Cass revisited

Since Art From Space was first conceived, we've wanted to try find famous landscapes from art history but never got around to it. Rita Angus' Cass seemed an obvious starting point. With the advent of street view, the opportunity is even there to try replicate that view.

In a much more physical manner, fellow blogger Cheryl Bernstein has beaten us to it, impressively driving through the Port Hills of Christchurch to locate the view Doris Lusk once painted for her Canterbury Plains from Cashmere Hills, 1952. Cheryl's first stop is HERE, where you get a glimpse of the distinctive valley, but the later view is strangely missing from the streetview map. From above looking left from Victoria Park, this is the view HERE, although THIS topographical version might be of interest, given the association to McCahon's interest in geomorphology.

Bernstein also mentions that Christchurch Art Gallery is embarking on a geotagging project for their collection, an activity growing in popularity with photographers (and museums), although the CAG link doesn't work and we can't find any further information on their website. Nevertheless, we presume these two lithographs by Graham Bennett won't have posed much problem, being respectively situated HERE and HERE.

Incidentally, the little blue train icon marks the location of CASS, depicted in a number of works, including some by other artists including Peter Peryer and Julian Dashper.

PS. Christchurch Art Gallery librarian Tim Jones, has kindly provided a link to their collection website where you can browse those works that still need to be geotagged. If you browse the rest of their collection, you'll find other works that make reference to specific places already have a geotagged google link. We couldn't resist looking around some more and discovered that these two Rita Angus works are depictions of THIS building. And we'd like to add that this painting is of Sam Hunt's old PUHA PALACE.

Image: Canterbury Plains from the Port Hills, sourced here.

Spanning time

"[Elger] Esser uses found postcards from his extensive historical collection of Breton and Norman seaside views as source material for his images. Selecting a small section of them, and enlarging them to the point where the grain becomes apparent, Esser's images are lyrical and strange. Often depicting waterery views, the images are serene, but also unreal. They depict time as something lost, but also as worthy of retrieval."

So says Hanna Scott on the Sightseeing blog where she has been developing a forthcoming exhibition. Esser's bridge can be found in other grainy meta-timezones HERE and HERE.

Trawling through earlier posts, there is also this entry about artists overlaying or mapping temporal moments, particularly Marine Hugonnier's photographs across the 24hr dateline BETWEEN Siberia and Alaska, and the re-imagining of historical sites, including THIS one, much like Mark Adams' revisiting of Cook's sites (including HERE, HERE and HERE).

Image: Elger Esser, Saint Andre de Cubzac, Frankreich 1996, C-Type print, VG Bild-Kunst 2009

Classic tracks

Although the novelty factor is undeniable, we are still finding TVNZ's belated screening of James May's Top Toys curiously compelling viewing, with a surprising amount of art parallels. In epidode one there were oversized KITSETS, then there were large meccano bridges. Another goodie is the recent episode where a classic motor racing track was revived to its former glory using vintage aerial photography and Scalextric slot cars. Sounds a bit like a Billy Apple project, albeit without the slot cars.

For Billy Apple's Bruce & Denny Show, seven classic tracks, raced by the legendary team of Bruce McLaren and Denny Hulme during their 1967-1968 victorious sweep of the Can-Am series, were recreated. These were produced from period aerial photographs to determine the exact outline of the tracks as they were at the time, then all converted to the same scale and rotated to true north. Featured tracks are ELKHART LAKE (Wisconsin, now Road America), BRIDGEHAMPTON (New York, now a golf course), MOSPORT PARK (Ontario, now Mosport International Raceway), EDMONTON (Alberta), LAGUNA SECA (California, still active), RIVERSIDE (California, now a mall) and STARDUST (Las Vegas, now the suburb of Spring Valley but fondly remembered).

May's programme is underpinned by a similar sort of social archeology. In this episode he pays tribute to Brooklands, the first purpose-built motor racing circuit in the world but out of action since 1939. Although SECTIONS of the track remain, along with a museum, the most action around here takes place on the Mercedes Benz test track that resides in the MIDDLE of the old track. May sends his slotcars across housing and industrial estates, fences, a river, pond, through corporate offices and across a road in order to recreate the BROOKLANDS circuit. At 2.7 miles in length, Brooklands now holds the record for the world's longest slot car set.

Image: Billy Apple, Paying Tribute. The Race Tracks, 1967, screenprint on paper, 521 x 843mm, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Two Rooms.

