The title of Mario Cassar’s recent public sculpture in Victoria, Some Things Never Change, implies that some things do change. If the title tells us that only some things are untouched by the constant movement of time, then it also indirectly hints at the pervasiveness of change all around us.
The world is in flux, yet some aspects of it apparently remain constant, and this assertion quite naturally begs the question: what exactly are this world’s permanent fixtures? Which things never change?
The artist provides us with a few clues. He says that he was inspired by the forms of the inukshuk, a primitive kind of stone structure found in some Arctic regions and used as a landmark by different communities like the Inuit.
With the inukshuk, permanence is represented by the very material it is made of, stone. Turning back to Cassar’s tall public sculpture, we can see that stone is substituted by a more industrial yet similarly lasting material, stainless steel.
We are confronted by a family of three figures of varying sizes topped by smiley faces and composed of signs and symbols that we are all accustomed to, most prominently the dollar sign, the euro sign and an inverted yen sign. What is this family so happy about? What is it that makes the parents and child smile? It cannot be the current economic crisis, nor can it be the visible transmutation of human form into codified sign-language – the overcoming of humanity by man-made global signs that have multiplied so successfully that they survive – unchanged in a post-human world.
If the inukshuk’s stacked stones are surrogates for human bodies and limbs, are these clear-cut, shiny symbols in Cassar’s family cold surrogates for real human relationships?
Do not look at the three faces in Cassar’s sculpture for answers. Showing no obvious signs of age or gender, they keep smiling at you, and quite simply, they never change. Perhaps, beneath the gleaming, cold exterior of these figures, something else lurks. Something that elates their spirits and makes them smile. Something like love.