UNTITLED (ANTI-MONUMENT)

On the night of the 28th of April 2010, a bag of cement was liberated outside of the University College of London's Campus. The cement was carried into the dark recesses of the university grounds and systematically dumped onto the stony base of a small gazebo within a secluded part of the campus. While the cement mixture waited patiently, water was carried back-and-forth from the men's washroom with two 1 litre water bottles and periodically poured onto the sandy mixture. When the cement reached the right consistency, the mixture was walked over like one does to grapes when making wine. The work was dedicated to a colleague at the Slade who gave me a small publication she had wrote on monuments. To return the favour, I declared to her that I would make her a monument. Instead of constructing a large phallus or figurative sculpture, I decided to erect (or de-erect) an anti-form anti-monument in the vein of Robert Morris and Lynda Bengalis. The day after the anti-monument was constructed, I returned to the site to see that the monument had disappeared. Only a stain of its former self remained. When I went to the place where I usually lock up my bike, I realized that a security guard was waiting for me and I overheard him whisper into his walkie-talkie, without subtlety or tact: "If I see him, do I call the police?" Needless to say, I was terrified and I stayed away from campus for an entire week, until I was summoned to the Deputy Dean's office. In the meantime, I had two close friends write these responses to the work. After I explained my motives for making the sculpture to the 'Dean,' he agreed that there was no malicious or ill-content in the act. We both agreed that the best solution would be to apologize to every single worker who had to clean up anti-form, anti-monument cement puddle.

–Andrew Witt

The monument is an anti-monument. If the monument is that which the victor builds to invest a sense of conclusion in the present, as Benjamin Buchloh says it is, the anti-monument must preserve the future through acts of aesthetic inauguration. To thieve a bag of dry concrete and have the natural elements paste it to the ground –that is itself the reversal necessary for the inundation of possibility, since what else remains of victory if its glue is strewn?

–Nathan Crompton

I read Kafka’s metamorphosis this morning. There was a commentary in my book about the story, which said that all language is metaphor for describing the world. Like metaphor, language establishes itself high, a blanket whose contours vaguely conform to the undulating and multitextured world beneath it. Yet this blanket is not soft, its enunciation results in its encrustation. It becomes a part of the world, and for this reason, it is immediately taken literally. And all metaphors, (according to the guy) when taken literally, become monstrous. Reading monuments as a metaphor for historical events, I agree that they too share this quality. The shifting sands beneath the obelisk sway onward, they leave behind a threatening pointy shell. Literalized and autonomous, it can no longer find the same sense of belonging to the circumstances that created it. It describes no reality, traces nothing below it, nor houses anything. Thus, from outside and from inside, it becomes a monster. The guy, Stanley Corngold, writes: "Kafka's "counter-metamorphosis" of the metaphor in The Metamorphosis –so Anders and Sokel propose– is inspired by his fundamental objection to the metaphor. His purpose is accomplished through the literalization of the metaphor." I think what Corngold is trying to say is that by making the monstrous nature of the metaphor explicit, Kafka gets underneath the hard shell of how we describe reality, finds a home in it, and, speaking about it from without, sees up at it from within. For some reason your anti-monument and the chain of events it has caused reminded me of Kafka’s story. Like Gregor in the metamorphosis, it presents an interesting case: it has made the monstrous nature of the monument as metaphor explicit, by revealing its metaphoric literalization visually. The discord that resulted with the security guard, the strewn glue, these are all confirmations, literalizations, encrustations of the monstrosities reverberating from confirmed, literalized, encrusted metaphor. And so, the concrete ground by the bench, layered over by more seeping concrete that now undulates by its own law, spreading outward and hardening, into the hard fact of the security measures and narrow, necessary escapes. Tough, textured tracks trickle trying to trace trails through the trapped troubled times be low. Perhaps there are bubbles between the concrete ground and the anti-monument, invisible to everyone but the bugs there; invisible to us even when freed by the hacking axe or mase of whoever chops the anti-monument back into rubble and takes it away.

–Victor Sanabria