Portrait of Tom Otterness, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui.
At Craig Starr this spring, Tom Otterness re-presents The Frieze, for many of us displayed for the first time. Despite originally intended in 1981–83 as an architectural molding, Otterness has installed it now as discrete panels, all cast in 2025, shifting our understanding of the reliefs from ornament to stand-alone art objects.
The Frieze depicts a battle of the sexes, with women facing off against men and deposing (and quartering) their king. The genders are differentiated only by their primary, outward sexual characteristics: nobody has hair, and everyone wears heavily lined grimace-smiles. While some figures cavort—in positions wholesome and less-so—with animals alive and fossilized, others tumble like gymnasts or climb and fall in complex braids of torsos and limbs. I thought of the previously cited references (Michelangelo, Rodin) of The Frieze’s original reviews and many others not discussed in print before: the sexually ambiguous acrobats of the Modena metopes, the “Tumblers” Paracas textile of ancient Peru, and the apotropaic Sheela na Gigs of the British Isles. The Frieze offers both the calisthenics and the humor in all of these forebears.
Otterness and I spoke on a glorious May morning after coffee. The following is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.
Tom Otterness: At eighteen I came to New York. I didn’t go to college. I went to art school instead, but my real college was working at the Museum of Natural History here in New York. I was a night watchman there for four years, and worked one year in the Anthropology Division. That was the context for me of the narrative of The Frieze—the dinosaurs and the kind of aesthetic blending of all the world cultures that were represented at the Natural History Museum.
Amanda Gluibizzi (Rail): I guess your sculptural project at large is kind of an expansion of the diorama concept.
Otterness: Oh, it certainly has had an effect on me, yes, yes. I always liked what they did. It seemed like everything was fair game except the current culture that we live in. Every other culture except for the one we’re in right now. We’re filling in the blank.
Rail: It’s hard to do anthropology on yourself.
Otterness: Yeah. No objectivity.
As a night watchman, I could go into the departments unaccompanied and investigate. The diorama section was always interesting. The 3D sculptures are in a kind of receding perspective, and they blend perfectly into the perspective of the painted backdrops. It’s a very complicated perspective problem. It was fascinating to see them do those things.
Rail: Let’s turn to your work. The Frieze was made and first displayed in 1981–83. Can you talk just a bit about revisiting it now? How does it look to you forty-three years on?
When you consider it in terms of the early eighties—so, the Reagan years—and then putting it on display in 2025, do you think about the political situations that are happening in both time periods, and how it might be kind of a conversation with them?
Otterness: It certainly is some kind of good fortune to have The Frieze back out when we’re entering a possible monarchy here. It seems like a good time to see it again, to be immersed in it again: the overthrow of the king, the killing of the king—all of that stuff is the narrative of it. In the past, I would think, “Oh, didn’t we start the country this way?” We overthrew a king, and here we are in this full circle of heading back to monarchy… or worse.
I also get immersed in the energy when thinking about it now. I remember doing the whole thing in an eight-month period, with an intense drive behind it as I was doing it. I went to Brooke Alexander, and I fit The Frieze narrative into his gallery with maybe a half a dozen or a dozen photocopied drawings. It was remarkable to see him jump on board to back it up—the shock for me of having him pay my rent and letting me hire a crew. It was sort of like stone soup. In the beginning Brooke was very firm: “It’s just gonna be $300 a month, nothing more.” And then, well, I needed mold material, and then I needed to hire a couple people. I needed to do this, I needed to do that. And it turned into my having a crew of six or eight people and eight months of work to get it completed. A small fortune. It still astonishes me that Brooke could hang in there through all that.
Rail: In some of the things that I’ve read about it, The Frieze was described as being sold by the linear foot with a 20-foot minimum. Is that true?
Otterness: Yeah, that was it! At the time, I was a sheet rocker. That’s how I made my money. We would be at downtown jobs rehabbing places that had ornate cornice moldings, and I was fascinated by that technique. I learned from an old Italian guy the subtleties of it: how to mold it, how to attach it, how to screw it in place, how to fill the seams so it looks seamless. Moldings are sold by the linear foot.
Rail: And is it sold by the linear foot today, too?
Otterness: Yes, we have a method like that. The price has gone up a little bit.
Rail: Well, thank goodness for that! So, if I bought it, do you scale it up or down to fit a space, or would the narrative stop where the footage stops? How does that work?
