Artist’s Project: Redmond Entwistle

In the film, the artists Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark are revived from the dead and ejected from their makeshift mausoleums in New York by the forces of redevelopment.

Led through New Jersey by a young Dan Graham, they debate their artistic positions with the ‘non-actors’ they encounter at the sites of their work in New Jersey.

Monuments re-enacts the narrative subtext of Post-Minimalism with some of the crude poetry of the American B-movie, drawing on the treatment of the figure in the landscape in North American cinema from sources as diverse as John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln and Fattie Arbuckle & Buster Keaton’s ‘two-reeler’ films.

The film retraces Post-Minimalism’s abiding interest in the relationship between New York and New Jersey. What at first seems to be a film about art history, becomes a portrait of the areas of New Jersey that were once the industrial belt of New York, and a second story emerges of the demise of industry in the region and the changing position of North America within a globalized economy.

Entwistle’s artist’s project is composed of two elements: the script for Monuments, and Footnotes, a specially-edited accompanying video. To view Entwistle’s artist’s project, scroll down through the rest of the page
Monuments Script
(or ‘What About Limits in Art?’)


Redmond Entwistle (b. London, 1977) is an artist-filmmaker currently living in New York. Entwistle employs documentary and abstract modes of film-making, often investigating histories of social displacement and creating portraits of cities anchored on the invisible or the implied. Recent works include Monuments (2009), a narrative exploration of the origins of Post-Minimalist art in the economic and spatial relationship between New York and New Jersey, Skein (2007), a video portrait of migration to the towns that spread out from New York, and Paterson Lodz (2006), a 16mm expanded film about two towns (Paterson, New Jersey, and Lodz, Poland) and their interrelated history of politics and migration in the early years of the 20th century. Redmond Entwistle studied at California Institute of the Arts and the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has presented projects at group shows at Miguel Abreu Gallery (NY), Nought to Sixty (ICA, London) and Art in General (NY).

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