Forever Yours
Is it pornographic or pious? To decide, think location, location, location
By Jerry Saltz Tuesday, Oct 28 2003

A view of Woodlawn Cemetery in theBronx, N.Y.

Patricia Cronin
Memorial to a Marriage
2003
Woodlawn Cemetery

Memorial to a Marriage

Egyptian Revival masoleum architecture atWoodlawn

Seen in almost any Chelsea art gallery, Patricia Cronin’s realistic, lifesize, carved Carrara marble sculpture of her and her artist partner,
Deborah Kass, supine, semi-naked, in a somnolent, loving embrace,
would stick out as conservative—little more than a middling exampleof 19th-century sculpture. Given her spotty track record, you might
not be surprised. Cronin, 40, made a moderate splash in the early
1990s exhibiting randy watercolors of herself and Kass making love.
Instead of following up on this work’s promise, she undertook an
uninteresting series of paintings of horses, then houses. Her last local
solo, in 1998 at White Columns, was a generic installation of a tackroom filled with riding paraphernalia.
Now Cronin’s done something somewhat daring and unusual: Sincethe art world hasn’t beaten a path to her door, she’s opened a different
one. Memorial to a Marriage, as her sculpture is called, is not meant
to be seen in a New York gallery—not now or ever. It is installed, andaccording to the artist “will be on view through eternity,” about 10
miles north of Chelsea, in a shady dale of one of the toniest cemeteries
in America, Woodlawn in the Bronx—the resting place of six former
New York mayors, various robber barons, ladies and gentlemen of
the gilded age, congressmen, senators, a Supreme Court chief justice,victims of the Titanic, scalawags and their scions, as well as Herman
Melville, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Irving Berlin.
At Woodlawn, often called “America’s Père Lachaise,” or “our mostprestigious cemetery for men and women of accomplishment,”
Cronin’s strategy of not fitting in turns fascinating. Here, among
the tombs and temples, amid the urns, broken columns, inverted
torches, medieval Celtic castles, carved weeping women, forlorn
angels, and heartbroken figures, Memorial to a Marriage doesn’t standout, it blends in. So much so that it’s almost invisible—just anothermonument to death, love, and loss in this amazing garden of graves.
Only when you think about why Memorialblends in does it stop being
conventional and start being insurrectionary.
I knew what I was looking for when I went to the cemetery. I had
seen pictures of Memorial and even a small plaster model. Yet it
still stunned me when I came upon it. The sculpture is technicallyproficient but stylistically ordinary: Saint-Gaudens by way ofCourbet’s painting of female lovers, The Sleep. But after wandering
through Woodlawn and understanding what this place represents andhow status quo it is, Cronin’s queer cloaking tactic blossoms. If it weresome sensationalistic girl-on-girl porn sculpture, Memorialwould
be obvious, ironic finger-pointing—little more than grandstanding.
Instead, she plays not only with art history but also with the law. In
the process she subverts both.

Woodlawn’s celebrated Kingsley angel

In memory of devoted mother

Memorial depicts Cronin on her back, a blissful smile on her lips, herright breast partially revealed by peeled-back sheets, cradling Kass,
who sweetly spoons her and rests her head on her mate’s shoulder.
The lovers’ arms and feet entwine. Somehow you know these arereal women, not allegorical figures, cherubs, or spirits of eternal
sleep—that they’ve shared one another’s lives and bodies. After
having been dumbstruck by so many spectacular and spectacularly
gaudy monuments, looking down on this slab, which lies just above
the ground on a low base, shaded by evergreen and oak trees, you’reushered into a very different, very juicy realm.
Memorial forces issues. If you’re left of political center, you mightfeel like your side scored a point. If you’re on the right, you might beoffended. When I asked a clean-cut, twentysomething couple whothey thought the carved women in Cronin’s sculpture were, the young
man said, “mythical people or saints”; the woman, “angels.” I said,“I think they’re lesbians, and that they’ve just had sex.” The couple
peered down, widened their eyes, tottered slightly, then began shaking
their heads back and forth. I don’t know what, only that Memorial did
something to them.
It seems to be doing it a lot. According to a cemetery official, SusanOlsen, who keenly observes that much of Woodlawn is “widows’ work”(many monuments were overseen by women), news of Memorial has
spread: Cronin’s is now the third most visited grave site at Woodlawn,behind only Miles Davis and Duke Ellington.
Cronin makes you understand that the space around us is charged
with controlling mechanisms and sexual regulations, and thatheterosexual rule is law, even if this law is enforced in ways that havegrown so common as to be all but invisible. Executed in a classicalstyle, Memorial is a deeply communal but adamantly anti-classic
work. In a gallery, the sculpture would be an outcast. At Woodlawn,
as in life, Cronin is: U.S. law still forbids her and Kass to marry.
Memorial to a Marriageis a monument to something that can’t happen
here—yet. It is bittersweet, but also filled with an outlaw’s outrage. AtWoodlawn, Cronin has turned inequity into triumph.
jsaltz@villagevoice.com
find this article : http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-10-28/news/forever-yours/