Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is one of those doorstoppers of a book, or rather a door blocker, it may even have potential as an actual door in each of its massive six volumes. (his contemporaries felt the same: ""Another damned, thick, square, book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?" wrote William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, upon receiving the second volume from the author, 1781). The whole series, published between 1776 and 1789, used to be required reading for your average disaffected intellectual and odd statesman, especially those with a penchant for history (Virginia Woolf and Winston Churchill were amongst its fans). In sitting down to write about it, I misremembered the title to this hefty history, as The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. I’m not alone in this blunder, the web is chock full of the same error by others. But "Decline and Fall" implies one vision of catastrophe and the "Rise and Fall" another. The first makes you feel like it was always built to fail, planned imperial obsolescence, while the second feels almost hopeful, optimistic, as if they nearly had a chance: if only things had just gone a little bit differently, we'd all be chitchatting in Latin. "Rise and Fall" can of course mean both at the same time, an undulating history realized in a single gesture.

"Rise and Fall" as a phrase appears again and again, as subtitles to biographies of fallen celebrities, in historical treatises on Jim Crow and the American Whig Party, America's Premier Mental Hospital and the House of Medici, the Confederate government and Twitter. It's a stand-in for collapsed aspirations. The earliest book I could find with "Rise and Fall" in the title was from 1643 though it existed as a phrase long before that to be sure. Google Books yields 18,549 books with the words "Rise and Fall" in the title. The earliest reference I could find for the phrase was in a description of the tide from 1340.

But Rise and Fall has monumental proportions: it soars dramatically from the plains, the cracked obelisk or the stripped pyramid. Used even mockingly, it's to show the imperial pretensions of the small or the smallish failings of the large. Rise and Fall implies a narrative over time. Even "The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector" recently published is a substantially shorter period than say "The Rise and of Ancient Republicks" of 1793 by Edward Wortley Montagu, the sense of narrative, one action following another, over a period is embedded in its meaning.

This notion of "Rise and Fall" got revisited famously in another monumental book, equally effective as a door stop, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," a nod to Hitler's Roman-sized imperial ambitions. Hitler even told his architect Albert Speer to design buildings that would make good ruins. (perhaps another example of "Rise and Fall" simultaneously, but more on this later).

Rise and Fall (we can drop the quotations) spells out the ambitions of empire and the failures of hubris. But to write a book about fallen empires gives pleasure to recounting the history. In the case of the imperial individual, we can go back to Agamemnon through to Hamlet and beyond to show us delighting in the high brought low. Any channel surfer on cable TV has had some amount of time sucked away by the History Channel, nodding to one of the innumerable documentaries on the Nazis or the Romans (most of the modern colonial empires get short shrift on TV, the wounds still sting a little too much for prime time, especially without the righteousness of victory). But sometimes the Rise and Fall is collapsed into a moment, an object, a story.

In regards to the ancients, Shelley's Ozymandias jumps to mind as art that collapses history into a moment, and those ambitions laid low are collapsed into an object. ("My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:/ Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"/ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/ Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,/ The lone and level sands stretch far away." But even Shelley has the distance of legend, of not having actual seen the wreck, as the sonnet commences with "I met a traveler from an antique land..."

Like the statue in Ozymandias, the objects themselves from these fallen and ruined empires can be easy stand-ins for inscribed narratives, but then again the objects in the raw are inherently old, the Fall long past, the Rise a distant memory at best. In a way, only art, with the critical distance of time, (as Shelley gains his distance from the "traveler") can capture the simultaneity of "Rise and Fall." I think of the artists and architects that learned from the Romans (even if concrete wasn’t reinvented until 1756), it was the objects that inspired, the spare ones left over, and in this inspiration, this left over stuff went from junk to treasure. The relics stopped being just relics and became a dynamic phenomenon in the present to be literally and figuratively traded, cashed in, or used to bend history toward a new center of gravity (an easy modern example is Mussolini claiming the mantle of Rome for himself).

In Europe at one point or another, the remnants of ancient civilizations became magically transformed from useless old piles of rocks to be looted when convenient to either an inspiration for future masterworks, a viable way to make a few bucks on tourism, or at worst a justification for a new set of imperial ambitions. When it was old junk, they sold or destroyed it to almost any who cared for it. I can almost see the eyerolls of a Greek shepherd as some nutty Englishman climbs through his fields obsessing over the rocks. (The ancestors of these shepherds feel a little bit differently about these things of course, more on this later.)

The thing immediately made and the collapsed in the same moment is different though. The thing made to be destroyed, or made of material that almost ensures its destruction. Modernity is filled with this of course: the McMansions that line the foothills on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the cheap plastic trinkets made in China that disintegrate in your hands as you purchase them, any computer ever manufactured. Built-in obsolescence for semi-disposable existence. But the Rise is never as obvious as the Fall in these things. Time does not exist for these semi-disposables, they have one simple meaning and one simple use for one simple time. Your brand new computer is outdated the moment you buy it. It’s all Fall in the end, the Rise is in Moore’s Law and the exponential ascendancy of technology of which any one object is merely a mile marker.

But Rise and Fall, with all its imperial ambitions and eventual ruination and final fetishization, has been captured simultaneously in the gestures and objects of Los Angeles-based artist Liz Glynn. Embedded in Glynn's work is a fascination with antiquity, a sense of the ancient that is as much in love with its ruination as the impulse that made it. To simply replicate the objects of the ancients is better done by forgers, Glynn often takes different notions and symbols of contemporary relationship to the past and rebuilds them, investing in them all of the tension of Rise and Fall, usually using distinctively unmonumental materials and methods. Many of the great art works of antiquity, especially Greek sculptural masterpieces, we know only from cheap Roman copies, the ancient equivalent of the lawn jockey. But Glynn's work are not replicas, but rebuilds that reveal all the seems of its roughhewn creation without any attempt made to fake ancient authenticity. In her practice she emphasizes the contemporary, this notion of an ever-shifting present, using the past not as an action long over, but as agent in the present.