Doctoring time

Fans of Dr Who spin-off Torchwood (we've just finished the second series on DVD) will immediately recognise THIS view of central Cardiff, which plays a prominent role in the series. Cardiff, so the story goes, is in the middle of a rift in space and time and the Torchwood hub, where they deal with rift anomalies, is based underneath the Millennium Plaza (pictured). One episode has them rescuing a warehouse-scale alien meatloaf (built by Barney (son of Wystan) Curnow). Jumping into STREETVIEW, you're practically on location, waiting for Captain Jack to pop up out of the pavement.

Speaking of enormous alien structures, we've just discovered THIS DOOZY just a little north in Birmingham, designed by Future Systems, who are also responsible for the Lord's Media Centre, found HERE.

Transmissions from the Satellite Heart

The strange representations of reality found on google earth (and maps) got even weirder a few years ago when they launched Street View, adding another layer of time slippage and weird glitches to an already complex landscape. Just over a year ago, Google's army of camera cars trawled the streets of New Zealand and we've been fascinated ever since. Whereas once it was cool just being able to zoom in on the roof of your house, or check out nearby swimming pools, now you can check out cats or catch people doing dodgy things. Naturally, suspicious country folk and those wearing tin-foil hats got nervous.

Our latest discovery is then phenomenon of cloaked cameras. You haven't travelled until you've driven the streets of Alaska inside a PLASTIC BAG. Or whatever THIS ONE is.

So there's plenty of fun to be had with Street View, but we never expected to find this.

It seems, when he's not helping Yoshimi battle pink robots from space or spending Christmas on Mars, our favourite musical cosmonaut, Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, likes to hang out in a bath tub out front of his Oklahoma home. Seriously though (not really), it's a bizarre installation Coyne and partner Michelle created for Halloween 2007, just in time for a visit from Google's roving camera. You can see it for yourself HERE (notice how it disappears when you take a jump to the RIGHT?).

"Nature is never finished"

“In my field we’re trained to make condition reports,” said Francesca Esmay, Dia’s conservator, but she added of Smithson’s work [Spiral Jetty], composed of more than 6,000 tons of rock and soil: “Its scale is such that I can’t just go out with a camera and pencil and clipboard by myself and describe it.” So several months ago she turned to the Getty Conservation Institute, an arm of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which has organized and assisted in conservation and monitoring of art and historic sites from Central America to Africa to the Middle East.

After considering nearly every possible way to document “SPIRAL JETTY” from above — Rent a weather satellite? An airplane? A helicopter? Use a kite? — the institute, which often works in countries where conservation projects are carried out on shoestring budgets, came up with a remarkably simple solution: a $50 disposable latex weather balloon, easily bought online.

(Story and image extracted from The New York Times, November 17 2009)

An art opening

"New Zealand painter Andre Hemer’s unique umbrella art project recently came to life on the front lawn of the AUCKLAND GIRLS GRAMMAR SCHOOL with 256 students standing in formation holding umbrellas aloft to form the word CURE. From the air the work had a “digital precision” as first the C, then the U, R and E opened to form the word. A collaborative event involving the artist in Berlin, together with Art for a Cure curator Paul Baragwanath, AGGS and David Ponting Architecture which provided the architectural drawing. The event, part of the "Art for a Cure" exhibition, was documented from a helicopter thanks to Bayley’s Real Estate agent Marnie Adams. To be part of this living, moving artwork that flowers in the rain, buy the umbrella designed by André Hemer from here."

The Art for a Cure exhibition is now on at Hopetoun Alpha, Auckland, culminating in a closing event and auction on Friday 30th October. Exhibition catalogue downloadable here.

Image: Andre Hemer, Art for a Cure, courtesy of the artist and Antoinette Godkin Gallery, Auckland.

Motor City is crumbling

The industrial heart of Detroit has become a ghost town, according to a recent photo essay in Time Magazine (thanks SH). Images include the grand MICHIGAN CENTRAL STATION, derelict for more than 20 years; The FISHER BODY PLANT, producer of Buick and Cadillac bodies, abandoned in 1991 but still home to some floor sculpture; and what must be the grandest car park we've seen, the former MICHIGAN THEATRE within the MICHIGAN BUILDING, apparently built on the site Henry Ford built his first car.

Looking around, Henry seems to have his NAME written all over this town. THIS lot full of rusting iron frames is quite a sight. Heading west from the city you find the Ford plant, and nearby Zug Island and surrounds has some DRAMATIC AND INTRIGUING scenes. We wonder how life COMPARES across the river in Canada?

