(jaunty music)
- My name is Hew Locke.
I live and work in London
and I've been commissioned
to make work for The Met facade this year.
I've been working with public monuments
for over two decades.
I find the concept of public statues fascinating,
particularly images of great people from the past,
usually men, and what's their right to be there?
It's about heritage and heritage in the street.
I was prompted, initially,
to look at the museum critically, in a sense,
so I looked into a lot of objects researching around,
well, where does something come from?
Each object, painting, artifact
in the Metropolitan Museum has got a story,
some complex, some messy.
The labels you see, that's a fraction of the story.
The piece is called "Gilt,"
and "Gilt" is a pun on G-U-I-L-T.
I started with drawings
and I came up with the idea of a trophy.
The Metropolitan Museum is in a way a prize.
The objects in the museum represent the power of the museum.
What I'm depicting are objects
which would not necessarily come together.
It's a collage of different influences.
Then it's this thing of mocking up the larger piece,
and that gets mocked up in clay.
It's cast section-by-section in fiberglass
because I'm gonna get this thing gilded, so it's disguised
so the trophy is gonna be shining gold.
And I don't care who you are.
Installing public art is nerve-wracking,
but thrilling at the same time.
I can't stress how different that is
to something which is in a private gallery.
"Gilt" is a collage of history,
a collage of memories, a collage of interests,
it's a facade on the facade of the Metropolitan Museum.
It should look good from the front
but completely functional from the back.
All that glitters is not gold,
and it's propped up by metal poles.
The base of the trophies is a monster
from a statue of Andromeda.
I see the monster as me, as us,
and the objects on the upper part
as the stuff which has been collected for me
and us as the viewer to gorge ourselves upon.
Trophy 2 and Trophy 3 are allegories
on possession, provenance, who owns what.
They're playing with The Met's collection,
playing with history.
What's common to both trophies
are the handles made out of serpent skins
and both trophies are covered in eyes.
Eyes who are looking out at us,
looking at what we are consuming.
Trophy 1 and Trophy 4, they're broken masks,
one pre-Colombian and the other one from Africa,
because for me, the most important part of this
is the thing that you can't see, but exists in your mind.
So when you walk around the museum,
you think, "What trophy would I add onto this?"
I'm hoping that people
will let their imagination run riot, basically.
A surprise is what I'm always trying to get to
and I'm hoping that I've created something interesting
which people look at in public
and walk into the museum and carry in what they've seen.
(jaunty music)