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Commanding an Empire
John Haberin New York City
Monuments for the USA
Alexis Rockman and Tseng Stealing
The other day The New York Times had to apologize again. In his undergraduate thesis, Carl Icahn had written about the "empiricist criterion of meaning," not imperious. I felt a chill, as I thought of calls by Niall Ferguson and other neocons for America to assume responsibility for commanding an empire.
Since the war in Iraq, artists, too, have been struggling to disentangle imperial dreams from empirical reality, fake news from the facts. In the winter of 2006, two exhibitions asked whether America can remember the recent past. Each addresses anxieties in an age of globalization. With Course of Empire, Ed Ruscha's anxieties stretch from economic realities to a short history of American painting. It also captures his influence from Pop Art to the present—and I cover it separately along with Ruscha in retrospective. Meanwhile "Monuments for the USA" pleads for a nation worth remembering. 
The group show has the more heart-felt despondency and a longer memory. First, though, you had to get there. At the time, conflicting signs directed one away from White Columns, without actually naming it, because a city agency or community group would not allow art to spoil the glorious Meatpacking District with anything so ostentatious (much less the new Whitney Museum still to come in 2015). Meanwhile, another agency had refused a post-office box on Horatio and, correspondingly, a more helpful street address. If this sounds like a commentary on politics, art, and the public sphere today, that should put you in the right frame of mind for "Monuments for the USA." You will just have to strain to locate your own memories of America.
Almost twenty years later, some are still obsessed by the American empire and its fate, but Alexis Rockman has returned to it in an unexpected way, though nature. He can hardly help it, for he considers it an imperative as an artist, but it will not be easy—not when humanity itself may well be extinct. It has run what the subtitle of his show, "Naples," calls its "course of empire." Naples itself may be already underwater. Just downstairs, Tseng Stealing sees much the same threat to America, just without the halfway comic allegory. Yet his barren landscapes seem no less familiar and true.
Monuments for US
"Remember the Alamo!" "Remember Pearl Harbor!" "Remember to brush and floss your teeth." For a nation, a family, or the psyche itself, memory may begin as a recitation of the facts, but it quickly becomes contested grounds. As with the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington and now at Ground Zero, so, too, can plans for a memorial. Forget Postmodernism's "unmonumental." With "Monuments for the USA," the contest is on.
The contest began in San Francisco, where Ralph Rugoff, director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, invited over sixty artists to submit proposals for their imagined monuments. Certainly art has paid no shortage of tributes to "September 11," Ground Zero, and America after 9/11, whether in the parks, the galleries, or even the borders of Ground Zero. And certainly that date looms over this exhibition as well, as when Tariq Alvi reports his own experiences that day or when Chris Johanson and Kal Spelletich put a surveillance camera at the center of their "negative monument." Yet the few works that I had seen before and the few artists most directly engaging historical specifics, such as Hans Haacke and San Durant, seem heavy-handed and overly literal amid this abundance of voices. The best work steps back from events, more akin to Ruscha's Course of Empire, in order to remember America and to wonder what it may have lost.
Again and again, they see a bitterly divided country, struggling to preserve its past. Gary Simmons imagines a permanent divide, between the red and blue states, like the wall extending past Israel. Artemio imagines a gigantic envelope with an old-fashioned wax seal as a Monument to Truth. Its whiteness against an open lawn, framed by a curve of row houses, makes it seem as if the White House has suddenly vanished, leaving only a permanently sealed farewell. Ken Lum and Tobias Putrih both imagine sites for archives, one as passages between light and darkness, the other as a kind of cardboard bird or dinosaur—its entrance, reasonably enough, through a hinged rear end. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, as Elmgreen and Dragset, elevate the message "Short Term Memory" in the style of three different artists—Robert Indiana, Jenny Holzer, and Félix Gonzáles-Torres.
For many, looking back comes with frightening messages for the future. A wall of letters from Andrea Bowers recovers agonized voices from before Roe v. Wade, a brutal intersection between national and personal history Susan Hiller takes the image of the Statue of Liberty from the end of Planet of the Apes. Others turn to economics, as with Michael Ross's Monument to Small Change, or the environment, as with Yutaka Sone's island garden and images of a giant sequoia by Anya Gallaccio. When Martin Creed suggests the neon word People, as in "We the People," he invites one to how the comforting we has vanished from the political arena as well as from his art. After Jeffrey Vallance and his Monument to the Unrecognized Artist—a gallery's spare, white cube, enclosing a skylight, with the marble and pedestal steps of a temple—one may ask, too, who will supply our voices.
