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.

More journeys by hot air balloon

Exhibition announcement:

March 5 - April 3
Lighter Than Fiction (2010) by Jenny Marketou (Greece/US)
Presented by the Project Room for New Media at the Chelsea Art Museum

The Chelsea Art Museum, Home of the Miotte Foundation, and the Project Room for New Media are pleased to present Jenny Marketou: Lighter Than Fiction. What do you see when soaring over Los Alamos, New Mexico... utopia or dystopia? A landscape of natural beauty or a place where nature was unleashed in the creation of the nuclear bomb? Jenny Marketou’s video installation poses the question, juxtaposing dreamlike perspectives with disturbing realities. These contrasting states are experienced in three single channel video projections that comprise the installation.

In “Stolen Bubbles” 2010 Marketou has mixed visual and sonic material from Karel Zeman’s “The Stolen Airship” 1966 with her original animation that draws from the airborne balloon project called “Bubbles” 2009 - both filmed over Prague, Czech Republic.

“Bubbles” is based on a public sculpture project where the artist created a remarkable set of 14-meter banners with her original graphic composition using the word “Fragile” which were draped onto an air balloon. Marketou filmed as she and her guests riding the balloon experienced breathtaking views of PRAGUE and the dream-like sensation of floating with the wind currents, hovering above the busy pace and anxieties of city life.

“Levels of Disturbance” (2009) is structured around the aerial audio and visual recordings that Marketou captured while flying in a small jet over the natural landscape around LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was created in the 1940s, that is still contaminated by nuclear waste and turbulent human emotions. During editing Marketou destroyed the order of the video sequence and the coherence of the narrative, placing at the center of each frame a round sphere animated in a perpetual motion that controls and obstructs access to the full image of the landscape. The viewer is drawn into this unsettling spinning sensation, generating metaphors for the human condition.

“Lighter Than Fiction” investigates the precarious balance between reality and fiction capturing the view from above where the lightness of utopian sensations and imagery are contrasted by dystopian realities.

Image: Still from Jenny Marketou's video animation “Levels of Disturbance” 2009

Special Reserve

[exhibition announcement]

A lot or a little might be said, but in the end there will be something to pass on.

By WilliamHsu and Nick Spratt

For their project at Newcall Gallery, Hsu and Spratt initiate a series of events that position the gallery as site within a trajectory, providing an access point to other spaces in its immediate surroundings. These events in their varied forms explore and reveal parameters of inclusion and exclusion within shared space. They interrelate in a way that might call into question how collective experiences may be instigated and relayed.We invite you to join us for the opening event on Wednesday evening at Glenside Reserve South.

Please join us at GLENSIDE RESERVE (beside Newcall Gallery, see map) 6pm tonight for the opening event.

Weather forecast looks fine but if it rains please bring an umbrella.

Show runs 4 - 20 February

Hours for 2010: 12-5pm Thursday - Saturday

(The gallery will not be open on Waitangi day, Saturday 6 February)

Details about subsequent events will follow during the course of the show.--

NEWCALL GALLERY

Level 1, Newcall Tower

Hohipere St

Newton

Auckland

http://www.newcallgallery.org.nz/

Double fantasy

With a full moon on both Dec 2 and Dec 31, the first decade of this millennium will end with a blue moon. But before this year is out, weather permitting, we'd like to spend some time at our favourite swimming spot - Bethells Beach on Auckland's iconic West Coast. Heading north, it follows Campion and Caro's Karekare, popular Piha and McCahon's Muriwai.

Of course, Te Henga (Bethells Beach) is a landscape with its own lovers. Most notably, Don Binney frequently returned to this location, often drawing in situ to capture it both vacant and as a backdrop for his bird studies. Interesting to note that Google Maps has it as Te Henga at THIS altitude, but zoom CLOSER and it becomes Bethells. Curious.

Reuben Paterson now joins the list of artists inspired by this coastal treasure, with a work commissioned for the New Artland TV series. Titled There Goes The Moon, Paterson's ephemeral earth work pays tribute to his ancestral home of MATATA, which was devastated by flooding and landslides in 2005. It also recalls his 2004 outdoor installation for Scape, which similarly paid homage to the sacred energies of a local landscape - PUTARINGAMOTU (Riccarton).

