Monuments

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.’A brainy, beautifully imagined film with an unexpectedly dry humour to boot.’ IFFR 2010Funded by the Arts Council England with support from Film London and Film London Artist’s Moving Image Network and a New Commissions grant from Art in General.