Being in the city, from time to time, one happens upon wonderful little ephemera that you never knew existed in places where you would never expect them to occur. One such thing happened to me when I was taking the A train from the 14th street/8av station the other day to meet a friend on the west side. Having just come to the New York City, I’m rather unadventurous when it comes to my daily commute and usually take the 6 train straight to Union Square where our studios are located. But going out of my way forced me to discover this wonderful station where artist Tom Otterness has installed a permanent public art piece commissioned by the MTA entitled “Life Underground”.
I found the name of the installation after Googling for a bit, intrigued as I was by these oddly endearing little sculptures in the subway station and I was surprised at the title – it was also, as were the sculptures, a pun on the day to day life of a New Yorker, which is spent, lets face it, most of the day commuting underground. The installation consists of series of whimsical miniature bronze sculptures depicting cartoon like characters showing people and animals in various situations, and additional abstract sculptures, which are dispersed throughout the station platforms and passageways. Otterness said the subject of the work is “the impossibility of understanding life in New York” and describes the arrangement of the individual pieces as being “scattered in little surprises.”Art critic Olympia Lambert wrote that “the lovable bronze characters installed there are joined together by a common theme of implied criminality mixed with an undercurrent of social anarchy,” but labeled them as “too cute”, saying that this “undercuts the work’s more critical edge.”
Although being cartoonish and cheerful, the bronze sculptures tend to carry a socio-political punch. They are filled with multiple meaning alluding to sex, class, money and race. They depict, among other things, huge pennies, pudgy characters in business suits with moneybag heads, helmeted workers holding giant tools, an alligator crawling out from under a sewer cover with a man in his mouth, giant disembodied feet, two figures holding a cross-saw going after an i-beam, workers sweeping up subway tokens and several other anachronistic paraphernalia. The main theme appears to be the struggle of the little man against the capitalist money-machine in a difficult and strange city.
The New York Times published a 2003 account describing the interaction of a 4-year old boy with the sewer alligator. After jumping on the alligator’s head and trying to wrestle the little man from his bronze jaws, the observer notes that the boy, “about to give up, he kicked the alligator, his foot connecting solidly with the bronze head. Surprise spread across his face as he ran away, crying, ‘Mom, it tried to bite me!’.”
Otterness became so obsessed with this project, that he delivered more than four times the amount of artwork he was originally commissioned to produce. His wife finally made him end expansion of the collection by imploring him to stop “giving away our daughter’s whole inheritance”. The complete series encompasses more than 100 individual pieces. Some of the individual pieces were put on public display in 1996 on the southeast corner of Central Park at Fifth Avenue, and then in Battery Park City in downtown Manhattan in 1997, to get public reaction prior to its installation originally scheduled for 1998. Approximately 25 of the pieces were finally installed at the end of 2000 with the balance installed in the following years.
The installation took ten years to complete from commissioning to final completion owing to long disputes with bureaucrats, however it is now one of thee most popular pieces of subway art in the system, which also includes beautiful tile work at several stops and frescoes of dinosaurs and various other extinct creatures at the stop for the American Museum of Natural History. I think next time I may drift over there…