Donald Trump’s visit to San Diego today to tour border wall prototypes will be political theater, allowing a president who loves props to wave at some very big ones. The wall is Trump’s signature issue, and it’s easy to envision him thoroughly enjoying a walk through the eight giant, concrete-and-steel test sections placed for his perusal. There’s been a smaller storm brewing around another tour of the prototypes, staged by the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel. In December, Büchel began a project to have the wall sections designated a national monument, declaring that they “have significant cultural value and are historical land art.” He launched a petition to preserve the prototypes under the American Antiquities Act on both historical and aesthetic grounds, citing as precedents Stonehenge and the mass-produced “readymades” of Marcel Duchamp. “This is a collective sculpture; people elected this artist,” Büchel told the New York Times. In the meantime, he has been organizing $25-a-head excursions to the site. As many pointed out when Büchel launched, there were a number of reasons why his performance felt like a lame provocation from a man with no connections to or context for the region. The Los Angeles Times went on one of his tours and noted that the European guide and curator accompanying them had never before been to Tijuana, directly across the border from the prototypes. Hundreds of artists condemned the project in an open letter as “concerned more with spectacle and irony than critically dismantling oppressive structures that undermine the lives of the most vulnerable” and called for a boycott of Hauser & Wirth, a prestigious international art gallery that has promoted Büchel’s piece. The backlash, of course, ensured attention — the same symbiosis of outrage and buzz that greeted the artist’s 2015 installation of a mosque inside a church in Venice (authorities shut it down, claiming it was a security threat and that Büchel hadn’t gotten the correct permits.) But the big gesture of Büchel’s work, invoking a dated argument about whether anything can be art (yes, probably), doesn’t engage with the reality of the border or the history of U.S. immigration enforcement any more than Trump’s photo-op. Preserving the prototypes as monuments would freeze-frame only a particularly absurd and bald-faced moment in a continuum of xenophobic construction.

Büchel’s work doesn’t engage with the reality of the border any more than Trump’s photo-op.

“The wall” is already a living site of creation – already a monument to suffering and resistance.