The Real World | Tom Otterness

Come play with me... and watch out for my bite. Yes, the whimsical sculptures created by Tom Otterness in The Real World do have a satirical meaning. But they're so much fun, you won't mind it a bit. One of New York's most popular public artworks, The Real World, completed in 1992, is installed in the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City, a block west of Stuyvesant High School.

The bronze-cast sculptures of The Real World are quirky and funny, a miniature society of charming, cartoonish people and animals. The Kansas-born, occasionally controversial artist is known for his humorously entertaining, yet gently barbed, public artworks. The work in Rockefeller Park includes all of that -- with over 100 sculptures by Otterness.

They're cats and dogs and birds and frogs and bankers and robbers, gleefully out of proportion and halfway real. There's a little man dwarfed by a frog, a life-size metal dog tied up with a rope, a child-size dodo bird you can ride (if you're small enough), a semi-human book-reading figure wrapped around a lamppost, giant hands you can step on, dismembered bronze feet plunked down in the open space, a monkey, huge feet a real small person can (and should) slide down, giant pennies being carried on the backs of tiny human figures while others ride atop the coins, moats and tipping towers, and on it goes. You'll want to climb on the sculptures, touch them, interact with them -- as children do.

Yes, the larger themes are there -- social commentary about the little man vs. the capitalist machine, sex, class, money and race, greed and corruption -- but really this bustling, intelligent, entertaining installation will make you long to be a kid again.

Otterness’s work can be seen in other public New York places, most notably Life Underground (2002) in the subway station at 14th Street and 8th Avenue, and in other cities around the world. Otterness was the first artist to create a balloon for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade -- a giant Humpty Dumpty suspended upside down (falling, of course).

The Real World is located in Nelson A. Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City, where you can also enjoy sweeping views of the Hudson River, the New Jersey shoreline and the beautiful park.

By Kathie