Seeking Liberty
The city is full of NYC-centric swag shops that manage to feel ubiquitous and practically invisible at the same time. Most natives pay them no mind at all—except perhaps when they’re in need of a cheap baseball cap or scarf. When the hordes of out-of-towners descend on these locales, their purchases tend to be dictated by degree of festive adornment, or weight and size (“will it fit in the suitcase?”) or basic kitsch value.
Few of either tribe have reason to give more than a passing thought to all the Statue of Liberty figurines clogging the shelves. They’re the the foot soldiers of patriotic commerce, the undifferentiated gray-green goo that keep the stores looking full and provide the easiest impulse buy possible: Just grab a torch-bearing arm and go!
I certainly gave them no other thought until spending an afternoon at the 9/11 Memorial, where I was struck by the visitors there— some local, but mostly tourists — and how visually and culturally distinct from each other they seemed. It was as though in that safe-though-complicated space, there was an echo of that ‘Melting Pot’ promise of people coming from disparate places and cultures peacefully to build a new world together.
Exiting the Memorial site I wandered into the closest-by of the NYC swag shops. Midway through the first aisle my eyes alighted upon a small figure. I picked it up, and looking closely, something felt my perceptions shifting, Then I picked up another:
Simple logic would suggest that mass reproductions of the Statue of Liberty would yield muddy, clumsy, indistinct echoes of the original— at best probably doing no more than hewing broadly to the heavy slabs of that stern visage and letting the rest fall away. However, a significant percentage of them are not generic in appearance at all: They appear melancholic, giddy, startled, serene, frightened, possibly under the influence of something, and in a case or two, arguably menacing. And scale makes little difference. Often the tiniest figures, with faces less than an inch in height, may have the most delicate—or dramatic— features.
The vagaries of the reproduction process play a part in enhancing individuality—the plastic within a much-used mold may shift, so that ‘twins’ become “cousins’ at best, and adding a silver- and silvered-plastic plating can alter facial features for angelic or… other effects.
Some of the faces could have been repurposed from other figures, but most suggest a distinctiveness far removed from any modern popular-culture examples, Were they based on a celebrity? A friend or relative? Appropriated from imagery (religious perhaps) in the region where they created?
Were they outsider-art-esque attempts to capture the feeling of power, strength, or defiance that the implacable serenity of the original may have seemed to lack by comparison?
With no answers likely forthcoming, the evidence that lingers is that human minds and hands will always reach toward expression and connection, even in the smallest moments.
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