MONDAY MAY 21 2012
But for those who are looking for a slightly more cerebral artistic offering coming out of the Azerbaijani capital Baku, you need look no further than Rashad Alakbarov, a skilful sculptor of shadow and light.
Since Alakbarov graduated from Baku’s Faculty of Decorative Arts at the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Art in 2001, he has dabbled in painting, theatre decorations, video art and architectural design.
But some of Alakbarov’s best work has been his installation art pieces that use shadow and light to very impressive effect.
Alakbarov gathers everyday objects – sometimes solid, sometimes translucent – to block and manipulate light projected against them to create landscapes, cityscapes, portraits and text-centred ‘paintings’.
'Looking at two cities from one point of view' by Rashad Alakbarov
His “Looking at two cities from one point of view” piece uses two light sources to project an eastern city with mosque on one wall, and a western city with skyscrapers on another.
Plastik portret by Rashad Alakbarov
“Plastik portret” uses suspended plastic bottles to create a charcoal-like portrait of one of Alakbarov’s friends.
'Crisis Haha' by Rashad Alakbarov
And “Crisis Haha” sees the same structure of metal pipes form two different words – “Crisis” and “Haha” – when light is shone against it from two different angles.
Alakbarov’s work is reminiscent of pieces created by British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster, though this pair’s creations tend to have a darker feel to them.
Noble and Webster work as a collaborative partnership and are linked with the “post-YBA” generation of artists who have emerged over the last decade, following on from the Young British Artists of the 1990s such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the like.
It could be said that Noble and Webster’s shadow sculptures are a load of rubbish – quite literally – since they incorporate various materials including household waste and scrap metal, in addition to taxidermy animals.
When a light projector is pointed onto these assemblages from a certain angle, they are transformed into immediately recognisable shadow profiles that play on ‘perceptual psychology’ such as that tested in Rorschach inkblot tests.
'Sunset over Manhattan' by Noble and Webster
Here we feature four of Noble and Webster’s artworks. “Sunset over Manhattan” made from cigarette packets and tin cans with holes shot by air gun pellets, all placed on a wooden bench.
'Dirty White Trash' by Noble and Webster
“Dirty White Trash (With Gulls)” puts to good use trash collected by the artists over a six-month period, in combination with two stuffed seagulls.
“Metal Fucking Rats” by Noble and Webster
“Metal Fucking Rats” is a depiction of two randy rodents created from projecting light at welded scrap metal. Taking the scrap metal on its own, it really is difficult to see how such an accurate silhouette could be created.
'Wasted Youth' by Noble and Webster
Finally, piles of replica food and packaging from McDonalds food, plus wood, have been used brilliantly to create a silhouette of a young couple relaxing together in “Wasted Youth”.
To see more of Rashad Alakbarov’s work, please visit www.facebook.com/media/
And to find out more about Tim Noble and Sue Webster, please visit www.timnobleandsuewebster.com
MONDAY MAY 07 2012
Banksy usually employs distinctive stencilling technique to produce graffiti containing some sort of political and social commentary, and his work has featured on streets, walls, and bridges in cities across the globe.
This week we look at the work of his Gallic counterpart, OaKoAk. Like Banksy, OaKoAk is a pseudonym and as, with Banksy, a large degree of speculation surrounds his real identity.
What we do know is OaKoAk is originally from Saint-Étienne, a city in central France that has produced such diverse luminaries as the 18th sculptor Antonin Moine, 20th century contemporary artist Orlan and the current orienteering world champion, Thierry Gueorgiou.
OaKoAk describes himself as “a fun-loving French artist who likes to play with urban elements”. Whether it’s a crack in a wall, a broken drain grill, a crumbling façade or an upended bollard, OaKoAk takes imperfections of the street and uses them to create artworks that are generally less political than those of Banksy, yet still contain a delicious – and sometimes dark – sense of humour.
And if it is not imperfections of the street with which OaKoAk is playing, then it is banal, everyday street features that we are normally unlikely to think twice about to which OaKoAk manages to give a new raison d’être, features such as traffic lights, doorsteps, zebra crossings, stairway banisters and utilities boxes.
To see more of OaKoAk’s work, visit his website here: oakoak.canalblog.com/ and to order OaKoAk’s book – a printed compilation of his work – please visit: www.editionpopulaire.com/blog/oakoak-first-artbook
MONDAY APRIL 23 2012
The Sun, seen in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths
Taylor joined The Atlantic to edit ‘In Focus’, a photography blog featuring photo essays about, in his words, “ . . . a range of subjects, from breaking news and historical topics to culture high and low”.
