Wrestler Bookend Launch Party
The launch of the Wrestler bookend will be celebrated in style, with a reception on Friday, June 24 at 6pm at The Wolfsonian. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Paola La Rivera at 305.535.2680 or paola@thewolf.fiu.edu.
In need of some serious muscle to hold up leaning rows of books? Has your search for the perfect bookends led you to dead ends and cul-de-sacs and down narrow alleys littered with the remains of flimsy, unsatisfactory bookends? The Wolfsonian–Florida International University’s Dynamo Museum Shop has heard your pain, registered your frustration, and is pleased to offer you bookends fit for your books. The Wrestler bookends, based on the much-loved Wrestler statue standing sentinel in the museum’s lobby, with its impressive muscles and solid bulk, is fit for, well, just about anything, including the task of helping your books stand proudly on their shelves. The bookends, created in collaboration with Levenger, a national retailer that designs and sells high-quality tools for reading, are available through The Dynamo Museum Shop beginning Thursday, June 2, 2011 and on the Levenger website at http://www.levenger.com/PAGETEMPLATES/PRODUCT/Product.asp?Params=Category=17-1163|Level=2-3|PageID=8135. The bookend retails for $99; purchase two or more for $88 apiece. A portion of the proceeds of all sales benefits The Wolfsonian.
The looming Wrestler statue, which has inspired several other popular products available through the museum’s shop, including most recently a flash drive, a notebook, and jewelry, is quite familiar to museum visitors. Prominently located in the first-floor lobby next to the elevators, the Wrestler greets museum-goers and sets the stage for the galleries with its singular combination of modern craftsmanship, gravity, and whimsy. The Wrestler was created in 1929 by American sculptor Dudley Vaill Talcott (1899-1986) from the high-tech material of his day, aluminum, which was hailed as “a metal of this generation” by The American Architect magazine in 1929. And it was a sculpture of that century: the Wrestler was monumentally modern and embodied the grand era in which it was created, a time in America’s history in which there was an unrivaled, unflinching confidence in the future. Cast by the Cleveland Foundry of the United States Aluminum Company, the statue stood as a symbol of America’s emergence as an industrial power and its twentieth century coming of age. The statue was originally on display at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, where its intimidating 6’ 6”, 475-pound bulk awed and astonished (and where an American wrestler captured the gold).
The Wrestler’s appeal to contemporary museum visitors and its status as a symbol of The Wolfsonian reflect both the museum’s concerns and its location, explains Wolfsonian director Cathy Leff. “The Wrestler embodies many themes addressed by our collection. He is an expression of the promise of the machine age and this new material, aluminum, as well as that era’s growing interest in sports and physical culture. The fact that he was exhibited at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics is fitting for our collection with its strong representation of worlds’ fairs and expositions. These were national and international encounters that brought together peoples and nations. Through these events, you got a pretty good sense of who had the political and economic power, where innovation was coming from, what new ideas might transform our world. And not only is the Wrestler very fitting in the context of our own interests, but he also fits right in with South Beach’s fascination with body culture.”
The Wrestler bookend is crafted with digital exactitude of tough polyresin with a finish echoing the iconic gleam of burnished aluminum. It weighs in at 3.8 pounds—a mighty miniature commanding to be put to work. The bookend is available at the museum shop at 1001 Washington Ave, Miami Beach and at Levenger.com www.levenger.com. Anyone interested in purchasing the bookend(s) can contact The Dynamo Museum Shop at 305.535.2680 or paola@thewolf.fiu.edu.
At the end of the 1920s, American artists were faced with competing modes of visual modernity. Modern styling based on French applied arts was the mode of choice for architects and interior designers such as Raymond Hood and Norman Bel Geddes. Academic sculptors such as Paul Manship and Lee Lawrie interpreted pre-classical Greek figures for their commissions at Rockefeller Center. Science fiction culture, inspired by such films as Metropolis, introduced robots into the public’s imagination and encouraged an ever-growing fascination with technology and machines. New alloys and processes resulting in products such as Bakelite and aluminum allowed artists to express modernity through materials alone.
The Wrestler is a blend of these modernist idioms. The planer, geometric hips are worked in a jazzy, ziggurat style. The exaggerated muscularity of the body without a face is an iconic figure smoothed by modernist streamlining. The cast-aluminum process and the robot form combine in a futuristic fantasy of the power of the machine. When this work was displayed at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, it embodied America’s rising eminence in industry, in design, and in the will to envision the future.
Levenger is a national retailer that designs and sells high-quality products for reading, writing, and other creative expression. Known for its catalog of “Tools for Serious Readers,” the company frequently partners with libraries and museums to create products whose sales help to support various reading-based programs. Through its foundation, Levenger is a supporter of the National Book Foundation and underwrites its Innovations in Reading program. The company is also a longtime contributor to the Literacy Coalition of Palm Beach County, which serves its headquarters city of Delray Beach, Florida, and a leading sponsor of the Coalition’s Loop the Lake for Literacy fundraiser. For more on the Levenger mission, vision and values, visit Levenger.com/about.
The Wolfsonian is a museum, library, and research center that uses objects to illustrate the persuasive power of art and design, to explore what it means to be modern, and to tell the story of social, historical, and technological changes that have transformed our world. The collections comprise approximately 120,000 objects from the period of 1885 to 1945—the height of the Industrial Revolution to the end of the Second World War—in a variety of media including furniture; industrial-design objects; works in glass, ceramics, and metal; rare books; periodicals; ephemera; works on paper; paintings; textiles; and medals.
The Wolfsonian is located at 1001 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach, FL. Admission is $7 for adults; $5 for seniors, students, and children age 6 -12; and free for Wolfsonian members, State University System of Florida staff and students with ID, and children under six. The museum is open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday from noon-6pm; Friday from noon-9pm; and is closed on Wednesday. Contact us at 305.531.1001 or visit us online at www.wolfsonian.org for further information.
The Wolfsonian receives ongoing support from The Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program, Cultural Arts Council; the William J. and Tina Rosenberg Foundation; United Airlines, the Official Airline of The Wolfsonian–FIU; and Bacardi USA, Inc.