Kurt Goodrich Artworks

Reprieve
The period of time spanning the cold war, from the rise of the Soviet Union to its fall, from Lenin to Gorbachov; the time spent by those particular Soviet Architects in swimming to the United States backwards in their Constructivist Pool, a pool in which their escape from Stalin’s purges towards their apparent freedom in the New World proceeded via negative propulsion -- a negative propulsion that necessitated their swimming synchronically in the direction of those golden onions of the Kremlin in a pool, they themselves devised and commandeered in reverse towards Manhattan; it is this period of events that marks the submergence of the repository under the Unter den Linden, in Berlin.  When this pool docked near Wall Street in 1976, the architects, now lifeguards and swimmers, were shocked at the uniformity (dress, behavior) of the visitors who swamped their craft in a brute rush of curiosity.  Had communism reached America while they were crossing the Atlantic?  This is exactly what they had spent the last forty years swimming in reverse to avoid, the crudeness, lack of individuality (Delirious New York, pg. 255).  Where Koolhass’ fiction closed in 1976 they, the Soviet architects, had taken off in shock, directing their pool further upstream; a rusty salmon, ready finally to spawn?  We must now reinvest this ending; not with a new one, but with the segue into a new chapter. 

This new chapter begins with an appendage, from a period even further removed from the present, a gift to the United States from France.  A gift given to commemorate the Third Republic following the Franco-Prussion War of 1870 -- an event we will soon become familiar with; an edifice that could not possibly have escaped the attention of the Russian Constructivists as their craft passed by upon entering the New York Harbor.   In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, Bartholdi’s house in Paris had been occupied by Prussian soldiers, and the city suffered through the final days of the Commune.  Realizing his artistic skills were of little use in his homeland, where the new Republic struggled for survival, Bartholdi felt compelled to act, resolving that his deed would be charged with significance.  Earlier in his career he had dreamt of visiting America; now, circumstances made the wish into a logical decision.  In the United States he could observe the character of the New World and its free citizens, seek new commissions, and make new contacts.  Above all, he could search there for the proper environment for his greatest project, a monument that would celebrate the Republican ideal of Liberty.  On June 10, 1871 he boarded the steamship Pereine, bound for New York.  On his first day in the new country, Bartholdi searched out potential sites for his monument, including the Battery, Central Park, and the islands of New York Harbor, which possessed a special attraction.  A thriving gateway to the New World, the port seemed to Bartholdi to symbolize the industrial modernity and ongoing progress to the expanding country.  (Liberty: the French American Statue in Art and History, pg. 100).

With its 214 wooden cases numbered and labeled to guide the re-installation, the first seventy-five railroad cars carrying Liberty pulled onto the quay in Rouen, where the crates were transferred to a French naval transport.  Reassembled and unveiled in 1886, on a base designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the statue, for Bartholdi, crystallized the fundamental forces of the nineteenth century -- nationalism, technological progress, mass communication, entrepreneurial vigor, the public monument as a vehicle of moral instruction? (ibid. pg. 188) 

The sympathies of the United States, which blamed Napoleon III for the war of 1870, were originally aligned with Prussia, but when the new French Republic was declared in 1875, the United States was the first power to recognize it...the young French Republic saw in America a constitutional model to be imitated, if not in every particular detail, at least in durability. Fund raising for Bartholdi’s Statue began in 1875 on both continents where relations between the two countries were not yet one hundred years old. (ibid. pg.27)

Protection: Chief among U.S. exports

In this same period of time c. 1870, the United States role was being transformed to include not only that of a model for democracy but also that of its self-proclaimed protector.  A new role generally couched in terms in-offensive to its public.  These roles are now again in a state transformation. Whereas, the industrial base of the U.S. was predicated on the former Cold War; the subsequent build-up — in paranoiac proportions — of its arsenal constituted a new shroud that enveloped the western democracies.  This role was played out in numerous backyard conflicts that accompanied the Cold War.  With the threat of Soviet backing, these conflicts, for the United States, could be rep- resented as major investments politically, socially, and economically.  The stakes were projected to be high; Korea, Vietnam, Cuba.  Following the collapse of the wall, the same is no longer true.  Backyard conflicts today, play themselves out in an arena where protection is no longer the hard sale. The threat no longer imaginable, is no longer implantable. Conflicts that the United States intervenes in now, sub- sequent to the Cold War, are represented in altered terms: Iraq, with its grasp on strategic oil reserves; Panama, with its drug trade; Haiti, with its human rights abuses?  These conflicts are now descaling in direct proportion to the fragments of the Wall’s collapse as are the military industrial complexes and the respective workforces of the two superpowers.  It is in this process of dissolution; politically, socially, and economically, that the GNP Corp now seeks to further its stated agenda.