"I love those who do not wish to preserve themselves; the down-going ones do I love with mine entire love, for they go beyond"
Frontier Monument (alternative title: Witchbunker) is the second in a series of public monuments on which I have been working over the past 10 years. This artistic genre seems to me to leave forefront the experience of being in, next to, near the object because they tend to obscure to a certain degree the indendty of the artist.
I started working on the Frontier Monument in New York in 2001, but its real development came while I was living in Roswell, New Mexico in 2004-2005. The Frontier Monument /Witchbunker would fit in a number of American landscapes, but Roswell, at the end of the conservative axis of the battleground state New Mexico, in a desolate and punishing landscape, was inspirational for the project. The sculpture is intended to be built along the roadside, a stop one might make on the way to another place, poking along, maybe one’s map has a little point of interest at the spot. It is a transitory monument that is part of the landscape and yet is foreign to it. Questions such as fortitude or fortification, pioneer or paranoid, solitude or isolation seem to saturate Roswell. They are endemic to the ambivalences raised by the project.
In my artistic practice I tend to manipulate the physical qualities and associations of my primary materials (tree sap, jelly, coffee, Fox piss, glue, to name a few). I work with these materials in the same way I work with myths and suppositions of the work’s subject as a way to talk about identity. In this project I am interested in how the very physical engagement with the sculpture---with the size, scale, smell, temperature alterations within this subterranean structure ---- effect the viewers experience of a frontier cabin. I have been seeking ways to make the building of this sculpture one in which the public would participate by engaging in fundraising-land. The billboard photo is a sketch for a series of billboards I imagine on an interstate. The same sign will be part of a website which will seek to fundraise for this project. The billboard and website will also display the slogan of this project, which reads: "I love those who do not wish to preserve themselves; the down-going ones do I love with mine entire love, for they go beyond" (Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra). The quotation taken out of its original context could have religious connotations. I thought of attracting the ultra-religious crowd in eastern New Mexico/Western Texas to donate towards the realization of Frontier Monument could make for interesting supporters and I was curious about how it would go over.
Please find attached a number of drawings and sections for the Frontier Monument model/sculpture. A "fly-through "animation and the model/sculpture is now in the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art in Roswell, NM, however it is not on display since the founder of the museum thinks of this monument as inappropriate for his state.
Kasper Kovitz, Beirut 10.16.2012
"I love those who do not wish to preserve themselves; the down-going ones do I love with mine entire love, for they go beyond"
Frontier Monument (alternative title: Witchbunker) is the second in a series of public monuments on which I have been working over the past 10 years. This artistic genre seems to me to leave forefront the experience of being in, next to, near the object because they tend to obscure to a certain degree the indendty of the artist.
I started working on the Frontier Monument in New York in 2001, but its real development came while I was living in Roswell, New Mexico in 2004-2005. The Frontier Monument /Witchbunker would fit in a number of American landscapes, but Roswell, at the end of the conservative axis of the battleground state New Mexico, in a desolate and punishing landscape, was inspirational for the project. The sculpture is intended to be built along the roadside, a stop one might make on the way to another place, poking along, maybe one’s map has a little point of interest at the spot. It is a transitory monument that is part of the landscape and yet is foreign to it. Questions such as fortitude or fortification, pioneer or paranoid, solitude or isolation seem to saturate Roswell. They are endemic to the ambivalences raised by the project.
In my artistic practice I tend to manipulate the physical qualities and associations of my primary materials (tree sap, jelly, coffee, Fox piss, glue, to name a few). I work with these materials in the same way I work with myths and suppositions of the work’s subject as a way to talk about identity. In this project I am interested in how the very physical engagement with the sculpture---with the size, scale, smell, temperature alterations within this subterranean structure ---- effect the viewers experience of a frontier cabin. I have been seeking ways to make the building of this sculpture one in which the public would participate by engaging in fundraising-land. The billboard photo is a sketch for a series of billboards I imagine on an interstate. The same sign will be part of a website which will seek to fundraise for this project. The billboard and website will also display the slogan of this project, which reads: "I love those who do not wish to preserve themselves; the down-going ones do I love with mine entire love, for they go beyond" (Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra). The quotation taken out of its original context could have religious connotations. I thought of attracting the ultra-religious crowd in eastern New Mexico/Western Texas to donate towards the realization of Frontier Monument could make for interesting supporters and I was curious about how it would go over.
Please find attached a number of drawings and sections for the Frontier Monument model/sculpture. A "fly-through "animation and the model/sculpture is now in the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art in Roswell, NM, however it is not on display since the founder of the museum thinks of this monument as inappropriate for his state.
Kasper Kovitz, Beirut 10.16.2012