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David Miller Memorial for an Invisible Monument
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Miller's concern with processes of loss and recovery, with patterns of displacement result in interventions far from sentimental or artificial. His view of the artistic process as both meaningful and functional employs the substance of the object, not only its appearance. This approach informs much of Miller's work and his installations at ruins, historical buildings in Bohemia and Slovakia. A good example is Raj, (Paradise), a still-life composed from everyday objects and suspended as one of the weights of the old clockworks in the granary at Plasy Monastery. Miller 'improved' the functionality of the clock by replacing a rope tethered sack filled with rocks and old machine parts with an equal weight in cast-iron and chain. The objects are deployed not only as comment on the building's former function --a hybrid place: at once a transcendent, sacred space, a sanctuary, symbol of technological mastery over the cosmos, a town clock and storehouse for grain - but become an intrinsic part of the old time machine, a gravity impulse for the rhythmic movement of the pendulum, the ringing of the bells and the marking of time's passage. Hromnicky, his piece at Klenová Castle, installed high above the subterranean dungeon below, repaired the castle towers' lightning rods by replacing their missing conductors or finials with cast iron 'candles'. The work links the former site of human power and surveillance (over the landscape) to the natural elements, to forces that over centuries and now erode the fortification and return its stone to the surrounding environment. The title, from Czech folklore, refers to tall candles lit during thunder and lightning storms to appease the fury of angry gods.
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Miller's recent installation for a sacred space -- the ruined Synagogue in Samorin, Slovakia -- consists of cast-iron objects placed within, around and on the building. The Synagogue was emptied during the Second World War when Samorin's Jewish community was destroyed in Nazi death camps. Desecrated, eventually used as a warehouse and later abandoned altogether, the sanctuary lost its meaning. Miller's process of reconciling, cleansing and reclaiming is enacted throughout the site using cast bottles of detergents or in Miller's words 'clean souls, [missing] figures', cast bottles of beer, wine and liquor or 'spirits' as well as by cast hand tools fixed permanently to the building; as if the continuity, violated by history was by this act recreated. The significance and piety evoked by these works is a form of redemption; a re-membering set in sharp contrast to classical monuments' all too frequent retaliatory function, to their expressions of historical obscenity that conspire to suppress unacceptable or painful histories by obstructing personal and social memory. Even if our history is full of rage, injustice and brutality, of unbearable details to which we are daily exposed and through which we become alienated, it can be possible to animate loss, history's secrets and sanctity and give them new meaning within daily life. Milos Vojtechovský, Prague, September 1998
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Top Image: David Miller Untitled (Memo Pad) 1994-1998 Photo courtesy of the artist
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Milos Vojtechovský is a curator of contemporary art, director and founder of the Center for Metamedia in Plasy, Czech Republic. | |