Built and destroyed in a day, Paterson's Te Henga piece, like Riccarton before it, is another Narcissus reflection. This time it is an image of the moon, utilising the shimmering sand and surf to reflect the moon above while the installation is washed away. You can watch the entire process here.

Image: Reuben Paterson, There Goes The Moon, 2009, photo: FAT Productions/TVNZ 7.

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.

Remap Berlin

"Remap Berlin spreads a thin geographical virus in Google Earth and deals with different levels of reality. The project introduces a series of b&w photographs shot in Twinity, a mirror world that reproduces a realistic 3D replica of Berlin. The photos shot in Twinity, are then geo-localized in Google maps, re-mapped from virtual to real and positioned in the exact point where they have been shot in the mirror world. Once uploaded in the photo sharing community Panoramio, the pictures are mixed up with other ones shot in the same geographical point from real life users. Many of these pictures have been selected by Google and can now be found as “Popular photos in Google Earth”: his became a little geographical virus, parts of our memories of the real world. The photographs are cityscapes, shot by Marco Manray roaming around the still empty streets of Berlin in the beta version."

Internet landscape photographer Marco Manray's Remap Berlin project is currently featured at Window.

Image: Leipziger Platz, found here and HERE

Stack

Last week Australian sound artist and writer Ros Bandt was in Auckland for a symposium on ElectroAcoustic music, held by The University of Auckland. Although we have had her book on Australian sound sculpture for a number of years, it was great to finally meet her.

After our chance encounter, she kindly left us with Stack, a CD of "original sonic explorations of a major new urban tower, an ephemeral acoustic space in the development of the City of Melbourne... Bandt brings to life the inner and outer sonic possibilities gleaned from the massive city stac, a 55-metre chimney designed to extract fumes from the new CityLink tunnel in the heart of Melbourne's underground." The resonant space recorded by Bandt was effectively lost when the tunnel was opened, silenced by traffic and the roar of extrator fans.

Many readers will recognise Stack's site as being alongside the infamous yellow peril, outside ACCA. From ABOVE, we can almost look right down the vent. STREET VIEW allows us to look back up at the exterior towering above us from the ground. And HERE you can drive right through the aforementioned tunnel. Nice!

Image: Ros Bandt records with the stack, photo by Arthur McDevitt.

Palaces of the Mind

We've passed by here before, but noticing Deborah Crowe's fabulous photo in this year's ever-so-controversial Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award, we thought we should offer a few new views of Kibble Palace, Glasgow: HERE, HERE and HERE.

In the online catalogue Crowe says: "Little did I know (25 years ago) that the place I felt at home was the Australasian section of Glasgow Botanic Gardens. My recent practice involves an interest in creating imaginary worlds; revisiting places, buildings and moments that have informed and cultivated a preoccupation with architectural structures and perceptions of spatial experience."

Image: Deborah Crowe, Kibble Palace, small world II, C-type photographic print on aluminium

Missing marbles

Over on Over the Net there is a recent entry on New Zealand marble, the white marble of PIETRASANTA (18km south of CARRARA) and the new works being produced there.

Image: Marble blocks being quarried in the Pietrasanta mountains, found here.

Lots

We thought we were being clever with last year's virtual homage to Ed Ruscha's Thirty Four Parking Lots, but it seems we're not the first, and others have even been to the trouble of finding the original sites (thanks J+MB).

Eric William Carrol has used Google Maps to create this flickr album, and now there is Pascual Sisto's automatic version, which rolls through all 34 locations live from google without you needed to so much as click a link. Nice.

Image: Eric William Carrol's Lot 32.

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/).

Paradise junction

Like John Hurrell, we've often pondered the middle-of-the-road wetland RESERVE established during the recent redevelopment of Auckland's central motorway connections. At first there was just a lot of soil being moved about, excavating a negative space while creating a corresponding mound. Then it was planted, watered, and made functional. It seems artist Cellulite Rose has beaten us in claiming this curious civic piece of earth work as art.

Image: Publicity photo for Cellulite Rose's Island Resort, 2009

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.

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.

