WILLIAM CORDOVA "EPHEMERAL MONUMENTS"
 

Opening: 11  June 2010
Duration: 12 June to 15 September 2010

Ephemeral Monuments
Ephemeral and mostly site specific monuments are an integral part of William Cordovas body of work. Mostly made of lumpen materials and discarded consumer goods, he is recycling these rejects of society, items classed as waste and destined to be forgotten, he is practicing a kind of cultural conservationism, through which he also preserves the often multi-layered semantics of these items on a symbolic level: ‘The use of found materials is not to erase, transform and make anew but to emphasize the content(s) already existing within that used or found material.’ (W.C.)
The installation Exile on Mainstreet refers only superficially to the Rolling Stones’ tenth studio album. Consisting of 49 LPs the work forms a labyrinth from the discarded music archive of an elite US school. The random order of the records undermines the selection processes to which such schools customarily subject their applicants. The photo on the cover of the Stones’ Exile on Mainstreet album – which comes from the book of photographs The Americans, Robert Frank’s sceptical view of American society in 1953 – introduces an additional level of meaning.
Fleeting, ephemeral, random, the monuments erected by Cordova mainly centre around radical political movements and their protagonists’ struggle for self-determination. His work “The House that Frank Lloyd Wright built 4 Fred Hampton and Mark Clark” (2006), a simple wooden construction presented at the Whitney Biennial in 2008, was made in honour of two Black Panther activists killed during a controversial police operation. In cooperation with fellow artist Leslie Hewitt, he created the installation “I Wish It Were True” as a salute to the Third Cinema movement and its legacy. It visualises the powerlessness of African- and Latin-American cinema against US mainstream cinema with a wall consisting of over 800 video cassettes.
In addition to staging solo exhibitions e.g. at the Fleming Museum, University of Vermont (2009), the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2005/06), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2003), his works were presented in the San Juan Triennial (2009), the Whitney Biennial, New York (2008), and the Biennale di Venezia (2003).