Abstract

In 2010, a display of Olmec art served as the inaugural exhibition for Renzo Piano’s Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It included two colossal naturalistic portraits carved out of basaltic rock carved sometime between 1500 and 400 BCE. One of these heads, known as San Lorenzo Monument Five, had been at LACMA before, as part of an exhibition in 1963-64. Castañeda traces the spectacular and politically charged history of the transportation of this and similar monuments—they also appeared in front of Cullinan Hall in Houston and at New York’s Seagram Plaza—as instances of what Walter Benjamin describes as temporal “doublings,” producing an on-going preoccupation in the realms of architecture, museology and “public art” with the aesthetic and logistical spectacle of monolithic sculpture.