Lee Deigaard

  • WORK BY MEDIUM
    • Photography
      • Unbidden
        • Unbidden (i)
        • Unbidden (ii)
        • Sagacious Creatures
        • Horse: Nocturnal
        • Installation Trespass
        • installation views
      • Equuleus
      • Crusher Run
      • Horse: Diurnal
      • Horse: Nocturnal
      • Dirty/Pure
      • Dirty Lick
      • Embedded Lenses
      • Exploded Trees
      • Things Fall Apart
    • Photogenic Drawings
      • Encephalograms
      • Photogenic Drawings of Trees
      • Photogenic Drawings: Petri
      • Photogenic Drawings: Untitled (fluoroscopy)
      • Photogenic Drawings: Vortices III
    • Drawing/ Painting
      • Ink Drawings of Trees
      • Vortices
      • Trees
      • Drawings
    • Installation
      • One Thing Leads to Another
      • Pulse
      • Submerge
      • Crusher Run
      • Flow
      • Steady Star
      • A Tree Falls
      • Eclogue
    • Projects
      • Horses at the Museum
        • How to Invite a Horse to a Museum
        • Gus and Deuce Go Elsewhere (video)
        • Gus and Deuce Go Elsewhere [stills]
        • Field Trip
        • One Day
    • Sculpture
      • Forms
      • Hybrid Woman
      • Topsy
      • Horse and Rider
      • Heads
      • Heads
      • Heads, in the hand
      • Body
    • Video
      • Gus and Deuce Go Elsewhere (video)
      • Plastic Gulf
      • Steady Star
      • One Thing Leads to Another
  • WORK BY CONCEPT
    • Recent
    • Things Fall Apart
      • Things Fall Apart
      • Exploded Trees
      • A Tree Falls
    • Photogenic Drawings
      • Photogenic Drawings of Trees
      • Encephalograms
      • Photogenic Drawings: Petri
      • Photogenic Drawings: Untitled (fluoroscopy)
      • Photogenic Drawings: Vortices III
    • Animal Protagonist
      • Unbidden (i)
      • Unbidden (ii)
      • Sagacious Creatures
      • Topsy
      • Horse: Nocturnal
    • Horse
      • Equuleus
      • Horses at the Museum
        • Gus and Deuce Go Elsewhere (video)
        • Gus and Deuce Go Elsewhere [stills]
        • How to Invite a Horse to a Museum
        • Field Trip
        • One Day
      • One Thing Leads to Another
      • Horse: Diurnal
      • Horse: Nocturnal
      • Dirty/Pure
    • Topography
      • Crusher Run
      • Ink Drawings of Trees
      • Vortices
    • Moving Parts
      • Plastic Gulf
      • Steady Star
    • Body/Corporal
      • Equuleus
      • Forms
      • Hybrid Woman
      • Dirty Lick
      • Dirty/Pure
      • Horse and Rider
      • Body
      • Heads
      • Heads
      • Heads, in the hand
    • Forensic
      • Exploded Trees
      • Embedded Lenses
    • Textual
      • Dirty/Pure
    • Immersive
      • Pulse
      • Steady Star
      • Submerge
      • Flow
  • CURATE/COLLAB
    • Latin for Crab
    • PhotoBOMB
    • Standing Heat
    • You Beautiful Bitch
    • Animal Proximity
    • Sfumato
    • at The Front
  • INFO
  • WRITING
    • Encephalograms
    • Topsy Memorial
    • Forms
    • Photogenic Drawings
    • Hybrid Woman
    • Trees
    • a tree falls
    • Writing: Statmob
  • NEWS

Memorial to Topsy     Read about project

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  • Topsy, the elephant died by electrocution in January 1903. Deemed a “problem” elephant because she killed a man who fed her a lit cigarette, she was sentenced to die. Luna Park’s founders parlayed Topsy’s notoriety in the press for months as free publicity and treated her death as a publicity stunt. As the winner of a national competition, I built a memorial to Topsy for the Coney Island Museum.

    Along Luna Park’s Grand Canal when it opened in May 1903 were rows of Mutoscopes whose “moving pictures” could be viewed by paying a penny. Peering into a box to watch a contained, repeating sequence references the elephant’s confinement, her repetitive days controlled with painful gouges, and of being put on display. Turn the crank and the figure within the box dances, strips, or gets electrocuted on demand. In a crowd, personal responsibility gets diluted, but the viewer at the peephole becomes implicated, a witness and a voyeur.
    A mob came to watch Topsy die. Thomas Edison’s company filmed the event.

    Topsy features lastingly in the collective unconscious. Born wild in India, she traversed the globe and the back roads of vanishing rural America even as she was confined to spaces and behaviors wholly out of scale to her needs and her body. The ethics of animal welfare, capital punishment, corporate warfare and opportunism, voyeurism, mob mentality, and human solecism permeate her story. Through her death, Topsy quite literally and wholly embodied converging frontiers of corporate development and technological innovation.

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