Tony Tasset | Blob Monster | 2010

Photos by: Kevin J. Miyazaki / Sculpture Milwaukee

Over the past three decades, multi-media artist Tony Tasset has created several related major bodies of work. Early in his career he explored the post-modern impulse to make art about art—by making art about art. Tasset showed his love and passion for both the post-modern copies and the modern originals, his references ranging across artistic generations, using traditional and contemporary materials.

Tasset’s area of focus turned to identity politics alongside a broad art world press for more diversity and equity in our cultural realm. This push, led by women, people of color, artists of different sexual orientation, and immigrants, challenged how we see authority and authenticity, making room for narratives beyond our worship of the hero-conqueror model of history. Tasset made work about his own middle class, white male life, exposing the personal inside the larger context of the political.

Tasset’s more recent vein of work is of surreal, large-scale sculptures that draw imagery from American popular culture. Tasset pulls ideas and inspiration from music, literature, movies, amusement parks, and public swimming pools, his polyglot interests putting high and low art forms on the same playing field. From giant pumpkins cast from a state fair winner to melting snowmen encrusted with shared of shiny glass, Tasset reflects the realities and disappointments of the American dream.

Tasset’s giant sci-fi Blob Monster, 2009, recalls The Blob, a 1958 movie, featuring Steve McQueen in his debut. The Blob was about a creeping menace that could not be stopped, a post-war parable about the Cold War. The figure’s sad droopy face looks like a child’s toy left out in the sun too long. Tasset’s monster refers to the monsters inside of us, or perhaps the untouchable forces of culture, both large and small, that define our world.

Tasset uses iconographic imagery, recontextualizing familiar objects in a scale that can compete with architecture. In light of the current pandemic, Blob Monster embodies an unstoppable force that we human must band together to stop.