On the road to New Plymouth...

 ...thinking about Michael Parekowhai

The great leap backwards

Lookalike? Copycat? Who knows.
Images Wellington and Twickenham

In Berlin

Now that's what we call a serious piece of public sculpture

Googling on: Whirly birds and art

Where would art be without helicopters, especially big art and even more particularly big art in out-of-the-way-places. Want to put a statue on the top of a building? Helicopter. Need to pour a couple of hundred galleons of water over the statue of a thirsty God? Get a helicopter in here. Need to make a big art statement in the air? Where’s a bloody helicopter when we need one?  So here for an uplifting Sarturday morning on OTN is a bunch of helicopters doing stuff with art when cranes just aren’t up to it.
Images: Top to bottom left to right. The most famous helicopter-art combo is filmed from, yes another helicopter, for La Dolce Vita. The statue of Freedom gets airlifted off the Capitol dome for a bit of a clean and restoration and in Trinadad a helicopter is brought in to help out with the ritual bathing of a 26 metere statue of the Indian God Hanumān. A statue of King Neptune in Puerto Plata was stolen, chopped up, found again, restored and then proved too heavy to lift and Ayse Erkmens sculpture airbourne during the 1997 Munster sculpture exhibition. A couple of miscellaneous sculptures with attached ‘copters. It’s art (Robert Doisneau’s as it happens) and it’s helicopters and finally, ok maybe not art, but looks like part of what might be a statue of an elephant airbourne under a helicopter.

The duck Christo problem

When Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s inflatable sculpture Rubber duck was reduced to a puddle in Hong Kong harbour, it gave OTN the opportunity to combine two favoured themes - the big and the lookalike.  Hofman has created a number of his 15-meter ducks. One was recently floating in Sydney harbour and is now in storage waiting for a return gig next summer. As the Hong Kong Duck is down for maintenance we can match it up with Christo’s 1983 Biscayne Bay installation Surrounded islands. Hofman also attracted OTN ‘s attention when he made not one but two giant rabbit sculptures.

Images: Top left, Rubber duck deflated in Hong Kong and right, one of Christo’s Surrounded islands. Bottom, the Hofman duck in Sydney

Art at work

Playtime on Fiona Connor's Frieze installation Style guide spa
Photo: via Fiona Connor

Rat king

Left the Union scab rat brought out to protest non-union labour being used at the Frieze Art Fair and right a 3.5 meter bronze 'art' version created by the Bruce High Quality Foundation ("a learning experiment where artists work together to manifest creative, productive, resistant, useless, and demanding interactions between art and the world") that sits without any visible irony in the foyer of Lever House.

The good oil

It’s Saturday afternoon, it’s a nice day in Philadelphia, why not get out of the conservation lab at the Museum of Art and onto the Ellsworth Kelly? Time to give it one of its three-monthly coatings of oil to prevent ongoing rusting. They do it with diluted linseed oil apparently and it's something “that Kelly likes done.” This all made sense until we read the label. It described the work as being constructed from “weathering steel”. Not any more.

Pumping

Four years ago we posted on the RockyBalboa sculpture that had been banished from the doors of the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the foot of the grand stairway leading up to it. A demotion perhaps but you can't keep Rocky down. The first movie may have opened back in 1976 but still the man is the centre of attention with a line of people waiting to be snapped in the Rocky pose.

Images: Top, Sylvester Stallone takes the pose in the first movie and the sculpture as seen as a prop in Rocky III outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Bottom, families pose with the statue where it stands today.

The play way

A sculpture park in St Louis turned out to be a surprise. For a start there's its superb location in the middle of downtown near the famous Eero Saarinen Gateway Arch. And then there's the way it is used. People in this city seemed to love it and want to spend time there. You forget how unusual is it to see crowds of people not only physically enjoying sculpture but also including it in the important events of their lives.

We happened to be in St Louis on Prom weekend and the place was packed with limos, anxious parents and hundreds of dressed-up kids looking for special places to be photographed. OK, the Gateway Arch was first pick but a close second was the Citygarden sculpture park. The GatewayFoundation owns the works and it obviously believes that any scuffing or wear can be readily repaired. And so there are no do not touch signs, no keep off the art notices and no barriers.

