A Curiosity, a Museum Piece and an Example of a Road not Taken

[…] Christina Hemauer’s and Roman Keller’s current project, A Moral Equivalent of War: A Curiosity, a Museum Piece and an Example of a Road not Taken (2006–7), also concerns a manifestation of power and, like the work of Greenfort or Ukeles, offers itself not as a didactic polemic but as a reordering of energies, resonance and Conceptual nutrients. The project revolves around the artists’ search for the solar panels that former US President Jimmy Carter had mounted on the roof of the West Wing of the White House. Installed in 1979 during an apparent moment of awareness of the dangers of the US’ dependence on foreign oil at the peak of the so-called second energy crisis – at a time when Carter called for 20 percent of American energy to come from solar power by the year 2000 – the panels and all they symbolized were torn down under the Reagan administration in the 1980s. They eventually found their way to a dining-room roof at ‘America’s Environmental College’, Unity College in Maine, but are now long defunct. Hemauer and Keller strapped one of the panels to the roof of their car and drove from Maine to the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta, filming a documentary along the way, meeting Carter himself, transforming the panel into a museum exhibit and reopening a dialogue about present energy policy.

Text Max Andrews, «The Whole Truth», Frieze issue 108