What’s up with all the knock-off statuary?
The latest duplication, “Forever Marilyn” by John Seward Johnson, soars 26 feet over Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. Johnson took a still-shot image from a 1955 movie “The Seven-Year Itch” that looked under Marilyn Monroe’s skirt..
How many ways is Johnson’s work wrongheaded - besides the fact that it monumentalizes prurience? Allow me to count them.
The movie scene was shot on Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue, not Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. Do I hear a “so what? Places matter. It makes sense, for example, that Johnson’s “God Bless America,” mimicking Grand Wood’s 1930 painting of a farmer and his daughter called “American Gothic,” stands in the Pioneer Plaza in Chicago, home of the Chicago Art Institute, where the painting hangs.
And it makes sense that Thomas Schomberg’s bronze “Rocky,” which apes the movie boxer character, is installed at the base of the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Rocky first trained.
It also makes sense that Felix Deweldon's statue of five marines and a Navy corpsman raising the flag on Iwo Jima - modeled after Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal's picture of the flag-raising at Mount Suribachi - stands near Arlington National Cemetery
But it makes no sense that Johnson’s 25-foot sculpture “Unconditional Surrender” –patterned after Albert Eisenstaedt’s photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in New York’s Times Square at the end of WWII – fronts Sarasota Bay in Florida.
Eisenstaedt described the moment of his picture-taking and you’ll notice that Sarasota didn’t get a mention:
“In Times Square on V.J. Day I saw a sailor running along the street grabbing any and every girl in sight. Whether she was a grandmother, stout, thin, old, didn't make a difference. I was running ahead of him with my Leicalooking back over my shoulder but none of the pictures that were possible pleased me. Then suddenly, in a flash, I saw something white being grabbed. I turned around and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse.”
Of course, if one takes my point to its logical conclusion, the statue of David in the Ringling Museum in Sarasota should be moved to Jerusalem. But appropriate siting aside, there’s the matter of originality.
Noted art critic Robert Hughes put Johnson’s lack of originality this way: “It has no imaginative component that I can see and apparently appeals to dull corporate minds like his own — the sort of people who run American motels and malls.”
And get this: Johnson’s rip-off of Eisenstaedt’s photograph in Sarasota isn’t the only one around. Several versions have shown up in various cities. Should a town like Sarasota that calls itself an art town welcome unoriginal art?
Answer: if it’s Sarasota, yes. The city’s two leading art institutions use replicas of famous art as emblems for themselves: the Ringling Museum reproduction of Florence, Italy's "David"' by Michelangelo, and the Ringling School of Art and Design's ideation of New York's "Cube" by Isamu Noguchi.
So, I take it back. It makes sense that one of Johnson’s slavish copies stand in Sarasota.
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