Have you noticed that sculptors have taken to copying their work over and over?
Seward Johnson hacked out “Unconditional Surrender,” the 25-foot knock-off of Albert Eisenstaedt’s famed photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse on V–J day in Times Square. And then he added several re-iterations that have been displayed in various cities: San Diego, California,[7][9]Key West, Florida, Snug Harbor in New Yorkand Sarasota, Florida. Materials vary - Styrofoam, aluminum, bronze - but the image remains the same. You can’t miss it in Sarasota, where it looms over the downtown bay-front like giant humanoids on the order of the Hulk.
Are you getting this? To make his sculptures, Johnson not only copies from other artists, but also copies from himself..
The latest case in pointlessness. British artist Mark Wallinger is selling an edition of 30 models of a humongous size horse, as yet un-built. Granted, horses are important in England’s long tradition of Fox hunting, and granted Wallinger once owned a horse he called “A Real Work of Art.” But a horse the size of an eight-story commercial building plus 30 copies lacks horse sense. .
Then there’s Ringling Museum's life-size aluminum statue = made glaringly flashy with Day-glo colors - of Don Quixote on horseback by Izhar Patkin. There are five more exactly like it in other collections. The artist sculpted one in clay and a foundry cast it six times in aluminum. Talk about glittering generalities.
Patkin is said to be paying tribute to Miguel de Cervantes’ celebrated novel “Don Quixote,” the first modern novel that is both a tragedy and a comedy. One wonders what the garishness is all about.
Maybe by coloring the statue so trash-ily, Patkin was commenting on “Man of La Mancha,” the Hollywood-izing and musical-izing of the Cervantes classic.
Some critics have said that when Patkin repeats the same image, he’s challenging the concept of originality. In that case, he picked the wrong subject. Cervante’s work is famously unexampled.
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