Hat tip to "Discovering UMB" for reminding me of this old journal entry. I too, am a fan of the eclectic outdoor artwork at UMB.
A rather famous sculpture faces the path at this point, one of those neo-classical heavy draping affairs. The title is fairly self explanatory, "Death Stays the Hand of the Sculptor", so it goes. It makes me think of Luiz Jimenez, the fiberglass sculptor who gave UMB the "Ironworker" and the "Pastel Gator Clusterfuck"; he was killed when his piece de resistance: a giant evil blue horse with a giant evil blue penis, fell over and crushed him.* The sculpture was none the worse for wear and currently rears its doomsday hooves over the drop-off area at the Denver International Airport. "It is not my job to censor myself," Jimenez once said. "An artist's job is to constantly test the boundaries." So it goes.
*The reader may feel the mention of the giant evil blue penis is gratuitous - it is not. The reader might think the penis is in scale with the sculpture and its size goes without saying - it is not. The penis is exceptional in the generally tasteful genre of equestrian statuary. It probably goes without saying that an evil horse would have an evil penis but to omit evil from its description would allow for doubt and there should be no doubt here. The mention of color is purely to clear up any misconceptions that dog fanciers may have about the horse having a "pink thing" that appears when you come home after a long trip; it is in fact a pure cerulean mega-phallus. All of this penis talk may seem distasteful in the light of the sculptor's tragic demise - it is not. Remember who put it there in the first place.
No comments:
Post a Comment