Artists Fawn Krieger, Ian Pedigo, Julia Rommel, and Roy Stanfield live in New York, make work that wouldn’t look out of place in Unmonumental and are invested in many of the exhibition’s themes. What follows is an artists’ perspective of one of the most talked-about exhibitions of the year. Lyra Kilston moderates.

[Editor’s note: this discussion took place during the first phase of the exhibition, when only the sculpture had been installed.]

Lyra Kilston: Let’s start with the term “monumental” with respect to the form of an object, the difficulty of creating political monuments in a pluralistic era and the museum's role in producing monumentality through its position as a space of authority. What do you think about the show's title and the New Museum’s claim that its inaugural show is an attempt to undermine its position as a venue that can uphold monumentality and historicization? Isn't it rather monumentalizing to devote an entire exhibition space to a somewhat similar kind of art?

Julia Rommel: I would define a monument as an object that physically signifies the power and importance of something or someone. I think a historical monument's physicality always stands in for something other than itself. The monument is not declaring the importance of its own materials and making. Instead, the materials and making are declaring the importance of some removed thing, idea, person, or event. But I do not think that this is the case with an art object. I think a piece of artwork can crystallize and signify the importance of its own making (and maker) or its own materials. By those qualifications, I have a hard time coming up with examples of artwork that are not monumental. And this show undoubtedly places each of the works in a context that monumentalizes the artist's concept and process.

Ian Pedigo: There are several works in the show that seem to rely on the monumental in their formal design, such as Manfred Pernice's architectural Commerzbank I, Urs Fischer's Untitled sword-in-the-stone piece, or Jim Lambie's pink, monolithic Split Endz (Wig Mix). Perhaps the aspect of the work that the Museum considers to be unmonumental is the materials used by the artists? It doesn’t seem like a very compelling argument, if this is the case. It is the equivalent of focusing on paint as a material used to make two-dimensional work.

Roy Stanfield: I agree. Is there actually content behind this work, or is it merely about materials and how they are arranged, as they’re presented by the curators? I was stunned by all the conceptual differences in the exhibition and how they went unrecognized. It was like the curators could see a trend but not see any of the work. If I was judging from the show and the farcical talk I saw, I would say that the curators really didn't care. I bet they'll move to the next trend with the same blasé approach. They're employed, and I look forward to seeing their bland exhibitions for the rest of my life. And when they die, I will build them the weakest unmonument I can muster.

Fawn Krieger: I’m glad this discussion will be entertaining! The monument can speak not just to perceived heroicism and triumph, but to national shame, an effort for reparation and restitution, acknowledgment and redemption perhaps, if this word still has any weight. So then I'm curious—what is the distinction between un- and non-, between unmonumentalizing and nonmonumentalizing, since the former would seem to point to reversal and the the latter to abandonment. Since the monument contains the possibility of the rupture, self-reflection and responsibility, I’m unsettled by the impulse to imply its reversal or undoing. I would like to see this exhibition—which is asking me to question the new New Museum's roles—actually take artistic practice outside of its own space, dematerialize its own turf, decentralize its headquarters. My sense is that this museum has perceived and continues to perceive itself as a hybrid—part highly shrunk, part digging through wreckage, part little sister, part derelict, part glam and all elastic. I can't see how, if asked to consider fragmentation and dispersal, the politics of the institution's own site wouldn't be brought into this. Also, it seems to me that another concern in challenging monumentality would be to include work that displaces the traditional ego through questions of authorship and expansive collaboration. I hope these components are part of the curatorial agenda as the exhibition unfolds.

LK: Fawn, I like your point about how “unmonumental” signals the utter failure of the monument (the concept with which curator Massimiliano Gioni also chooses to begin his essay), instead of its rich possibilities to self-critique. This raises the idea of "failure." It seems like Unmonumental is full of abject “failed objects”—intentional failures as sculptures or perhaps intentional failures (via rebellion) in the market—for a limited moment anyway.

IP: I don't see these sculptures as investing in failure at all. In fact, I think it relates more to returning to an origin where one can start over again, attempting to erase the mucky surfaces and rebuild from the ground up. It seems very optimistic to me, and much more open to potential.

RS: I hate to be a killjoy, but someone convince me that we should be taking this title or the New Museum so seriously. The work should be more important than the label “monument” or “unmonument”. The title is pulling too hard and labeling too much. It is too binary and removes the space that I thought some of this work was intended to create.

