Invasion of the Fem Godzillas

Invasion of the Fem Godzillas

Since the war on monuments was launched during the Obama presidency, our once beautiful public squares have turned into an allegory for crisis of creativity. Sculptors would like to replace the downed artwork, but, for one, they don’t seem to know what to do about women.

Traditionally, Western art idealized femininity, creating images like Venus De Milo and the Statue of Liberty. Feminists railed against men projecting their fantasies — be they carnal or social — into the womanhood. The age-honored treatment of women became problematic. California figurative artist Marco Cochran summed up the grievances: “Women’s presence in public art is rare. When they are depicted, it is often through outdated or passive narratives.”

Feminists asked for more statues of extraordinary women — or, failing that, likenesses of ordinary women who would be great if only the patriarchy allowed it. The perceived injustice is addressed with mandates. For instance, in 2018 the City of San Francisco decreed that 30% of its public statues have to depict non-fictional women.

San Francisco might have been the first city to turn art and history into accounting, but the trend to push for more monuments honoring women is decades in the making. In recent years, I wrote about the mash up Sigame statue in Oakland:

And the 18-foot armless Barbie titled Witness.

The British-Caribbean artist Thomas J. Price took a more straight forward approach by placing outsize likenesses of casually dressed black women, most of them obese, directly on sidewalks. In 2023, he erected a 13-foot bronze sculpture by the train station in Rotterdam. It captures an ordinary black woman in a tracksuit doing nothing in particular. At the unveiling, a teen migrant girl wistfully opined that the statue represent the opposite of a white man in a suit. Are we to interpret it as inspiration?

In March this year, Price lodged another 13-foot figure, this time on Piazza della Signoria in Florence, to compete with Michelangelo’s David. That figure is in good physical shape — it’s her mental health that’s concerning — she is shown looking at her cell phone. If David is made of elegant marble, the surface of the woman opposite him shines like gold. The idea is to command attention — and destract from admiring the masterpiece.

Price is on a roll: this week, he unveiled a 12-feet obese black woman in Times Square in New York. [Featured Image] She is taking up space in a pose allegedly reminiscent of the modest David, but social media found her looking surely — like a Karen, an HR manager or maybe Tish James.

Since critics praise these massive works for being inconspicuously in your face, by this standard the 45-foot white woman of R-Evolution in San Francisco wins the game of obnoxiousness. “This sculpture is about being seen,” explained its creator Cochrane.

The naked giantess is part of the series that premiered at Burning Man in 2015. The National Mall narrowly avoided the reinstallation of the fem Godzilla on its premises in 2017 — that would be perfect for the #MeToo moment that raged across the world in Trump’s first term, not so great for national self-respect.

Made out of steel rods and mesh, the project is designed to light up from the inside. As some gawkers discovered during its assembly, the way to wire the colossus is through her posterior. A video of a construction crew member muscling himself into her belly via the buttocks opening went viral on social media. If the sculpture is about being seen, we’ve seen too much.

One Twitter/X account smirked, “This picture kind of embodies the spirit of San Francisco, head up arse.” R-Evolution suits the city well. Embarcadero Plaza needs a large fixture. In the 1950s, the structures in that area were demolished to build a freeway. But the freeway was torn down after the Loma Prieta earthquake, opening up the view of the waterfront and the lovely Ferry Building. Renewal projects left behind an empty lot, and the Burner dame filled up the space nicely. Its mesh texture matches that of the nearby bus terminal — in a way, she belongs to the Embarcadero. The downside is that the visitors arriving to the city by boat are now greeted by the naked derrière of a strong woman.

Like a nudist beach, R-Evolution entirely lacks sex appeal. She might be well-proportioned, but her size alone renders her unerotic. In this sense, too, she is perfect for the town — a feminist ogre is the fitting third act for the play that started with the Summer of Love.

I like the aesthetics that elevate the mundane and picture everyday people — slice of life painting and realist literature are my cup of tea. What I dislike is the depiction of an unremarkable person caught in the act of being unimportant towering over me. Pierce and Cochrane augmented the generic. In place of eclectic mash-ups like Sigame and Witness, they continued in the line of the faceless Julia of the Obama-era cartoon of a public charge.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t believe public monuments should celebrate people for merely existing — or being born with a certain gender or ethnicity — but for accomplishing something. And by accomplishing, I don’t mean eating yourself into heart disease. David enthralls not because he stared into his cell phone — he killed Goliath. White men in suits are productive. Black women idling, on the other hand, is not the stereotype to cling to.

Figurative artists used to be able to show an individual in his singularity, be it a historical figure, an allegory or simply a neighbor. The contemporary attempts to create composite woke goddesses evoke visceral disdain because the audiences are tired of group rights and long for individual excellence.

Contemporary monuments certainly don’t objectify women. If only. They don’t convey much of anything. Their sponsors are too invested in ideology to capture a feeling or to be spontaneous. Instead, like a good settler-colonialist, they mark as much territory as possible.

Despite establishing the quota for the fair sex public art, San Francisco added only a single bronze portrait of Maya Angelou to its inventory. And sure, its history doesn’t reach very far, and not many notable people lived or worked here, but part of the Bay Area’s problem is selective amnesia.

It would serve the city well to honor Joan Didion, one of the founding figures of New Journalism, who documented the creepiness of the hippy scene in her 1968 classic Slouching towards Bethlehem. Because San Francisco is still struggling with Summer of Love pathologies, a monument to Didion on the Upper Haight would feel like a breath of fresh air. Her bookish beauty is a great counterweight to the 45-foot faceless bot.

And if the idea is to find inspiration in history, there is no need to limit ourselves to female personalities. Mark Twain, the founder of modern American literature, lived and worked in San Francisco — it’s bizarre to me that the local establishment doesn’t cherish his legacy. Alfred Hitchcock, the director of classic features set in the Bay Area, and the American outfitter Levi Strauss are another two personalities whose legacy is indisputable but overlooked.

And of course it’s never too late to return the monument to Christopher Columbus and the Early Days group removed by City Hall. In the interests of justice, the statues of Francis Scott Key, Junipero Serra and President Ulysses S. Grant, torn down in the 2020 Antifa/BLM riots, need to be restored.

San Francisco voters rejected its useless mayor London Breed who presided over the fentanyl crisis. Shamefully, Breed ordered a review of public art for potential removal. Her successor, the Levi’s heir Daniel Lurie, made visible progress cleaning the city’s notorious homeless encampments. He should be well-advised to reverse every single policy that made the metro unlivable — and that includes the uglification of public art.

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