Wednesday, March 31, 1999
Sculpture's message lost
Free-your-mind ideal caught up in racial tension
BY ANDREA TORTORA
The Cincinnati Enquirer
HIGHLAND HEIGHTS — It didn't take long for Dan Collett to learn what happens when a piece of your art goes public: People comment.
Twelve hours after Mr. Collett's iron and wood sculpture was installed in late February, with permission, on Northern Kentucky University's campus, black students wanted to know what it meant. The word racism was used. The uproar was so swift, the university removed the structure by noon the next day.
“Ishmael's Cage” is now back in place, after being allowed to remain on exhibit until the end of the semester.
The structure is a black iron cage with a wood slat floor. A man sits crouched in the corner, in a pose Mr. Collett adapted from Rodin's “The Thinker.”
The man's ankles are in shackles, but the metal bands are open. The cage has no roof. The door is ajar. Yet the man sits in the corner, arms crossed on his knees, head down.
The idea is to make people think about their physical environments and things in their lives. People feel burdened because they let their problems become shackles and chains that weigh them down, said Mr. Collett, 21, of Crescent Springs.
“That's what's holding him down,” Mr. Collett said of the man in the cage. “He can't free his mind.”
The work definitely sparked something in the minds of several students. Some said the man in the cage is a slave; others thought the university was making some sort of statement.
All Mr. Collett wanted to accomplish was some introspective thinking about who we are and where we're going.
He got the idea for the piece after reading Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, the story of a gorilla named Ishmael put on display in a cage for people to poke at and make fun of. While in the cage, Ishmael challenges his intellect and learns about humanity and captivity.
It took Mr. Collett three months to craft the piece, bending wire into the shape of the man, banging and soldering sheets of metal to the wire to form the three-dimensional figure. “It's not a black man. It's steel,” he said.
He built the piece specifically for the place where it sits: The same site a controversial Red Grooms sculpture occupied until it was removed last year.
That sculpture, created in the 1970s, depicts director D.W. Griffith, actress Lillian Gish and cameraman Billy Bitzer filming a scene from the Griffith movie Way Down East. A segment of NKU's population was offended by the sculpture's prominent display on campus because it could be interpreted as a tribute to Mr. Griffith, whose most famous movie — the 1915 Birth of a Nation — is overtly racist.
A lot of the talk about Mr. Collett's piece comes more from the site where it sits than the work itself, Fine Arts Department director Don Helm said. The lengthy debates about racism and the Grooms piece were still fresh in people's minds, Mr. Helm said, and some people made judgments of Mr. Collett's work before taking a long look.
“The piece, and the very fact that it elicited the kind of responses it did from the knee-jerk liberals and the reactionaries, is the very reason it should be there,” Mr. Helm said.
Mr. Collett said he wants people to experience his work by going inside the cage, or grabbing hold of the cell bars. He said he did not want to conjure up images of slavery or racism. He has a tattoo on his back that says Erase Racism.
When students protested his work, he placed an artist's statement, ex plaining the piece, near the sculpture. And he's been trying to talk to the students upset by what they see in his art.
“Nobody wants to be called a racist,” Mr. Collett said. “We need to just annihilate the concept of race, stop looking at color and look at each other as people. And what better environment than the academic environment, where we're supposed to be learning to save the world.
“If I would have known I would go though all this, I don't know if I would do it again,” Mr. Collett said. “But at least it sparked something.”
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