Tremors

"Theo Schoon, the Dutch artist, introduced me to the geothermal areas of the central North Island - areas to which I have returned many times to record on film the detail and drama of these fascinating places. Here at your feet and in the air you breathe are the feverish exhalations of volcanic activity. These sites are the art galleries of nature's creations, thrust to the surface from subterranean crucibles by steam, boiling water and gases."

Len Castle quoted by Peter Simpson in the Mountain to the Sea exhibition catalogue.

Last week, amidst some of the steamiest weather Auckland has experienced in recent times, Hawkes Bay Museum and Art Gallery curator Tanya Wilkinson opened a touring exhibition of Len Castle's geologically inspired ceramics, combined with photographs by the artist and a selection of commissioned poetry, all of which makes for a nice publication.

Amongst those places favoured by Castle and simmering with primeval forces is the volcanic heart of the North Island around Tongariro, which includes the CRATER LAKE of Mount Ruapehu, the UPPER and LOWER TAMA lakes with their wind-swept, bottle-glass surfaces, and the seemingly kiln-fired, peak of NGAURUHOE, adorned with jewel-like lake glazes HERE, HERE and HERE.

Heading north from the super-sized crater lake of Taupo are the geothermal facilities at WAIRAKEI, the many small lakes through the region, including ROTOKAWA, TIKITAPU with its strange digital surface patterning, the pale blue and strikingly titled Echo Lake (WHANGIOTERANGI) alongside the emerald green Ngakoro, and of course the bubbling mud of WAIOTAPU and WHAKAREWAREWA in ROTORUA. And then, out to sea, it is hard to miss the miles-long plume of White Island (WHAKAARI).

Speaking of smoking peaks, here's MOUNT SAINT HELENS, VESUVIUS, KRAKATOA and ETNA. Not to forget the regularly erupting island of STROMBOLI, site of a movie starring Ingrid Bergman as a frustrated new bride. This in turn inspired Woody Guthrie to write a great piece of bawdy verse in which he longed for the perty actress to make his mountain quiver, a song that went unrecorded until Billy Bragg and Wilco were allowed through the late folkster's notebooks.

Image: Len Castle, Tongariro Emerald Lake

V3.0

It may look like not much has happened around here over the last few months, aside from a sudden burst of activity over the last week. But we've been busy building stuff out back for you. In addition to grazing through posts for links in our blog, you can now browse Art from Space's content in a more graphic format with all location links now loaded into google maps. It seems more fun this way, and hopefully it will impress certain PEOPLE. The new mother ship, with easier to remember address, is now here.

Chute

In our last tour of New Zealand's hydro facilities it seems we missed an important one. Fortunately Peter Peryer, whose use of a blog to reveal the day-to-day influences on his practice is well worth a subscription, has been keeping a close eye on the CLUTHA RIVER. He reports that the dam now has surplus storage and, indeed, it does look like we've gone from a serious low to a significant high since alarm bells were ringing last winter.

We're envious of the remarkable landscapes, cloud formations and earthworks he has snapped while on residency in Otago and during frequent trips north. Here is his Three Sisters in Tongaporutu, reduced to just a pair for a while but now featuring a new sibling. Unfortunately the coast is shrouded in cloud so we can't see exactly which incarnation lives on the GOOGLE MAP.

Air travel appears to be an occasional recurring theme of Peryer's and he has even snapped the elusive B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber, which has invisibility powers that seem to even keep it clear of map sitings. A number of people have documented finding them HERE at Edwards Air Force Base, halfway between Lancaster and Littlerock. Similarly, there were a lot of documented sitings of one left on the tarmac HERE at Northrop Grumman, and most of the fleet of 20 are said to reside HERE at Whiteman Air Force Base, but in all three cases someone has done a very good job of spiriting (airbrushing) them out of view. There is apparently one parked inside a hangar at the National Museum of the US Air Force, although a good gathering of vintage craft can be seen outside HERE. In the middle of the Indian Ocean on the controversially depopulated Diego Garcia atoll, which contributes to GPS data, you can see HERE the portable climate-controlled bubbles they are kept in. But our favourite siting, also at Edwards AFB, has to be this bomber-shaped garden over HERE.

Images: Peter Peryer's Sluice Gate Number 1 at Roxburgh (above) and our own version (below), one of NZ's Top 10 modernist structures according to Docomomo.