At the far end of the park a striking but sombre work by Richard Serra was left to its own devices but most everything else was in use. Kids climbed the Mark di Suvero, people imitated Julian Opie's LED walking figures, a family explored the inside of a large bronze head by Igor Mitoraj, a couple fooled around with Jim Dine's Big white gloves and prom celebrants used anything that was going to complement their striking poses.

Images: top, Climbing Mark di Suvero’s Aesop’s fables. Second row, photographing Prom outfits on Untitled (two rabbits) by Tom Claasen. Third row left, striking a pose in front of Jim Dine’s Big white gloves, big four wheels and right, kids clambering out after hiding in Eros Bendato by Igor Mitoraj. Bottom, a very McCahon-like view of the garden through a portal in Richard Serra’s Twain

Concrete cowboy

Long before artist George Segal began casting his friends in plaster to make his famous signature Pop Art sculptural tableaux there was Oscar Simpson pioneer dentist. Simpson, who lived in Dodge City invented the gold inlay process that was to be the bad-boy brand for generations of gangsters and via his teeth modelling skills became an enthusiastic amateur sculptor. So when Dodge City was looking to celebrate its new City Hall in 1929 it was Oscar Simpson who came up with the idea for a cowboy statue. All of which was so, so news for his friend Joe Sughrue a law enforcement officer soon to be Marshal of Dodge City. But Joe was a good pal and lay down in a wooden box fully clothed in cowboy gear and allowed Oscar to fill it with plaster. When this set it was carefully detatched and used as a mould for a concrete pour. For the face a life mask was created with a couple of straws poked into Joe’s nose for breathing purposes. As is most often the case when someone is having plaster poured on his face the sculpture has its eyes closed an alarming detail in the depiction of someone who has just drawn a six shooter.

Images: Top Oscar Simpson’s cowboy sculpture standing on Dodge City’s Boot Hill. Bottom left Joe Sugharue and right detail of Simpson’s sculpture

Lamp post

One of this year’s Most Inappropriate Public Sculpture awards will surly go to the Indian head reliefs bolted to the lampposts that help light downtown Salt Lake City. Although the Mormons started out kind of neutral to the local tribes, as their settlements grew the First Nation peoples were inevitably pushed out to reservations or induced to leave the state to avoid starvation. The placement of the reliefs at dog level is a metaphor probably not lost on the odd Indian that ventures into SLC.

Figure in ground

It’s about two and a half hours drive out of Salt Lake City with the last ten or so on well sign-posted gravel roads. Despite warnings that it was too early in the season for Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty to be reliably visible, there it was. But until we got there who knew the lake, surrounding mountains and sky were going to present such a spectacular setting? As for the Spiral jetty, well it looked just like it does in the pictures. But, hang on a minute, what’s that big post stuck right bang in the middle? It turns out there’s a guy standing at the very end tip of the spiral. It’s a Spiral Jetty nightmare. In all fairness he just waded around for a few minutes and then came on in so we could take the same uninterrupted human-free pictureseveryone else does.

Truthfully in the two hours we were there we mostly had it to ourselves but we did see a bunch of guys on trail bikes and customised bikers suits, a young artist who was a Perec fan and her dad from Salt Lake City, a couple of guys (one was spiral guy) with a very old dog, a small plane (the trail bike crowd raised pretend guns to shoot it down), and flocks of migrating birds. It was warm and perfectly still.

Let Smithson have the last word. “This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty. No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence.”

Image: Spiral guy.

The finger post

For all of you who vacillate between the IT world and the art world, welcome to the world of digital sculpture.

 Images: Top to bottom left to right. Maurizio Cattelan Middle finger, Thomas Houseago 2 Fingers, Toby Christian Finger, random sculpture in Stockholm, photograph by Ai Weiwei, Sebastian Di Mauro in Brisbane, Robb Jamieson Finger Hole, César Baldaccini Le Pouce, Constantine’s hand and hand finger in Rome, sand art fingers. (click on image to enlarge)

Dog days

As you will have noticed on OTN if things get desperate at the end of the week we reach for something big to entertain you. This week it is giant dog sculptures. You'll be familiar with Jeff Koons’s Puppy but who’d have thought anyone would invite Richard Jackson’s Bad dog lift a leg on the Orange County Museum of Contemporary Art. Big dog, good dog.