With a burning passion for telling visual stories on the web, Taylor had previously worked at The Boston Globe where he created and presided over Boston.com’s acclaimed photo-essay feature ‘The Big Picture’ for nearly three years, garnering eight million page views per month in the process.
When Taylor embarked on his ‘In Focus’ journey in February last year, he said: “I have a lot of plans, some small, some big, not necessarily many more pictures or pictures that are much more gigantic, but just going to the next level with it.”
Partial solar eclipse
And the talented photo curator hasn’t disappointed, especially with his cosmic offering earlier last month (March 7th) entitled ‘A Trip Across the Solar System’.
Taylor reflected that NASA’s robotic probes, the European Space Agency and others are all amassing data across the solar system and that there are currently spacecraft in orbit around several planets with some even leaving our solar system altogether.
And even though the Space Shuttle has been decommissioned, Taylor noted that astronauts are carrying out experiments aboard and sending back “amazing photos” from the International Space Station.
“With all these eyes in the sky, I [wanted] to put together a recent photo album of our solar system,” says Taylor. “[It’s] a set of family portraits, of sorts, as seen by our astronauts and mechanical emissaries.”
Featured in Taylor’s fantastic compilation is an excellent view of the Sun (top image), seen in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly aboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Looping lines reveal solar plasma rising and falling along magnetic field lines in the solar atmosphere.
Taylor has selected another view of the sun (second image from top), a partial solar eclipse when the Moon moved in between it and NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite near the end of February.
Saturn's fourth-largest moon Dione
The sixth planet from the Sun, Saturn, has 62 known moons orbiting it and the fourth largest, Dione, can be seen here through the haze of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, in this colour photo chosen by Taylor and snapped from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
A “Blue Marble” image of the earth
Closer to home now and this NASA photo shows a “Blue Marble” image of the Earth taken from the The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite instrument aboard NASA’s Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP. It is a composite image that uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface.
Swirling cloud formation capped by the green aura borealis
A swirling cloud formation and the lights of the Aurora Borealis are seen here from the International Space Station above the Gulf of Alaska.
Night-time view from the International Space Station
The International Space Station also captured this superb night-time shot of the USA’s east coast. In the foreground, a pair of Russian vehicles parked at the orbital outpost can be seen.
Unpiloted ISS Progress
An unpiloted ISS Progress resupply vehicle approaches the International Space Station, carrying nearly three tons of food, fuel and equipment for the residents of the space station.
Russian support personnel
Above, Russian support personnel work to help get Expedition 29 crew members out of the Soyuz TMA-02M spacecraft shortly after the capsule landed outside of the town of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan in November.
Russian cosmonaut
Meanwhile, Expedition 30’s flight engineer Russian cosmonaut, Anton Shkaplerov, here participates in a six-hour, 15-minute session of extravehicular activity to continue outfitting the International Space Station.
To see all these cosmic photos (and more) in a larger format and to find out more about Alan Taylor’s ‘In Focus’ photography blog, please visit www.theatlantic.com/infocus/
SUNDAY APRIL 01 2012
The Barcelona-born artist recently put his architectural visualisation day job on hold to take stock of his professional situation. But in the process his imagination became unleashed and these images – or imaginings – are the stunning results of his highly-productive career break.
Buildings have always been an important for Enrich. His grandfather and great grandfather were both in construction and by the age of 18, Enrich already mastered Autocad, a software application for computer-aided design in 2D and 3D. He studied architecture at university and, on graduating, found work through his teachers.
“My teachers, all architects, became my first clients,” he says. “I was on top of the world, being asked to do renderings, renderings and more renderings, getting fast and easy money by doing something that I had learnt before university.”
Looping 2007 Riga - "View from the Latvian movie director Liga Gaisa´s window facing the River Daugava. The bridge bends upwards when reaching the energy of the water. In the other side of the river, the TV building. In those years, a big pharaonic highway bridge was being built 2 miles south. The budget of this bridge was 3 or even 4 times the original while the society of Riga was starting to suffer from the the beginning of a deep crisis."
But Enrich soon realised that the more he worked like this, the more dissatisfied he was becoming.
“I had become an expert technician but was using zero per cent of my imagination," he says. “I had to make a radical decision, so I stopped working, and lived on my savings, starting a process of reunion with myself through CG (computer graphics). It began as a simple technical exercise to see what my real skills were about. Then, slowly, all my imagination started to flow.”
