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Magazine Number 20 Autumn 1993 |
Memphis
Windows of the Dream
National Endowment for the Arts - Visual Artists Public Artists Projects Grant
Nashville artist and Vanderbilt professor Michael Aurbach
is, at once, a perfect and decidedly risky choice as a
contributor to the "Windows of the Dream" project. On the one hand,
this project was designed as a memorial to a man who was
murdered here in Memphis; Aurbach's theme of past years
has, after all, been death, incorporated into a series of
installations entitled "Final Portrait." On the other hand, the man
who was murdered was Martin Luther King, Jr., a canonized
martyr who preceded multicultural philosophy; Aurbach was
critically--and rather self-righteously--castigated for his
detachment and political incorrectness in a review in the last
issue of NUMBER:.
It is true that Aurbach's work has an air of detachment, a
coolness and disengagement that can be cerebrally
stimulating but, yes, emotionally irritating. But one of the most
important, yet conveniently forgotten (by those who would--and
do--censor art for all the "right" reasons), qualities of
good art is its role as an irritant. Art is not a reverent
endeavor; there are no sacred cows, there is no "correct" or
"incorrect," politically or otherwise.
Aurbach's is an art which plays upon dichotomies--the
pure and the impure, high culture and low, technology and
kitsch--in both appearance and content. lt is socially oriented
yet personally eccentric, formal yet non-functional, quietly
confident yet subliminally confrontational. The "look" is
impersonal, untouched by artist's hands, often commercial or
industrial (depending upon the desired effect). The content
is usually dependent upon wordplay (both obvious and
arcane) and visual image-play, both of which often employ
recognizable stereotypes and obvious irony, blended with
less discernible and more intellectual references.
His untitled "Windows" piece is a typical contradiction. It
is, in some ways, more reverent than past works; there is an
overt respect for the subject and an anger beneath the coolness. At the same time, there is an underlying "tabloid" fascination with the actual dirty deed of assassination that one
might not find in other "Windows" pieces. It is rather simple
and straightforward in comparison to some of his previous
"Final Portrait" pieces: Within a grisaille hybrid-Egyptian
tableaux, a bridge, meticulously crafted and faced with
wooden "bricks," spans the space of the window--except for
an obvious gap in the very center. Inside one bridge tower
stands a simple lectern or pulpit; in the facing tower is a
carved wooden rifle, aimed at the lectern. Positioned above
this scene are two representations of video cameras,
evocative of security devices, each one aimed at an opposite side
of the assassination scenario below.
The symbolism in the piece is both implicit and explicit:
the unfinished bridge between the black and white races, its
construction cut short (or purposely cut apart the two
pieces would actually fit together) in the middle by the murder
of Dr. King. The symbolism of the security/video cameras is
more ominous than obvious: Do they reference the
government surveillance of Dr. King (also referenced in Danny
Tisdale's Better Than One window installation)? Does the
camera aimed at the assassin's rifle also imply government
involvement on that "end of the bridge"? Or is it simply an
accusation thrown into all of our faces, that we are all
somehow guilty by watching the scenario unfold from the comfort
of our living rooms, precognitively aware of the outcome as
a society but unwilling to act as anything more than observers
of a TV drama?
Aurbach's piece asks more questions than it answers.
And, in the long run, it acts not only as a tribute to a slain
martyr, but also as a slap at our collective, complacent (and
"correct") face.
--Cory Dugan
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