In June, I will install a new installation at Progress Elementary School in Spokane’s central valley as part of the Washington State Arts Commission‘s Art in Public Places program.
These are the preliminary drawings:
Last year, I was fortunate to receive a commission to create a public art piece for an elementary school in the Central Valley of Spokane. The school, Progress Elementary is a 1950′s era (1953 to be exact) elementary school. Principal Matt Chisholm is great and very supportive of an artwork that will celebrate the imagination and speak to kids in a way that will engage them as they grow from kindergartners to 5th graders.
I was really excited because they have this old built-in cabinet that initially, they wanted to get rid of, but I saw it as the perfect object to transform into a sculpture diorama, the beginning spark to the piece “Curiosity Case with Mega Downlodable Mindware Morphing toward Hydroquatic Agricosmos R.S.V.P. to the Electrobahn Flyers’ Dance Extravaganza…
Case is painted a 'wood tone" to prepare for its sculptural transformation
Working away to prepare all the pieces and parts for my new installation “Curiosity Case with Mega Downloadable Mindware Morphing toward Hydroaquatic Agricosmos R.S.V.P. to the Electrobahn Flyers’ Dance Extravaganza”
Burghers of Metropolis
Otto Youngers’ sculptures explore the relation between contemporary, political and environmental events, and American media constructs of masculinity. Satirizing various male stereotypes, the current exhibit deconstructs image-concepts of the successful corporate man, the powerful military man, and the leisure class hunter and fisherman. Expanding feminist inquiries into socially constructed, gender types, Youngers joins contemporary artists such as Richard Shelton, Ray Beldner and others in suggesting the inherently rigid nature of such cultural cliches and their related social expectations. Creating politically charged, historically poignant, and theoretically tough works, Youngers asserts a belief in art’s power to impact social change. Satirizing general cultural obsessions, rather than caricaturizing particular people, Youngers works profile men, animals, and occasionally a hybrid of the two.Working exclusively in wood, his sculptures at first seem coarsely carved, though in reality they manifest an array of surface finishes varying from roughly chiseled to smoothly sanded. In any given sculpture, selected areas are frequently more finished than others, lending interpretative focus and critique to individual themes. Extending a three hundred year tradition of visual satire, his sculptures aim to inform, provoke and even shock viewers. Raising a dissenting voice against pre-packed image bytes, he expands the sardonic dialogues of Daumier, Grosz, Dix, Baselitz, Balkenhol, Conal and others. Adding to the exhibit’s strident and at times cryptic tone was the Brewery’s small exhibition space, which felt overwhelmed and cramped in the presence of seventeen, predominately life-sized sculptural works. Playing off Rodin’s renowned Burghers of Calais (1886), Youngers’ Burghers of Metropolis (2001) spoofs the corporate male idea. Like Rodin, Youngers profiles a group of men and gives audiences a studied glimpse into their psychological condition. But where Rodin profiles seven tragic heroes from the town of Calais, France, who during the One Hundred Years War gave their own lives in exchange for the town’s citizens, Youngers profiles three men who appear stripped of mind and soul, yet retain outward markers of American respectability, namely dangling ties and requisite work shoes. Defined predominately by robotic, skeletal frames, their bodies are surmounted with rough-hewn heads chiseled to reveal distinctive, individual characteristics. Nodding to the preeminence of work in daily life, Youngers also recasts the renaissance allegorical motif of the three ages of man into a contemporary study of the three stages of a corporate career. In Youngers’ “Burghers”, a seated man with a double chin and neck wrinkles, represents an aging sixty-something worker, while behind him, a standing, twenty-something youth with an upraised arm seems to eagerly hail a taxi. Nearby a figure, perhaps in his forties, pulls a small wheelbarrow containing three brains, suggesting with Orwellian undertones that these characters have had lobotomies but don’t even know it. Deconstructing the heroic dignity that Rodin and Social Realists once ascribed to the common laborer, Youngers renders modern society’s corporate men as mere cogwheels in a social machine that renders them intellectually dead while keeping them physically alive.
Across a small pathway, a second sculptural group of three male figures similarly invalidates another male stereotype. Entitled God’s Army or Welcome Home, We’ve Come to Save You (2004), the work spins viewers’ attention to the subject of military might as manifest in three interrelated figures. All have small, skull-heads that perch atop much larger bodies, metaphorically
God's Army or Welcome Home We've Come to Save You
implying the men’s diminished conceptual skill but Promethean physical force. While their upper torsos resemble skeletons, from the waist down they look like birds, sporting feathered limbs and eagle claws in place of legs, shoes or feet. Brandishing guns, two of the men-beasts appear to shoot into the gathered group of spectators while the third figure raises his gun upwards, as in a victory salute, creating an ironic commentary given the figures’ potential reading as both hunter predators and potentially hunted prey. Above the group floats a pseudo winged putto, with its chubby little nude boy body lending an ironic air of simultaneous sanctification and dark levity to the tense scene. Utilizing familiar, even shopworn metaphors, to speak of life and death, Youngers disparages the media’s bilious rhetoric of male, martial invincibility as grossly overwrought. Satirizing American society’s addiction to testosterone highs, Youngers challenges viewers to reconsider the political and social implications of such exaggerated icons of identity and success. Intimating that this repertoire is not only corrupt but vulgar, his works suggest that conformity to type comes at a very high price. Amidst the dubious struggle for a classically triumphant ending, Youngers advocates for greater individual and collective wisdom, justice, and humanity.
