“That’s a serious problem,” he says.
One which his little businessmen make evident. These sculptures often appear without fanfare, alone or in small groups, faces etched by workaday stress. They heedlessly follow their corporate bosses into the deep dark depths of rain puddles, and text madly as rafts of refugees drift by in gutters; they cling to cell phones regardless of sinking canoes, and face rising seas with ineffectual floatation rings; they tow the line, even when it’s merely a shadow or a crack; they march mindlessly into storm drains which look like yawning factory gates.
“Progress should be oriented toward creating just societies,” continues Cordal. “We can discover that there is water on Mars but we cannot solve the water supply problems on Earth. We have overproduction of food but there are millions of hungry people in the world. We can manufacture a last generation’s weapons and we still wonder why there are wars.”
While seemingly blind to the contradictions, Cordal’s little businessmen are not always villains. In fact, it is often clear from the lines on their face, the indicative hunch of the shoulders, the desperate hollows in their cheeks that many of them do their “bread jobs” under duress—equal parts compulsion, coercion, and fear. It is not uncommon to find these careworn men considering a fatal leap off a utility line or ruminating over a small grass-covered grave within a natural fissure in the asphalt.
“And progress is lost inside these large shopping centers that surround us,” says Cordal, “inhabited by luxury cars… by plasma TVs, and the next generation of cell phones.”
In Urban Inertia, a recent exhibit in Montreal, we find one ill-fated fellow literally caught in a mouse trap that has been baited by a briefcase. Nearby, his colleagues sit in tidy rows within the bowels of an old file cabinet being indoctrinated by a presenter in gray.
[He] stayed there under the snow for several days. It was hard to understand how these things can occur in the so-called first world.”
Kafka, we think, would be proud, then probably embarrassed by the public display. There is a rusty toolbox filled with tiny scientists peering into one man’s skull, and another with businessmen being buried alive while they await instructions. Fear, suggests Cordal, is a powerful form of social control. Better to do nothing than risk embarrassment or profits.
Unfinished People, a series Cordal placed on the streets of New York last winter, probed the seismic cracks in such a system. Inspired by his first visit to the city, the series took shape when he saw a homeless man blanketed in snow.
“I was very surprised by the amount of homelessness I saw,” recalls Cordal. “But I remember especially this homeless person leaning against a railing with a blanket covering his body… [He] stayed there under the snow for several days. It was hard to understand how these things can occur in the so-called First World. We have reached a point that is too extreme in its insensitivity.”
To bear witness to the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, Cordal recreated a few all-too-familiar scenes in miniature and left them where people might look: a bundled woman on an old mattress with sad eyes, holding her kid on one knee; an old bearded guy with a blanket draped over his head; a new street kid with a knit cap, his dog, and a book, huddled against the chill. Cordal’s most desperate businessmen also made their way into this series: one wrapped in a thin red blanket landed near the railroad tracks in Brooklyn; another borrowed warmth from a subway vent; a jowly stockbroker type dragged himself out of the Hudson River, while another considered jumping in; tiny bodies bobbed in a puddle near Rector Street, and one lay face down on the sidewalk just under a downspout from which he has been permanently expelled.
“These are the people that do not fit into the system,” says Cordal, “people [who cannot] adapt to a type of society in which we are only useful if we are productive.”
Lucky passersby who noticed, stopped to take pictures of the Unfinished People with their cell phones. Of course they did. The pieces are touching and true. And safe. A person can peer into Cordal’s tiny faces and experience recognition, even pain, without the real risk of connection.
Admirers might even pick up these figures and take them home—these works, are, after all pocket-sized. But hopefully the work did not disappear before Cordal’s point was made. Hopefully a thousand people noticed the tiny haggard businessman on his knees in front of a large urban toadstool—a bright red plastic plug rising on the stalk of a small oxidized pipe. Hopefully, they understood the face of anguish that comes with the loss of irreplaceable things.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 39, which is sold out. Get our latest print issue of Hi-Fructose by subscribing here.