THE PUBLIC UNCONSCIOUS
In his public sculptures inhabiting parks, plazas, and courthouses across the country, Tom Otterness has long tackled themes of money, religion, sex, and class that ripple through our national psyche. Often alluding to fairy tales and political cartoons, Otterness's figures and animals cast in bronze have a lovability and extreme cuteness that belie their subversive edge and allow the artist to carry controversial subjects into the public domain like a Trojan horse.
Some twenty new sculptures, many generated from collaborations with communities around the nation and beyond, are brought together in The Public Unconscious, the artist's first major gallery show in five years. Walking into this menagerie full of characters and creatures with tremendous disparities in scale and slippery meanings is a bit like being pulled through the looking glass. A tenfoot-long millipede wears a top hat and chunky shoes on its multitude of little feet that support its sleek, torpedo-like body. Is it a commentary on how society works together in healthy cooperation or walks blindly in lockstep? Such multiple readings reverberate throughout these works that for Otterness reflect a kind of collective dream life and self-portrait of the country.
The emotional center of the show for the artist - who was born in 1952 in Wichita, Kansas, and has worked in the public sphere since becoming a member of Collaborative Projects in New York in 1977 - is Immigrant Family, a monumental grouping of figures stretching almost ten feet in each direction. Otterness's signature treatment of his figures is influenced by animation from the 1920s and 1930s and the geometric figures of early Malevich as well as WPA artists who looked to many cultures and boiled down a universal language. Part of what's unexpected in Otterness's simple cartoon world is that the details feel so true. In Immigrant Family, a mother and a father are dressed in immigrants' garb and cradle their baby who looks out to the world. The contact places between forms - where the button on the man's vest pulls on the fabric or where the baby clutches its mother's ttlumb - are critical for the artist who wants the viewer to recognize something physically convincing even within the radical distortions. Expressively, too, he's looking for what is essential. Otterness, who finds that almost all Americans have an immigrant story in their family history, invests the promise of the New World in the new life of the baby. He even made tortuous full-scale changes, including lopping off the giant head of the father who was originally looking outward and repositioning his gaze on the infant, to reinforce the idea of parents looking to their future in their children.
Probably the most pointed social satire in the show is Otterness's The Consumer, reprising his familiar theme of fat cats and their obsession with money. Inspired by a political cartoon of an obese man literally swallowing up trucks and industry, Otterness has sent a convoy of commodities - including an oil tanker, a lumber truck, a pack of cigarettes, and a diamond ring - up a ramp and into the open mouth of an almost spherical figure sitting on a money bag spilling out coins. Originally conceived as a 40-foot balloon for a project in Sao Paulo that didn't come to fruition, the almost eight-foot-high bronze figure stands as a universal symbol of unthinking avarice and retains the sense of an inflatable that's about to burst.
All of these new works have been affected by Otterness's integration of the computer into his design process over the last five years. This first began with a giant figural play structure he built almost entirely on screen that he considers a step toward his ambitions to make anthropomorphic architecture. The ability to mentally move around inside the structure through computer animation during the conception stages opened up a new window for him. Now, digitally generating pieces at radically different scales with ease, before working on his models by hand in clay, has become the standard way for him to think about sculpture. He extracted a small mouse, for instance, from a vignette based on Aesop's Fables that he did in The Netherlands in 2004 and for this show bumped it up to nine feet. The towering mouse, with its hands behind its back staring down quizzically at the viewer, creates an odd psychological dynamic. So does the huge crazy-eyed frog, from a 2004 public project at the Camuy Caverns in Puerto Rico, which has the viewer in its sights and looks ready to spring. Are they cute or menacing, benign or malevolent? In Otterness's wonderland, the ground is always shifting.
Most of these individual works come out of Otterness's public projects that reflect the character of communities he works with; but when cut free of a larger context, the works take on meanings of their own - just as Auguste Rodin's The Thinker exists independently of The Gates of Hell where the motif originated. In a project Otterness completed in 2004 for Texas Tech University in Lubbock, for instance, a king and queen titled Free Thinkers watch as a big tornado of right-wing and left-wing books tear apart a model of the White House. Reworked now as a stand-alone sculpture, the disgruntled king and more curious queen, naked save their crowns and robes pulled back, seem to be defiant radicals throwing off their Emperor's new clothes and thinking for themselves.
Other small works in the show, including a lilliputian figure scaling a microscope to examine a second little figure splayed out under the lens, come from a project in process for the city of Claremont, California, where the concept of “Intelligent Design” originated. There, in a public fountain, Otterness conceived a debate between evolving fish – who play with blocks, learn to read and write, and turn into lizards with graduation caps – and a snake wearing a doctorate’s tam with a bible and an apple.
Kissing Dung Beetles is another recent sculpture born of a larger project, a commission the artist completed in 2005 for the Nolen Greenhouses at The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, New York. He pulled out the small-scale motif od amorous insects from his bronzes of a giant phallic plant called Amorphophallus Titaniumin the Botanical Garden, and enlarges the dung beetles – kissing in the grappling embrace atop a money bag – to seven feet. In its new incarnation, whether the dung beetles are in love with each other or the money is up for grabs, but their passion is real. Otterness remembers the profound effect as a child of reading Franz Kafka’s famous story The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa awoke to find he had been changed into a monstrous bug. “It’s been hard to describe how convincing it seemed to me”, says Otterness. “I look at Kissing Dung Beetles and think it could be Gregor if he didn’t die in his room alone but got therapy, found a mate, and made some money.” Using such humor and optimism to float murkier personal and collective issues is the defining quality of Otterness’s allegories.
Hilarie Sheets