Collette Chattopadhyay is a writer, critic and art historian and regular contributor to Art Nexus, LA Artcore Viewpoint, and is a contributing editor to Sculpture Magazine.
Flora, Fauna, Viruses OR Trees Make Better People
by Collette Chattopadhyay
November 2008
Chaos Theory
In 2004, Otto Youngers exhibited sculptures that explored male gender stereotypes and war. His new exhibition Flora, Fauna, Viruses…OR Trees Make Better People, explores themes of war and brutality using the psychological power of sculptural forms. The predominant themes of atrocities, executions, and death fields make the current exhibit devastatingly memorable. One might assume that given media society’s widespread coverage of war and its destructive force that a group of sculptures would hardly phase a jaded audience. Yet, Youngers succeeds in garnering attention because his works envision in detail the psychological impact of such realities.In this exhibition, Youngers presents five sculptural installations that function as visual allegories. Four are presented in the opening gallery, while the fifth unfolds in the smaller, back gallery chamber. Gone are Youngers’ sculptures made in the likeness of men. In its place, he has sculpted of found wood, a wide array of enigmatic and hybrid creatures that appear to both define the living and the dead. As the End is Drawn sits at the entrance of the opening gallery and features two animal-skulls that “watch” a black and white framed image that functions as a metaphor for a television set. A sculpted, Miroesque ladder rises behind the “TV,” recalling similar ladders that exist in Miro’s Surrealist paintings of 1927, which link the physicality of earth with the mysteries of a night sky. Otto’s sculpted scenario nods as well, to Plato’s philosophical musing regarding the perception of reality by the masses as described in his Allegory of the Cave. There, the huddled skulls continue to mistake shadowed images of the real for reality itself. With a dry wit, Youngers places the rest of his installations – that metaphorically function as visions of the real – behind As the End is Drawn.
As The End Is Drawn
Behind this work, the sculpted diorama Universal Chaos Theory presents the aftermath of battle. A constellation of three rocket-bombers, interspersed with devil-skulls fitted with cherub-wings hang from the ceiling, calling attention the signs of terror and carnage that reside in the death ring below with is littered with skeletal remains. These include femurs, backbones with and without rib-cages, and craniums attached to jaws that bear teeth frozen in a silent scream. Carved, wooden representations of weeds and flowers are the only signs of life that appear amidst the site, suggesting nature’s potential triumph over atrocity.
Behind the circle of death is a circle of executions called Virus sic[including Bird Brains and Other Evolutionary Tails]where large, standing,
Bird Brains and Other Evolutionary Tales
anthropomorphic birds with long beaks, no eyes, and extremely long, sharp talons hold smaller birds hostage. Studying the nexus of war’s realities, this diorama details two executions in progress. In one, a ruthless arrogant bird-commando stands behind his prisoner, toying with his gun either out of sheer boredom with the game of death or out of an interest in psychologically tormenting his captive. Meanwhile, the bird-prisoner has withdrawn into himself, his rib cage caving inwards as his body angles in contrition, awaiting a shot in the back that has not been fired. Nearby, a second bird-commando aims a gun as his defenseless prisoner, who is down on his knees, facing his executioner. With his right wing-hand on the trigger of a gun, the commando gently caresses with his left hand-wing a grenade held close to his own torso. Nearby a large, skeleton-spider grins widely, eagerly waiting the hostages’ deaths. On the walls surrounding these sculpted scenes, Youngers presents the carved illusions of farm and household tools transformed into weapons. These give viewers pause suggesting how readily the implements of ordinary life can be transformed into weapons of war.
Queue
In the gallery’s back room, the master carver presents a pathway strewn with carved impressions of shoes, most very old fashioned. Using shoes as an archetypal reference of wartime atrocities that sever the human spirit from its body, the shoes or shoe shadows suggest a host of deceased souls, intimating the departure of the soul from the body. Those queued up here did not leave their belonging behind, but did leave their shoes as markers of a pathway from this life to the next.
The challenging and tough, Youngers subject matter is matched here by a brutal, rough carving style that fits the rugged weightiness of its tale. It is as if the sculptor has had time enough only to sculpturally sketch the realities with which he attempts to forewarn the living of that the phantom images of shadows dancing on a cave wall or television screen actually recount the lost lives and histories of those whose absence is manifest here in mythic form.
Collette Chattopadhyay is a writer, critic and art historian and regular contributor to Art Nexus, LA Artcore Viewpoint, and is a contributing editor to Sculpture Magazine.
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