Comparisons of our current political state to Weimar Germany have become routine in the age of Trump, and while so far, the Donald has proven himself too incompetent to actually become another Hitler, it is true that America’s democracy is being stressed in a way that echoes the constitutional breakdown which precipitated Der Fürher’s rise. On the surface, Matthew Monahan current exhibition doesn’t appear to explicitly reference Trump or anything else related to our moment, but the work does make an indirect allusion to Weimar, which originated, oddly enough, with a school play.
When his kid’s teachers decided to mount a stage adaptation of director Fritz Lang’s sci-fi classic, Metropolis, Monahan was drafted to help with the costume for the film’s most iconic character: The working-class heroine, Marie, who becomes transformed into a robot. Metropolis, which tells the story of a future society governed by oligarchs who live atop skyscrapers, is a masterpiece of Weimar cinema, and knowing the link between Monahan and the film, it’s hard not to see Marie’s Deco-Steampunk presence in his latest figurative paintings and sculptures.
The former represent a new direction for the L.A artist, heretofore known for 3D deconstructions of bodily forms into stylistically referential shards—sort of what Victor Frankenstein might have done if he’d gotten a degree in art instead of medicine.
Monahan proceeds in a similar vein with his paintings, stenciling black acrylic spray paint onto white aluminum panels to depict groups of disarticulated Cubo-Futurist figures. They seem to be busily punching each other out, and in that respect, recall the street fights sparked by Nazis thugs that roiled Weimar-era Berlin—though, visually, Monahan’s combatants have more in common with Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space than they do with brownshirts. The paintings also feature areas of the compositional surface built up to recall cutout shapes in Dada collage, while fields of Ben-Day dots that often form eye-straining moiré patterns serve as backdrops to the violence.
This last touch is a bit out of place, given the association of Ben-Day dots with Pop Art and newspapers photos, but they do lend a certain grainy, 20th-century character to the work. They also represent a prominent motif, one that’s echoed by the sculptures, caged here in boxes made of metal sheets perforated with small holes. The latter follow the black-and-white scheme of the show, only in reverse, with white figures imprisoned in black cells like classical statuary awaiting sentence on death row. Typically for Monahan, the sculptures, created from resin-coated, polyurethane foam, appear to have been randomly assembled in chunks, fastened with long, slender bolts that stick out of the material in a hardware-store reprise of Saint Sebastian.
Monahan’s work has always betrayed an anxious, dystopian bent, but he gives it formal clarity here. The art world is hardly a stranger to easily wounded liberal sentiment, or to freak-outs over the current occupant of the Oval Office. But if Monahan is having his say on the matter, he’s at least rising above “Trump Sucks” fare to deliver a deeper dive into how art responds to unfortunate historical circumstances.