Andrea Robbins and Max Becher

On Saturday, September 13th, 2014 Sonnabend Gallery will open Following the Ten Commandments, an exhibition of new works by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher.

For the past two years Andrea Robbins and Max Becher have been photographing Ten Commandment monuments on public land: at courthouses, public schools, parks and county seats in locations across the United States. Many of these religious monuments are or have been under legal dispute. Some have remained in place for many years and were gifted by the Fraternal Order of the Eagles in conjunction with the release of the 1956 film 'The Ten Commandments' and were suggested by the film's director Cecil B. DeMille. More recent decalogues were gifted by private citizens. Some have been ignored, others successfully defended under the premise that their historic significance supersedes their religious message or preference. Some have been permitted to remain after local government converted the small plot of public land on which the monument sits to private property. And while other monuments have been removed either voluntarily or by court order, legal outcomes have have differed enormously.

A selection of works from the series 770 (2005) by Robbins and Becher will also be on view. In this project the artists photographed replicas of 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, the home of the Lubavitch Rebbe Menachem Schneerson. Duplicates of this Collegiate Gothic style brick building have been built in cities around the world for use as Hasidic centers. The Brooklyn building has become an icon that is part of the lexicon of Orthodox Judaic religious landmarks. While the building is always recognizable, it also changes and adapts to each local context. It is this transformation, as well as aspects of franchising in both projects that interest Robbins and Becher.

In this pairing of series, the artists also hope to make visible the ways in which the Ten Commandment monuments have been positioned as a kind of "tagging" of public space, American History, and political representation; while the symbolic significance of the 770 buildings are mostly recognizable by the Lubavitch community, since they are on private property and do not carry any outward markings of their function or origin.

Robbins and Becher’s body of work over the past thirty years has been concerned with what they call “the transportation of place,” situations in which one limited or isolated place strongly resembles another distant place, usually as a result of a group identity being imposed upon a location and thus transforming it. Whether the subject is German colonial settlements in Africa, Germans dressing as Native Americans, American towns dressed as German towns, New York in Las Vegas, New York in Cuba, Cuba in exile, or African American Cowboy culture, Robbins and Becher are interested in places out of sync with their causes and consequences.

Andrea Robbins and Max Becher have collaborated on photography and film/video projects. Their work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, LA County Art Museum, the International Center for Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, Museum Kunstpalast Dusseldorf and Maison EuropZenne de la Photographie (MEP) Paris. Their work has been featured worldwide in many books and magazines, and four books have been published on their work: The Transportation of Place, The work of Andrea Robbins and Max Becher with essays by Lucy Lippard and Maurice Berger, Aperture, 2006; Portraits, Maurice Berger, editor and Charlotte Carter, University of Maryland 2008; Brooklyn Abroad, with essays by Nora Alter and Rupert Pfarb; and Colonial Remains, with essay by Benjamin Buchloh, Kanaal Art Foundation Belgium, 1996.