When the Confederacy Came to LA

This is not a traditional review but a look at the set of myths and the sublimated pursuit of dominance that have made it necessary to mount an exhibition featuring decommissioned Confederate monuments disrupted or forced into deeper layers of disgrace by remix and recontextualization. The result is a humiliation ritual that both targets and empowers white nationalism in the American South, instigating its reactionary temperament just enough to arouse productive tension but not enough to alleviate it or rehabilitate the temperament itself. Since its opening this past October, which came in the wake of the brutal, live-streamed assassination of Charlie Kirk and public fallout that ranged from glee to real mourning to opportunistic purposing of the optics of both grief and outrage, MONUMENTS, at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the Brick in Los Angeles, has been an institutional zone wherein real and symbolic clashes between far-right extremism and bourgeois liberal dismay are played out in pantomime. We are all of us characters in this impromptu theater of convoluted archetypes.