-Buffalo c. 1920 - 1925

This bronze buffalo was made by the Arcade Manufacturing Company; they were toymakers, not fine artists, but this is art. What must it have been like to hold this creature in your hands as a kid? The weight of the bronze, the smoothness of the metal. The company was going for realism but you can see how their vision falls short. The body of the buffalo is both heavy and clumsy. The legs are thin and the texture of the metal is rough around the mane. I wonder if this was mass-produced in a factory? You can imagine how many of these Arcade produced and how far they traveled. There’s something really appealing about the attempt at representation here, and how it doesn’t quite get there. The Arcade Manufacturing Company created a form of embodied expression which embraces ambiguity. I think that's pretty cool.