Corporate Art

Wandering through Flushing Meadows, one sometimes comes across huge cast-metal sculptures. Poorly proportioned and painfully self-conscious, these statues don't have a lot of artistic merit, but they say a great deal about the combination of sophistication and prudery that was New York in the mid-1960's.

One of my favorites lies between the Unisphere and the Fountain of the Planets. It has an impressive-sounding name, "The Rocket-Thrower."


For me, though, the sculpture hearkens back to adolescence, when I was first discovering the wonders of masturbation. Looking at it from this angle, the connection becomes a little clearer:


And the surprised expression on the sculpture's face also seems very familiar:


I see it as a mixture of amazement, pride, and abject terror, something along the lines of "Dear God! I'm never going to be able to clean this all up!"

Aah, childhood memories...

Oddly enough, "Spoogius, the Rocket-Shooter" seems to be flying on a huge turd:


Over the years, Spoogius has gotten a little weathered, and the streaks of water have created beautiful patterns of tarnish:







Near the U.S. Open Pavilion, there's a huge statue of a man and a woman floating on a bunch of birds. I'm sure it's called "Leda and the Swans," or something similar:


I call it "Anorexius and Minimus," after the classic Greek myth featuring a starving woman and a man with a very small "hoplite." I'm sure the sculpture is supposed to honor the ideals of athleticism and the classic ideal of victory, but the woman is really, really skinny, and her ponytail hairdo seems a little out of place:


Overall, it looks as if Joani Cunningham from Happy Days decided to go bird watching while naked.

The male counterpart is actually kind of scary. He's also really thin, and has a very, very small penis:


Ooh, look! It's an innie!

The unintentional subtext of this sculpture is that the man is allowed to be naked, but he can't be threateningly well-endowed.

All in all, the sculpture seems to have a very confused perspective regarding art and nudity. On the one hand, the sculptors realized that nudity is classical and artistic, but they couldn't bring themselves to openly support it. Going for a middle path, they offered a starving girl with bizarrely huge boobs and a man with almost no penis. The subtext is clear: heterosexual relationships bring emptiness and castration. One wonders if this was a piece of subtle homosexual propaganda, an indication of a general scorched-earth policy toward relationships, or merely evidence that the artist had never seen anyone with their clothes off.

The 1960's are so weird.