Skeleton Handcuffed to a Tree In Park Slope. How Kinky.
Apparently, Park Slope parents’ interest in bondage and shackles is limited to best-selling books and does not extend to a burnt and twisted skeleton handcuffed to a tree in an empty lot.
Is it really any more transgressive than anything Amy Sohn writes about?
The Park Slope Patch reports on the neighborhood’s growing consternation over the replica of a skeleton that has been hanging, shackled, in an empty lot on 4th Avenue and 12th Street for the past few months. The lot has transformed since the 1970s from a gas station to a community garden/playground to a condemned community garden/playground “due to contamination from the buried gas tanks below the soil.”
The Patch reports that it is now “in the process of being sold to the Sisters of Mercy, a Catholic nonprofit organization, and will be developed as a two-story group home for mentally and physically disabled adults.” This will probably take some time though as the lot still needs to be rid of the buried gas tanks and cleaned up.
So it has stood empty.
Lonely.
Until, a few months ago, an enterprising artist decided to use the space to hang the skeleton from a tree. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this public art was not embraced by the community. Because it looks scary and disturbed? Well, yes.
Neighbors of the lot have commented on the skeleton saying things like “whoever put it up must be demented” and “the lot is an eyesore, and the skeleton just adds to the space’s negative condition” and “if the nuns saw this, their habits would fall right off their bodies!”
Interestingly, despite what seems like a universal dislike for the skeleton and, by association, the artist who installed it, no one has thought to take it down. Why? Perhaps it is because they actually KNOW who the artist is and don’t want to upset him?
That’s right. The people interviewed know exactly who placed the skeleton in the lot. He has installed several other things in the lot over the years, though nothing quite as controversial. But despite the fact that the unhappy community members could just contact the artist and express their dissatisfaction, these Park Slopers have decided to voice their opposition through the venerable Park Slope Patch.
One man decries the artist as “an eccentric man who considers himself an artist, but I think he is actually an oddist.”
Which—and I had never actually heard of an oddist before, maybe because it doesn’t technically exist as an artistic movement—actually seems kind of cool.
Like Park Slope can be the fertile ground for the new artistic trend of Oddism.
I mean, this is already the neighborhood of “Regressive” parents, why can’t one more movement take shape here?
