Two days after one of those giant statues of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Firdos Square, and had its head chopped off and dragged through the streets of Baghdad, artists at the University of Minnesota were participating in the art department’s 34th Annual Iron Pour, casting new and graven images for artistic fulfillment and academic credit. Dozens of artists in heavy protective clothing, safety glasses, and a hodgepodge of facemasks and respirators braved the acrid smoke from the coke-fired furnace, which stung the eyes and embedded in clothing. Manipulating heavy crucibles on pulleys and poles, teams of artists poured molten steel into sand molds. It was a delicate and carefully timed group performance, not something you see too often among go-it-alone artist-types.
Given the sweat and planning required to finish even the simplest of these metal sculptures, did anyone here experience a pang of sadness for the public art being pummeled in Iraq? Max Thomas, a University senior in red safety glasses, said that seeing a 40-foot statue come down was an amazing visual experience in itself. He said, “I wish all sculptors could have an armored M88 tank to do stuff with!” His eyes went wide with the possibilities.
First-time pourer Peter Schmidt, a student from Southwest State, had doubts. “It’s a shame to see all those statues being torn down. It’s like taking away history—like burning up pictures and paintings.” Although no fan of that particular subject or its execution, Schmidt hoped the statue’s remnants would one day end up in a museum rather than, say, the basement of a frat house at Baghdad U.
Jim Swartz, another visitor from Southwest State, considered the artistic possibilities of the fallen Saddam statuary. “I figured you have two choices with all those statues: Either put them in a museum for bad art from bad regimes, or cut them up and reassemble ’em in a really nice abstract way. That’d be the first thing I’d do,” he said.
Actually, the bad art museum is not all that far-fetched, said iron-pour organizer and U of M art professor Wayne Potratz. “I can certainly understand why people would want to destroy a symbol that’s been oppressive, but one of the things that’s happened in the former Soviet Union is that they’ve taken a lot of the sculptures of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin and put them in these very bizarre sculpture parks. Then they’re all together, representing an era.” Indeed, in Grutas, Lithuania, a local entrepreneur assembled more than 60 statues and busts of Lenin and Stalin in a park that locals dubbed “Stalin World.” The park, which its creator has boasted “combines the charms of Disneyland with the worst of the Soviet Gulag prison camp,” has not been without controversy among Stalin’s victims. But it has become a popular tourist attraction. Would a future Saddam Land be any less tasteful or popular among history buffs?
“The statue of Hussein does speak about a particular style and an idea of what art is,” Potratz said. “I thought it was pretty typical of what I call totalitarian art, which follows very closely the aesthetics of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. It’s naturalistic work depicting heroic figures. It’s very much like a lot of the post-Civil War statuary you find here in the States.”
Structurally, the Firdos Square Saddam got low marks from Prof. Potratz. “My impression was it wasn’t made very well, because they had big steel pipes in the legs and it was broken up pretty easily by people with hammers. That leads me to believe it wasn’t such a great casting.” What would Potratz create if given the opportunity to build a 40-foot sculpture intended to weather the ages and sway the masses? He thought for a minute and then grinned. “Me, I’d make a giant turtle.”—Dan Gilchrist
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