The Mandarin Frog Man Is The Only Man Who Really “Gets It”
In these quarantine days I have become very enamored of my morning walk. I do slow laps around the cul-de-sacs, dodging joggers and strollers from a six foot distance, taking deep breaths of that Florida smell—biomass, car juices, jasmine. You can laugh at me for being an old person, but I’m North-adjusted now and I think 85 is too hot to go for a run, even if I could drum up the motivation.
Also I would have to stop to look at all the froggies.
My neighborhood, Mandarin, surfaced in the local news in 2015 after these painted concrete frogs started appearing on stumps, medians, and railings all around the area. They were traced back to a man named Donald Bowden, who prefers to go by the pseudonym Frog Man. Frog Man bought a frog mold from an art shop in the 80’s, and had been churning out these little dudes to give to his friends and family for a long time, but recently decided to decorate the town with his creations.
Of course we are all completely in love with Frog Man. After his identity came to light, he raised over $100,000 for the Mandarin Museum by doing custom frog commissions for interested customers, and later won an award for civic involvement. He continues to paint sculptures and leave them out in new, unexpected places. Last post, I talked about signs and emblems, seeing the traces of a person without seeing that person. Here, Frog Man leaves his frogs like love-marks all over the town. The sculptures multiply, as real frogs do, but they never oversaturate.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about these frogs. They are examples of “folk art,” or “low art,” meaning they’ve got wide appeal but won’t garner acclaim or attention from folks in the “art world.” At the same time, we know that divisions between high and low art are totally bunk (hello, Notes on Camp), and that they tend to devalue the work of women, people of color, and the economically disadvantaged, and so on and so forth. Who says the Mandarin Frogs aren’t worthy of recognition, critique, and study? Who says??
And so now, after mulling over this on my walk for several hours, and after many subsequent hours of going slowly and terminally insane as a result of being locked inside during a global pandemic, I have decided to write an academic treatise on the body of Frog Man’s work.
Thesis: the Mandarin Frogs function as aesthetically formative, politically relevant place-making devices for this community, and this is true whether Frog Man intended them to play these roles or not.
Let’s get into it.
The Mandarin Frogs Articulate an Aesthetic Specific to North Florida
I live in the swamp. Here, gators get stuck in peoples’ pools, sinkholes swallow down houses, gangs of ibises roam the streets, eating bugs off lawns. Developers have been draining and diking Jacksonville’s wetlands away one gated community at a time, but something about this place is still damp. It’s frog territory! Frogs love the heat and wet; they are notorious bog denizens. Frogs also move in and out of the water depending on their stage of life, just as the youths flee Jacksonville for college and later get sucked back in by promises of cheap rent. A frog is a good symbol for the people of Northeast Florida.
The Mandarin Frogs Help Unify and Define an Amorphous Community
Mandarin is a pretty sleepy neighborhood. It trends old and Conservative (even amongst our significant Jewish population, which I find extremely disappointing). It’s also sprawly, like the rest of Jacksonville, bleeding into Southside to the north and abutting bougie St. Johns County at its southern border.
My point here is that there’s little in Mandarin for residents to identify as a communal touchstone. We’re spread out spatially, and don’t share the kinds of cultural markers that would generate a sense of “emplacement.” Except…these weird frogs keep popping up. What is going on with these frogs? Suddenly, everyone is talking about the frogs, everyone is interested in the story of the frogs, and eventually, the story of the frogs becomes integrated into the story of the neighborhood. What is Mandarin? Oh, you know, the place with the frog sculptures. Mandarin is no longer an arbitrarily drawn geographic boundary, but a meaning-laden label for a neighborhood with a specific, froggy character.
The Mandarin Frogs Make a Political Statement About Climate Change
Fact: Northeast Florida used to be relatively sheltered from hurricane activity. In the past 167 years, only one hurricane made landfall in NE Florida as a Category 3. Recently, though, hard knocks from Matthew and Irma have left their impacts on the area. Hurricane damages are expected to worsen over time due to a combination of warming waters off coast and a weakening of the Jet Stream current that might usually shove storms away from our shores. Both of those phenomena are, of course, the results of climate change.
Also fact: Mandarin has one of the highest concentrations of old growth oak stands in Jacksonville. Oaks are hardy but not bendy, which puts them at a disadvantage in high wind situations (here is a video of Jim Cantore in the middle of storm reporting—you can see flimsy trees in the background bend n’ snapping Legally Blonde-style for their very lives).
Conclusion: When hurricanes hit this neighborhood, big trees go down, leaving behind big stumps. And those big stumps make perfect, flat-topped podiums for some colorful frogs.
Frog Man himself has said that he was inspired to decorate these blowdown stumps in particular because they look “lonely”: “[the stump] just needed something on it.” Placing a frog there, he directs the public eye to this “lonely” place, a relic of destruction that we might otherwise ignore. He calls attention to our loss, memorializing the tree that once was, and at the same time urging us protect the oaks still standing. Viewed through this lens, the Mandarin Frogs become Lorax-like ambassadors themselves, begging us to combat climate change before the ecological damage worsens!
But that’s obviously not the whole story. These frogs are not apocalyptic figures; they’re bright, cheerful, decorated abstractly. I’m thinking Hilma af Klint, I’m thinking preschool finger-painter on a mission. Frog Man again: “I want to perk people up and make them smile.” He is neutralizing the “loneliness” of the dead tree, and, by extension, the anxiety and isolation we feel living in this modern-day extractivist dystopia. So, the Mandarin Frogs are at once klaxons blaring the call for necessary change and restorative objects encouraging us to hold out hope for a better, more beautiful future.
Is This All Kind of Bullshit? Sure, But I Don’t Care Because I’m Bored in Quarantine and Also Art Can Be Whatever I Want
OK, so it might be a stretch to characterize the Mandarin Frogs as examples of explicit political iconography. But guess what? Once art is placed in public, it becomes subject to public interpretation. Not only do I get to play with the art, touch it, take pictures of/with it, geotag it, etc. etc., I also get to write 1000+ words of pseudo-academic garbage about it if I so choose. If you think I’m wrong (about the Mandarin Frogs or about art in general), go start your own blog. Rebut me! Social distancing might last 18 months. You have the time.
Besides, I’ve been thinking about how Frog Man said this project has made him feel like a “thief in reverse,” someone who takes nothing, asks for nothing, someone who only relinquishes. Relinquishing goes beyond just the act of physically unburdening oneself of an object (which, to be honest, doesn’t seem much better than littering). To relinquish something, you must cede the object along with the use value of the object. Frog Man’s gift to us is the frogs themselves and the meaning they bring—whether that meaning is “cool fun toy,” “ecological crisis critique,” or something in between. So thank you, Frog Man. You’re the only man around here who can handle me.
