Down to Earth
It was sheer lack of funds that dictated the material James Croak, a sculptor then living in Brooklyn, began using in 1985. "I wanted to cast a full-size self–portrait, but I couldn’t afford bronze, so I walked down the street to an empty lot, dug up dirt, put it in a wheelbarrow, took it home, mixed it with glue, and pressed it into the plaster mold." The result was Dirt Man With Fish, a man in a hat and overcoat with lifelike cast-resin fish protruding from his torso and legs as is swimming through him. Croak cast other sculptures modeled after his own body, among them eighteen versions of a businessman called Dirt Man With Shovel. Today, these decade-old works suddenly have a new resonance: They instantly evoke the images of people leaving the World Trade Center attacks covered in dust. (Croak also did a series of latex casts of bodies and body parts for a 1995 series called "New Skins for the Coming Monstrosities.") "About twenty people e-mailed me to say they thought about Dirt Man With Shovel after the attacks," says Croak, 49, who took part in the recovery effort at ground zero and, in another strange coincidence, supported himself as a charter pilot in the late eighties. Croak’s new cast-dirt and cast-wax sculptures (pictured, Dirt Man Shows the Monsters, 2001), currently on view at Stefan Stux Gallery (529 West 20th Street; through November 10), were all completed before the attack except for Ruining the Possibility, a group of wax gargoyles crowded topsy-turvy in a glass tank. Though Croak says he had already conceived the piece, its finished state said something new: "It became a portrait of Hades."

Edith Newhall