Twin Towers

Much earlier this year, a time I distantly recall as being summer, google maps was more likely to be used for scoping out holiday road trips than workplace escapism. That may not have been the purpose of the reader who, knowing our predilection for the strange parallel worlds created by time-displaced maps when they are stitched together, forwarded THIS map link. (Thanks LM)

Whilst further exploring the adjacent area, we came across THIS striking view of the iconic Ratana Church, a now class form which has inspired artists including Don Binney (scroll down), Ans Westra, Robert Ellis, Derek Henderson, Natalie Robertson, and many others. One now features on the cover of Deidre Brown's new book Maori Architecture, already reviewed here and here, which seems a perfectly good opportunity to circulate a digital view.

Here today...

Until midnight tonight a giant LED clock will count through 1440 minutes to re-activate the ALBERT PARK ROTUNDA as a site of activism and free speech. This is Bik Van Der Pol's contribution to the One Day Sculpture series. Given the inherently temporal nature of this project, it doesn't naturally lend itself to the slow-release mapping we usually concern ourselves with here. However, many of these sorts of works leave a long-term residue, either physical or conceptual, that shifts the way we view a site thereafter. Henry Moore's BRONZE SCULPTURE in Wellington, perhaps the antithesis of all this temporal activity, will forever appear compromised as a result of One Day Sculpture, unless the Wellington City Council and Wellington Sculpture Trust decide to accept Billy Apple's proposition, at which point the sculpture will begin to undergo a long-term physical transformation.

Throughout the ODS Symposium there were a few works that were repeatedly invoked as reference points. As evidence of the continued influence of Rosalind Krauss' Sculpture in the Expanded Field, we revisited SPIRAL JETTY and also the disappearance of Tilted Arc. The favoured recent examples that kept cropping up were Francis Alys' When Faith Moves Mountains and Javier Tellez's One Flew Over the Void (Bala Perdida). Like many of these works, Tellez utilises tension from an existing sculptural structure, in this case the West Coast end of the U.S-Mexico BORDER FENCE. Alys recruited 500 volunteers to move by four inches one of the giant sand dunes of VENTILLA near Lima as an act of deromanticising land art for the land-less. In a similarly anti-monumental gesture resulting in more vanishing earth works, in 2007 gelitin spent seven days on CONEY ISLAND BEACH digging holes and filling them in again.