I’ve been struggling with how to begin this post for about fifteen minutes, and the one thing that keeps on coming to the forefront of my mind is this :

“Holy *&%$, this is the most amazing book I’ve ever seen.”

So, let’s begin there.

I’m not going to lie - I’ve been a bit disillusioned with toys lately. This happens when you go spelunking into the recesses of the closets and can’t find the back, but can still find 30 different Green Lantern action figures. You start to question the nature of things. Between tax time and running out of space, things haven’t been looking pretty in my brain. I have all of this stuff, but what does it MEAN? I was losing focus. I knew that none of this was ever about ‘having stuff’, so where did this all start?

Toygiants is a 200+ page tome of toy photographs. In their own broad way, toys are a perfect representation of the homogenous plasticization that the media has been putting us through. They’re little imperfect clones of creatures and movie stars that we can own. They’re popped out of molds, and they’re painted up and sent out into the world as tiny little icons of adulation. Still, many recent toy-art books have gone the safe Dorling-Kindersley route, presenting a collection of pristine toys, neatly labeled on white backgrounds, informational and organized, all remaining a few steps less than ‘art’. They read like product photography, which is great if you want to know what something looks like, but little else. A few other toy photographers place toys into realistic situations, trying to blur the line between reality and toy as much as possible, which also has its charm.

What the Fuchs do in Toygiants shatters these concepts. The gigantic Batman head plastered on the cover is an illustration of this. It has scraped paint, really bad seam lines, and isn’t really in a state where a collector would covet it. Here’s where I’m reminded that toys go beyond collecting, and into a world of color and form and shape. This is why I started collecting them in the first place - not because I NEEDED to have a complete Batman rogue’s gallery, but because the shapes and colors and forms inspired me. That inspiration turned into a never-ending quest to find better and better inspirations, until it turned into a collection. I don’t think that my outlook on this kind of amassing would be so positive if I hadn’t viewed this book.

Toygiants has a good deal of white background photography, the book is initially dominated by page-sized photographs of toy faces, from He-Man to Andy Warhol, Luke Skywalker and The Incredible Hulk, which I read as a kind of parody / statement on celebrity worship - keeping in mind that the original prints are wall-sized. Where the book begins to really impress me is their redefinition of the idea of a ‘collection’ through the photography of certain themes of items together, regardless of where and which ‘series’ they came from. While it doesn’t usually occur to me to place a Flash figure in a collection of toys based on the color red, seeing it in a new context is refreshing, not to mention accessible. We have these toys - we just didn’t think of constructing a rainbow with them, and the concept is kinda beautiful.

Beyond color-coded collections, figures are gathered in sunburst patterns, melted, and put into surreal scenarios - not based on their characters, but based on their formal, visual, or cultural properties. It kinda makes my shelf of Justice League team members look terribly pedestrian. And freezing a whole freezer full of ice-themed figures, until they’re covered with a thick sheet of ice, is genius. The closest I ever came to this was putting a meat-themed robot into my freezer and taking some Polaroids a few years ago. Many of these images can be seen on the book’s website.

So, just as much as I’ve always looked at machines and wooden constructions as potentially dissectible, Toygiants has benefitted me in the same way on a personally creative level, giving toys a new meaning and purpose. The greatest compliment I can give anything is that ‘it inspired me’. Toygiants not only inspired me, it re-interested me in collecting for art, and I feel urged to share it with whoever I possibly can. Even if you’re not interested in toys, the design aspect and the accessibility remain.

This is great stuff. The original edition has an MSRP of $65, but the Silver Edition, released this month, has a much cheaper $45 MSRP, additional pages, and a pull-out poster of silver-themed toys. Other editions exist at the Toygiants website, with limited edition prints enclosed. I can’t stress this enough : it is a beautiful thing.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.