In her most recent series, California Surrogates for the Getty, 2008, Glynn took all of the pieces the Getty had to infamously return to Italy from whence it was proven they were looted, and remade them with cardboard, trash, California yard waste, plaster, and victory wax (a product regularly used in making replicas). Within each ill-begotten vase is the capture of looted treasure from the past, many of the objects were made of simple materials paint and clay, but our fascination with the remnants of Rome and the limitations of the strange laws governing the sale of antiquities, made each of the vases nearly priceless in their rarity and availability. Curators are painfully aware of the laws governing the sale of antiquities, and all works of dubious provenance should be considered stolen. But for Marion True, the erstwhile curator at the Getty and her bosses, the temptation of the objects overweighed the suspicions of their having been looted. But arguments abound, does Italy (the ancestors of indifferent shepherds and petty warlords) really own these objects, or is it just another kind of conquest? Who really owns what? But the laws were made to discourage looting and preserve the precious conditions of a dig for archaeologists (as well as for countries to once and for all be able to claim the junk in their ground as treasure)?

In each vase remade by Glynn, there exists the antiquity as a stand-in for the Empire that made it, its ruin, our fascination and pleasure in its things, though in the end, she rejects their semblance of permanence. She refuses to make fetishes of fetishes, but rather the works humble materials undercuts all the hubris they've come to represent, both of their imperial makers and they're modern dealers and curators.

Besides the shaky relationship we have to the past and its objects, the current powers regularly trot out imperial ancestors for comparison. One of the impetuses of Glynn's most ambitious project, 24 Hour Rome Reconstruction Project, 2008, was the regular repetition by the would-be conquerors of Iraq, George W. Bush and his cohorts, of how "Rome wasn't built in a day" as an answer to the failure of reconstruction in Iraq. This cliché became a cover for all of the failings of their invasion, it's shoddy planning and catastrophic aftermath that persists till this day. But embodied in this story of tinny cliché and empty claims, is the favored comparison of America as the New Rome, regularly echoed by esteemed pundits and sloganeering politicians. As a rejection of this claim, Glynn took the impossibly poetical challenge of actually building Rome in a day. From Romulus' simple thatched hut atop the Palatine Hill in 753 BC (who killed his brother Remus to become the first ruler of Rome) to its sacking by the Visigoths in 410 AD, Glynn, alongside an army of volunteers, undertook to build Rome in a day.

Originally realized in the storefront non-profit space Machine Project in LA and redone for Glynn's participation in the first edition of the New Museum's first edition of its triennial in New York, this work captures all the pomp and circumstance, the monumentality and unmonumentality (to use a word coined for another New Museum exhibition), the build-up and break-down of the grandest of human endeavors. The gesture of building Rome in a day is one that echoes the monumentality of the Eternal City, but the process, materials, and temporality of 24 Hour Rome Reconstruction Project undercuts that’s impulse towards the colossal with all of the power inherent in the gesture of building a Rome at all. But like California Surrogates for the Getty, the materials are humble, never the marble of empires and wanna-bes, but cardboard collected from what would otherwise be thrown away, the simple materials beautifully undercutting the arrogant hopes of the powerful for eternity.

The title of this essay is the "The Rise and Fall of Liz Glynn," and in this I wished not only to echo Gibbon (perhaps conveniently misinterpreting the mentor), as well those who repeated, in one form or another, his iconic title, but my intention wasn’t to write about the "Rise and Fall" of Glynn as an artist like one might write about the Rise and Fall of Michael Jackson, but rather, the simultaneous moment, Rise and Fall at the same time. Failure and decay built into destruction, making and remaking ruins in a way that fully acknowledges the properties of ancient objects in the present as well as the civilizations that made them. The past is not simply an outcropping, a nice background for a tourist photograph, but things and actions wholly enmeshed in the mercurial flow of present. Other contemporary artists have played with the past as mode, but often do so without attributing sources, using art history as an easily rifled through medicine cabinet, never fully acknowledging the force of the past in present ways of being and seeing, of conquering countries and the sophistries of modern politicians.

Rise and Fall as a single gesture, inscribed in all these works is the humor of human folly writ large. One can only describe the Bush years, and their use of the famous cliché, "Rome wasn’t built in a day" as a tragicomedy on the grandest scale, one that costs many thousands of people their lives. It’s easy to think of George W. Bush as a clown, an easy object of derision, till one remembers all those who died because of his terrible decisions. The work of a contemporary artist, may or may not change the course of history, that’s an argument larger than I can hope to tackle here, but artists can catalogue our faults and failures, mirror our optimism and failure, and do so, as Liz Glynn does in her singular ability to capture Rise and Fall in a single gesture, with a very serious brand of poetry, humor, and grace.

As I noted earlier, Rise and Fall contains a certain optimism, the hope of the Rise, even though it has built into the phrase the inevitable Fall. And even after the fact, there's at least some pleasure in the retelling and the objects that help that story along. Since I’ve begun with Gibbon, it seems only fitting that he have the last word from the final chapter of the final volume of his magnum opus, and I feel his sentiments may echo Liz Glynn's, the fleeting moment of Rise and Fall at the same time:

The art of man is able to construct monuments far more permanent than the narrow span of his own existence: yet these monuments, like himself, are perishable and frail; and in the boundless annals of time his life and his labours must equally be measured as a fleeting moment.