As well as the anti-facial recognition pieces I am experimenting with, I will rework 'Charging Bull', also know as the Bull of Wall Street, which stands in the middle of the financial district of Manhattan, New York.
"The sculpture was created by Italian artist Arturo Di Modica in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash. Late in the evening of Thursday, December 14, 1989, Di Modica arrived on Wall Street with Charging Bull on the back of a truck and illegally dropped the sculpture outside of the New York Stock Exchange Building. After being removed by the New York City Police Department later that day, Charging Bull was installed at Bowling Green on December 20, 1989. Despite initially having only a temporary permit to be located at Bowling Green, Charging Bull became a popular tourist attraction. Di Modica may have been influenced by a pair of huge metallic sculptures, a charging bull and a bear, placed in front of the Frankfurt, Germany Stock Exchange in 1985 as part of the 400th celebration of the exchange."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_Bull
Mid charge, with flared nostrils and horns ready to gore, Di Modica's sculpture captures much of the aggression, stubbornness, largesse and unpredictability of the stock market and the wider economies it sits in. It is cleverly placed so that the general public can walk 360 degrees around it, which makes the bull, and the risk it presents, feel totally unrestricted.
It has become an iconic symbol for finance and so it feels like the ideal image to subvert when looking at counter culture and capitalism.
I originally planned to create a 3D piece, replacing a bulls horns with my fingers with the implication that capitalism is fucking us all. I planned to create a negative mold of my fingers using dentists alginate, then attach my finger casts to a scaled 3D printed charging bull, creating a silicon jacket mold of the combined components and then casting into that. Logistical and financial barriers prevented me from creating this piece at this time. It's on the shelf for another day.
I adapted my idea to my means and time frame, and have decided to use Adobe to create a digitised collage version of my original plan that I will then screen print. I will experiment with the print finish but my initial idea is to print on clear perspex and then use this to project the image scaled up onto the side of a building. Ideally a bank.
