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reviews matthew monahan

moca focus:
matthew monahan
museum of contem por ary art, los angeles
26 July – 29 october
Crumpled faces and the dismembered bodies of monumental statuary litter the gallery at MOCA
Grand Avenue, bathed in natural light. Walking through the collection of sculptures makes one
feel, at first, as if face-to-face with the colossal heads of Olmec warriors or the shattered body
of the antique Ozymandias, the large figurative bodies inviting stories to be told or histories
speculated. Matthew Monahan’s work depicts what appear to be primitive representations of an
ancient past, but his use of contemporary materials and references makes this exhibition less a
hearkening-back to the mystical primitivism of a distant past than an attempt to engage with the
primal disorder hidden beneath the clean explanations of modernity.
Monahan never attempts to hide the historical provenance of his work; the recycled
plywood plinth proudly names its place of origin and date of manufacture; the gold leaf and thick
paint don’t attempt to hide the white foam. Some of them have built-in vitrines, as if Monahan’s
work already attempts to dress itself up as an object of study.
On second glance, these statues appear like artefacts from a
post-apocalyptic future where humans have lost civilisation,
only to use its leftover materials to build shrines for new idols.
These new deities’ bodies appear wracked in pain, marked by
the contortions of fear and terror, but their faces manifest a
beatific placidity. They look calm in their tortures.
Nor does Monahan mask the intellectual space from
which these objects originate. The figure that rests upon
the box in Sanatorium Artaud (1994/2005) is reminiscent
of the figures Antonin Artaud drew while committed.
These artefacts and mummies, broken monuments, cracked
harlequin masks and smashed busts are the primitive disorder
and madness hiding beneath the sophisticated false reality
that Artaud so ardently attempted to smash.
The dual dates of 1994 and 2005 for Sanatorium
Artaud mark much of the work in the exhibition, as if
Monahan were excavating his own past, trying to find new
ambiguities to unearth within his subject, to go deeper the
second time. Monahan’s work neither sings a paean to the
noble savage nor envisions an imaginary, apocalyptic future
through artefacts, but rather attempts to engage disordered
mystical experience in an orderly, contemporary context.
The statues he creates are idols, but only after their twilight.
Their broken-down shapes and cheap modern materials are
sick gods born in a century that can no longer believe in them.
The mysticism they capture is the grime and grandeur of the
street-corner schizophrenic who might have been a shaman,
fetishes sold as cheap commodities without the protection
of animist spirits. In Monahan’s work, the disorder is sacred.
But given our profane age, it can’t help but majestically,
monumentally and purposefully fail. Andrew Berardini
matthew monahan’s studio, 2007.
courtesy museum of contemporary art,
los angeles
artreview 162
NEW_October_REVIEWS.indd 16 4/9/07 12:42:12
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