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