From Courbet to the Bronx, The Love That Dare
Not Speak Its Names Gets Marriage Memorialby Allison Meier on October 10, 2011

Patricia Cronin, “Memorial to a Marriage,” bronze. (all images courtesy Resnicow Schroeder Associates)
When Woodlawn Cemetery was established in the Bronx in 1863, the art offunerary commemoration was in its height. Sculptures by renowned artists like
Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French were as likely to be founddecorating tombs as galleries and public spaces. The Metropolitan Museum
wasn’t opened until 1870 and Central Park had only just been created, somany people would take their weekend fresh air among the monuments in therural cemeteries like Woodlawn and Green-Wood in Brooklyn.
That era of memorial sculpture ended, and most of us are laid to rest undersomber slabs of dark granite with only the barest of ornamentation. Patricia
Cronin saw the revival of this tradition as a way to not only create a lastingtribute to her and her wife’s love on their burial plot in Woodlawn, but to build amemorial to a marriage she thought they would never be able to have. I recently talked to Cronin over the phone.

“When I first installed the marble, there was one reporter I talked to who thought
I was doing something really avant garde, and I had to explain to him that before there was a Central Park, people went to the cemeteries,” she said. “Youbrought food and the kids and picnicked.”

Patricia Cronin at the installation of “Memorial to a Marriage”“Memorial to a Marriage” was installed in 2002 in marble form, funded by agrant from Grand Arts. However, despite seeming like a substance of eternity,
marble is incredibly fragile, especially in New York pollution, and it was alreadybeginning to deteriorate not even a decade later. On September 20 of this year,Cronin installed a new version cast in bronze.

Detail of “Memorial to a Marriage”
She said she picked bronze not only for its fortitude, but also to add a level ofinteraction with visitors. While she was researching cemeteries in Paris, sheobserved how it tends to polish down in certain touched areas. (The sculpture ofassasinated lady’s man Victor Noir in Père Lachaise comes to my mind. )“I like extending the performatory participatory nature of my project,” she said.

Detail of “Memorial to a Marriage”

One of her major influences was Gustave Courbet’s “Le Sommeil (The Sleepers)” (1866), where two women sleep heavily in each other’s arms. Like thelovers in Courbet’s painting, Cronin and her wife Deborah Kass are naked in abed, asleep under Bernini-like folds of sheets. It’s a very tactile bronze, and I canimagine the years of hands that might caress over it in worn patterns, but at thesame time it’s very traditional in its creation. Monumental sculpture isn’t a focusof many contemporary artists, especially not bronze sculpture specifically created for cemeteries.
“I was just trying to really calibrate this so it was as sensual as I thought it needed to be, but also referencing American culture in its puritanical roots,” she said.

Patricia Cronin and Deborah Kass

While Cronin and Deborah Kass married on July 24, the day same-sex marriage
was legalized in New York, that wasn’t possible when she started the grave marker.
“It’s almost like a little bit of time play,” she said. “I’m alive, and I made a memorial
to something that didn’t exist.”
She states that the federal Defense of Marriage Act does still have to be repealed
so that same-sex couples can be assured of the their rights, but there was anotherlandmark moment that coincided with the installation of her neoclassical bronze
sculpture, which was the day that gay soldiers could serve openly in the military.

Installation of “Memorial to a Marriage”
Although she calls it an “anti-monument,” in that it’s not stabbing the sky like anobelisk or commanding attention like a temple mausoleum, it does weigh three
tons as it hugs the ground, “pulling you in the direction of what it’s about.” The formidable mass of “Memorial to a Marriage” had an even bigger significance before
she was able to be married.
“This had to have the weight of history, this had to be more real because I didn’t
have it,” she said. “Aristotle said that the artist looks out and sees the world incomplete and tries to finish it. I think the piece, because it’s so emotional and can get
under people’s skin about death and loss, there is a really type of aggressive aspect to it.”
Since 2002 when the marble was first installed, the burial plot has become one of
the most visited of Woodlawn, right along with Duke Ellington and Herman Melville.

Cemeteries are mostly unrealized as places for contemporary art, but with eachburial plot having its own small space for free reign, they could again become
grounds for expression, especially for those things that need to be memorialized
for eternity.
“Memorial to a Marriage” by Patricia Cronin is on view in perpetuity at Woodlawn
Cemetery (East 233rd Street, Bronx.
tagged as: deborah kass, patricia cronin, same-sex marriage, the bronx, woodlawn cemetery