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 Fatty 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.