HiCe's photostream  

Jim Dine
1985
12' x 12' x 33" each
Bronze

Ozymandias
Douglas Kornfeld
2009
18' x 16' x 2'
Wood, paint, steel

OZYMANDIAS is a colossal monument to "Man" sinking in the Main Lawn of the DeCordova Sculpture Park. Employing the ubiquitous contemporary symbol for man in giant scale, the artist, Douglas Kornfeld questions how cultural icons can reflect and represent the societies that construct them. Inspired by the visual and literary records of 19th century Napoleonic expeditions to Egypt, Kornfeld titles the sculpture, "Ozymandias" another moniker for Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses the Great (1279-1212 BCE) known for his extensive building campaigns and for erecting colossal statues of himself allover Egypt, and as a reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1818 poem of the same name. Only partially visible, the sinking symbol invokes the first several lines of Shelley's poem:

"I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies..."

Standing over 18 feet tall, Kornfeld's male monument invites references to iconic Egyptian figural monuments like the Sphinx and Ramses the Great, but also asks what the gendered pictogram means and represents to our culture today and its place within the larger context of history. A banal, mundane symbol for the men's restroom, now magnified and submerged as ruin, OZYMANDIAS stands as a satirical counter-monument, critically addressing what merits a built monument today as well as how this culturally constructed symbol will be historically catalogued and remembered.

www.decordova.org/art/sculpture-park/ozymandias

John Wilson
1987
40" x 30" 37"
Bronze maquette