The Inferno of Duty (excerpt):

Philippe Meste's Spermcube by Mihnea Mircan

[...] The 21st century monument, Philippe Meste seems to be saying, has something to do with unfair comparison, disobedience and betrayal, the perversion of logical systems of unity and totality, the falsification and corruption of the rules of action. The monument comes into being by choosing to do battle with a foe who is too big and too powerful. Answering the question concerning the contemporary monument calls for brutally removing it from tradition: Today's monument will have to proffer a different revelation, involve another type of memory, redefine the community looking at it, and recognizing itself in it, and summon a different sense of time. Meste works on behalf of the monument through the medium called action, using sculpture as camouflage, in the military sense. Camouflage, and the idea of sculpture as a concealed action or the remnant of action, describe Meste's relatively unusual stance in an art market which in other respects seethes with demonstrations of transgression. Meste nevertheless links back up with artists who have a preference for the logic of conflict and insurmountable difficulties, a soft spot for fights which they cannot win, but which nonetheless inevitably force confessions, not to say a retreat, albeit infinitesimal, on the part of the adversary. To get back to the monument, if the Spermacube is one, it becomes it by rendering allegory complex rather than emancipating it, by entangling it in the dirty and awkward nets of materiality. Its ideology is elusive, if not bipolar, probably because the 21st century cannot accept that a monument which is thoroughly ambiguous, or else a monument with ambivalence [...]

www.spermcube.org

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