I have been looking at contemporary artists that use children's toys in their work. The ones I was aware of are the Chapman brothers and Jeff Koons, both at the opposite spectrum from each other but I have been really interested in looking to see if there are other artists who use toys in a different way and if they had a political message. I actually discovered that there are several contemporary artists using toys in their works and especially from Asia. The fist one which I saw was an exhibition of is Joe Black. His portraits are made of children's tiny plastic colourful soldiers like in the portrait of Mao, shown below, which are placed upright in a detailed stylised way. He explored the idea of one man as a central force, ideas of branding, the cult of personality, and he says himself on his website: the portrait encapsulates the idea of one man as unifying and equalising the force of thousands. The thousand soldiers make up the image. They are supposed to resonate with Mao's personality. Joe Black made portraits also of Obama, Picasso, Diana ( which was considered controversial as he used crashed toy cars) to open up new ways of seeing portraits and making them.
He is not the first one to have made portraits using toys. There is also Brazilian artist Vik Muniz and his young 'Toy Soldier' below made out of children's toy soldiers, a reminder of childhood. His young face is fresh, his cap straight and open, in contrast with the many little toy soldiers from which the image is made. Some of the toy soldiers are fallen down, lying in different directions, as though they have been shot, reminding us of the horrors of wars and its violence. This contrasts with the innocence of the young soldier's face unaware of his future. This reminded me of his other work, portraits of worker's children in plantations in St Kitts, in which the beautiful bright shiny smiles are created from sugar cane, the very product that is imprisoning them.
It is a high risk area with leprosy outbreaks, really a place without a future and where one can find easily dead bodies in the trash. The garbage pickers helped him realise large portraits of them made out of garbage collected at the site where they go every day; this is a project of social reform to change their lives through the power of creativity and turn them into art assistants as they have to construct their portraits from refuse, using the same refuse they deal with in their daily life. The money from the images sold will go to the garbage pickers co-op funded by Tiao the leader. Tiao in the picture below, is styled after David's the Death of Marat, Muniz aims is to show the hard reality of life for the workers. Each of them was paid to participate in the project to show them a different way to do things, empowering them, marginalised people, at the end line of consumer culture. His work also, unlike that of Joe Black, touches the ephemeral quality of his portraits. I mean if you picked the toys out of the portraits, the garbage they are made of, you would be destroying the images.
Another artist who works in a very different way from the previous two is visual artist photographer Philip Toledo who made a whole series titled Hope and Fear using dolls in some of the portraits. He portrays people in suits made out of dolls see below.
The doll photograph is called Baby Suit, Possibilities of Thinking Out Loud, which clearly describes what one sees in the photograph, the costume they are wearing is an externalisation of their inner desires and fears. The photographs are beautifully executed,precise with the main people standing still and expressionless looking up or down, but one can feel the weight of the dolls on the person, which convey suspense or instability within the photograph, the apprehension of the photographer regarding what is taking place in American society. By this means he is also questioning the way beauty has been presented in classical portraits.
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