I began by quoting three admonitions to remember, all from Olav Westphalen—although, as in a monument to Doris Day's hair, he does run to the cutes. However, I felt relief when I could smile, as with Lilliana Moro's All the Presidents' Dogs, and puns like hers have a way of cutting more deeply than I expected. Group shows this large almost always go astray anyway, inviting far too many off-the-cuff responses, from artist and viewer alike. When Thomas Hirschhorn models a skyscraper as a tall volume of French theory, he is no doubt recycling his own obsessions, and the postmodern hyping on the world as image could almost describe a show too large to absorb. Yet I give Rugoff and White Columns a lot of credit, for the mess ends up provocative without their squeezing it all into a predetermined unity.
Obviously the exhibition has a politically correct slant, as one might expect from artists. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov in fact call their contribution a Monument to Tolerance. I could attribute this to liberal bias or to the marginal position of the arts in society, but, hey, then I would be entering the show's contested ground myself. Besides, in their focus on poignant memories rather than grand memorials, the artists here reflect a deeply felt attachment to America's past—one that, scarily, seems more and more like nostalgia. Gallaccio says it in her title, Because I Still Love You. Jessica Diamond's wall drawing pretty much sums up the show and perhaps Ruscha's and Hirschhorn's as well: The Archive of the American Dream.
The main course
Only a year ago at the same gallery as now, Alexis Rockman seemed a true Romantic, with a capital R. He turned to bright, true colors on watercolor, a traditional medium for nature studies in close-up—much as for artists from John Constable to Beatrix Potter. 
Search the Web for the likes of them and you will find images of Italy and, yes, the course of empire. Thomas Cole, a founder of the Hudson River School, made it a five-part allegory for past Europe and an emerging America. He also made it a model for a new American art. Scientists may have made the medium their study, too, but these were the facts of culture, art, and myth.
Cole's allegory opens with a pastoral ideal and ends in terminal decline. America, he thought, could outlast Europe, but it needed a course correction. The work may reveal its own near-fatal struggles with expansion between banks, railroads, and slavery as well. Rockman, too, is making a course correction. He has once again a dense wall of works on paper, well observed, but in brown like an old photograph, and the brushwork has taken on stippling like an encrusted surface. And that texture carries over into his first large painting, of a whale breaking the surface. It creates roiling, bubbling waters, its nose towering high above.
It also dares you to know what is real, what is human, and just what is going on. A curved band at the bottom in black distances the scene, and, easy to overlook, a yellow-orange palace rests at the right on the sea floor. You will see many more of its like in sunlight as the show continues, but then you may never know for sure what counts as broad daylight. The whale dwarfs the palace entirely, as does the wall behind a second scene, with lampposts, fish swimming past and nosing about in front. Is that a street scene, sunken for good, or are the fish inheriting the air? Is the glimpse of a grand villa behind the wall part of the same scene or not?
It gets either better or worse. Comets dive through the rest of the show, and another fish swims through the sky trailing a shower of gold behind. It could be an advertising banner for empire trailing behind an airplane or a discharge from its rear end. Rockman can overdue it, in his imagery and garish colors, and I hate to start over on him with a second review. Still, he is newly vivid in his return to nineteenth-century Italy and America. He also complements his last show and keeps you guessing what comes next.
Tseng Stealing skips right ahead to American decline, just in time Donald J. Trump's second inauguration. He may seem, like MAGA, most at home in the debris and the show's "Mouthful of Dirty Copper." Environmentalists may cringe at his acres of abandoned trailers and discarded trucks—or at least call for land-use management. Others may claim it as their own. Yet it looks familiar for good reason. It has muter color than Rockman's, like many ordinary cars, homes, lots, and open sands.
He also uses the density or emptiness of to construct a painting. Objects may spill onto or into one another, while successive plains may continue out into the distance, textured by bare trees, with titles like Open Wound. So much for affordable housing. It may be a map of empire, but try not to panic. America is always building and destroying more. Its very muteness seems true to life and its construction akin to painting.
"Monuments for the USA" ran at White Columns through January 28, 2006. White Columns has since resolved opposition to marking the building. Alexis Rockman and Tseng Stealing ran at Magenta Plains through March 1, 2025.