being obliged to conduct him through our apartment.’” He also writes: “[Frederick] Douglass noted that Lincoln was motivated more to save the Union than to free slaves, and he ‘strangely told us that we were the cause of the war.’” In July 2020 the Boston Art Commission voted to remove the city’s copy of Ball’s memorial sculpture; it was removed in December 2020.

As is noted in the exhibition’s press release, the word “monument” derives from the Latin verb monere, meaning to remind or to warn. Rakowitz’s writing on the objects included in American Golem plays with the potential collisions in this etymology, allowing each memorial-related element of the work to demonstrate, remonstrate, and admonish and, in so doing, identify the monsters lurking within public art’s original, idealized personas. Rakowitz’s appropriations of antique memorabilia are artworks unto themselves; his written texts are drawings merged with sculptural material to shape a different work of art, a different metaphor. His handwriting invites an intimate dialogue between artist and viewer that makes us think: How do we contextualize our past and present it in a way that is truthful? What will people accept as truth?

Public sculptures slated for removal often await their fate beneath a shroud-like black tarp. Rakowitz’s Behemoth replicates that sight. Menacingly rising and impotently collapsing, this synthetic inflatable monster breathes pure metaphor into the cultural disconnects national monuments have come to symbolize. But so does this work recall Rakowitz’s “ParaSITE” structures, inflatable tents that attach to a building’s outtake vents, providing warmth and protection to the homeless in winter. Reinventing the tarp that renders false heroes invisible, these portable structures suggest the possibility of a new monument, this one embracing human struggle, survival, and compassion.

A serendipitous moment informing Rakowitz’s history occurred when Jane Lombard Gallery featured, on the weekend of his vernissage, works by Allan Wexler at the Independent 20th Century Art Fair. Wexler was Rakowtiz’s professor and mentor at SUNY Purchase, and the bond between them is palpable. Rakowitz spoke with me about his student days, about Wexler’s profound influence on his art, saying:

He taught me to take things apart, to reinvent them, and project meaning into objects; to be true to myself, not to trends. He generated a different energy, urging students to be experimental, to go from the profane to the sacred, to think about art in terms of humanity, to never lose the warmth.

To be sure, the student learned his lessons well.