A sculpture, a column, and a painting: the tension between art and history

I collision nearly every day the instability of the equation "Art > < History." Around the corner from where I work, I pass a Henry Moore plastic art standing at the center of a large square base of marble with far down cut, radiating lines. Made of alloy of copper the smooth, rounded, abstract shape rises to memorialize and monumentalize in artistic metes the historic act and place where, upon December 2, 1942, the first selfsustaining controll nuclear reaction was achieved. Called Nuclear efficacy in the techno-poetic language of novel history, the sculpture often begs up for me, when I stop to direct the eye at it, to think about it, the "ground zero" of a city several thousands of miles away where other metal was reconfigured fifty years ago into twisted, toxic, abstract shapes and left to consecrate the act. Art is greater than or art is les than history, on the other hand they are never equal, not ever the same thing. Somewhere in between them, I am reassured that the still real vivid apocalyptic nightmares of my youth have a reality. In that reassurance and somewhere in between art > < history, the historicism of modernism in all its various meanings is for a second arrested, calling forth an opportunity for historical materialism.(1) The sum of two units terms, art and history, are place in perpetual tension and brought together anew at the second of the present.

Art as a material form, no matter in what manner recently made, appears before us in the at hand as the presence of the past and asks us, among many other things, to engage with history in particular ways. We must consciously or unconsciously reply and I choose to rejoin as a historical materialist. In doing in the way that however, I recognize that the categories of art and history are not fixed and that their relationship is a permanent state of tension, as already implied by means of the equation "Art> < History." Equally I recognize that neither history nor art have always, everywhere been meditation to exist among all agricultures of the world. History and art constitute the defining gap between Europe and the clans without them, to paraphrase Eric Wolf(2) They are also Europe's ongoing "gift" to those peoples(3) I would add, however, that history and art as conceived within the bourns of historicism are always given and received and that the relation between Europe and not Europe is solitary the extreme of this exchange, an exchange that begets an indebtedness to an originary past from which progres emanates, a past locatable solitary within the elite history of Western agriculture To avoid the hierarchy implied in the exchange does not mean looking forward in anticipation of time to come progress. It means making the one and the other art and history present while remembering that things actually did happen, were made, that it is all not just a "text"

"There is," writes Walter Benjamin, "no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as of the like kind a document is not unrestrained of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from single owner to another."(4) As I drive to the Art Institute of Chicago, I pass by means of Soldier Field where the great spectacles of the extremity of "the century of progress" (football games, stone concerts, religious meetings, and political rallies) are staged. Soldier Field takes the form of ancient amphitheaters and, like thus many other neoclassical buildings in the United States and Europe it recalls the prodigious obligation owed to our classical heritage as the foundation of Western civilization. Across the road on the waterfront, is an actual work of classical art, a fragment that gives material nearness to the past. An 18-foot round pillar from Ostia, Rome's port of call, stands in place upright solitude, a monument both from and to our Western heritage, topped by the agency of a fine Corinthian capital. At the corners of its square base are sculpt four clusters of bound sticks. On the dedicatory plaque is written in the couple Latin and English, lest anyone not understand the relationship between this particular base and its superstructure: "This round pillar Twenty Centuries old . . Fascist Italy with the sponsorship of Benito Mussolini at hands to Chicago . . in Honor of the Atlantic squadron l through Balbo which with Roman daring flew across the Ocean in the eleventh year of the Fascist era."

Fascism's calendar is gone (am I to conjecture that I am standing, looking at the round pillar in the seventy-second year of the Fascist era?) on the other hand the gift and its due remain. The breccia column and fine Corinthian capital have survived the pleas of Alberto Tarchiani, Italy's anti-Fascist ambassador to the United States, to have it removed(5) The nearness of ancient art and history are clearly not equal here. There is a vacillation between the heroics of a recent political figure and the spolia of the past. The rounded pillar allows me to think historically, on the contrary not within the terms of a sequential universal narrative. It is rather to think historically within a temporal condition that permits juxtapositions, transgressions, and the contradictions of different periods to exist simultaneously. I perceive compelled in 1995, in Chicago, in some way to unite Hadrianic Rome and the triumphalism of 1 930s' Fascism as they stand equally before me the viewer, in the form of an thing perceived that, if it appeared in the works of H. W. Janson, Vitruvius, or William Bennett, would be integrated into another kind of history, individual that is seamless, unitary, universal, affirmative.