"MONUMENTS" Opens — The Brick
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| Kara Walter, Unmanned Drone, 2023 |
"MONUMENTS" opened at The Brick with weekday crowds and security lines. The Brick is presenting Kara Walker's Unmanned Drone, her repurposed/recombinant take on Charlottesville's decommissioned statue of "Stonewall" Jackson. Though it's nominally a one-piece show, the sculpture plus contextual material can easily take the better part of a lunch hour.
Unmanned Drone is a 3D collage, created with the assistance of digital modeling. Like most collages it trades in found grotesquerie. Walker's chimera has an uncanny power: You start when you catch it in your peripheral vision, as the brain registers heads and limbs that don't add up.
I found the contextual material surprisingly absorbing. It covers Confederate General Jackson, his horse Little Sorrel, and sculptor Charles Keck; those responsible for putting up the statue (in 1921) and taking it off view (in 2021). Given that right-wing media is already attacking "MONUMENTS" as propaganda, it's worth saying the gallery texts struck me as a model of making a factual story interesting and letting the visitor navigate the many shades of ethical gray. Consider Beaux Arts sculptor Charles Keck. Like many monumental sculptors of the time, he took commissions where he could get them, sometimes from patrons of diametrically opposed political views. Perhaps Keck's best-known monument is the Booker T. Washington Memorial at Tuskegee University, dedicated the year after the Jackson statue.
However, in Walker's artwork, General Jackson surely represents a brand of American evil that comes wrapped in faith, patriotism, and monuments. In a conversation with Brick curator Hamza Walker, the artist mentioned the characters of Flannery O'Connor and "the knots people are tying inside of themselves to adhere to a belief they think is true and right."
Reservations are available on The Brick's website. Unmanned Drone will be on view through May 3, 2026.
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| Charles Keck, Thomas Jonathan Jackson Memorial, 1921. Photo by Nickmorgan2 |
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| Charles Keck, Lifting the Veil of Ignorance (Booker T. Washington Memorial), 1922. Photo by Carol M Highsmith, Library of Congress Collection |
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| Kara Walker, Tread, 2023 |
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| Kara Walker, Ghost, 2024 |
Comments
I'd buy her "Star Spangled."
By deconstructing the statue and reassembling it in a twisted form, Walker reveals the sharp edges of this thing. Historical statues try to smooth things over, even in how they reference violence (e.g., waving a sword triumphantly). Here, Walker lowers the sword and puts the sharp end against the flesh of the hand. Walker reminds us that this thing can cut you.
--- J. Garcin
> crowds and security lines.
When razzing LACMA for being another one of LA's various locations of contemporary art (and seemingly way too many of them), I didn't even think about places like The Brick. However, if that gallery is able to bring out visitors, good for them.
However, by the standards of certain museums in North America or Europe, etc, LA's LACMA, Getty and the Huntington (much less the region's contemporary art museums or a Simon) draw comparatively modest annual visitors. That's even more of a "?!" when the institution in San Marino also contains auxiliary (and crowd-pleasing) parts of a large garden and library.
Whether applicable or true or not, I recall a writer based in San Francisco over 20- years ago saying that people in LA weren't as much into the visual arts. In other respects (and maybe somewhat relevant or connected too?), central Florida attracts more tourists each year than either LA or SF does.
At least with "Guernica" we see the full-throated degeneracy of war. Walker's message seems too clinical, edgy but not visceral. Oh, well. She's done so much better.