Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson) offered a challenge to deep-seated legacies of revered white men in America with their exhibition “White Man on a Pedestal.” After collaborating for two years, the artists put together eight new sculptures and installations (all works 2017) at the largest scale of either of their careers to date. As stories of sexual misconduct and harassment proliferate against the white supremacist backdrop of Donald Trump’s presidency—including allegations against former Artforum copublisher Knight Landesman—it has become clear that white men won’t descend from their pedestals willingly.

The white man in (Robinson)’s work is intentionally generic, a proxy that originated with her project #WHITEMANINPOCKET. In 2013, while teaching at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, she removed the briefcase-toting white man from a “pretend professionals” toy set. The figurine, which she named Dave Fowler, became a fetish object of whiteness that she carried with her everywhere, imagining an expropriation of his wealth of privileges. Meanwhile, Garner has been researching a particular historical white man, the sadistic gynecologist J. Marion Sims, and his brutal experiments on enslaved women. Garner’s skinned statue of Sims (the original is located near the 103rd Street entrance to New York’s Central Park) is hewn from nubbly foam and covered in bloodred polyurethane. His mangled silicone skin was also on view, slumped in an open casket.

A dozen silicone sculptures dangle in Garner’s Rack of Those Ravaged and Unconsenting, suspended by meat hooks from an eight-foot-square metal frame. Brown body parts such as hands and breasts are identifiable among fleshy mounds, sutured and stapled together, and splitting open to reveal a riot of deftly manipulated beads and pearls. Accompanying the piece was a red velvet vitrine of real gynecological tools, loaned from the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The metal hooks, clamps, and blades make all the more palpable the atrocities of Sims’s operations, which were performed without anesthesia and were often medically unnecessary. Garner’s merciless determination to communicate this subject matter can be felt even from a distance; her carnal forms rang with hurt through Pioneer Works’ huge exhibition hall. Sharp metal pins wound as they bedeck the Rack sculptures—the pins were added by the artist to protect her breast-like forms from being fondled by the public. Garner embeds herself in a paradox: The violence she dramatizes is both morally repulsive and visually enticing. This tension is most evident in A Fifteen Year Old Girl Who Would Never Dance Again; A White Man in Pursuit of the Pedestal. A maimed leg spins seductively on a silver table, dripping with the shining globules of some hellish fruit.

In contrast to Garner’s intricate handiwork, (Robinson)’s seventeen-foot-high monolith Twelve Thousand Maniacs! takes a manufactured material approach. The artist ordered ten thousand tiny plastic “Daves” to be mass-produced in China. (Robinson)’s regimented figurines collapse into a chaotic heap at the base of this grand monument, visualizing the thrill of white patriarchy folding under the weight of its own constitutive fallacies. A tragicomic mood pervaded (Robinson)’s Altar, an ironically tender funerary arrangement of candles and plastic flowers for Dave, lit with a glinting disco ball. Even more Daves could be found in If I Were King. . . , zip-tied together to form two curtains. But, unlike the industrially produced army in Twelve Thousand Maniacs!, these are misshapen casts molded by the artist herself. (Robinson) treated her subject most successfully in Maniacs!, where the careful orchestration of his homogeneity can be seen clearly as an endlessly reproduced blankness.

Gleeful fantasies of retribution underlay “White Man on a Pedestal,” exultant in its impressive production.Yet the daunting scale of the work tempered any celebratory tone. Each Dave was stamped with the WORD SHARE, implying the shared task of dismantling systemic injustices. While the real statue of Sims is scheduled for removal by the city, Garner and (Robinson) reject the hegemonic fixedness of monumentality itself. After the exhibition, (Robinson) ritually buried the Daves, yet no matter how many times she lays him to rest, his synthetic specter hardly degrades. Garner’s slippery monuments bring our nation’s deep trauma to the fore, bespangled with raw wounds and pierced by the threat of more violence to come.

—Vanessa Thill