Big time

The Art, Life, TV blog has just alerted us to the recent passing of Claes Oldenburg's wife and collaborator, Coosje van Bruggen. We were planning to do this anyway at some stage but it seems appropriate to launch into an overdue Oldenburg Big Things tour:

INVERTED COLLAR and TIE, Frankfurt an Main (partly obscured by the tower and not yet available on Street View)

Here is their giant SHUTTLECOCKS sculpture.

FREE STAMP in Cleveland.

The CRUSOE UMBRELLA is excellent viewing.

Casting a long shadow over the tradition on vertical monuments it parodies (bludgeons?), here is BATCOLUMN in Chicago. Check out the cosmic beam of light the bat appears to be deflecting in STREET VIEW!

And best of all from this vantage point, perched on top of a building in Koln, DROPPED CONE looks like it has fallen from the sky.

Image: Ice-cream Koln, photo found here

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.

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.

Colour fields

Since an online visit to Monet's garden, we have been keeping an eye out for visible sunflower fields, blurry haystacks, poppies, or any other plantation bringing a splash of colour to the satellite landscapes. So far, although our efforts have hardly been persistent, there has been little success. However, an actual drive through the real terrain of West Auckland a few days ago, taking the scenic route home to avoid an accident on THE BRIDGE, led us to this industrial ROSE GARDEN with its softly dappled pink and blue smudges - and an excellent light-flare off a greenhouse roof. Jumping into street view, we couldn't help admiring the spectacular FUNNEL OF CLOUD caught in the sunset.

It seems to be a garden summer with the Auckland Art Gallery opening a delightfully electic (eccentric?) exhibition, The Enchanted Garden, not long after former gallery director Christopher Johnstone launched his own book on gardens in New Zealand art. Of the many delights unearthed from the collection vaults by curator Mary Kisler, there is one of the gallery's six views of MALTA's impressively terraced fortifications painted by Alberto Pulicino while still occupied by the 'Knights of Malta'.

Of particular interest in Johnstone's book is the early depiction of now long-gone homes, and their surrounding grounds, in what have mostly became dense, urban areas. Of these historic garden estates, a few survive, including Sir George Gray's mansion at KAWAU (depicted by Alfred Sharpe and Constance Cumming) and ST JOHN'S COLLEGE in Auckland (depicted by John Kinder) retains many early features. It is interesting to note that the extensive plantings Colin McCahon (and family) made and painted at their Titirangi house were probably influenced by time he spent working as a gardener at the WELLINGTON BOTANICAL GARDENS. Jumping back into STREET VIEW, we can almost replicate his works depicting the Titirangi House through the trees.

Leigh Martin, best known for abstract work, is included for his floral 'noise' paintings. Whilst studying in Glasgow, Martin is said to have spent much time in the local Botanic Gardens, including KIBBLE PALACE and particularly the NZ flora section. He also met the late Derek Jarman, whose shingle garden at PROSPECT COTTAGE near Dungeness (also home to a nuclear POWER STATION, an excellent set of sound mirrors, and is an important ecological site) is well known, and just as striking to the ear (audio here) as to the eye.

Image: One of many images of Derek Jarman's Garden available on flickr and similar websites.

Bring Back Buck

As overthenet recently reminded us, this year is a significant one for the legacy of Buckminster Fuller, who popularised the geodesic dome and the term Spaceship Earth. A travelling retrospective exhibition resulted in a substantial feature in the November ArtForum, which also includes a piece on the Centre For Land Use Interpretation, an organisation we'll discuss on a later date.

Fuller's Axiometric contructions result in ideal architecture for admiring from the fifth facade. So, predictably perhaps, based on Wikipedia's list, here are some of Bucky's biggest extent domes:

NAGOYA DOME, Japan
TACOMA DOME, Washington, USA
SUPERIOR DOME, Michigan, USA
WALKUP SKYDOME, Arizona, USA
POLIEDRO DE CARACAS, Venezuela
The former SPRUCE GOOSE HANGAR, California, USA
EDEN PROJECT, Cornwall, UK

Interesting to see another 20th C. visionary, Howard Hughes, had his Goose parked in a dome. According to a recent NZ Listener article, Chris Booth has plans to tunnel a subterranean land art project beneath the Eden Project.

Image: The Buckminster soccer ball, official ball of the FIFA Word Cup from 1970 - 2006.

Stacks

A few months ago photographer Frank Breuer was in New Zealand to exhibit some work and talk about his cool, typological surveys of seemingly banal subjects, such as shipping containers, warehouses and power poles. Working methodically in series, his images manage to extract an enigmatic poetry from these otherwise generic scenes.

