Today is day 7, the final day, of Arts In Education Week here in Appleton as proclaimed by Mayor Woodford and what better way to celebrate by featuring Appleton’s most famous sculpture, “The Collective” by Paul Bobrowitz. It seemed particularly important for me to highlight it now because, I checked in with Director of Public Works Paula Vandehey, and she told me the sculpture’s 2-year lease is up in October. It would seem that, unless its lease gets renewed like the “Stairway To The Stars” sculpture in Pierce Park our city may soon be saying goodbye to the big head sculpture.
Reception to the sculpture has been…mixed. I think it safe to say that more people dislike it than like it. But it does have its supporters. I personally love it, although I am willing to live with its loss. Anecdotally, I would say that I’ve heard supporters of the sculpture express a lack of understand as to why people don’t like it. In an interview with the Post Crescent, the artist himself “questioned whether the opposition to his sculpture would be the same if it were newly or uniformly painted to conceal the salvaged steel.”
I’m pretty sure that the reason people dislike it has nothing to do with the color of the propane tank sections that make up the artistic work and more to do with the fact that the sculpture looks like a really ugly, misshapen head. It’s basically the embodiment of a Wojak/Soyboy meme.
Per the Post Crescent: “That is what I was thinking of when I was putting all of these individual faces together to make the head, which is the collective,” [the artist] said. “That’s us. We are a collective of everything and everybody we’ve ever encountered.”[…]”The idea I’m trying to get across is we get a bunch of different input, and it’s not necessarily all pretty, but that’s what creates the person who we are.”
I do like to think that most people’s lives are more than ugly misshapen people and moments coming together to create one large, ugly, misshapen whole.
The sculpture was presented to the residents of Appleton as a work of “outsider art”, but I question whether that is an accurate label. The artist has had his artwork displayed across the state of Wisconsin outside of schools, businesses, and in cities as public art displays. He is not a retired lumber jack toiling away at his concrete and glass creations in obscurity. He’s not a reclusive janitor obsessively penning and illustrating a multi-thousand page fantasy saga that will only be discovered after he has passed away. Instead, he has a website where he publicizes his artwork and highlights the projects he has been commissioned to create, none of which is typical outsider artist behavior.
Bobrowitz has assembled a sculpture park in Colgate, WI where the public can go see some of his other work. If you have a free day you may want to check it out. On a nice day, you’ll have a beautiful drive from Appleton to Colgate, and the sculpture park itself is pretty remarkable. In addition to Bobrowitz’s Spectacular Sculpture Park, I’ve been to Dr. Evermore’s Park in Sumpter, WI as well as Lakenenland outside Marquette, MI. My general opinion is that Dr. Evermore’s has the most artistic sculptures and Lakenenland is the most enjoyable to children because it has a few interactive sculptures, but the Spectacular Sculpture Park blows those other two away as far as the sheer volume of works displayed. There are hundred upon hundreds of sculptures. Mr. Bobrowitz seems to be an astonishingly prolific artist. There were a couple sculptures that struck me as potentially being more artful and interesting than The Collective—the sculpture of Atlas holding up a propane tank Earth, for example, or the one of a big open box with a large rock dangling down the middle, but I can understand why The Collective might have been chosen over some of his other works given that it is among the most eye-catching even if it’s not actually attractive. I do think Appleton residents can count themselves fortunate that the naked, anatomically correct scrap metal man and woman sculptures were not foisted upon our city.
I was also surprised to see that The Collective has a much more attractive sibling sitting out there under the pines of Colgate, WI. This other sculpture has a much less pinched and beady expression in its eyes as well as a more pleasing overall physiognomy. I suspect that if this version of The Collective had been placed in Appleton rather than the version we ended up with, it would not have generated nearly as much ire.
Still, I’ll be sad to see it go, and hope that it will stay around in some way if not necessarily at it’s current location.
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