I finally found my man.
I’d been on the hunt for him for months—ever since Sarah visited from Hong Kong in January. We caught up in a brewery in the Altstadt one evening after she’d done the guided tour of the ‘dorf. I asked her what her favourite feature of my adopted city was and she didn’t hesitate. “The giant statue of David with bright yellow pubic hair.”
I was perturbed. How could there be a giant statue of David with bright yellow pubic hair in the ‘dorf without my knowing? Was it some kind of alternate reality? She couldn’t inform me of its whereabouts either because of her lack of orientation here, so I spent the next months riding precariously around the city, constantly on the lookout for a great clump of golden pubes.
I almost managed to forget him. Then, on a blue sky day late in the summer, I rode just a little to the left of my usual way, and passed the Malkasten restaurant and gallery. There he was. No double take required.
David is stopping here in the ‘dorf for several months as part of a tour around Europe. His sculptor is Hans-Peter Feldmann, a Düsseldorf artist born here in 1941. The statue is a nine metre high steel frame covered in Styrofoam and plaster and finished with epoxy resin. The base is a big water tank, filled by the local firemen with 3,000 litres of water in order to be heavy enough to withstand wind or bored people power.
Feldmann is a collector and conceptual artist. He collects toys, random objects, kitsch art, amateur photos and postcards. Then he orders, alters and re-presents his collections, delivering the objects in new lights and contexts. He does this with a wit and mischievousness that challenges the audience’s views of stereotypical images. He definitely achieves this with his replica of David. Michelangelo’s David is a symbol of strength and anger. Feldmann’s David is a symbol of irony and overstatement.
I read in Contemporary Art Daily that Feldmann finds conventional classical and Renaissance sculpture boring. With his changes to Michelangelo’s original, he has managed to simultaneously mock the conventional Renaissance form and taunt us with changing ideals of masculinity and power.
Michelangelo depicted David before his battle with Goliath. Anatomically, everything about him is consistent with a young man at the moment before slinging a stone. His right leg is taut; the left one juts forward in readiness. He is mentally tense, brows fixed in stern concentration, eyes wide open and staring purposefully at his enemy. The slingshot he carries over his shoulder is almost invisible, apparently to signify triumph of cleverness over strength.
Feldmann’s David leans a little more casually and appears self conscious of his pose. His slingshot looks like something he’s using to lazily scratch his back more than a weapon with which he’s going into battle. Even though he’s buffed and muscular, he radiates harmlessness. Up close, his face looks rather vulnerable, and his bright blue eyes stare, like the original, with mortal fear, but more at a vague nothingness in the distance rather than any real enemy in his vicinity.
David is moving on soon, down the Rhine to Cologne. I think I’ll try and get back to see him one last time before he goes. There was a something around seventy-year-old man jostling me for close-ups when I was there and curiously I got a little self-conscious about David. I didn’t get to touch him.