In my opinion the show is veiled. It takes on some of the features of material interest, but presents the same old thing—found objects presented for purposes of reading into connotation and then into identity. I propose that this is a reversal of reason, and that materiality should be the focus of this set of work. Artists who have misunderstood that, and/or did not present a compelling resistance to it, should not have been included. Ultimately, what it means is that the work is now packaged forgettably.

FK: An interesting idea—forgettable… Perhaps it's not so different from the terms the curators chose—disappearance, erasure, destruction, debasing. It's quite remarkable how strongly Carol Bove's work stands out. There's a necessity and significance to those materials that does not feel sarcastic nor expected nor inflated. It reflects an internal passion to me, one that I can only partially get into, but enough to know I'm not being mocked, evaded or lied to, which is the experience I have with a significant number of the works included in the exhibition.

LK: Let’s move on to the idea of collage, which to me seems to reflect our breakneck Google-image-searching moment of the Church of Surface. A resigned and ultimately nihilistic submission to this condition seems to come through to me, which is why I was drawn to some of the works—by Elliott Hundley, Matthew Monahan and Kristin Morgin, among others—that revealed some investment, not just rejection.

FK: I visited the show with Michael Brenson the other day and he made a reference to the exhibition suggesting a collision between Christianity and Paganism. We happened to be in front of Urs Fischer's sword-in-stone piece. The comment helped me to think about this exhibition within the context of ideological constructions, and the point at which they butt up against one another and create fissures and cast-offs. I'm curious if this point resonates with anyone else, and how it might elaborate on the wall text: “Historically, collage tends to appear in times of trauma and social change.”

IP: This statement feels like an attempt to contextualize the work in relation to recent disasters, both natural and man-made. In contrast, I think much of the work (at least the work I like, for instance Isa Genzken's Elephant or Elliot Hundly's Proscenum) is an attempt to use what is immediately available, to create something that fits into life with an ad hoc sensibility, rather than an attempt to follow a set of instructions or make work that seems conceptually sound. If anything, I think this attitude relates to the idea of necessity or survival, dealing with what happens after the traumatic event (if there was one), using what remains lying around, rather than making work that is inspired by what we see in the media.

LK: Yes, I don’t know about the statement that collage tends to appear in times of trauma, either. What about the popularity of collage in 1950s L.A., with Wallace Berman and his Semina group? Or the way that poets, or artists like Joe Brainard and Ray Johnson, have used collage playfully? I think we want to believe there are certain art forms that signal the red alert, but nothing is that simple. And when are we not in a time of trauma and social change? Especially in today's instant media climate—a climate in which a disaster in Bangladesh is our front-page news within minutes?

JR: This show had me immediately thinking about the making of history. Can Unmonumental be said to create (force) a false history? There was such a wide range of work—from work that seemed completely wrapped up in its own narrative to work that seemed to be a battle cry against its own context. So the greatest danger of this show, as I see it, is that the artists might be lumped together in history into one movement, based on this simplified similarity of material construction. I asked the artists during a public panel whether they were disturbed by the possibility of such a history being formed. The answers I got were reticent enough to make me suspect that they indeed were. A real shame of the history the show creates is that more interesting connections will be overlooked.

LK: When the New Museum tries to be un-hegemonic by asserting a type of sculpture that is un-monumental, a new hegemony rises to take its place—a hegemony in which a precious (and sincere) carved marble bust made in 2008 would be relegated to history's dustbin.

JR: I think the possibility of a distinction between thinking about the work and thinking about the museum is in large part what we are questioning here. As stated by the curators, one of the central premises of the Unmonumental show was to bring together work in the spirit of Marcia Tucker's progressiveness. Yet the show does not elicit this spirit. What would Richard Tuttle think? Much of the work in Unmonumental evokes Tuttle’s style, yet curating work that evokes the style of Richard Tuttle is the antithesis of his original radical gesture.*

RS: One big happy collage unmonument; one big unhappy college monument.

LK: If I had to choose between the two, I’d choose the first.

*Richard Tuttle’s exhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker at the Whitney, sparked the uproar that caused her to leave and found the New Museum in 1977.

Work by the artists who participated in the roundtable can be seen here:

www.fawnkrieger.com

www.ianpedigo.com

www.juliaannerommel.net

www.mmmmmmmmmmmmmimic.net (Roy Stanfield)

Lyra Kilston is a writer living in New York. She is an editor at Modern Painters.