This process has seen Enrich live in Riga, Latvia and Munich, Germany, the settings for the above artworks, in addition to – and probably most influentially – Israel. Below, Enrich takes us through some of his work inspired from his time in the latter country.
Deportation: “The State of Israel considered that my being an artist was an activity that I couldn’t do with a tourist visa, so I had to leave. In this last project I transformed the three Aizrieli towers into three big sirens. Israel is a country of sirens, and on the special days like the Holocaust day or the Memorial Day, the sirens’ characteristic sound takes your breath away.”
Medusa: “The Orchid Hotel. The balconies try to reach the best view towards the sea. In those days, I was swimming in the beach every morning, and one day I got attacked by a giant jellyfish.”
Mersand: “The left wing intellectuals of the city gravitate towards the Café Mersand. It is the maximum expression of the Tel Aviv bubble, apparently unaware of all the conflicts that are taking place with Palestinians just few miles away. I decided to implement this bubble concept by isolating the building on top of a rock, in the middle of a desert.”
Shalom 2 Tel Aviv 2009: "Dedicated to the most emblematic, and tallest for many years, skyscraper of Israel. His shape always invited me to zip it up and down and what’s inside… This view is taken from the window of a 2 floor house located in the historical Neve Tsdek (Oasis of Justice) neighbourhood…the house is an astonishing private museum of Madkot, the Israeli beach tennis, with more that 1 hundred rackets."
For more information on Victor Enrich, please visit:victorenrich.com/gallery
SUNDAY MARCH 25 2012
One of Burden’s latest offerings, ‘Metropolis II’, is also car-related, though any personal distress that he has put himself through for this creation will simply have been down to the hours he has had to invest in, and the sheer scale of, what is being hailed as a mechanical masterpiece.
‘Metropolis II’ is an intense and a complex kinetic sculpture, modelled on a fast-paced, frenetic city that straddles the present and the future.
Steel beams form an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of 18 roadways, including one six-lane freeway, and HO scale rail tracks.
Miniature cars speed through the city along translucent roads at a scale equivalent speed of 386km/h (240mph). Every hour, the equivalent of approximately 100,000 cars circulate through the dense network of buildings made from glass, ceramics, wood and even Lego.
It took Burden and his chief engineer Zak Cook more than four years to create ‘Metropolis II’ including research, development and construction in Burden’s California studio.
Burden confesses to no real interest in transport or urban planning – more toys in fact – but he wanted to embark on such a massive undertaking because he and Cook had spent so much time and effort on developing ‘Metropolis II’s forerunner.
‘Metropolis I’, which had a mere 80 toy cars bombing around on single-lane highways, was sold to a Japanese museum that exhibited it for six months before locking it away.
‘Metropolis II’, on the other hand, has been loaned to Los Angeles County Museum of Art for display over the next decade by a collector who bought the sculpture at the end of last year for millions of dollars.
Apart from the sheer size of the installation, there are intricate touches that reflect the detail and endeavour that has gone into designing the cars and the roads.
For example, traffic flow has been maximised and vehicular disasters minimised by using lane dividers that act as natural brakes for the cars on corners.
The cars have also been specially manufactured in China to Burden’s specifications, which include extra strong axles.
When the cars get to the bottom of a hill, magnets in the track catch on and pull them back up a slope to the top.
Despite all these refinements, ‘Metropolis II’ still requires two full-time attendants while it’s running, one standing in the centre of it and one outside to monitor traffic flow.
“I’ve seen spectacular pile-ups involving cars that spill off the road and derail trains,” says Burden of his creation. “Every hour, 100,000 cars circulate through the system, so you’re going to get some glitches. It’s not digitised.”
In real life though, that is how Burden wishes all roads will be – digitised.
Indeed, ‘Metropolis II’ is certainly no utopia; for a start green spaces are conspicuous by their absence and the landscape is more reminiscent of a city of the future conceived last century, rather than one thought up today (in fact, it is a little like that which features in the 1927 Fritz Lang film ‘Metropolis’).
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“Only in the speed of the cars is this the city of the future,” says Burden. “The city of the future is that every car is going to be controlled. Rigidly controlled. Controlled by Google, not by a driver.
“It’s insane that somebody’s who’s drunk or having a heart attack or is a teenager on speed can drive a two-ton diesel projectile. It’s insane! My dream for the city of the future is that the cars go faster and be totally automated.”