Image: Fisher Body Plant #21, Interior, including artwork by Scott Hocking. (Sean Hemmerle)

The Big Bang

Shared links on Facebook are proving a great source of material, far too much to keep up with given the pathetic output rate this blog has recently slumped to (hello, hello?). Today's gem (thanks JP) is a Guardian article on a 55m Manchester sculpture, which has had its difficult life brought short and is being dismantled due to safety concerns. Needless to say, the work still exists HERE in the parallel universe of google maps where it will remain until the next update. At least, that's the story we would have liked to have told but it seems the sculpture was never even built in google land. With little obvious connection beyond its large size, it seems through repeated comparisons that Big B was doomed to live in the shadow of Antony Gormley's ANGEL OF THE NORTH.

Image: A deactivated bang. Photograph by Mike Peel (http://www.mikepeel.net/).

How low can you go

Recent adventures had us primed for an exploration of the world's tallest towers but we couldn't resist a little more spelunking. A recent email (thanks again, JR) introduced us to Guatemala's 330-ft deep GIANT SINKHOLE (described here and here). And then we found our work had been done for us, thanks to this handy list of Large Holes by Virtual Tourism, which we will shamelessly borrow from:

MIRNY DIAMOND MINE, Siberia is the largest open diamond mine in the world and is visible from an extraordinarily high altitude.

KIMBERLEY Big Hole, South Africa is apparently the largest ever hand-dug excavation in the world.

This grainy VIEW doesn't offer much so we'll have to take their word for it that Belize has one of the better Blue Holes (image above). The deepest is Dean's BLUE HOLE, nearby in the Bahamas.

The Monticello Dam's GLORY HOLE spillway is used to drain the reservoir when the dam is at full capacity and creates an impressive negative space within a negative volume.

Lastly, we'll stop at the inverted mountain of BINGHAM CANYON MINE, Utah, begun in 1863 and supposedly the largest man-made excavation on earth. It has plenty of the classic MOTIFS we've admired before and, seemingly occupying two time zones, a nice dusting of SNOW at one end. Being in familiar SPIRAL JETTY territory, we thought we'd have a look around the Great Lake and found no shortage of salty eyecandy, including HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.

Tunnel Vision

"[Ralph] Hotere was sitting beside the train driver, staring straight ahead as the train hurtled through the landscape then vanished into the blackness of the first tunnel. Then, just as suddenly, theywere catapulted back into blinding light. Then they hit another tunnel. As the artist described this journey he closed his hand when he mentioned the darkness of the tunnel then his fist sprang open when he mentioned daylight. [...] This sporadic immersion in darkness is what makes the visible world come alive, what makes it vivid and even profound; just as the stretch of daylight is necessary for the darkness of the tunnel to work its inverse magic."

Gregory O'Brien recalls Ralph Hotere sitting up front from Dunedin to Palmerston in After Bathing at Baxter's, 2002.

All this talk in the news of potential tunnels in Auckland reminded us of the extraordinary effect created when trying to navigate through Mt Victoria TUNNEL in Wellington using Street View, a curious phenomenon brought to our attention in the comments of Public Address. It's a bit like flying through the intro sequence of Dr Who.

Art From Space has long been interested in finding ways to unfold the 2-dimensional upper surface facade of the map; to somehow burrow within the information, breaking into the matrix, if you will. So our latest addiction is spelunking through the entrances and exits of the world's subterranean roads. Starting local, here are BOTH ENDS of the Lyttelton tunnel, including Peter Beaven's iconic toll BUILDING featured in Long Live the Modern.

With a little help from Wikipedia, here is a quick tour of the world's road tunnels. With six lanes and a good collection of popular culture cameo parts, HERE is the Lincoln Tunnel, which runs under the Hudson river to connect New Jersey with Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. Le Tunnel Sous la manche, or the CHANNEL TUNNEL, has the longest underwater section but no street view yet. Unfortunately there is also no street view or enough resolution to sight the architecture and sculpture that heralds your entry into the Mont Blanc Tunnel, providing a trans-alpine route between Italy and France. At 24.5km, the longest is Norway's Lærdal Tunnel, although there is very little MAP VIEWING yet but we look forward to seeing the sequence of caves added especially to keep drivers amused and alert. One of the longest in Asia is the Hsuehshan Tunnel, which runs from HERE to HERE and has its own FM radio station. Opened in 1897, London's Blackwall Tunnel displaced more than 600 houses, including an alleged former home of Sir Walter Raleigh, and has several sharp bends, apparently included either to keep horses from bolting when they re-encountered direct light, or to avoid tunneling through black death burial grounds. Starting from BLACKWALL (where the ROOFS are impressively landscaped) it brings you out near the MILLENNIUM Dome HERE.

