In color and form, most of the works on view combine human and machine elements, as in a kind of cyborg assemblage. There are plenty of browns and grays, unpainted surfaces with individual body parts made heavy and rough.1 The cyborg aesthetic in Statuesque is neither as ideologically charged as its Dada and Futurist predecessors, nor as spectacular as its CGI robot-themed blockbuster contemporaries. Pawel Althamer’s Sylwia (2010) is sprawled on her back in the manner of an odalisque, legs assembled from discontinuous segments, while Huma Bhabha’s The Orientalist (2007) sits on a throne in pretend majesty and a silly grin, with cut-off trousers that reveal stick legs and bulbous feet. Matthew Monahan’s Nation Builder (2010) is a grim interpretation of American interventionism. Monahan’s sculpture is literally cut off at the knees, even as it bears a column like Christ’s carrying of the cross. Rebecca Warren’s Large Concretised Monument to the Twentieth Century (2007) scuttles forth, resembling a wasp-waisted Olive Oyl. The most unnerving works are by Thomas Houseago. Untitled (Lumpy Figure) (2009), described by the artist as “barely a figure,” staggers and bears up under the weight of the intestinal forms that snake over its body. Houseago’s second work in the exhibition, Untitled (Sprawling Octopus Man) (2009) stands in a predatory crouch, activating the fight-or-flight reflex in viewers who find themselves stared down by its inhuman mask of a face.

In its exploration of subversive approaches to artistic idealism, Statuesque recalls a pair of shows at New York's New Museum in 2007-2008. Unmonumental—which included Curry, Monahan and Warren—dealt with approaches to anti-monumentality; and After Nature—featuring work by Althamer and Bhabha—envisioned a future ecological and civilizational collapse. Still another recent group show indicates the surprising importance of Los Angeles, where Curry, Monahan and Houseago all now live and work, as a locus for artists grappling with such ideas. California Maximalism, a 2009 exhibition at Nyehaus in New York, included work by all three, and interpreted their so-called "maximalism" as following from Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy as well as the earlier West Coast Funk defined by Bruce Conner’s work.

Thomas Houseago, Untitled (Lumpy Figure), 2009; bronze; 101 x 39 x 55 in.; courtesy the artist and Michael Werner Gallery, New York; photographed by Kevin Todora.

The narrative that I just sketched, however, immediately raises questions. How, if at all, can the hefty and imposing work in Statuesque be squared with an idea of the 'unmonumental'?  While the New Museum exhibition showed several of these artists backing away from sculpture’s long-standing claims to power and authority, the works in Statuesque are quite capable of squaring off against traditional monuments of equestrian or seated figures. For that matter, how can the uses of sturdy materials (i.e. bronze and aluminum) in Statuesque be incorporated into the lineage of Los Angeles artists such as McCarthy and Kelley, who relied on unstable organic matter and ephemeral performance? Perhaps the impulse to achieve permanence and monumentality is simply so powerful that even representatives of counter-institutional or "unmonumental" traditions will eventually bend that way (with ambivalence).

More to the point, the version of monumentality that appears in Statuesque is explicitly detached from the human image and commemorative purposes. Instead, it has an otherworldly and science-fictional bent through its many cyborg-like figures. In its sense of fantasy and exaggeration, Statuesque holds unexpected parallels with robot blockbusters such as Transformers or Iron Man, as both play on the dramatic tension between fantasies of overwhelming power and an experience of humbler reality. Movie examples include the unassuming Peter Parker of Spider-Man, or the socially outcast mutants of the X-Men. In the case of the sculptures, the contrast between the works’ formal power, and the distressed or disjointed nature of the individuals they depict, defines the works’ dramatic tension. Translated to the serene context of the Nasher’s sculpture garden, this vision has a richness that allows one to imagine surprising connections between modernism and the multiplex.

• 1. On both counts, however, Aaron Curry's work is the exception. It is drenched in overwhelming Day-Glo yellow and pink, and constructed from semi-abstract, biomorphic two-dimensional forms. Following a trajectory traced from Picasso through Anthony Caro, Curry shows how a bodily figure can be constructed optically, while lacking a solid core.