Nebraska is a beautiful state. It is filled with natural monuments such as Chimney Rock and Indian Cave, it gave passage to Lois and Clark and was the birth place of Gerald R. Ford, our Nation’s 38th President. Nebraska is filled with farmers producing corn and raising cattle and is the proud home of over 1.5 million people. It is in this great state where we can find miracles of engineering in the skyscrapers of Omaha, and Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, with Universities like Kearney’s producing teachers, and Creighton, teaching young student’s how to save and further human life.
But it is also in this state that you will find phenomena such as the J. Doe series. Since May, this new trend has filled the street corners of Omaha’s Downtown, the lawns of businesses and has overtaken areas of once natural, or man-made splendor extending all the way to the panhandle.
But what critics and many Nebraskans are saying about them is even worse: they are hailing these pudgy, sex-less creatures as art.
But these fiberglass structures are not art. Juxtapose any single J. Doe statue with the Mona Lisa, the statue of David, or Sylvia Bokor’s Tomorrow Today, then choose what is art and what is not.
These statues are contortions of reality. Their bulbous bodies are splotched, seemingly at random, with brightly colored paint, or none at all, and are contorted into in-human and in-humane positions. One of them is painted a glossy dark blue with its legs severed from its torso, its body twisting away from it’s only source of locomotion, one being split in three by two solid concrete walls. Another covered in concrete with a second bulbous body protruding from it at a slight angle. A fourth is split down its sides with a large, orange spring thrusting it’s halves apart.
Ayn Rand, the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (the second most influential book of all time according to the Library of Congress, behind The Bible), states that “Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.
By a selective process, art integrates those aspects of reality which represent man’s fundamental view of himself and of existence (The Romantic Manifesto).”
In essence, we create art in our own image, as it could and should be. By erecting art that portrays human beings in positions of pain and suffering, the artist is stating that existence is pain, equating life with suffering, and happiness with physical torture. By covering them sporadically with erratic designs and random colors, the statues depict the universe as random and chaotic, and without reason.
An even more frightening concept is the phsychological equivalent of these statues. The J. Doe with two bodies contained in one is equivalent to someone with dissociative disorder; the man suffering from psychological impotence whose fear of everything reduces him to a mere pool of mental stagnation is equivalent to the statue separated from its legs, unable to walk or stand; the listless teenager unable to discern between right and wrong plaguing the streets and schools is the personification of the J. Doe thrust in opposite directions by the large tangerine-colored spring; the figure split in three, separated by concrete walls becomes the woman unable to connect causes with effects who, frustrated by her own inability to understand life, kills herself and her children.
Then there is the statue of David, the bright boy who reportedly slew a giant, the Mona Lisa, whose radiant smile bestows its benevolence upon any onlooker, and Sylvia Boker’s Tomorrow Today portraying the future the way it can and should be.
Now compare art with the trash littering the streets of Omaha. And wonder which images are fit to fill the streets of cities and our own minds.
These are actual pictures of the J. Doe things: J. Doe Project