Burden adds: “Metropolis II is not about making a scale model of anything, it’s more to evoke the energy of a city, and the sound is a really important part of it. I love hearing that the cars are going at 230mph. It provides a tension, more than anything else. It’s not just seeing the cars go around, it’s the noise level.
“The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the speeding toy cars, produces in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic, active and bustling city. We wanted to make it truly overwhelming. The noise and level of activity are both mesmerizing and anxiety provoking.”
You can experience some of that noise and gain an excellent insight into the project by watching Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s documentary film (above) that followed the creation of ‘Metropolis II’ in Burden’s studio.
For more information on Chris Burden’s work, please visit: www.lacma.org/video/directors-series-chris-burden
Art from Light and Shadow
Azerbaijan is currently gearing up for hosting the Eurovision Song Contest in Baku, Saturday, May 26th, a privilege - or'fate' depending on your view on the contest - bestowed on them after their triumph in last year’s edition.But for those who are looking for a slightly more cerebral artistic offering coming out of the Azerbaijani capital Baku, you need look no further than Rashad Alakbarov, a skilful sculptor of shadow and light.
Since Alakbarov graduated from Baku’s Faculty of Decorative Arts at the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Art in 2001, he has dabbled in painting, theatre decorations, video art and architectural design.
But some of Alakbarov’s best work has been his installation art pieces that use shadow and light to very impressive effect.
Alakbarov gathers everyday objects – sometimes solid, sometimes translucent – to block and manipulate light projected against them to create landscapes, cityscapes, portraits and text-centred ‘paintings’.
'Looking at two cities from one point of view' by Rashad Alakbarov
His “Looking at two cities from one point of view” piece uses two light sources to project an eastern city with mosque on one wall, and a western city with skyscrapers on another.
Plastik portret by Rashad Alakbarov
“Plastik portret” uses suspended plastic bottles to create a charcoal-like portrait of one of Alakbarov’s friends.
'Crisis Haha' by Rashad Alakbarov
And “Crisis Haha” sees the same structure of metal pipes form two different words – “Crisis” and “Haha” – when light is shone against it from two different angles.
Alakbarov’s work is reminiscent of pieces created by British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster, though this pair’s creations tend to have a darker feel to them.
Noble and Webster work as a collaborative partnership and are linked with the “post-YBA” generation of artists who have emerged over the last decade, following on from the Young British Artists of the 1990s such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the like.
It could be said that Noble and Webster’s shadow sculptures are a load of rubbish – quite literally – since they incorporate various materials including household waste and scrap metal, in addition to taxidermy animals.
When a light projector is pointed onto these assemblages from a certain angle, they are transformed into immediately recognisable shadow profiles that play on ‘perceptual psychology’ such as that tested in Rorschach inkblot tests.
'Sunset over Manhattan' by Noble and Webster
Here we feature four of Noble and Webster’s artworks. “Sunset over Manhattan” made from cigarette packets and tin cans with holes shot by air gun pellets, all placed on a wooden bench.
'Dirty White Trash' by Noble and Webster
“Dirty White Trash (With Gulls)” puts to good use trash collected by the artists over a six-month period, in combination with two stuffed seagulls.
“Metal Fucking Rats” by Noble and Webster
“Metal Fucking Rats” is a depiction of two randy rodents created from projecting light at welded scrap metal. Taking the scrap metal on its own, it really is difficult to see how such an accurate silhouette could be created.
'Wasted Youth' by Noble and Webster
Finally, piles of replica food and packaging from McDonalds food, plus wood, have been used brilliantly to create a silhouette of a young couple relaxing together in “Wasted Youth”.
To see more of Rashad Alakbarov’s work, please visit www.facebook.com/media/
And to find out more about Tim Noble and Sue Webster, please visit www.timnobleandsuewebster.com
MONDAY MAY 07 2012
Street Art by OaKoAk
A few years ago we featured the satirical street art and subversive epigrams of the pseudonymous England-based street artist Banksy on A Parallel World.Banksy usually employs distinctive stencilling technique to produce graffiti containing some sort of political and social commentary, and his work has featured on streets, walls, and bridges in cities across the globe.
This week we look at the work of his Gallic counterpart, OaKoAk. Like Banksy, OaKoAk is a pseudonym and as, with Banksy, a large degree of speculation surrounds his real identity.
What we do know is OaKoAk is originally from Saint-Étienne, a city in central France that has produced such diverse luminaries as the 18th sculptor Antonin Moine, 20th century contemporary artist Orlan and the current orienteering world champion, Thierry Gueorgiou.
