De\tour\1\2\3\Anti-Monuments, is a large photo installation from hundreds of 6x7 negatives, taken while re-staging the paths designated by King Louis XIV as his official diplomatic garden tours, called "the manner for viewing the gardens of Versailles." I've been performing these re-staging walks through and around these gardens making photographs there since January 2000, when I read that a huge storm had destroyed a large portion of the gardens. Initially, I went looking for the famed Labyrinth of Versailles, only to find that it had been destroyed by Louis XVI to create a Queens Garden for Marie Antoinette. I had read of this labyrinth and seen prints depicting it. The misunderstanding that it still existed became a lynchpin to my decade + work at Versailles, and questions which address documents as recordings, as evidence, and our approach to documentary materials and practices; trace and remains.
I'm interested in the radical potential, and poetic exigencies of loss, impossibility, and re-invention. My practice is preoccupied with 'radical doubt' and the struggle to make sense of compounded evidence from which narratives, biography and history are comprised. Some of my tools in questioning documents, and in considering loss, are disrupted narrative, repetition or metonymy, excess, performative action, and re-staging.
De\tour\1\2\3\Anti-monuments (Versailles): For this portion of my work in the Versailles gardens, the 'tours' were walked repeatedly, during 2008-12 and photographed through the course of these performance-walks. The photographs from these negatives are meant to be hung to excess in a space. The size of the images and the overall installation is variable, and images are reconfigurable in different spaces, creating a mise-en-scene in which a viewer's peripheral vision is exceeded. I approach these grounds and gardens as a crime scene – a place where entropy, excess, and contingency, collide with language, and the writing of history and biography. Anti-monuments continues a dialog with issues raised by 1960s and 70s conceptual art with an interest in phenomenology, emphasizing the role of an active viewer in piecing together narrative and interpretation; the physical, psychic, and spacio-temporal aspects of a response to artworks as to a scripted space such as this one. Project dates: 2000-2020, ongoing.
Anti-monuments, 2000, early notational photographs, Versailles, France. Published in Cabinet Magazine #6.
