Following The 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project, her contribution to the New Museum’s first triennial in 2009, Liz Glynn continues to explore the fraught relationship between institutions and art objects. For her latest venture, California Surrogates for the Getty, 2009, she trawled the Dumpsters of the venerable Los Angeles institute to dig up common materials (the exhibition checklist cites “California yard waste, trash, plaster, and Victory wax”) that she repurposed to make copies of the disputed antiquities returned by the museum to Italy in 2007.
Displayed on austere steel shelves and occasionally propped on the floor, Glynn’s “surrogates” are the kind of amateur, handmade reproductions of vases, shards, and statuettes that would never make it into the revered museum. Yet by standing in for the “authenticated” artifacts now returned to their “original” home, they are partially and perversely imbued with the aura of the missing objects. In this elision, Glynn invites us to follow the “aura trail,” which might eventually lead to the realization that the Roman Empire was itself built through an endless cycle of political and cultural conquests, lootings, borrowings, and imitations. It could also point to the professional and personal reputations that irrevocably lost their aura in the protracted litigations over the rightful state and institutional ownership of the ancient objects. And it may well implicate the very gallery that represents Glynn as a one-of-a-kind creative entity for peddling aura to the contemporary art consumer.
The strength of Glynn’s installation is that it does not restitute the status of the original but actively distributes its potency among a host of contingent sites (artist, spectator, gallery, museum, and nation-state). Though the business of aura may be stronger than ever, Glynn’s “surrogates” reveal the impossibility of locating or maintaining a unique point of origin.
