The Art of Return by James Meyer

The Art of Return by James Meyer

Author:James Meyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ART000000 Art / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-09-10T16:00:00+00:00


Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells—in other words, neutral rooms called “galleries.” A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world. A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral.134

Nelson does not heed the lesson of Smithson’s text, his Foucauldian critique of the “neutral” white cube. Replicating the Woodshed inside an art gallery, he contains a project that was meant to scatter and decay, betraying the older artist’s intentions. He stages the fantasy that we could “return,” if that were possible—that we could turn back entropy. He allows us to imagine for a moment that we are seeing the just-buried Woodshed for ourselves—and then he forecloses that desire. We are reminded, after the initial gasp of surprise, that Nelson’s shed is ersatz after all. That it will be dismantled after the show comes down, far more quickly than Smithson’s work was, in fact. We are reminded that his work is temporary and contemporary, even as Smithson’s Woodshed endures. The entropic work flickers in and out of awareness; the idea of the Woodshed has far outlasted the sculpture that Smithson made.

Nelson’s Woodshed speaks of its moment. It is the spring of 2004. The outrageous abuses of Muslim prisoners at Abu Ghraib have come to light. The British military will count seventy-five casualties in Iraq before the year is over.135 Nelson’s replica of Smithson’s earthwork, buried in sand, in a hall in Oxford, England; his drums emblazoned with the logos of energy conglomerates; his package inscribed in Arabic; and his projection of Maxwell’s creepy lecture locate viewers with exacting precision in the very place and time of viewing. And this establishes a structure of comparison between that situation and another place and time. Nelson’s remake of an iconic artwork of the Vietnam War era exposes an absence of dissent in his own time, the hopeless failure of the Left and peace activists to mount an effective response to the U.S.–U.K. invasion of oil-rich Iraq.136 His simulacral Woodshed confronted viewers’ nostalgia for the Sixties and Seventies, when avant-garde works of art and activism seemed to make a difference.



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