Signs in the key of life

We've been meaning for some time to bring the strange terrain of Las Vegas to Art From Space, but it appears the Art, Life, TV, Etc. blog has beaten us at our own game. Nevertheless, the Neon Museum Cheryl has provided COORDINATES for is quite a sight, even from this distance, and a welcome addition to the proverbial to-do list if we ever get there in the flesh. Even if we don't, this long-retired SKULL in the neon boneyard is an online treasure, as is the assortment of ALPHABET SOUP signage, lucky horse shoes, and the adjacent CARNIVAL.

Image: Andy Anderson, the Anderson dairy mascot, now in Fully Working Order

Here we give thanks...

The vast icy terrain of Greenland appears to be google's biggest blindspot and is punctuated with curious artefacts where indistinguishable bits of map have presumably been stitched together. This glimpse of MARTIAN landscape is certainly intriguing but, at 40km in length, it is this metaphysical GATE that is most striking. But should we attribute it to McCahon, Mondrian or Malevich? Kubrick? (Thanks AS)

Loving the alien

"A recurrent scene in sci-fi movies shows the earth withdrawing from the spacecraft until it becomes a horizon, a beachball, a grapefruit, a golf ball, a star. With the changes in scale, responses slide from the particular to the general. The individual is replaced by the race and we are a pushover for the race­ a mortal biped, or a tangle of them spread out below like a rug. From a certain height people are generally good. Vertical distance encourages this generosity. Horizontality doesn't seem to have the same moral virtue. Far away figures may be approaching and we anticipate the insecurities of encounter. Life is horizontal, just one thing after another, a conveyer belt shuffling us toward the horizon. But history, the view from the departing spacecraft, is different. As the scale changes, layers of time are superimposed and through them we project perspectives with which to recover and correct the past." (Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 1976)

"In London, the Barbican's spring show The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art opened only a day after the latest incarnation of the Carnegie International - at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art - which was subtitled Life on Mars. The two shows proposed superficially different uses of the metaphor of extraterrestrial life to reflect on contemporary artistic practice, yet underlying these apparent differences, one could detect common themes that are now strongly influential in Western culture - that of a pessimistic apprehension of impending disaster; a profound sense of uncertainty and disorientation regarding human society's claim to progressive agency; and a kind of post-historical estrangement from the experience of modernity. What drives these, however, is a now common theoretical and political celebration of what might be called the Absolute Other. Along with the more recently opened mega-show After Nature at New York's New Museum, these shows all share a peculiar critical operation - the use of a strategy of displacement of the human subject from which to ‘look back' or ‘look from afar' on human life..." (JJ Charlesworth, Any Other But Our Selves, 2008)

[22/5/09 this link just in from overthenet]

Image: Mark Bradford, Help Us, 2008, on the Carnegie ROOF

Echoes from the future, mirrors from the past

Today I chanced upon this article by Joe Banks aka Disinformation about the English sound mirrors we mentioned a few months back. I like the way Banks extends the idea of sound as an inherently temporal media to describe the sound mirrors as allowing a 'glimpse' into the future. Banks goes on to compare these structures to Dani Karavan's Negev Brigade Memorial, overlooking Beersheba, Israel, which was presented in the Israeli Pavilion in the 10th Venice Biennale Architecture Exhibition. Trained as a painter, Karavan also represented Israel at the 1976 Venice Biennale with his Environment for Peace installation.

Although the NEGEV MONUMENT, with its light tunnels and wind organs, is not so easy to see, many of his other permanent projects are easy to spot from satellite. Here is MA'ALOT, which runs between the Ludwig Museum and the impressive Cologne Cathedral. Here is his ESPLANADE CHARLES DE GAULLE in La Defense, Paris. And here is DORFPLATZ (Village Square) at the Credit Suisse HQ, Zurich.