Mesmeric
Monument
Work in progress notes
Liane Lang
May 2010, Riga
For Mesmeric Monument I approach sculptures, monuments and spaces, which have
a reference to each other and share ideological origins. Some objects like
the Statue of Liberty and the Soviet Victory Monument are ideologically in
conflict with one another, but share some formal roots. I approach the objects
with a basic choreography, transcribing or imagining a visual description
of the body in space and in movement, using both props and dancers. My starting
point for the initial sketches is Labanotation. I use this term only as a
reference, as I do not undertake a meticulous diagrammatic transcription,
but a visual description of the potential radius of the body, the direction
of movement and the interpretation of this movement, which has been arrested
in bronze or concrete. Rudolf Laban (1879-1958, Austro-Hungary, a dancer,
a choreographer and a dance/movement theoretician) seems a fitting starting
point for this project in several ways. His choirs, choreographing the mass
movements of people, have an actual as well as conceptual relationship to
Nazi mass choreography, which usually took place around a monument or monumental
space. This was re-interpreted for the Communist marches and parades. The
seemingly great contrast between the avantgarde choreographer and the totalitarian
space of performance is here blurred and fluid. The ambiguous relationship
between artist and power is mirrored in the situation of the artists who made
these big political monuments and sculptures.
The notation of movement appears in the project in several forms. The soldiers
in front of the Statue of Liberty from 1935, involved in a frantic dance,
the crowds at the Soviet Victory Memorial from the Soviet era, a flurry of
bodies crowding around the monument in a ritualistic celebration. These dancers
are found objects, their choreography in direct relation to the ideology of
the object. In contrast a more gentle demarcation of space occurs when the
small single figure travels along the edges of the Victory monument and when
the figures, at Salaspils Concentration Camp Memorial travel the field as
shadows or silhouettes. Here I think of the notation of impossible movement,
which is implied and subconsciously perceived in the giant concrete or bronze
figure, frozen eternally in a shape, it’s extension and direction pointless
and impotent, but still legible. Giving by proxy or through small interventions
a turning circle to the monolith, his movements are to re-animate him into
a new visibility and context.
The installation of Mesmeric Monument in the gallery is the antithesis of
the monument, dissolving the solid, immobile and inaccessible. Traversable
and fragile the installation exists in light and movement. The final sequence
is twice removed, the monuments projected onto the white bodies of dancers
in a darkened space, they become visible only through their movement, their
bodies determining what is revealed and what is obscured.
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