The weight of history is acutely felt in two recent New York sculpture exhibitions: Huma Bhabha’s untitled two-part show at Salon 94 and Christian Lemmerz’s “The Omen” at Leo Koenig, Inc., both of which demonstrate a medium’s unique ability to mediate and monumentalize a density of cultural and psychological associations across distended perceptions of time.

Huma Bhabha’s installation at Salon 94’s uptown space takes its name ‘...And in the track of a hundred thousand years, out of the heart of dust/Hope sprang again, like greenness’ (2007) from the 12th-century Persian book of verse, The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam. Nothing, however, is found to grow between the two totemic figures facing away from each other at the ends of a ravaged platform. Each is composed of a mixture of found and modeled elements: Styrofoam, chicken wire, wood, and clay, assembled and finished with a sensitivity that minimizes rather than proclaims their material difference. Art historical associations abound yet flow across iconographic and formal registers: Archaic Greek Kouros, Egyptian pharaonic, and Indian Ganesha statuary modeled with a 20th-century assemblage aesthetic handed down through Picasso and Rauschenberg. These allusions cohabitate in Bhabha’s charred mindscape, as damaged hollow form is assembled spontaneously from the refuse of modern life; the hollowness is literal, as we are always allowed views to the works’ interiors.

In a suite of sculptures in Salon 94’s Freeman’s Alley space, Bhabha continues her play of ancient forms off of modern materials. They Don’t Speak (2007) is an enlarged portrait bust—or a shrunken Easter-Island-style head—that hints at its making and perhaps even hints at the South Asian heritage of its maker with a knife embedded in the nose that invokes the image of the Ganesha. The Immortal Story (2007) involves a sunken figure lying atop a stack of packing foam and an unhinged door that give it the form but not the weight or permanence of a Medieval Catholic sepulcher. Her use of Styrofoam—simultaneously disposable and horribly impervious to biodegradation—balances against the feeling of ephemerality and is a brilliant material conceit.

In a third work, a pair of oversized feet of the same materials are staggered and cut off above the ankle, giving the disjointed feeling of movement and stasis, animism and permanence that is the distinctive affect of the Kouros. Bhabha updates these forms by anchoring them in the material detritus of our time, one that has been ravaged by its own disasters ongoing or unfolding. Her grotesque admixture of material, temporal, and cultural associations carries a potent charge that should be apprehended as a warning: the antique idols to which Bhabha alludes are not only ciphers of past worlds or remnants of the now-ruined societies which they once inhabited, but they are also harbingers of our own societal demise.

At Leo Koenig, Inc., a show of three works by Christian Lemmerz activates a web of historical and art-historical allusions by transmitting potent, contemporary subject matter through the filter of a classical art medium, carved marble. The show is dominated by two life-sized single- and multiple-figure (respectively) marble sculptures, Katrina and Abu Ghraib (The Lovers) (both 2007). These works memorialize in marble two of the most vivid and traumatic episodes of the Bush administration’s travesty of American foreign and domestic policy to date. Couched within Lemmerz’s polemic, however, are explicit literary and art-historical references. The hooded figures of Abu Ghraib distinctly recall the masked embrace of René Magritte’s painting The Lovers (1928), while Katrina gestures towards a narrative episode from Honoré de Balzac’s short story “The Unknown Masterpiece,” wherein a lone foot emerges from Frenhofer’s otherwise unintelligible painting to mark it as a work of art.

Somehow, it felt good to commune with these sculptures, to have objects in which to locate the shame and outrage which their source images evoke, to feel passivity and dejection challenged by a physical presence. But questions remain as to what Lemmerz is signaling by this particular fusion of content and form: what do Balzac and Magritte have to do with Katrina and Abu Ghraib? To be sure, the combinations force an awareness of the viewer’s complicity in these horrors — an outgrowth of our passive consumption of images as divergent as a Magritte painting, a classical marble sculpture, and a photograph from Abu Ghraib. However, one is left with a feeling that the potency of Lemmerz’s content threatens to overwhelm the formal interest of the work and skew meaning towards over-determination.

French sociologist Henri Lefebvre wrote “monumentality transcends death... this transcendence embeds itself in the monument as its irreducible foundation; lineaments of atemporality overwhelm anxiety.”¹ Lemmerz’s sculptures leverage this potentiality to ensure that the recent events that he depicts will remain present for some time, etched in stone for other generations to see. Bhabha gives no such assurances. Her sculptures bear the weight of time with a gripping physical and ontological vulnerability. By giving the form but not the function of the monument, she extends the anxieties of our time backward to ancient form, and forward to an uncertain future.

¹Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 221.