Showing posts with label Gelitin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gelitin. Show all posts

8 April 2009

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.

13 August 2008

Space bunny

While in London last week, I was able to see the excellent Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary. The exhibition makes good use of the Hayward's sculpture courts, one highlight being Gelitin's installation that allows you to admire the London view whilst paddling about in a boat on a flooded upper courtyard lake. Surely it would be a sight to admire from the adjacent Royal Festival Hall's fourth level Blue Bar, but it is unlikely to become a surreal fixture on London's GOOGLE MAP, unless the city happens to be re-surveyed while the exhibition is on.

One project of Gelitin's that has made it onto the google map is a giant (knitted) rabbit (sounds familiar), which will be spending 20 years ON A MOUNTAIN TOP in Italy. (thanks YSH)

There is also a free little show at the Hayward which features community crocheted coral reefs. Unfortunately their website offers little in the way of images or information. The Hayward's website, buried amidst SBC stuff, also contradicts (so does Wikipedia) the Psycho Buildings blurb that boasts of how the gallery was designed between 1960-62 by a radical group of young architects, three of whom later joined Archigram, famous for unrealised projects such as a Plug-in City and a Wearable House called the Suitsaloon.

Image: The giant green Star Wars rabbit

About

Art from Space is an exploration of art-related phenomena that manifests in interesting ways on Google’s aerial maps. It is also an experiment in curatorial practice; collecting, presenting and contextualising items in ways that users can explore, free of curator-imposed framing and sequencing. This blog is Art from Space’s developmental musings made public, where items are introduced to the project in real time, rather than awaiting the grand unveiling of a completed exhibition. Specific locations of interest are highlighted in CAPS and linked to a map for further exploration. Visit the mother ship HERE.

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