Otterness: For the original Frieze, I would go in with a tape measure and negotiate with the client about which part of The Frieze they liked, and which section would I think it’s best to put it on this wall, or circle a skylight, or go around the door, or something like that. We’d reach an agreement about how to approach it, and then I would measure off the footage, cast it, and come back and install it. That was the method at the time. I thought it was interesting that Craig wanted to see them at eye level, instead of up in the cornice moldings, to address them as panels on their own. To me, they are compositions, they’re self-sufficient works, you know? The plasters themselves are unique sections, and they’re fixed 90 degrees to the wall and meant to be hung in the middle of the wall. I like that this show has given me a fresh look at the work after all these years.
But we’re still doing both, even though it gets a little complicated. You can have a doorway like Craig’s got a doorway off of the old system. And I’d be more than happy to do a complete narrative for somebody in the same way I did in the past.
Rail: When I was there, the woman who took us up to the gallery mentioned that it’s been installed in the reverse order from what it originally was.
Otterness: It worked out that way. The front room has what I would call the climax of the central part of the narrative, with the king being overthrown, the monumental penis being pulled down. The king is being carried toward the center. And there’s a kind of strange Francisco Goya-like finale of a figure giving birth to kings and eating them at the same time. Then in the back room is the innocent children’s paradise where the kids start off arm in arm, and dinosaurs are being chased. It’s the innocent beginning.
Rail: So, we hit the fall first?
Otterness: Yeah.
Rail: I guess it’s true that we can only go up from there, right?
Otterness: I guess that’s the fact. I thought it was interesting to see it broken out of that strict, linear narrative. I think it was good to address it in sections or in fragments. It helped me see it in a different way.
Rail: The Frieze is interesting, because it changes registers, moving from a horizontal composition to a vertical composition and then back again. We’re forced to read it differently. Architecturally, it creates a basic post-and-lintel shape, which we associate with the earliest built structures, and which I think matches the prehistoric sensibility that some early reviewers have felt that this work conveys. In the essay for Craig Starr, Michael Brenson quotes Herbert Read as describing sculpture as being somewhere between the two extremes of the monument and the amulet. But The Frieze, to me, feels more like it’s conterminous with architecture; it’s both sculpture and structure. Do you feel like it is architectural, as well?
Otterness: Oh yeah, it was always referring back to early architectural, high-relief sculpture. The Brooke Alexander show was clearly architectural in the way it was installed. And it was critical to make it feel like it was born into the wall—that they’re really unified.
Rail: That’s a great phrase, “born into the wall.” It is, of course, of the wall, but also the wall seems to be repelling them. The relief itself is enacting your Goya figure, being both consumed and born at the same time.
Otterness: Yeah, I like that. There was one section where I broke into the wall to make the relief recessed, and it’s how I still imagine that large panel of the Killing of the King (1981). I imagine it in a permanent installation cutting a big hole in the wall and setting it back in some historical grotto that is carved out of the wall.
Rail: It has basically a lunette shape. It’s an arch over the figure who’s—I don’t know—both reveling in and pleasuring herself at the fall of the king. The shape allows it to be almost like an altarpiece.
Otterness: Oh, everybody’s celebrating in their own way.
Rail: The material that you’re using in the Craig Starr show—plaster covered in polymer emulsion—does something great for the reliefs, just visually. It lets them maintain their matte surface. It mutes the shadows of them. Obviously, they cast shadows onto the wall, but the shadows within the reliefs wind up being kind of fuzzy and tactile. The figures are like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters or something. They have this thick density to them, and you feel their weight and the heft. But I’m curious about how it shifts when you cast them in bronze, and what your preference is. Do you prefer the plaster or the bronze versions?
Otterness: It’s been a while, so for a long time I thought of them as plaster and their relationship to the wall being the primary material. But after so much time, I was taken with seeing them finally in bronze, you know, after a forty-three-year delay. I’m a bronze guy now. I love that stuff; humans seem to have some draw to touching it, to identifying with it, and it seems to give the work a kind of depth and seriousness. But like you were saying, with the new white plaster Frieze there is some kind of magic between the figure and the background, and the emergence of the figure from the background. It’s more subtle: it’s almost like coming out of clouds. These are two different approaches. I have fantasies of doing the bronzes as maybe a freestanding gateway outdoors. Things that can function in bronze that the plaster isn’t capable of.
Rail: Go the full Rodin, right?
Otterness: Yes—as always, if I’ve got one model, it’s Rodin. Do every variation you can imagine. That’s the Rodin method.