In one of his talks he mentioned that he often explores sites in advance on google maps. Excellent! We had been looking for a good excuse to present the colossal colour-field abstracts we have long admired, stacked up in some of the world’s major freight yards. So here is ANTWERP, LOS ANGELES, LIVERPOOL, KOWLOON, TOKYO, SYDNEY, and TAURANGA.

Image: Frank Breuer, Untitled, 2005, (1578 Antwerpen)

The Yellow Peril

In 1995, Claudia Bell and John Lyall wrote a book about the big sculptural things provincial towns like to put up as a kind of local signifier. The book not only became a TV documentary, but also a set of postage stamps, but darned if we can find any convincing views of one on google maps yet. A recent tip-off alerted us that Australia is also rife with Big Things so, while searching for a giant penguin in the Tasmanian town of (wait for it...) Penguin, we came across a blog entry on the Big Banana, the Yellow Submarine, and Melbourne's infamous 'YELLOW PERIL', now accomodated in a more sympathetic setting at ACCA.

BTW, we did eventually find the penguin, but only by cheating and driving around for ages using STREET VIEW. Likewise the OHAKUNE CARROT and the GORE TROUT.

Image: The Big Cheese, in Bodalla, NSW.

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

The Fifth Facade

Last weekend saw the death of Danish architect Jørn Utzon, famous for building (and not completing) the Sydney Opera House. Today, 95bFM's Sunday Breakfast played an interview with Utzon's biographer, Richard Weston. In particular, we couldn't help being impressed with Weston's description of Utzon's awareness of the Opera House's visibility from the Sydney Harbour Bridge and that the building needed a 'fifth facade' so it would also look good from above. Nice phrase, we thought, realising we'd found a great way to refer to many of the things that Art From Space is interested in: art, architecture and landscapes that carry content in their horizontal axis as much, if not more, than the vertical axis, which is traditionally the focus of most monumental structures that have the sort of scale to be visible by satellite.

As Weston noted, the Opera House's site is remarkable, jutting into a picturesque harbour amidst boats and alongside the BRIDGE, something that is immediately evident when zooming in by satellite, even from a GREAT ALTITUDE. Zooming further in, the elegantly tiled shells of the ROOF/WALLS, all precast in concrete from the same sphere, curve in a way that defies the simple distinction of vertical and horizontal, which has long been a favourite site here on Art From Space.

Image: Sydney Opera House under construction in 1968, found here.

Nine Swimming Pools

As I flew over San Bernardino and looked down and saw the swimming pools and the houses and everything in the sun, I was more thrilled than I've ever been on arriving at any city...

David Hockney, 1970, quoted in the catalogue for Stella Brennan's Wet Social Sculpture, 2005.

Having spent some of the weekend observing the suburban excesses and follies on view in real estate guides, I found myself wondering if owning a swimming pool has the same status it did in the 1970s and 80s when Para did a roaring trade in kitset luxury. Perhaps it's the circles I move in now but I can't think of a single close acquaintance who currently owns a swimming pool. Checking the satellite-cam, I see the large circular hole that accomodated one of these (dug in the family BACK YARD by my father and assorted helpers in the early 80s, displacing a large dirt mountain that I found far more entertaining) has long since been filled. Perhaps there isn't much call for pools in Hastings now that the local mini-Disneyland, which was a crumbling shadow of its former self in the mid-90s, has been flooded to be rejuvenated as a WATERPARK. Assuming they can afford admission, this will spare kids the idignity of having to climb the fences of local school swimming facilities for after hours and holiday access.

Earlier this year I read in the paper that British police are concerned about a new trend in which young people are using google maps to locate swimming pools where they can have daytime parties while the owners are at work. Although I can find no trace of it online, the original 2005 incarnation of Stella Brennan's Wet Social Sculpture at St Paul St included an aerial photograph of a chlorine-rich suburb, one of those leafy areas Brennan refers to in the catalogue as the swim-zone.

This all sounds like a good enough excuse for another tribute to Ed Ruscha's book works, this time in the spirit of his 1968 Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, at least one of which appears to have been photographed by climbing a fence. Here's a nine-stop tour of Auckland's North Shore, preceded by a quick visit to the PARNELL BATHS, currently featured in the exhibition and publication Long Live the Modern.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Or, for a sense of what Hockney and Ruscha were talking about, you can zoom at random on any of THESE BLOCKS in Beverly Hills - and here's a quick peek in the PLAYBOY Mansion.

Image: Stella Brenna, Wet Social Sculpture, 2005, installation detail