Every day this week, Dan Savage has graciously sent an image of a sculpture found on his vacation in artsy Saugatuck, Michigan, for me to critique. It has been so! much! fun!

But I wanted to give myself an additional challenge over and above critiquing JPEGs of things I’ve never seen, so I decided I’d look at Wednesday’s Sculpture and Thursday’s Sculpture strictly in relation to one another, whatever they turned out to be.

I am told that this Sunning Bear was made by a person named Gert Olsen in 2002.

I am told that this Empty (Revisited) was made by a person named Shawn Phillip Morin in 2003.

As for that last one, Mr. Savage didn’t give me the breakdown of the materials, so I’m left to wonder whether the pedestal is a pedestal or a part of the sculpture. I would rather it be part of the sculpture, and people probably can’t help but remember it that way after they walk away from it, so I’m considering it fair game.

Which is good for the sculpture, because frankly, Empty does not really need to be Revisited, does it? (Here’s a great Eastern-influenced example of empty revisited from 1969, by Isamu Noguchi, sitting right out there every day in Seattle’s Volunteer Park.) It’s much more fun to think of Morin’s sculpture as an empty-headed hipster in tapered pants walking disdainfully by a bank.

OK, but then we have to return to the emptiness, yes we do. Because that bear is as full as full gets. It’s way, way too full, by the way. Also, I’m as guilty as the commenters of seeing sex on that thing. I, too, thought it was thrusting its butt in the air and turning around to see just who was coming for it. It makes me feel…not good. I declare this sculpture the most painful of all this week. But it is also the only one that’s made any kind of impression on me. You can’t call it colorless, even if it’s made in white marble. It’s a sort of accident, too—I’m sure the artist didn’t mean to make a randy bear with its ass in the air, but, well, here we are.

If you want to get all academic on yourselves, consider that the history of sculpture is conflicted when it comes to interiors versus exteriors. Henry Moore’s figures (here’s Vertebrae across from the Central Library in Seattle) are animated by a soul within them; in Donald Judd’s empty boxes, every last thing is on the surface (and in Eva Hesse’s great feminist reversal of Judd’s boxes, every last surface is visible, but hairy and internal and vaginal, an update on this.) So, I suppose, put all this in your pipe and smoke it. I’m with the bear, who accidentally implies that he wants penetration, and then blocks it with his smooth, unbroken surface and intended, asexual childishness.