(Slightly Rigged) Caption Contest!

One of my fave people on Twitter, Karen Geier retweeted this image this morning.

WTF is it? Who made it? What on earth is it titled?

I slapped the image itself into Google Image and came up with a bunch of links to stories like "15 of the Weirdest Sculptures in the World," for example, this one.

Another of my fave people on Twitter took a more direct route.

@fernhilldammit I started to google "statue naked man", and "kicking babies" came up automatically!

— FuzzyWuzzy (@_Confessor) March 21, 2015

This is what he came up with.

Public parks are not a place you would expect to stumble across a statue of a naked man kicking babies.

But the managers of Oslo's largest park, Frogner Park, like to offer walkers and tourists something truly eye-catching when they step out for some fresh air.

The 80 acre Vigeland Sculpture park, located inside Frogner Park, was designed by sculptor Gustav Vigeland, and contains no less than 212 bronze and granite sculptures.

Go look. There's a video too at the link, which really must be seen. (Bonus! "In the Hall of the Mountain King" soundtrack.)

I couldn't find an official title for "Naked Man Kicking Babies." Let's give it one.

But I'm cheating. The best I think is on Karen's retweet.

please stop throwing babies at me i just want my pants back pic.twitter.com/8L2EmkRybS

— kenth (@painted_eel) November 21, 2014

Also, I just wanted this image on my blog.

And in Other Weird Sculpture News Today

That's NOT funny.

The Davis Museum at Wellesley College is holding an exhibit of the work of sculptor Tony Matelli, and to help advertise the exhibit, the museum placed one of Matelli's statues outside. Titled The Sleepwalker, the realistic-looking statue shows a bald man in his tighty-whities lumbering forward with his arms outstretched, his eyes closed, and his head lolling around in deep sleep. It's funny and is, unsurprisingly, a big hit on Instagram. It's also creating controversy, as reported by the Boston Globe, as many students object to the statue on the grounds that it's scary. Zoe Magid, a junior at the university, started a Change.org petition demanding that the statue be moved inside the museum. "Within just a few hours of its outdoor installation, the highly lifelike sculpture by Tony Matelli, entitled 'Sleepwalker,' has become a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for some members of our campus community," she writes, adding variations of the word trigger two more times.

The museum director responded but. . .

This email did not placate the critics of the statue, who left dozens of comments, mostly written in feminist jargon.

Amanda Marcotte quotes some dandy examples -- go read.

I'm sure this story is on its way to a conservative media outlet near you, where some white, privileged man in tighty-whities will roll his eyes about the hysterical feminists, which, in this case, well—good call.

Seriously, and I say that SERIOUSLY because I am a feminist, what the hell kind of feminists are we raising these days?

Doll Face (and Body)

Twitter is often a very strange place.

One of the people I follow, @SarahSecord, posted this earlier today.

I had to ask: Where does it come from? She didn't know, said the person who posted it "did not a) post it respectfully or b) provide the name of the artist."

So I used the fabulous feature of Google Images and dragged the image into the search box and found the artist, Freya Jobbins. Have a look at her other work. For me, it's about equal parts playful and seriously creepy.

Here's an Artist Statement from her.

Toys, especially dolls can represent so much to us all. Memories of surreal companionship, co-dependancy, learned nurturing, innocent love to sexual and morbid curiosity. Represented flesh, like the plastic flesh used to manufacture these dolls to recreate 'the real thing, has beauty in its divine detail. To the superficial perfection of Barbie, Ken and the Bratz dolls to the plump baby dolls, the plastic is a very non-traditional sculpting material. But the act of cutting, dismembering and reconstructing the damaged, discarded, and worthless dolls, into humanoid faces and busts is a metaphor I use either consciously or subconsciously.

This particular piece, though, has some complex resonance for me, and I imagine, other feminists.

Might this be the ideal vision of women by misogynist anti-choicers?

Me, I'm going to keep it handy to post whenever I get lectured about the proper role of women.

Hot . . . and NOT

It is very hot here, so I was thinking how nice this would be.



Then I remembered seeing this -- the world's tackiest sculpture.




Read about the 'artist' here.

Poor Marilyn. Still -- and forever -- a victim of patriarchy, unlike others.