Put the Cone on, You're One of Us

Coneheads and Queer World Building

by

Kris Cirkuit

How a joke about improving statues became a small world of unlikely characters, shared belonging, and uncertain futures.

I got the idea for “Coneheads” during the World Cup. Scotland had made it through, and the Tartan Army was on the loose in the United States. Traffic cones started appearing on top of statues in Boston. Locals weren't used to it, but it is a fine Scottish tradition. It started with the Duke of Wellington statue outside the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. A fine statue, but it would look better with a traffic cone on its head. The traffic cone is now a permanent fixture.

Traffic cones began to appear on statues in other places in Scotland. Some people said this was wrong: it was a Glasgow thing and needed to stay there. Others felt that anyone should be able to stick a cone on a statue. The debate became quite heated, but in the end, no one can really stop someone from improving a statue by adding a cone.

Putting a cone on a statue changes who gets to speak through it. A monument gives a particular version of history a permanent public presence. Its scale, position and materials lend authority to the person represented and to the decision to commemorate them. The cone makes that authority available for revision. The public can answer back, and the response can become as recognisable as the original monument.

The statue remains standing, but a familiar object changes how we see it, making its dignity conditional. The cone suggests that the meanings assigned to things, even things cast in bronze, are open to negotiation.

Coneheads carries this possibility into a population of second-hand toys. Each figure arrives with an identity defined by someone else: a manufacturer, a fictional universe, a previous owner. Often I know little about these histories. Giving a figure a cone, a name and a biography allows another identity to emerge from the same material. Its previous meaning remains visible, but its future is no longer entirely governed by it.

The queer world-building developed through this process. I began with the pleasure of making the figures, then recognised that their coexistence suggested a particular social arrangement. They belonged together without becoming alike. Their differences did not need reconciliation before the world could accommodate them.

Queerness, as I am using the word here, includes questioning how certain ways of being come to appear natural, proper, or inevitable. Categories organise our lives, but they also distribute permission. They shape which bodies seem appropriate in particular spaces, which relationships are recognised, and who must explain their presence. A category becomes especially powerful when we forget that someone established its boundaries.

Among the Coneheads, an alien, a puppy and a milk carton belong on equal terms. None provides a model that the others are expected to resemble. Their differences shape the community from the beginning, so belonging doesn't require anyone to become less peculiar. Each has room without needing a separate explanation for why they are there.

This gives “Put the cone on, you’re one of us” more weight than the wording initially suggests. Belonging becomes something you can enter through affiliation. Nobody needs the correct origin, body or previous story. The cone offers a shared sign through which otherwise unrelated figures become a community.

This also raises a question: who is entitled to say “us”? I choose the figures, assign their names, and establish the condition of membership. The world's apparent openness still depends on the decisions I made when creating it. The Coneheads is not some sort of miniature utopia. It contains the same tension that interests me in other communities: the desire to belong alongside the desire to remain self-determined.

A traffic cone usually tells us where we may go, but as a hat, it becomes an absurd sign of belonging.  I think that reversal is part of the humour, as an object designed to keep us in order now identifies a community whose members refuse any sensible classification.

Queering technology involves questioning the assumptions built into the things we use: who they were designed for, which behaviours they encourage, and what possibilities they exclude. Objects and systems carry expectations about their users, but those expectations do not determine everything we can do with them. Using something otherwise can expose the distance between its intended purpose and the possibilities people find in it. That distance leaves room for invention, pleasure, and resistance.

In Coneheads, this happens through a small material intervention. The toy and the cone are both mass-produced objects with defined roles. Bringing them together creates an identity that neither manufacturer supplied. The original designs remain recognisable, but they no longer have the final say. A character emerges through alteration, naming and storytelling, then becomes available for further reinterpretation by whoever finds it. This is where repurposing connects with the work's wider queer proposition: an assigned identity can become a starting point for possibilities its author never intended.

When I place the characters in public, it becomes an intervention as they enter spaces already organised around expectations of what should belong there. A tiny figure can interrupt those expectations without demanding much from anyone. Someone may notice it and pick it up, and someone else may ignore it completely. For that moment, an ordinary location supports an unexpected encounter.

A finder can rename the figure, move it, give it away or invent a history that contradicts mine. The website records some encounters, while others remain unknown. The characters acquire lives that the project cannot fully document or possess.

Coneheads began with a joke about improving statues and grew into a world where unlikely characters belong together. Once they are out in public, other people can give them new stories and somewhere else to belong. I may never know where they end up, but I like the thought that someone has made room for an alien, a puppy or a milk carton wearing a traffic cone.