Images: top, Richard Jackson Bad dog and second row from right, Dutch dog and Sun spot a big dog work in Colorado. Next down, Jeff Koons Puppy and Balloon dog and bottom, Best friend in corrugated iron by DonsBigArt and Yoshitomo Nara at the Aomori Museum in Japan.

Art is where you find it

In another life we have been taking a set of photographs we have called Once were petrol stations. This is to explain why we have been showing an interest in a new petrol station that is being build just round the corner. So we were there yesterday when, as you do with your modern petrol station, they brought in the sculpture to install.

Head of state

When it comes to damaging public sculpture in the name of religion, politics or plain bad temper, heads get a real beating. A stroll through any antiquities museum will reveal broken noses, scratched-out eyes and, when things get really out of hand, full decapitation.  We had one of our own beheaded in 1987 when a group called Upokokohua took off with Sir George Grey’s head which up to that time had been located on top of his statue in Auckland’s Albert Park. A new head was made by sculptor Roderick Burgess (he also did the controversial Sir Keith Park effort in London which briefly appeared on the Trafalgar Square Fourth plinth).

All this brings us to another re-headed political statue. This time it's one of Margaret Thatcher currently on offer to her hometown Grantham. When on display in London in 2002 Thatcher’s head was removed from her marble body by an outraged visitor using one of the protective metal stanchions for the job (another reason to back OTN’s campaign to remove protective barriers around sculptures). The repaired sculpture is now on offer to Grantham but there's not a lot of support for the idea with one councilor opining that it could be ‘asking for trouble’.  There are two other sculptures of the ex-Prime Minister on view, one in Westminster (standing) and the other in the United States (sitting).

Images: Top Baroness Thatcher before and after. Bottom same with Sir George Grey

Water works

A highlight of the recent New Plymouth District Council meeting about the Len Lye Centre was a quirky presentation by art patron and engineer John Matthews. One of Len Lye’s strongest advocates, Matthews presented images and videos of Len Lye creations in production. Included were mega versions of existing works (e.g. a 30 metre high version of Blade) and new stuff developed from Len Lye sketches or ideas (e.g. a serpenty thing that convulses across the floor). One of the giant products was a Water Whirler to be based on the much smaller one that is on the Wellington waterfront. Matthews told the Council that the engineering was incredibly difficult and it was still uncertain whether they could even get such a thing to work. Failure is always a possibility in experimental work but the risk is particularly high in the case of these works developed from Lye's sketches long after his death and without his continuing guidance or precedent.

Certainly failure has plagued Wellington's Water Whirler almost from Day One when it was installed in March 2006. Speaking to the people who keep it maintained, it turns out that practically every part has gone wrong at some stage. After being out of action for a while last year, it was briefly up and running for around a week in November. But then it stopped again and a small sign apologised for the break in transmission. Last night we noticed the sign had been removed so we waited around for the 9 pm show. A couple of young women climbed right out onto the podium and sat with their feet dangling over the water. We told them to watch out as Whirler was about to start. “It's ok, it never works,” they called back. And they were right.

Image: waiting for Water Whirler

Art at work

Solace in the Wind doubles up as a marker in a scavenger hunt.

Community chest

In the species Figurative Sculpture there is a small but exciting subset depicting despots. We've already posted on despot effigies, of Saddam Hussein as in pulled to the ground by the US military and private (suspended like a shark in a Hirst like tank, but there are others. Maurizio Cattelan’s poignant Him is a diminutive Hitler on his knees in prayer and now Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov aka Lenin. True, this Russian ring-in might seem too close to genre wax works for purists but we’re pitching it for the sake of numbers. The sculpture is life size and is we think the first sculpture of an embalmed body. The scoop is that this time the body ‘breathes.’ “Oooh look at Vladimir Ilyich’s chest going up and down” visitors exclaim as the animatronics kick in. You can check out a live action video here