Rail: I wanted to pick up on something that you said about it looking like a grotto or an altarpiece. I was curious about whether you’d ever thought about painting them so that you could kind of have, like, a Luca della Robbia effect.
Otterness: Della Robbia would be white and blue or something, right?
Rail: And yellow and a little bit of red.
Otterness: I have definitely painted some friezes. Mine tend to be yellow and red, not necessarily turquoise blue. I tend to go for high-gloss taxicab yellow. In the early days, I did some versions of them that way, and with hand-drawn oil pastel lines around them to sort of echo the forms and stuff. I’m not far from that; I could go there. I could imagine it.
Rail: I’m happy to hear about taxicab yellow, because that is the best yellow.
Otterness: Yeah, I’m addicted. I guess it’s everywhere, but in New York, it means something. It’s a warning color, you know—watch out. So don’t cross.
Rail: Oh, I love that. You said that with the plaster, it feels like they’re coming out of clouds, which is a really lovely way of thinking about them. I think that we particularly see that with the relief that opens the show, the Battle Cartoon (1981). It’s a distinctly different aesthetic from the other panels. I would say maybe it’s “medium” relief as opposed to high relief.
Otterness: Yep, they are more submerged into the background.
Rail: I can see the comparison to Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina, which is what people always compare it to.
Otterness: Yeah, it’s pretty direct.
Rail: But I think it might be possibly even closer to Leonardo da Vinci’s Battle of Anghiari, which is dusty and smoky, and so I’m curious about that. I’m also wondering about the woman clutching the child—or at least what I’m reading as a woman clutching a child—in the lower right-hand corner. Because she—if she’s a she—is not in Michelangelo or Leonardo.
Otterness: Yeah, not many women in those early reliefs.
Rail: With her inclusion it then becomes—rather than real battles, which both of the Renaissance masters were depicting—perhaps a mythical or a spiritual battle, so the Rape of the Sabine Women (ca. 1635–40) or the Massacre of the Innocents (ca. 1565–67). I’m thinking that it’s possibly even closer to a Lorenzo Ghiberti than it is a Michelangelo.
Otterness: Well, these all sound great to me! That particular relief was preliminary. I had done it back in my hometown in Kansas, in the house that I grew up in. I was in my mom’s house in the basement when I did that. It’s a premonition for the later work in that the essential battle of the sexes is there. I guess that is what distinguishes it from the classical models: the battle is between the two sexes, not between men battling over women or something. It’s a battle between men and women.
Rail: It establishes that there are women involved in this battle, and that woman from the very first Battle Cartoon then rises up in righteous indignation and starts giving as well as she’s gotten.
You’ve spoken in the past about working in the milieu of abstraction. When you first came to New York, you were being taught to work figuratively. But then also, the vibe around you was continuing to be abstract. You mentioned in one interview that you worked at Mark Rothko’s studio. I was very curious about that Battle Cartoon relief, and whether it’s a way of making a sculptural equivalent of all-over painting?
Otterness: Yes, I think the Battle Cartoon comes out of that. I carry over all the things I learned from abstract painting and allover painting that dominated the art world at that time. For me, I had a kind of split personality: at the Art Students League, I would go in the afternoons and study Renaissance anatomy with Robert Beverly Hale, and then in the nights I was doing abstract painting with Ted Stamos. Rothko was a kind of a god to us then, but I constantly went back and forth between high anatomical studies, detailed physical explorations and then this abstract world. The League itself was split into camps. You would be in one camp or the other; one making fun of the other. But I was in both camps. It made for a good year. The anatomical studies are a strange underlying piece of information for my simplified forms.
Rail: If you were to see this installed permanently with all of the pieces, including the free-standing sculpture and the grotto Killing of the King, how would it work? Do you see it almost as a period room in which this is part of the furniture that’s required to complete it? How does everything relate?
Otterness: Oh that would be great! Maybe I could get my own period room in the Met, side by side with the Louis XVI grand salon. As I developed it, I thought of the narrative of The Frieze being the overthrow of the king, and the centerpiece as the female baby holding a new world; the way that the globe would revolve matches the circular narrative that’s surrounding us. The baby would be the center point if it were to be a permanent, complete installation.
Rail: And that same size? Or would you size it up?
Otterness: That certainly would depend on the whole situation. Were you able to find anything about the Los Angeles courthouse installation? It’s The Frieze at a much larger scale—at double or triple the size of this original Frieze. Did you run across that?
Rail: Oh, I didn’t, but tell me more about it.