Speaking of tunnelling to the millennium, we would reminisce for a bit about watching Irwin (The Swarm) Allen's The Time Tunnel but a lack of age would make that a fabrication. But we are rather fond of the literary wormhole (wordhole?) Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries have created between North and South Korea. The border town of Pal-Pan Dong is presumably just an artful figment , although it is hard to tell with so little of Korea (North and South) marked on google maps. They have info on the DMZ bus tour here (it takes a while) and here, or you can cruise the BORDER yourself, noting what are presumably military installations all the way along and looking for tunnels.

Within the DMZ you will find just two villages, Daeseong-dong on the South side HERE, and the allegedly uninhabited Kijong-dong in the North HERE, with lights turning on and off but nobody home, and sporting the world's tallest flagpole. As has been reported in the LA Times, google maps has done wonders for opening up North Korea to virtual tourism - bring on the duty free.

Image: The HOLLAND TUNNEL entrance, close cousin to the Lincoln, features on the cover of Yo La Tengo's 1997 album, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One.

Abandoned

With our running interest in hidden places, negative spaces, voids and other types of monumental emptiness, we couldn't resist this post on WebUrbanist, which we have managed to mostly translate into map locations (and more deserted cities here).

Hong Kong's once anarchic Kowloon Walled City was torn down not long after Jackie Chan used it as a set for Crime Story, including real footage of exploding buildings. Before demolition, Japanese explorers spent a week mapping the vacated site. It is NOW A PARK.

The RYUGYONG HOTEL casts a long shadow over Pyongyang, a towering memorial to failure.

Our favourite is the mysterious and futuristic UFO ghost city of SAN ZHI, Taiwan, which sadly disappeared only a few months ago.

Once the capital of Azerbaijan, AGDAM's crumbling mosques demonstrate that living at the crossroads can have a negative effect, which can leave you in the middle of contested territory just as it can also make you a centre for commerce. Then there are the built open spaces of the city of FATEHPUR SIKRI, Uttar Pradesh, India, which was the capital of the Mughal Empire but is said to have been abandoned since the 16th century when it ran out of water only decades after being built.

Unfortunately the map resolution is not great but here is the former splendor of BOKOR HILL STATION in Phnom Bokor, Cambodia.

Closed in 1999 after a single accident, Opko Land in South Korea is still a mostly intact amusement park, although google has been very slow to add maps and detail to most of Korea so THIS is as close as we get. A shame because we like amusements parks and promise to seek out a few more, abandoned or operating, at a later date.

Image: The UFO house in Sanjhih, taken by cypherone

A Slow Start

"Landscape is ultimately going to subsume us all, it's the inevitable destination of all living things. So it is almost an irony that landscape is one of the expected subjects for painters... I describe my works as an unnatural staging of the natural. There is also a contemplation of monumentality, in the sense that I make a lot of very small works but I"m also drawn to making something so big that it is part of the landscape, a sense of scale that is also a mechanics of play. And there's a desire to make something that has a time component... What we have initiated is what I call a permanent work in progress. I will be long dead by the time the work reaches fruition, when the plants are mature enough to flower goldenly and magnificently. So what I think I can justifiably claim is that what we are working on is the slowets art work in New Zealand."

So says John Reynolds, in his book Certain Words Drawn, about his earth works SNOW TUSSOCK, GOLDEN SPANIARD and Cordyline. The first two are part of a larger project employing artists, also including Gavin Hipkins and Jae Hoon Lee, to rejuvenate the heavily mined landscape of Macraes Flat. Cordyline is hidden on Alan Gibbs' private sculpture park at The Farm in Kaipara. There is a fourth earth work by Reynolds, which precedes these but doesn't seem to have been concluded. This was part of a bigger multi-disciplinary project about layering data on the Auckand landscape. The first of a proposed series of planted arrow formations should be growing somewhere around here at UNITEC.

Reynolds' comments on temporality ring true when visiting these works via google. Golden Spaniard is shown at a very early stage with what look like heaped tailings being gathered into a giant koru shape before being sculpted into a ziggurat form. The earth-moving is now completed but there are many years of growing ahead. In anticipation of potential future phases of Art from Space, we will start archiving these map images as they are updated for juxtaposition with later incarnations.

