The Golem Project 2002

During the last week of September 2002, the first of the public art projects commissioned by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art was installed on a vacant lot in the city, at the corner of SW Taylor and 3rd Avenue. On the lot itself Daniel Duford kiln-fired three huge crouching figures, golems; on one of the adjacent buildings, on the wall facing 3rd Avenue, he painted two more figures, large male nudes with the same physique. They stood looking outward, with open hands.

The installation was intended to last a month.

Vandals immediately began smashing the sculptures. By the fourth night they had all been smashed. RV (Branham, founder & editor of Gobshite Quarterly) and I went to photograph them at our first opportunity — caught the MAX into town, scuttled along shopfronts, hurrying because of the very light rain, step, step, shopfront, shopfront –

An empty lot – grass, mud, a liver-red wall – with something flesh-coloured in the corner. In that first split second I felt a great misery; it prickled and numbed at the same time. I heard the sound of a huge and silent lamentation. It seemed like the sound of the Holocaust.

I looked towards the corner because of the colour.

The body had no clothes.

Golems are a Jewish tradition, and so I felt anti-Semitism. The lot was shabby and abandoned and had been for years, the kind of place Mack the Knife would have used. The flesh-coloured pile looked like a murder, hacked and disjointed and bloody.

Flesh thrown away like garbage.

The figures painted on the wall had exaggerated leg- and arm- and chest-muscles, indications of strength. But they were painted, confined to the wall. All that physical power was helpless to prevent the violence every night, the mean killing, the grinding of some social engine that's usually hidden.

The witnesses had been helpless.

That was the initial horror: that we ourselves, anyone, everyone, can be prey, that the predation is hidden and unstoppable even if it is witnessed. In this culture we have come to believe that nothing like that is true here – we have wealth and the rule of law; we have medical care and social safety-nets; we have education and opportunity. We do not live in a war of all against all. We aren't just meat and blood, bloody garbage.

But we are.

Flowers had been laid on the fragments, expressions of sorrow or pity from passers-by. They didn't balance the sadness or redress the damage; but they did address the humanity of the figures and sympathy with their maker.

The rest of the lot contained tyre-tracks on glistening mud. The tracks entered from the edge and ran over the three circles of mingled cinders and pottery-shards where the crouching figures had been fired. The grass was in the north-east corner where the cars never drove.

With the figures out of the way and the fragments in the corner, the lot became once more the informal, free off-street parking the City had frowned on for years.

Looked at objectively, the destruction of the golems wasn't murder; it was vandalism. At that level the pile in the corner was a by-product of a completely visible and banal social engine: car-commute-parking. This art was destroyed as thoroughly as Iraq's would be.

We originally intended to run an account of the incident in Gobshite Quarterly; as it turned out, The Organ covered it before Gobshite could go to print. I kept the photos. On one level, legally, they belonged to the company and weren't mine to discard, but, on another, I kept them because they revealed the ruthless undergirding of the city which is proud of its liberality and commitment to the arts.

I never escaped either the horror of my first glimpse of the figures or the feeling that the incident was a portent. The vandalism revealed not only a truth about human vulnerablility and this city, but, with its echoes of Weimar Germany and its timing during the build-up to the Iraq war, also something vast and true about epochal changes rising up to engulf us and being imposed from above.

I could only sense the knot of meaning in that lot. I couldn’t understand what had happened. I saw and knew the physical facts, but I couldn’t understand the mechanism of its meaning.

— from the Introduction to Golems Waiting Redux
Daniel Duford and M. F. McAuliffe
Daniel Duford and GOBQ LLC, Portland, 2011

The Golem Project 2021

In the ’80s we lived in L.A.

I worked as a clerk in a large majority-minority high school just south of L.A. Sometimes the clerks and secretaries would have a girls’ night out – we were all women – and we’d go to someone’s house for the evening. I can’t remember the occasions. Birthdays, perhaps. In these established working class living rooms there were no books; surprisingly often there’d be a piano. On the piano or a shelf, so many times, there was a framed 5x7 or 8x10 inch black and white photo of a young man sparkling with youth and happiness, looking upwards and to the left, dressed in a cap and the knife-sharp creases of a military uniform. They were the graduation photos, sons in the service.

There were so many of them, over the years, so identical, so insistent on the knife-sharp clothing they seemed to me to be a code. I couldn’t understand it but I could see it there, insistent, glimmering in plain sight, just below the surface…

One of the teachers had twin sons, one of whom was in the Army in Germany. He showed me a Polaroid his son had sent: three or four very young men in fatigues with beer cans and grins, high-fiving in front of a banner spread across the wall above them. DOOMSDAY DOGS. The unit name above and the cheering lads below. An earthquake of fear and unmooring in that photo, in me as I looked at it.

Doomsday – the end of the world, war, chaos, fire, fury, rubble, death; smashed land and landscapes, cities, smashed wheat and insects and trees. The unit had been formed to function in that spectrum, couldn’t function properly except within it. Doomsday Dogs. The mindbreaking, heartbreaking, inculcated relish in that phrase.

We moved to Portland in 1992.

Daniel’s kneeling golem figures were inspired by photos of interred Afghani prisoners. They were a meditation on vulnerability, he said at the time.

But as well as being simply smashed the figures were psycho-sexually mutilated. Body parts – hands, heads and the penis – were missing.

The remaining fragments were pushed into piles. In the charcoal deposits from the original firing there were tyre marks, the lot reclaimed for parking.

Despite the flowers and other marks of grief and respect left by passers-by, the piles of fragments were still torsos, thighs, hands; outlines like thick skin opening into interiors dark as our inner geography. They were simulacra; they were also bodies as garbage, stone-sized pieces of clay with the shine of wet blood (after the small rain) flung by cars or chance next to a single carnation or a stray anonymous and yellowed stalk.

In a sense it was a battlefield, the rubble from conflicting claims on public space, conflicting ideas about what to do with (or to) vulnerability, about who should be permitted a place in the public’s attention, what to do with disagreement or discomfort, how to behave as individuals and groups, the difference between groups and bands and bandits, about what happens at night and what happens by day. It was a battlefield. It was the site of what any moment might break apart and reveal, the hellscape at the bottom of the sinkholes normality covers.

Despite documenting the site I could sense its meaning still lying outside my understanding.

It wasn’t a code. It felt like a hologram.

About a month ago a friend sent me her Bookiversary announcement. I realized that it had been a decade since Daniel and I had published his limited edition of artist’s book, Golems Waiting Redux. It’s rare and fragile and out of print now. A few days later I began remembering the graduation photos, the loss of all anchor in the Doomsday Dogs polaroid.

Among the fragments, body parts – hands, heads and the penis – were missing.

And there: the secrets of the photos and the vacant lot amalgamate, like joined like the halves of a walnut in its shell.

On the left there is war, revealed as a vast permission. It gathers up all the psychoses already swirling through any population and annexes them, nominally controls and directs them, unleashes them. War criminals outnumber their trials. On the right there are the graduation photos, revealed as false promises. The code of the knife-sharp crease avers that destructive potential is under control, leashed and leashable, commandable, unbetraying and unbetrayed; and always and only used in the service of the good.