Enemy’s Enemy: A Monument To A Monument
2012
87 cm x 6.5 cm [diameter]; base 12 cm x 12 cm x 2.5cm
Tuan Andrew Nguyen
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat. The flames surround him eroding the extremity of the bat. The delicate sculpture refers to the sacrifice of the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, who immolated himself on June 16th 1963, in reaction to the discrimination and the repressive politics of the Diem Catholic regime (regime installed by the Americans) towards the Buddhists. Ironically a memorial was built where the sacrifice took place in Hô Chi Minh-City, despite the fact that under Communism, religion was incompatible with the desire to transform social class. The artwork recalls the shape of the monument; a monument to a monument. By acknowledging this historical action on a famous national site, one can witness the Vietnamese communist government sympathizing somehow with the victims of the American ‘puppet’ Diem, despite its security policy which guaranteed most of the time an equally repressive behavior. The representation of this act on a sports accessory, which is supposed to symbolize America and its different social classes, is a way to recall that this popular game reveals social and political behavior. Baseball is considered like a national sport in the United States and Louisville Slugger is one of the most famous brands in the history of baseball. In some ways, it could be considered as a sacrilege to carve such a symbolic national item, that represents power but also violence. The social symbol carried by baseball and the hypocritical act of building a memorial monument in tribute to this monk, both come from different contexts but are, however, used in favor of political contingency. Religion and sport are social occasions for community gatherings, but may also provoke conflict and violence.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen is an artist and filmmaker, one of the three founders of The Propeller Group created in 2006. He always establishes his work within cultural, political and historical contexts and usually refers to the formal strategies of conceptual art. He studied at CalArts in Los Angeles but currently lives in Ho Chi Minh City.
Colors:
Related works featuring themes of: » Americana, » Cross-Cultural Dialogue, » Film/Video, » Intricately Sculpted
© » KADIST
Jeffrey Vallance
1978Vallance’s Rocket is a vibrant picture in which masses of color and collage coalesce into a central vehicle, yet the whole surface seems lit with the roar of space travel...
© » KADIST
Bani Abidi
2008The threshold in contemporary Pakistan between the security of private life and the increasingly violent and unpredictable public sphere is represented in Abidi’s 2009 series Karachi ...
© » KADIST
Mario Garcia Torres
2004Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
© » KADIST
Karl Haendel
2011Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...
© » KADIST
Koki Tanaka
2009Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...
© » KADIST
Bani Abidi
2012The perceived effortlessness of power, projecting above experiences of labored subordination is examined in Death at a 30 Degree Angle by Bani Abidi, which funnels this projection of image through the studio of Ram Sutar, renowned in India for his monumental statues of political figures, generally from the post-independence generation...
© » KADIST
Juan Capistran
2005White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...
© » KADIST
Gregory Crewdson
2005Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...
© » KADIST
Lisa Oppenheim
2003The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
© » KADIST
Cildo Meireles
1975Meireles, whose work often involves sound, refers to Sal Sem Carne (Salt Without Meat) as a “sound sculpture.” The printed images and sounds recorded on this vinyl record and it’s lithographed sleeve describe the massacre of the Krahó people of Brazil...
© » KADIST
Alexis Smith
1995In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
© » KADIST
Juan Capistran
2002The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...
© » KADIST
Lisa Oppenheim
2003The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
© » KADIST
Lisa Oppenheim
2003The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
© » KADIST
Aaron Young
2007The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel...
© » KADIST
Oded Hirsch
2012Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
© » KADIST
Dinh Q. Lê
2008Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition...
© » KADIST
Barry McGee
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...