What’s that strange image along the side of the road? Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s four large, neon dancing penises! They flash on and off, and they sport top hats, canes, and bow ties, Fred Astaire style.
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There are silk screen images inside the boxes at the rear, but they are visible only by day, up close: among them are a little girl skipping rope, a black man on his knees praying to a television screen, a space shuttle shooting a hole through a “Save the Seals” postage stamp. Behind are glittery stars hanging on clotheslines. All around are steel bolts of green lightning driven into the ground.
“Of course the most notorious image is the dancing penises,” says Lawless, “which I got off the side of a building in Buffalo. I guess some kids were playing off Mr. Peanut, and they did a large, eight- to ten-foot character out of spray paint. I had taken a photo and put it in my archives as an image I wanted to use. It seemed very appropriate for what I was trying to do. I was burlesquing the whole idea of male dominance.
It was cold, windy, and rainy the night of the Buffalo unveiling. More coordinated it and appointed himself emcee. He was pleased to see the television cameras rolling. Currie gave the first speech, about the importance of public sculpture, and left immediately after that. He didn’t want to see what was going to happen; he feared a backlash against artists. “The city was embracing the project. They were all eager to see it go through. I don’t know if this is the emperor’s clothes all over again. Everybody wanted to believe something until the lights went on.”
Lawless happened to be doing some work on the sculpture the next day when Walt’s brigade and some city workers arrived. They had torches and a bulldozer. Lawless turned to civil disobedience. He crawled on top of one of the penises and refused police orders to come down. Finally his lawyer, negotiating with the mayor’s office by car phone, reached an agreement: Green Lightning could stand as long as it wasn’t plugged in.
“They had a good laugh,” Lawless says. The corporation counsel and the state’s attorney declined to prosecute.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bruce Powell.
