“Modern Day Thinker”
Mark Pilato
A gift of Blake and Linda Gall
The library’s new armless brass statue makes me feel annoyed, angry, and frustrated every time I look at it. I do not feel aesthetically pleased.
They have a new statue on the landing of the stairs. It’s a woman made of brass. It’s meant to be an imitation of the old, broken Greek statues of people, the statues that don’t have arms anymore. I could be mistaken, but it’s my understanding that those Greek statues originally had arms in the beginning. They lost them over time because the arms were fragile and they broke off. I don’t recall ever reading about them, but I assume that’s what happened.
But now, I’ve seen it parodied on cartoons on television, and that kind of thing – something you might see on Scooby Doo, cartoons from my childhood. It is a ‘familiar phenomenon,’ something that exists in cultural awareness, that there are a bunch of famous statues from Rome that have their arms broken off. So cartoons would sometimes parody those statues as a joke. That’s how I first learned that they existed, actually. I saw the parodies and I thought ‘Why are they imitating statues without arms?’
This annoying brass statue is made of a material that is durable and unlikely to break, even if the building crumbles down around it and the archeologists have to dig it up a few hundred years in the future. It could easily have had arms without fear that they might break.
However, somebody somewhere *told* somebody that ‘ancient Greek statues are beautiful.’ Ancient Greek statues are the official definition of aesthetic values, somebody told somebody, and so, we must imitate them, including their brokenness, so that people will *recognize* that they are an imitation of something which is the definition of aesthetic beauty. If the arms weren’t broken off, people might not recognize the ‘symbol’ that represents something familiar, the well-known phenomenon of ancient statues with their arms broken off. Broken-off arms are not, themselves, aesthetically beautiful, but they have popularly come to symbolize something that once was beautiful before it was broken. (Actually, phrasing it that way makes me understand it a little better – but I don’t want the statue to be meaningful, I want it to be beautiful!)
That’s just it. I don’t want to argue about what are the meanings behind the statue. I want to look at it and see that it is pleasing to the eye. I don’t want to argue that this brass copy of something which was once beautiful, but is now broken and lost, and which now only symbolically represents something beautiful, is an interesting statue because of its having that symbolic meaning. I can feel myself fighting against it right now. I don’t want to see it that way.
Is the statue supposed to be controversial and deep? Is it just someone’s attempt to make a familiar copy of broken Greek statues? Was it chosen because someone is too stupid to judge for themselves what is, and isn’t, aesthetically beautiful, and so they chose something which would symbolically suggest something recognized as ‘officially beautiful’ so that people wouldn’t need to take the trouble of deciding for themselves whether or not it was beautiful?
The woman’s head is lifted up to the sky. Her smooth, flowing lines reach upward… until you get to the chopped-off arm. The arm juts out just beyond the shoulder. It looks like an Iraq war veteran. Do I want to be reminded of Iraq war veterans with their arms and legs amputated, every time I look at this statue which is struggling to be beautiful, reaching to the sky without arms, without legs?
Perhaps it wasn’t amputated. Perhaps the arm is a bud which is just about to grow. Perhaps this person is in a liquid, developing state which is moving. This is suggested by her left side, which is smooth and melted looking, the arm fused against her body. She doesn’t look like she is in any pain. She looks like she is in motion. (After looking at it again, I noticed that her left arm flows downwards so that her hand is touching her groin. I hadn’t seen this erotic aspect of the statue until just now.)
I might be able to make peace with this statue if I imagine her as a budding, growing, flowing, liquid creature, something alive, flexible, changing, moving, somewhere between a liquid and a solid.
I don’t think I will see her as just an amputee anymore, or just a copy of a broken old Greek statue. She is something else.
(After rereading this, I wanted to add that I still don’t really ‘like’ the statue.)
