Reclining Liberty
YEAR: 2022
ARTIST: Zaq Landsberg
MATERIALS: Plaster Resin, Oxidized Copper Paint, Foam, Wood & Steel
More of his work can be found at www.zaqart.com
Reclining Liberty is a mashup of the Statue of Liberty and the giant reclining Buddah statues of Asia. The piece, coated in plaster resin, is sturdy enough to allow viewers to touch, climb, sit atop, lean up against the figure, and interact with the monument at a human level. Finished with a paint with copper powder and an oxidizing acid, the patina mimics actual Statue of Liberty.
The Statue of Liberty stands tall in New York Harbor, and the object itself and the ideals it represents are literally and figurative above the viewers. Reclining Liberty attempts to bring these ideals down to a human scale and the literal grassroots level. The piece is at eye level with viewers, it’s touchable, charges no admission, is open to all whenever the park is open, and doesn’t even have a pedestal. It suggests that perhaps lofty ideals of Liberty and Freedom are not above us and out of reach, but are at our own level, all the time.
The pose of the Buddha lying down is not just about death, but is an illustration of one stage on the path to enlightenment. By merging the traditional Buddhist reclining pose and the quintessential American figurative symbol, Reclining Liberty asks the viewer to contemplate the status of the ideals the Statue of Liberty represents, is U.S. as in entity forever upright and tall, is it an eventual decline and fall, or is there another stage for the country, that will transcend this symbol all together. After all the events of 2020, and the unmooring of pretty much every American institution, this question is not just theoretical.
Monuments are where the historical, the political and the aesthetic meet. This is a through line in Landsberg’s work. The US is in the midst of a reevaluation of monuments, their history, how they function in public space, how they’ve changed from their inception and their impact on the communities they’re in. Landsberg twists recognizable monuments to shed light on these questions, and demystify the agendas that created them.