Portable War Memorial

[Dave Monroe]

>From Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1996), Ch. 5, "Artists and Workers,"
Sec. 4, "Language Games," pp. 150-9 ...

   "During the same period in America, [Edward]
Kienholz's Portable War Memorial of 1968 ... stood out
as an exception in its ability to confron the
historical moment.... the fact that his eye for
material was always at one with his unrelenting
outrage ... meant that no political issue registered
as wilfully inserted 'content' divorced from a work's
organizational logic.  It is nonetheless important to
recognize that the didacticism of the piece is
distinctly muted; little or no direct reference to the
Vietnam War of 1954 to 1975 intrudes.  The artist had
enough sense to realize that he could not match the
searing photographs and video footage issuing from the
conflict every day ....  The matter of the piece is
rather the preservation of memory in the suburbanized
political mind, in particular the potent but distorted
recollection of patriotic solidarity fotsered during
World War II." (pp. 150-1)

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/K/kienholz/war_memorial.jpg.html

http://www.museenkoeln.de/bdw/98/bdw_9827.htm

Perhaps some of you might actually have seen this in
person?  Aura in the age of digital reproduction ...





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