The Monument
The monument I choose is Life Underground. Life Underground is a series of more than 170 pieces in the underground station of 14th Street and 8th Avenue. The artist, Tom Otterness, took the building of the subway, old photographs of the construction in 1890s, and the work of 19th century political cartoonist Thomas Nast as references, and spent about ten years (from 90s to 2004) to create all these marvelous works.
When the MTA decided to start a program which named Arts for Transit to memorize the building of the subway, and put out a call for project proposals to be installed in the soon-to-be rehabbed station, Kansas native Tom Otterness was one of the respondents. He was a natural choice among the hundreds who applied. Otterness said the initial applicant pool of around 800 got whittled down to five or six applicants. The finalists then submitted full proposals, drawings and details. (Keri Blakinger, 2016)
An alligator coming out of a manhole cover, biting the behind of a person with a moneybag head (Wikipedia)
A little man with a big money bag sitting quietly on a bench perpetually waiting for a train (Wikipedia)
Because Otterness took Thomas Nast’s Comics as references, lots of his works were to mock politicians and businessmen. In one drawing, Nast portrayed the notorious politician with a moneybag for a head — and that’s an image Otterness lifted directly from Nast and brought to life. (Keri Blakinger, 2016)
My Work
I chose to make a monument about Donald Trump and the people who hurt by his words and politics to mock the politicians like him and memorize the people who suffered from him. I checked his Twitter, and I couldn’t believe that he published so much aggressive twits. Mexico and China are the two main countries that he often attacked, and he even expressed his disrespecting to women and LGBTQ. About his politics, he signed orders to abandon muslins from going to USA, limiting people from other countries like China to live and work in USA, and abandon Mexicans to go to USA and many children are separated from their parents because his actions (Their parents are in the jail, and these children cannot see their parents but stay in some damn orphanage.)
I searched recent political comics and found lots of comics about Donal Trump.
Most of his images are like this, so I decides to create a small sized sculpture of Donal Trump and take his images of politic cartoons as references.
Take Otterness’s statues as references, I made these too little statues. The size of his statues are really small, and he designed interesting gestures of his sculptures to interact with the environment and surroundings, which I decided to also design this kind of gestrues. The image of Otterness’s sculptures are really cute, but I decided to design a fat, bloated Donald Trump with funny blonde hair, orange-like skin color, and pursed lips to show his unreasonable politics. The unpainted, featureless, naked small human-shaped sculpture who is hanging at the edge of the small table with one hand and about to fall represents all the people who are or have been tortured or humiliated by Donald Trump and his politics. Donald Trump is standing beside this human, with his hands on his waist, and sarcastically, with a smile, looking at this human struggling from falling down.
I screenshot some of his twits that attack other countries or other people and his policy towards Muslins, Mexicans and so on and made the background full of these words and policies. I copied and pasted lots of the scenes of him standing and looking at the human to fall because I think not just Trump is torturing people, but lots of politicians are, too. Trump is just a symbol, there are lots of “Trump”s who are just like him, and also lots of people are suffering because of these so called “politicians”. This is what happening nowadays.
Process Photos
