A funny spoof on Lego sets and toy commercials is circulating on YouTube, but humorous in a somewhat disconcerting way. Almost a decade ago, Donald Kuspit made a famous assertion on a Rudolf Herz piece of art showing photos of Hitler and Marcel Duchamp. Kuspit affirmed it was completely coherent and Duchamp was a terrorist as well. His ready-made meant that anything can be art meaning in the current case of Lego, that yes, a concentration camp can be built from Lego and Lego can depict police state scenarios…. But the video is not that far off from the actual sets since Lego has been producing a series of cops and robbers themes lately that are disturbing and recall that corrupted romanticism of pop culture and its kitschy undertones are a fecund context for Lego to explore. Oh yes, the robbers do appear to resemble hillbillies….
Imagine my surprise, then, when, while looking for holiday presents and blithely scrolling through the Lego offerings on the site, I came across a set for the 5- to 12-year-old Lego aficionado called — are you ready? — a Prisoner Transport vehicle. It has high user ratings and comes with a prisoner, a policeman and, well, a prisoner-transport vehicle with gated windows. I almost had a coronary. Is Lego normalizing the prison industrial complex to 5-year-olds?…
…I kept scrolling. Surely there was a tribunal set in which the guards who have been caught raping and abusing juvenile prisoners are held accountable for their actions. And what about a prisoner-DNA set, where our 6-year-old scientist pretends to discover that the prisoner doing the time didn’t actually do the crime? How about the set designed after the peaceful prison strike in December in Georgia, where thousands of inmates — black, white, Mexican and other — put aside their gangbanging to make a statement about the human potential for greater good? Read More:http://www.npr.org/2011/01/04/132646227/the-root-lego-makes-prison-seem-like-childs-play a
ADDENDUM:
ZBIGNIEW LIBERA: Naturally, Lego was such an important piece that it divides my career into two parts. Lego brought me international recognition, and in this sense it really changed something. It is also very hard for an artist to have one of his works raise expectations very high. It becomes very hard to do any work after it. Sometimes such expectations even paralyze you, because you want to do something similar, but you cannot. And then you have to deal with the likelihood that you will never do something that significant again. It is a personal problem as well. But looking back over the years, it is not so simple to draw a dividing line. When I was working on the Lego project in 1996 it was not really known; it became well-known only a year later. But then, mentally I was at a somewhat different stage, I was dealing with different things. So where is this divide? Is it when I made “Lego” or is it when it became well-known, when I achieved recognition for it, which of course also changed me and my thinking about that piece?
H.T.:: Did Lego change your recognition in Poland or mainly abroad?