Welded steel, 88 x 80 x 76, 2005.
Abduction is a subject of motion in European sculpture. The figure in The Abduction of Liberty sits still. Liberty’s usual iconography is a set of things she holds: the torch and the tablet. This figure holds nothing. Her arms stop short, and each ends in a ring that reads as a manacle.
Her head is covered by a hood, and a band of short rays circles it at the brow. The rays are the crown of Liberty, the light she gives, and the hood stands where her face should be. A face is how a person is recognized, and a hooded prisoner is anonymous. Liberty’s own head covering is the pileus, the cap given to freed slaves and raised on a pole as her emblem. The hood sits where that cap would, a covering that signals freedom replaced by one that signals confinement. The hood was also the standard image of the detainee in the early 2000s so-called “War on Terror”, so the figure carries a recent prisoner’s marks on an old allegorical body.
She is enthroned as well. Steps lead up to a block, cloth across her lap, and behind her an arched frame and two large discs stand like a niche with halos. The setting is built for honor. Sculpture’s abduction subjects, Proserpina and the Sabine women, are scenes of struggle in motion, with the captive twisting in the captor’s arms. Proserpina’s story ends with her seated beside her abductor as queen of his realm, and this sculpture shows the same end state: the captive installed with ceremony and bound where she sits. Every honor in the setting is also a means of holding her. The niche that shelters a saint encloses a prisoner. The steps that raise her up put her out of reach, and the discs that mark her as holy set her apart from everyone else, as a cell does. She is on public view as a monument and held as a prisoner, and the steps, niche and halos do both jobs at once.
