A Visit to the Artist’s ‘Real World’ By April Koral Tom Otterness fans just can’t help themselves. Take Charles Fialkin, who lives in Battery Park City. It’s not unusal for him to miss a train or two when he’s at the 14th Street station where the sculptor’s fantastical statues unexpectedly appear on railings and ceilings. “Sometimes, I just can’t tear myself away,” Fialkin said, and a group of 50 or so fellow fans nodded knowingly. They had all come, last month, to “The Real World,” Otterness’s playground in the northwest corner of Rockefeller Park where they hoped to pry from the artist himself the meaning of it all. “What is the significance of the figure with the frog on top of it? Otterness: “I just liked it.” “Why does that cat have a man’s face on it” Otterness: “That’s my old friend Lenny. I don’t know why I did that.” “Why is a vacuum cleaner attacking the house?” Otterness: “Mom would turn on the vacuum cleaner during bad storms and so I became frightened of vacuum cleaners.” What Otterness, an unfailingly polite and self-effacing man, did not say is that it didn’t really matter who the lizard hanging from the lamppost represented (Malcolm X), why he put strands of DNA at the entrance (his daughter was born while he was working on the project) or why the big penny replicas are all turned one way (he doesn’t like “In God we trust”). What matters are the pleasures that this “world” provide its visitors—the children who climb the bronze figures or crouch to converse with them as well as the adults who relish the work’s humor, eroticism and political commentary. Like the path of pennies that lazily connect one vignette to another, Otterness meanderingly unwove his own life story. His first sculptures, he recalled, were made from the veins of yellow and red clay that lay in the bottom of the creek behind his childhood house in Kansas. At age 13 he started painting and his parents sent him to a local art school. Otterness’s father worked for Boeing Aircraft, but indulged an artistic side by writing poetry and playing the flute. “We had a reproduction of a Goya in the house,” Otterness said, “the famous one with a rich guy and the birds in the wings waiting to get him. That work influenced me.” Otterness’s taste for public art began early in his career. Soon after coming to New York City, he began selling plaster figures on the street for $4.99. He also joined an artists collective that in 1980 took over a 42nd Street massage parlor to show their work. For five years he worked as a night watchman at the Museum of Natural History. The experience, along with the hours spent as a boy catching frogs, turtles and snakes, he said, is what inspired the animals in his work. After “The Real World” opened in 1992, Otterness would often come to the park with his young daughter. And the discussions he overheard about his work reaffirmed his belief in the power of public art. “It’s not like in a gallery,” he said. “Here, people would start talking about sex, death, class, race, money—all the subjects we don’t usually talk about—with their kids and strangers.” Abby Ehrlich, director of programming for the Conservancy, who invited Otterness for his first speaking engagment at the park, agrees. “It slows people down. It pulls them in, and engages their eyes and imagination. And it happens every day and to every one of all ages.” Otterness said that he envisioned this corner of the park to be like a social-political map of the city. “The rich people live in Manhattan and the working people leave at night and go over the bridges,” he said, pointing to the house-like structure in the center of the park with its tiny moat. “The house is full of champagne drinkers, there’s a spanking scene, a robbery scene.” “The advantage of making art is that it doesn’t have to make sense,” Otterness told the group. “It’s not selling you something, it has no purpose, it’s not telling you which way to go.”