Otterness: It was a commission from the General Services Administration (GSA) titled The New World. It was in 1991, and it was a commission for the federal courthouse in Los Angeles. They have a pergola going around the main plaza between these major government court buildings. I took The Frieze and placed it in this pergola. It had two doorways to it and half a circle that showed the original narrative of The Frieze from King’s Parade on one side to Boating Party (both 1982–83) on the other, with the central narrative in the middle. It is cast-stone about three feet high, so more substantial. But this is a federal courthouse, and I had to go through this public process. It was reviewed and, well, they had some problems with the king kissing an elephant’s ass.
Rail: I can’t believe it.
Otterness: Yeah, I don’t know what the problem was. I remember convincing them that the female character to the left was hugging the rhinoceros. I mean, are you surprised that they didn’t allow the monumental penis to be pulled down in front of the federal courthouse? When they told me I had to make those changes, I think they were expecting me to pull out of the commission. Instead my strategy was to take a more yielding attitude in that public world. I tried to yield to the judges’ demands but ultimately stay in the same place, not letting them alter the essence of the proposal, and not letting them remove me from the job. So I had the elephant stand on top of the king instead of the original, the women pull down a very phallic column, and then I had the baby at a much larger scale in the center of a fountain. When I showed the drawings of the baby, I had photocopied them several times, you know, to obscure it. But when the baby got out there, her vagina was exposed. The chief judges went sort of ballistic. Once the House Representative Edward R. Roybal—who the courthouse is named after—saw the baby, they came in with forklifts and took it out, like, within two days or something.
Rail: Oh, wow.
Otterness: And then there was a big uproar in the LA arts community. In the end, they got it back in with the critical support of Joel Wachs, who was on the Los Angeles City Council, as well as Dale Lanzone, the head of Art and Architecture for the GSA. This was pretty surprising. The courthouse negotiated that they could have a rail around the baby to keep people at some distance from it. They said the rail was there to protect the sculpture. So, it has its own story at a larger scale. And the baby was clearly the centerpiece of this narrative.
Rail: Let’s talk a little bit about the sexual differentiation of the figures. They’re differentiated sexually with penises and testicles and vaginas and breasts, but not in terms of other signifiers, like hair or clothing, or even what we might think of as secondary sexual traits like body shape or “feminizing” features. The outward sexual organs become almost like equipment, although it doesn’t necessarily get used.
Otterness: “Unused equipment”—that’s a good line.
Rail: That’ll be the title of this interview. I’m so interested in why it was important. I understand that it’s a battle of the sexes, so it’s important to differentiate them sexually. But why not in any other way? And then I started thinking about, for example, the king’s penis in Killing of the King: it turns to be a profile of the penis, and so it becomes, then, a Claes Oldenburg Ray Gun. I’m really interested in the way that you’re using this equipment, basically as equipment.
Otterness: Oh, what to say? You know, I look back and think, well, a lot of the narrative and the substance of The Frieze comes out of my experience with CoLab [Collaborative Projects, Inc.]. We were half women, half men, but maybe fifty people in it, and we struggled together. There was a lot of haggling and negotiation—it acted kind of like a laboratory for some basic political lessons. We were struggling to bring art out of the containment of the art world—to drag it into the real world. We used magazines, cable shows, broke into city property to make the Real Estate Show, and rented a former massage parlor to make the Times Square Show in 1980. I think The Frieze has some relationship to all that experience. Feminist thought was deep within the organization: the idea that the bodies should be equal and equally powerful and equally formal. I also looked to Kazimir Malevich, Constructivism, and other sources that would bring the figure back to a more abstract form. It seemed important to balance the two sides as being equal, equal formally and equal in the strength and power of the figures.
Rail: One reference that I haven’t seen people make for them is to the Sheela-na-gigs of the British Isles. I don’t know if you’re familiar with these female figures that open their vaginas. They’re found on buildings like churches and cathedrals.
Otterness: I know them very well.
Rail: Okay, I was fascinated that nobody has referenced them. Sheela-na-gigs are often thought to be apotropaic; they’re protector figures for the buildings onto which they’re placed. And so, my question is this: can The Frieze be used to ward off evil?
Otterness: [Laughs] I wish that were the case, especially at the federal courthouse! You know, I like those Sheela-na-gigs very much. And that kind of gesture of female power is important, I think, and it can certainly ward off male power or men. Maybe it can function as a kind of voodoo sculpture, you know, and protect what’s inside.