A nude statue of Donald Trump appeared mysteriously in the Castro this morning, and somehow nobody noticed its impromptu installation right at the busy intersection of Castro, Market, and 17th Street.
Trump’s frowning, frumpy, naked visage appeared in Los Angeles, Seattle, Cleveland, and New York City too, apparently the work of anarchist art group INDECLINE.
The INDECLINE site features a video of the vicious visage’s creation. It’s modeled out of something called "monster clay," features detail work of the individual pores on the GOP candidate’s nose, and the musical score over its creation features a repeated sample of Trump declaring "the American Dream is dead."
And the title of the piece? The Emperor Has No Balls. We're giving you the PG-13 angle on the statue so far, but its full frontal view (seen below) provides a representation of the GOP nominee's genitalia, the dimensions of which are decidedly petite.
What’s the message behind such a provocative piece? It’s hard to say. The work is pretty deft and nuanced, after all.
Maybe "Ginger" (the apparently one-name artist whose signature graces the work) means for Trump’s snowman-like proportions to remind us of drought conditions in California and the rest of the US, which has left us vulnerable (naked, you might say) to disastrous water shortages?
Maybe the use of clay as a medium is a comment on our common humanity, a subtle allusion to Abrahamic myth of the creation of the first human beings from clay. Or perhaps the waxy surface of Trump’s famous mane of hair in the piece recalls the artificiality of our accepted standards of beauty, which reduce us all to an ungratifying, sculpted imitation of an unrealized goal.
Possibly, the statue’s flattened and unflattering buttocks are meant to parallel the flatness of the television screens through which a figure like Trump interacts with the world, a comment on the tragic split (ahem) between the iconic representation of a thing via mass media and the genuineness of the real thing.
Yes, it could mean anything. Anything at all. There’s certainly no glaring, blunt, aggressive political statement that jumps right out at you.
- The Emperor Has No Balls [INDECLINE]
- Anarchists Unveil Naked Trump [Washington Post]
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