Freaks

One of the books that taught me much about myth, archetype, literary convention and more broadly about the human condition when I was a student of literature many years ago was Leslie Fiedler's Freaks. I thought about the book again yesterday, when Ellie and I took the trip downtown to see the installation by our friend Peter Shelton at the handsome new...

...Police Administration Building across from City Hall, whose reflection figures in the pirated picture above. (On the way, we were surprised to find this street market right out front...

... with many local produce stores and multi-ethnic lunch choices: Mexican, of course, but also Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern. Unfortunately, we had eaten before leaving home!)

The Peter Shelton installation is called "sixbeaststwomonkeys" (he has always strung together his words and used the lower case in his titles). For many years now, artists who undertake public art projects have wanted to address the "plaza plop" problem; even large sculptural works are dwarfed into absurdity by today's immense buildings. Peter's solution is to occupy the full length of an entire city block--for locals, on Spring Street, bewteen 1st and 2nd--lining up his "sixbeasts" and "two monkeys" in a row of quirky, strangely human figures whose bronze surfaces gleam pleasantly in the Southern California sunlight. Here's the long view:

And here are some of the individual "beasts"...

They are charming, rotund, voluptuous, fleshy, slightly risible...

... and even though animal, strangely "human." Pig, rhino, hippo, whatever these creatures are they are very down to earth, very comfortable in the avoirdupois of their own gravity. The artist, clearly, will have to get used to them being adapted to their environment--used, here, as a convenient support for gardening gear:

The "monkeys", on the other hand...

... are tall, skinny, a little wobbly on their pins, above it all, reaching absurdly for the heavens.

"Freaks"? Yes, because they are freakish, these creatures. Their forms are distorted, pulled out or squished down, expanded, ballooned, rounded out, twisted. Deprived of limbs or heads, they are somehow complete in their incompletion, entirely satisfying to the eye and mind. It's Fiedler's point, in his book, that the freaks that once were the features of fairs and circuses never failed to fascinate because they reveal to us much about ourselves. As children, Fielder suggests, we experience out first years of life as freaks, tiny creatures surrounded by giants, feeling freakish in our own skins--too fat, too thin, to short, too tall--and falling about as we seek to gain control of our bodies in an alien environment.

It's this freakish quality that I find irresistible--and weirdly comforting--in Shelton's work. He reminds us of the human vulnerability of our bodies, of the fears and neuroses that we project on these odd vehicles in which we are given to travel around. Most of us never feel entirely comfortable and confident with what we see when we look in the mirror in the morning, and while the mirror Shelton offers us to look into is something like those fun show mirrors that provoke ridicule and laughter, they share the same truth: that this is how we fear others may be seeing us. His creatures makes us smile and want to touch them, to feel in their rotund surfaces some of the sensual satisfaction we ourselves so often yearn for. Or tower above us, gangly and awkward, asking for nothing better than that we reach up to comfort them.

Well, enough pontification from me. The best thing is to see them. Maybe sneak a touch...

A footnote (have I told you this one before?) Some years after finding so much to nourish my understanding of literature in "Freaks," I invited Fiedler to speak to a class of students at USC. Before he came from back east for the engagement, I asked if there was anyone he would like to join us for dinner, the night he was to spend in Los Angeles. His immediate choice was a man whose face was at that time universally familiar: Archie Bunker... the late Carroll O'Conner. We took the two of them and their wives to an Italian restaurant on Melrose and enjoyed both the lively exchange between the two men, and the star-struck stares of our fellow diners!