black & white photograph C-print:152 x 110,7 cm
Matthew Buckingham presents a narrative directly connected with a highly symbolic site in the United States, the Mount Rushmore Memorial*. He elaborates a historiographic narrative of this place and switches it into the domain of science fiction by proposing a photograph of the Memorial as it should appear in 500 000 years. The effigies of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt become unrecognizable. In the texts, deployed in a chronological order, we learn, among other things, that the sculptor Gutzon Borglum was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Buckingham tells real and fictional stories to test their validity and exemplarity in the present. The installation, featuring the image of the Memorial, can lead us to reflect on our role in writing new chapters of this history. * The Memorial is located in South Dakota in the United States, it is an 18 meters high monumental granite sculpture initiated in 1925, representing four of the most significant presidents in American history.
Matthew Buckingham was born in 1963 in the United States of America. He has recently had solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. His critical approach reenacts real or fictional stories while interrogating their validity in order to clarify the present. He considers the construction of collective memory and individual memory. He asks how these memories can be diametrically opposed to the writing of History with a capital H dependent on the Modernist ideology of progress. Several of his works are linked to the exploration of the lives of significant individuals, such as important figureheads for Feminism. His work relates to the questions posed as a consequence of Cultural Studies in the 1970s, of Queer and Feminist theories as well as Postcolonial studies. In his articulation of reality and fiction, he is close to works which are already in the collection by Mario Garcia Torres or by Walid Raad.
This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005...
His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs...
Fred Wilson’s flag paintings document the 20th century history of African people, indexing the period of liberation from colonialism...
Glaze (Savana) (2005) is an assemblage of found materials: a car wheel, a tire, and a wooden plinth of the type traditionally used to display sculpture...
Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
The Fifth Quarter might have taken its mysterious inspiration from the eponymous Stephen King story collated into the Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection...
In the installation Our Love is like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours, Martin Boyce uses common elements from public gardens – trees, benches, trashbins– in a game which describes at once a social space and an abstract dream space...
“BC/AD” (Before Cancer, After Diagnoses) is a video of photographs of the artist’s face dating from early childhood to the month before he died, accompanied by the last diary entries he wrote from April 2004 to July 2005 (entitled “50 Reasons for Getting Out of Bed”), from the period from when he lost his voice, thinking he had laryngitis, through the moment he was diagnosed with lung cancer and the subsequent treatment that was ultimately, ineffective...
The triptych Black Star Press is part of the series ‘The Black Star Press project’ initiated in 2004 by the American artist Kelley Walker...
In 2008, Grassie was invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to document the transformation of some of its spaces...
Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled...
Wagon Wheel is a work with a fundamental dynamism that derives both from the rotating movement of the elements suspended on poles and the kicking of the legs of the figure...