Atop a plinth in the center of the square sits a larger-than-life equestrian. A man and horse in a union of contrapposto, they trot an upscaled victory march halted in bronze, looking over the heads of the citizenry. The monument, a nationalist chevalier in all his sovereign permanence, stares blankly toward tomorrow’s obscurities. A brassy yellow underglow has started to seep through his weathering patina. This ponyboy is simultaneously idle and idealized, moralistic yet meaningless. As a political tool for the public imagination, he has forgone any semblance of complexity in favor of a centrifugal mis-remembering. As a testament to the limitations of the masculine imperial, this reiterstandbild obliterates the past by materializing history. What of his androgynes, what if his permanence might combust before us into a fog of pure abjection? Have his atrocities killed our God? What are the failures relinquished by this horse-riding figure in the center of the square? Do we win the staring contest, destroy his fixed position, and seek instead the caress of our mother, the void? The collective will of the throng is no match for his crumbling ideology. If we were to shift our expectations, to see Reiterstandbild as Reiterinnenstandbilder, would the permanence of this monument dissipate into the atmosphere, beyond the earthly pithy materiality of manhood? She jumps from the plinth to an equestrienne rebirth. In this nirvana, she becomes and remains to be something ongoing, falling through vertiginous weightlessness into infinite exhibitionism. She is proud to expose her mortal object-ness. In her endless toppling through darkness, she finds herself much closer to pathos, still maintaining a fabulous lack of apathy. Her new victories are not stains of colony or country but castings of contemporaneity, memories and shadows of broken stories put back together again. She has no fixed position, no polemic, yet she positions herself against our expectations. She is tired of asking us for honorability. We the pawns are free to interrogate her shifting form, almost-human or almost-inanimate, with all the unaggrandized immortality of a gust of wind. Objecthood suits her. She doesn’t mind to be seen, she will continue to be left as she is, as we leave her, as she wants you to see her, decentralized and yet still pointed toward some axial triumph over life on Earth. In the developed field of late sculpture, we find a secular maximalism pointed toward object-vision, and it is as scalable as it is certain. God is dead, monuments are keychains and L.O.V.E. is losing its H.O.P.E. and detritus might become the medium of the future. We thee artistes were born yesterday, free to use our tools and our wits to replicate or alter that monumental detritus as a medium of Truth or Untruth. We are left to choose whether to mount that High Horse or play My Little Pony. Cue another day’s smoggy sunrise over that chevalier in the center of the square. The monument is One of Us, the throng, in our collective non-mythology of a national spirit. He wears sheep’s clothing, generalizing one atrocity or another. The reiterinnenstandbilder anticipates her self-imposed toppling that snowballs towards an increasingly expanding abjection. We may not live to see these titans fall. Egging us on, we are tapping our foot, waiting for the age in which all certainties are to be destroyed. Come rapture, we can only hope that the foppish monument might be worth his weight in precious metals. But today, in between the supposed permanence of all existence and the assuredness of total destruction, we welcome these androgynized, farcical misrememberings until kingdom come. Dear God, may all tomorrow’s doodads and the fetishes of yesterday’s doubts expose themselves proudly before us. May they send us to madness. May we live to see the final judgement, promised by these horsewomen of the never-ending-non-apocalypse. – Stephen Michaels