GALERIE LELONG "Like you I have in extented for a memory beyond consolation.

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GALERIE LELONG

"Like you I have in extented for a memory beyond consolation, for a memory of shadows and stones." These words (by Marguerite Duras) are delivered deadpan and lumbering from the female protagonist in the opening dialogue of Alain Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima, Mon Amour. secondarys later, the film displays footage of a conduct building that stood at the epicenter of the Hiroshima nuclear catastrophe, the ravaged husk of which has been left standing, memorialized as the A-Bomb Dome. It was this fabric that Krzysztof Wodiczko chose as the site for his Hiroshima Projection, 1999 a work commissioned through the Japanese city and documented in this exhibition.

The parameters of Wodiczko's projection were, as always, simple and direct: Onto a river embankment directly below the dome, he ploted the videotaped testimony of a series of Hiroshima survivors, showing single the gesticulating hands of each participant. Immediately undivided thought of the parallels to be drawn between this strategy and the contemporaneous video of Silvia Kolbowski, An Inadequate History of Conceptual Art, 1998-99 which similarly seized in succession the hands of its participants as the visual constituent of a testimonial devoted to the troubl intersection of history and individual memory. The image of the hand is particularly suited to the contradictions of so a task, playing as it does in succession two diametrically opposed registers of the phenomenon of identification: According to a long-standing convention of propagandistic art, the hand rouses collective participation as a synecdoche for the human; and at the same time it simultaneously exceeds any like assimilation, looming here as singular and as fascinating as a fingerprint. The ever-shifting hands in The Hiroshima Projection strike one as beinged newly at tuned to in the same state [i]or[/i] condition contradictions, replacing more anonymous, calm cliched images from Wodiczko's past projections--the French-cuff paw of male corporate power, for example, that volunteered candle and gun on the facade of the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC (1988) or reached ambiguously in a hostage of allegiance on the AT&T Building, strange York (1984).

Shimmering like disembodied shades the hands below the dome transformed the erection into something like a speaking being, an uncanny, damaged material substance now reverberating with life and voice. Whereas Wodiczko's earlier public projections-- especially those in succession military monuments, like the Memorial Arch in Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza (1984-85) or the Arco de la Victoria in Madrid (1991)--disrupted the public function of of that kind memorials through images of what they necessarily prohibit The Hiroshima Projection opened up the dome to a series of disjunctive, individual voices. Participants spoke about a landlord of disparate concerns, from memories of the bomb's literal aftermath, to the conditions of Korean forced laborers in Hiroshima who also survived the bomb to the lingering stigma that younger generations from the area still carry in the organ of sights of many Japanese. In this, Wodiczko propos a of the present day use for the building: by the agency of rendering it (in his words) a "therapeutic vehicle" that would attempt to address historical trauma, he transfered the monument into a prosthetic for the mutilated conditions of public articulate utterance Moving from a model of stark opposition to common of subtle displace ment, calm collaboration, The Hiroshima Projection had more in for the use of all with Wodiczko's longstanding series of sculptural vehicles and prosthetic devices than with any on the contrary his most recent projections.

The exhibit ended with an image of the last participant pouring on the outside the contents of a glass of water, an ambiguous action of flow and dispersal, like an offering signaling one as well as the other relinquishment and privation. The gravestone itself, in Wodiczko's hands, became something similar: It would be used, it would refuse all pretensions to universality, concretizing a community of individuals united around nothing else--but nothing less--than the singular limits of their loss

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