Sasha M. Lee

Matthew Monahan @ The Museum of Contemporary Art

Published in Beautiful/Decay magazine

Matthew Monahan at the Museum of Contemporary Art

Matthew Monahan’s works exist in a liminal, otherworldly space, evoking a disorienting tension between the familiar and the unknown—they simultaneously hearken back to a time immemorial and a future as of yet unimagined. Monahan’s oeuvre calls to mind lost relics from imagined civilizations: broken, pallid sculptures reminiscent of war-ravaged Greco-Roman monuments lay in disarray; busts constructed from paper and charcoal, akin to the looming grandeur of the Easter Island moai, peer down from heightened plinths; and hand-made glass cases, mimicking the visual tropes of natural history museum display tactics, enshrine artifacts and statuettes—all of which are covered in a dusty patina of debris from Monahan’s studio. It is as if an entire cast of characters, frozen in their respective tragedies or victories, wait in the gallery: Byronic heroes, grimacing giants, fallen tyrants, demons, bandits and troubadours, each angling to reveal their stories.  Monahan’s idiosyncratic mise en scène echoes 17th centuryWunderkammern, rooms in which owners assembled aesthetic collections of objects, typically from expeditions or travels, to evoke a sense of wonder—eclectic assemblages of monkey teeth, Egyptian figurines, or “unicorn” horns that would be considered strange and beautiful at the time.

Interestingly, some of Monahan’s works in the exhibition are dated 1994/2005—alluding to the fact that his sculptures are often born from the ashes of prior works, through a process of salvaging and re-incorporating “studio rubble.” Indeed, Monahan sites an apt passage from Walter Benjamin’s musings as inspiration: “To ‘tidy up’ would be to demolish an edifice full of prickly chestnuts that are spiky clubs, tin foil that is hoarded silver, bricks that are coffins, cacti that are totem poles, and copper pennies that are shields.” From the detritus of his unkempt workspace, Monahan forges what he refers to as “recovered jewels of wasted hours.” This modus operandi strikes me as being at once both playful and esoteric in nature. His practice calls to mind the endeavors of medieval alchemists, transmuting common metals into gold—or in this case, waste into artworks.

Yet, much as Monahan mines his own oeuvre to reassemble new meanings from pre-existent ones, so Monahan explores the annals of history, philosophical texts and song lyrics to inform and enrich his practice. Monahan’s ideological sampling evokes both genuine and fictive mythologies and chronicles, ancient and contemporary. His titles range anywhere from “Pound of Flesh,” derived from the ruthless Shakespearian protagonist, Shylock, to “Said the Joker to the Thief,” a reference to Bob Dylan’s song “All Along the Watchtower.” Monahan filters these histories, along with his own, effectively collapsing time and place, as if to mediate the discordant nature of our post-modern reality. Like Frank Zappa’s “xenochrony,” in which guitar solos were extracted and used in new songs, or the recent development of the “mash-up,” in which disparate songs are spliced to create novel ones—Monahan’s artistic sampling and reconstitution of metaphors seems particularly apt for our time.

Though quite visceral, heroic and often times monumental in scale and sentiment, Monahan’s works can perhaps best be described as “anti-monuments.” Rather than creating fixed images to withstand the physical ravages of time or to retain some sort of timeless collective memory, Monahan’s works do not, in their materiality, claim to be eternally true, nor do they desire permanence. Instead, Monahan formalizes their precise impermanence, calling attention to their own fleeting visages by routinely remaking and remodeling their image– effectively challenging traditional notions of linearity and concrete history.