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1Guy YedwabWriting The EssayChild's Play Naaaaaaaaa nanananana nanaa na KATAMARI DAMACY.I can tell already that this essay will never do justice to
2001
, Liz Larner's temporary art piece sitting in the Doris Freedman Plaza. I know this because I can't sing the Katamari Damacytheme song at whoever is reading this.Katamari Damacy is a video game designed by Keita Takahashi and released in 2004.Whereas most American video games are senseless violent hack-and-slash wonders of brutality,Katamari Damacy appeals to the child in each of us. The point of the game is to take a small clodand make it into a big clod by rolling up objects that are smaller than your clod. The name of thegame translates into “clod spirit” (with spirit being used in the same sense as “team spirit” or “school spirit”).Liz Larner's piece,
2001
, looks like a very pretty clod. It's a mostly spherical shapecomposed of cubes and spheres mixed together. It's about the size of an adult, reflective, andcolored with a special green-blue plastic paint which means it shines different colors anddifferent shades in different lights. If you can imagine a blue-green iridescent dust bunnyroughly a hot dog stand in diameter, you're probably getting close to seeing
2001
. And it lookscompellingly, to me at least, like a katamari (clod) from the game. So whenever I see it, I want tosing the incredibly catchy theme song to the game.Another result of this probably accidental connection is that Liz Larner's piece does notseem to belong to its environment at all. Doris L. Friedman's plaza is a tiny rectangular strip of sidewalk that leads in to Central Park which, without the sign, probably wouldn't occur to me to
 
2 be a plaza at all. Across the street is the real Plaza, Grand Army Plaza, where a real statue of General Sherman stands regally on a six foot pedestal. In comparison,
2001
looks plopped downin the middle of nowhere.Miwon Kwon describes different forms and modes of public art in her essay “Sittings of Public Art: Integration versus Intervention” and introduces the common term 'plop art' to refer to public art that looks as though it has been just plopped down, the same way that this reference toKwon's essay looks plopped down in this essay. But
2001
also looks like it has been simply plopped down; it looks like Kwon's perfect piece of plop art. It is not raised on a platform or separated from Doris Freedman's Plaza at all—it is merely separated from the world by a smallwhite barrier which is so light that a child has already knocked it over before I have gotten there.Since it is mostly round, it looks like it will roll away if a wind comes—or if someone like mecomes by and gives it a strong push.I don't really give it a strong push, because the adult I've become doesn't seem to think it'sappropriate. In a way, I'm afraid that it really will move if I give it a shove. It might roll intotraffic, and cabs will slam into it, shattering the cars and crushing the people inside.Something must be wrong with me—everything I'm thinking about right now reminds meof toys or games. The image of crashing cabs in traffic reminds me of a toy car I used to have—itwas a large model about the size of my head of a regular car, but it was the “Crash DummiesCar.” You could smash the front, and it would collapse inwards and make the steering wheel hitthe crash-dummy driver, and he would fly into pieces. As a kid, I loved to smash up this car repeatedly and watch the pieces fly everywhere—and then put it back together.It's almost tempting, then, to push
2001
into traffic. But the difference between being achild and being an adult isn't in action, it's in consequences. I, as an adult, know that if I pushed
 
3
2001
into traffic, not only would I not be able to put the cars back together (a tragedy rivalingHumpty Dumpty), but I might kill someone. That's something you don't think about, really, invideo games or when destroying crash dummies.
2001
seems like a children's toy in the middle of an adult world. This isn't a playground— children don't run around unattended (there's a road nearby, for God's sake!) and even thisappealing-looking toy has been roped off by a white barrier. It looks like some sort of adultintrusion into a child's world. Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote an essay on how art serves as power: he breaks it into performances of power by the government, and performances of power by theartist. Here, I can't help but think that the white barrier is one of Ngugi's “performances of  power”--not by government, but by the adult.Across the street is a work of art which is far more 'adult.' It's
General Sherman
in GrandArmy Plaza that I mentioned, a monument to an adult (General Sherman) and an angel (a symbolof death and the afterlife) leading his way into battle. But suddenly, after having been looking at
2001
, I realize that
General Sherman
in this statue looks
exactly
like a little blue army man that Iused to play with in my Civil War Playset. In fact, I think I had the little blue General Sherman,and I think he looked just like
General Sherman
(only without the guiding angel).There is a rife history attached to
General Sherman
, tapping not only into the Civil War  but really tapping into the post-Civil war world and the incredible price which Atlanta had to pay, along with all the other cities in the deep South which General Sherman burned to theground in order to make the South feel that “war is hell,” as Sherman famously said. Still, for kids, war isn't hell: war is playground entertainment. They love to imagine little battles with littlefigurines, love to imagine gruesome carnage on the hills. That's why I loved to smash my crash-dummy's car over and over and over again.
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