For thousands of University of Wisconsin students and Wisconsin natives, Camp Randall Stadium is like a home. It’s a familiar place that manages to yield great experiences for nearly everyone, even football skeptics. There’s “Varsity,” tailgates on Lathrop Street, “Jump Around,” section O, Bucky’s push-ups, Mike Leckrone and that somehow always exciting part where the animated section letters race each other on the newly-installed, 170-foot-wide video screen. But there’s one thing that makes nearly everyone uncomfortable.
It’s the sculpture that looks kind of like a penis.
The looming, phallus-like piece of artwork hulks over the intersection of Regent Street and Breese Terrace. It’s 48-feet-tall and can be seen from blocks away. In the nine years since it was created, the sculpture has managed to raise thousands of eyebrows and sparked considerable controversy.
The man behind the phallus is Donald Lipski, a New York City-based sculptor who attended UW-Madison between 1965 and 1970. In his time at UW, Lipski was passionately involved in the anti-war movement. He took place in a protest on the UW campus against Dow Chemical Company, which was involved in the production of napalm for the Vietnam War. The protest ended in police officers breaking through the glass doors of the Commerce Building, hitting protestors with billy clubs, dispersing the crowd with tear gas and sending dozens of people to the hospital. In those same years at Picnic Point, he recalls “everyone was smoking pot, taking LSD, flying kites, blowing bubbles and bouncing babies on their knees.”
And the football team was terrible.
“Because of the militaristic nature of football, football wasn’t that popular during those years. It may have also been linked to the fact that there was just a horrible team,” Lipski said. “Being asked to make a sculpture for Camp Randall Stadium had a note of irony right from the start.”