Wheelchair Lift at the Temple of Dendur
Excerpts from this essay published in the 2014 edition of The New York Reader, produced by Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL
It appeared in Serpentine Magazine in December, 2014.
Abstract:
In 1965, the United States was gifted an ancient temple from the Egyptian government. Close inspection reveals its hieroglyphed walls to be a document of centuries worth of cultural change and globalization image economies. The accrual of these changes culminate in the most visually awkward artifact of all: a clunky, mechanical wheelchair lift on the side of its installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The temple and its new-found appendage shed light on how aesthetic regimes based in material transience occur in art, music, and architecture, and how these changes are indicative of ontological shifts between cultural meaning and the physical structure that carries it.