Lego– Medium of the 21st century

I never actually possessed my own Legos when I was a kid; I only played with the ones my cousins had whenever I went to visit them for the summer.  Even then, though, I thought it was a difficult medium to work with,  I had such elaborate designs of houses and castles in my head… and not enough

time or Lego bricks to make them.  It was frustrating.  On the one hand, I did make do with the limited resources I had but on the other, I knew that my dreams of building a house with two wings or a building of five stories always lurked in the back of my head, waiting to be realized.

Imagine how crazy I would have gone if I had nearly a million or more Legos!  I could have built sculptures!  And indeed, someone has.  Nathan Sawaya has become a Lego artist, building breathtaking and museum worthy creations from a childhood favorite medium.  While the designs are relatively simple-seeming, resembling enlarged and more sophisticated versions of childhood creations, they are also reminiscent of past sculptures from old masters.  Should Sawaya’s national tour be taken in by an art museum, would Rodin and others would be rolling in their graves, complaining about the nonsensical route classical art has taken in the new century?  Or would they applaud the innovative efforts of Sawaya to make Legos into more than just child’s play?

Then again, innovative use of everyday objects wasn’t readily accepted when it first debuted with Marcel Duchamp’s satiric sculpture, “Fountain“, in which he turned over a urinal and submitted it to an art competition as a work of art.  I wonder what contemporary artists would have to say about Sawaya’s work as an artist.