The Austrian writer Robert Musil remarked that "there is nothing in the world so invisible as a monument." It's apt that this line appears at the entrance to the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition Front Room: Notes on Monumentality, which opens today.
Monuments are supposed to inspire feelings of reverence, respect and awe for those they commemorate, be it an individual or an entire civilization. Monuments are memorials to past greatness and to heroic sacrifice, bravery and honor. But time has a way of effacing memories and shared values. Today's monument is tomorrow's ruin, and nothing testifies quite so eloquently to the collapse of the social consensus than a monument once embodied as its neglected ruin.
Curator Mark Alice Durant has brought together two dozen works that illuminate the role monuments have played in history, as well as their meaning for us today. They range from an anonymous graveside statuary in Baltimore to the ubiquitous bronze and marble men on horseback who populate city squares around the world, to the hauntingly ephemeral remembrances of contemporary artists for the victims of holocaust and war.
In English artist Adam Fuss' lyrical photograph "Untitled," which depicts fragments of statuary in a gallery much like the BMA's, the museum itself becomes a repository of ancient glories that no longer have a place outside its walls.
Monuments are protests against mortality, embodiments of our primitive wish to live forever. That is why they are usually made of durable materials - metal and stone - and also why they are so often larger than life, as if the increase in sheer scale conferred power to overcome the weakness flesh is heir to.
Yet some of the most poignant memorials in this show are executed in materials so self-effacing and fleeting they seem to mock the very idea of immortality.
Christian Boltanski's blurry photographs of Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust are displayed alongside a collection of cheap electric lamps and a dozen small, rusting metal boxes, each of which contains a tiny scrap of clothing. Boltanski's austere conceptual abstraction is as remote from the heroic monumentality of brick obelisks and triumphal arches as Maya Lin's minimalist Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington is from the equestrian statues of Civil War heroes.
Similarly, Polish-born artist Krzysztof Wodiczko evokes the human costs of the Cold War by projecting images of U.S. and Soviet weapons of mass destruction onto the monumental architecture of an earlier era, thus challenging the rhetoric of power embedded in these emblems of conquest and domination.
For such a modestly scaled show, Notes on Monumentality presents a sophisticated range of commentary on the uses and meaning of monuments, from the over-the-top architectural fantasies of old masters like Philip Galle and Giovanni Piranesi to contemporary works by artists Charles White and Sanford Biggers.
It's a savvy take on a class of once-revered artworks we've now grown so inured to seeing that, as Musil suggested, they might as well be invisible.
The show runs through May 25 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive. Call 443-573-1700 or go to artbma.org.
glenn.mcnatt@baltsun.com