Liz Glynn | Untitled (Burgher with extended arm) | 2014

Through her installations, performances and sculptures, Los Angeles-based artist Liz Glynn conducts historical research that links our current world to our past. Everything is contemporary at one point in time, and Glynn reimagines how individuals might help shape future outcomes through engagement and imagination.  

Untitled (Burgher with extended arm), 2014, comes from a series of performances focused on monumental sculptures in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Glynn and her crew cast molds from 19th century French artist Auguste Rodin’s work The Burghers of Calais, 1884-89, using Rodin’s own studio practice of fragmentation and recombination to create unsettling versions of an already disquieting tableau. (Rodin depicts the moment when the Calais leaders surrender to the conquering British forces who besieged Calais from 1346-47.) While Rodin’s work is monumental, its heroism of self-sacrifice veers sharply from traditional public sculptures that celebrate history’s winners.

Glynn reinforces the social fragmentation of Rodin’s time—the upheavals of industrialization, the jarring new forms of art pioneered by Rodin and his contemporaries—through this attenuated body. This disjointed figure speaks to the social and technological upheavals of our time, each personal pulled in different directions by our constantly changing social and economic climate.