Bearing in mind the wiry motifs Reynolds now has self-propogating around the countryside, it's easy to also look at these two forms as an interesting pair of in-progress drawings HERE and HERE. And just for good measure, here is the inverted ziggurat of the still-functioning WAIHI GOLDMINE.

Image: John Reynolds, The Garden for the Blind, proposed detail of installation in Orakei.

Wild Bill in Cloudland

Painter Bill Hammond's 1989 visit to the Auckland Islands has become somewhat of an apocryphal story, which we are told resulted in the brooding bird paintings that followed. What little most of know of this forsaken place are the hallucinatory images Hammond has fed into our imaginations. It is shrouded in further mystery from the fact that Hammond, who does not do interviews, has never spoken publically of his experience there. Photographer Laurence Aberhart was on that same expedition and last year added to the legend in the Jingle Jangle Morning exhibition catalogue with the tale of a long, cold night on Enderby Island, holed up in car cases and being entertained at "Bill's Bar". To conclude the catalogue's written section, there are two nocturnal photographs by Lloyd Godman, also on that trip along with Gerda Leenards, of a possessed-looking Hammond stalking through a Rata forest - these photos are now on show in the Auckland Art Gallery's Enchanted Garden exhibition.

But what is the reality of this mythical, far-off bird-land? Even a search on google maps sheds little light, with none of these subantarctic islands yet being marked. With some guidance from a traditional atlas, the ISLANDS are easily found and, at first appearance, present a primal view of the chiselled, craggy landforms on which shipwrecked castaways have often had to survive. Wikipedia tells us the MOSTLY uninhabited islands form the southern-most edge of the submerged continent Zealandia and are formed from volcanoes, with the main strait that is the hub of the southern end being the crater of an extinct volcano.

Zooming in, the crater seems completely shrouded in shadow and cloud, until one seemingly bursts through to a CLEAR VIEW of grey, icy waters and bare hills. Up on Enderby, you can almost smell the salt air as rows of Hokusai-waves queue to crash over CRAGGY ROCKS encrusted with dribbling layers guanno. Off the west coast is the evocatively named DISAPPOINTMENT ISLAND, which sits within a blurred circle of digital void, much like the time warp which has carvedthe island's NORTH-WEST TIP into several overlapping temporal zones.

Nearby Macquarie Island is not only draped in cloud from LONG-RANGE, it is completely LOST from the map, forcing you to drive blind until you get into close-range. At its northern tip a striking HORIZON LINE is formed at the point where the map disappears back into cyberspace.

Image: Cover of F.E. Raynal's Wrecked on a Reef, a tale of shipwreck on the Auckland Islands

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

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.

Into the future...

"The International Date Line is an awkward nineteenth century device conceived to manage the complexities of modern time, travel and global geography - it is the boundary line between 'today' and 'tomorrow'. Drawn through what was conveniently thought of as an 'empty' ocean, it is a haphazard broken line marked by cartographers on geographical and nautical charts. It is an intangible phenomenon, unbound by international law. The theoretical line is around 180 degrees from GREENWICH, formulated in 1884 as an agreement between commercial steamships of the principal maritime countries of the time. Shifts have occurred for practical reasons over the years, the most recent in 1995 to cluster all 33 small atolls in the nation of KIRIBATI into the same time zone.

"As early as the thirteenth century, mention was made of lost days in the region by the Syrian geographer-historian Abu 'I-Fida. In 1519 Antonio Pigafetta, the Italian chronicler of the first circumnavigation of the world by Ferdinand Magellan, mentioned a peculiar incident that occurred during the voyage whereby somewhere a whole day was apparently 'lost'. In Jules Verne's 'Around the World in 80 Days' 1873, Phileas Fogg learns that by moving eastwards he gains a day and thereby wins the prize. In Umberto Eco's 'The Island of the Day Before' 1994, the seventeenth century shipwrecked Italian protagonist reminiscences on his life and loves and becomes convinced that all his troubles will dissolve, if only he could cross the nearby Date Line."

Rhana Devenport, Date Line: Between Today and Tomorrow, in Date Line catalogue, 2007.

Why did the line cross the road...? Here is the PRIME MERIDIAN ARCH on the road to Barcelona, Spain.

Image: Looking like a cross between a Bill Culbert and a Gordon Matta Clark installation, this is the Greenwich observatory with its viewing aperture open for business.