gallery

The Santa Fe New Mexican
Saturday - March 19, 2005

Ticking Time Bomb?
Controversial sculpture targeted by vandals - or critics
By Tom Sharpe
The New Mexican

Someone pushed over the 6-foot-tall, 600-pound, gold-leafed hand grenade in front of Linda Durham Contemporary Art, leaving the artist and gallery director to wonder if it was simple vandalism or political-art criticism.

Sculptor Martin Cary Horowitz said the piece has created a "hoopla" since it was erected outside the gallery at the southeastern bend of Paseo de Peralta a week before the November general election. "Some people see them as antiwar pieces, and some people see them as the glorification of war," he said of his series of gilded weapons, of which the hand grenade is one. "It could be the war/antiwar thing."

Gallery Director, Patrick Carpenter, who discovered the damage when he arrived for work Friday morning, leans toward the theory that someone was trying to make a statement by vandalizing the sculpture. "We thought we'd leave it like it is for a day or so," he said. "It actually fell into some gravel on what would be the handle of the grenade piece itself, so that's fairly damaged. .... The entire piece will have to be regilded."

Earlier this year, in an effort to capitalize on the controversial piece, gallery owner, Linda Durham, sponsored an essay contest to give people a chance to write about what the hand-grenade sculpture meant to them.

Thirty-six people sent in essays. Reverie Escobedo, a Spanish teacher at Willow and Rio Grande elementary schools and Santa Fe Community College, was awarded $500 for her first-place essay, "Golden Dreams."

"I deal with the surfaces of made objects and found objects," Horowitz said Friday from his store, Gold Leafe Framemakers of Santa Fe. I gild them as I see them. The gold is my palette. I use different karats of leaf. Those karats give you different colors of gold." The gold leaf on the $30,000 hand grenade is almost pure gold, at 23.75 karats.

Carpenter said fingerprints show up clearly on gold leaf, but he is unsure whether the police will use the fingerprints to track down the culprits. Horowitz, however, thinks the police should pursue the vandalism against what he calls "art for the people." "This is an art town and anybody who demeans art, who messes with the art in this town, is messing with the whole town," he said. "It's art on the street. It's a political statement. Even if it's just vandals that knocked it over, it still makes a statement."