OaKoAk describes himself as “a fun-loving French artist who likes to play with urban elements”. Whether it’s a crack in a wall, a broken drain grill, a crumbling façade or an upended bollard, OaKoAk takes imperfections of the street and uses them to create artworks that are generally less political than those of Banksy, yet still contain a delicious – and sometimes dark – sense of humour.
And if it is not imperfections of the street with which OaKoAk is playing, then it is banal, everyday street features that we are normally unlikely to think twice about to which OaKoAk manages to give a new raison d’être, features such as traffic lights, doorsteps, zebra crossings, stairway banisters and utilities boxes.
To see more of OaKoAk’s work, visit his website here: oakoak.canalblog.com/ and to order OaKoAk’s book – a printed compilation of his work – please visit: www.editionpopulaire.com/blog/oakoak-first-artbook
MONDAY APRIL 23 2012
These photos are - quite literally - out of this world.
For over a year now, Alan Taylor’s discerning eye has been gracing the pages of theatlantic.com, the website of the celebrated American literary and cultural commentary magazine The Atlantic.The Sun, seen in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths
Taylor joined The Atlantic to edit ‘In Focus’, a photography blog featuring photo essays about, in his words, “ . . . a range of subjects, from breaking news and historical topics to culture high and low”.
With a burning passion for telling visual stories on the web, Taylor had previously worked at The Boston Globe where he created and presided over Boston.com’s acclaimed photo-essay feature ‘The Big Picture’ for nearly three years, garnering eight million page views per month in the process.
When Taylor embarked on his ‘In Focus’ journey in February last year, he said: “I have a lot of plans, some small, some big, not necessarily many more pictures or pictures that are much more gigantic, but just going to the next level with it.”
Partial solar eclipse
And the talented photo curator hasn’t disappointed, especially with his cosmic offering earlier last month (March 7th) entitled ‘A Trip Across the Solar System’.
Taylor reflected that NASA’s robotic probes, the European Space Agency and others are all amassing data across the solar system and that there are currently spacecraft in orbit around several planets with some even leaving our solar system altogether.
And even though the Space Shuttle has been decommissioned, Taylor noted that astronauts are carrying out experiments aboard and sending back “amazing photos” from the International Space Station.
“With all these eyes in the sky, I [wanted] to put together a recent photo album of our solar system,” says Taylor. “[It’s] a set of family portraits, of sorts, as seen by our astronauts and mechanical emissaries.”
Featured in Taylor’s fantastic compilation is an excellent view of the Sun (top image), seen in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly aboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Looping lines reveal solar plasma rising and falling along magnetic field lines in the solar atmosphere.
Taylor has selected another view of the sun (second image from top), a partial solar eclipse when the Moon moved in between it and NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite near the end of February.
Saturn's fourth-largest moon Dione
The sixth planet from the Sun, Saturn, has 62 known moons orbiting it and the fourth largest, Dione, can be seen here through the haze of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, in this colour photo chosen by Taylor and snapped from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
A “Blue Marble” image of the earth
Closer to home now and this NASA photo shows a “Blue Marble” image of the Earth taken from the The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite instrument aboard NASA’s Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP. It is a composite image that uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface.
Swirling cloud formation capped by the green aura borealis
A swirling cloud formation and the lights of the Aurora Borealis are seen here from the International Space Station above the Gulf of Alaska.
Night-time view from the International Space Station
The International Space Station also captured this superb night-time shot of the USA’s east coast. In the foreground, a pair of Russian vehicles parked at the orbital outpost can be seen.
Unpiloted ISS Progress
An unpiloted ISS Progress resupply vehicle approaches the International Space Station, carrying nearly three tons of food, fuel and equipment for the residents of the space station.
Russian support personnel
Above, Russian support personnel work to help get Expedition 29 crew members out of the Soyuz TMA-02M spacecraft shortly after the capsule landed outside of the town of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan in November.
Russian cosmonaut
Meanwhile, Expedition 30’s flight engineer Russian cosmonaut, Anton Shkaplerov, here participates in a six-hour, 15-minute session of extravehicular activity to continue outfitting the International Space Station.
To see all these cosmic photos (and more) in a larger format and to find out more about Alan Taylor’s ‘In Focus’ photography blog, please visit www.theatlantic.com/infocus/
SUNDAY APRIL 01 2012
Real Buildings, Surreal Images
Computer Graphics Artist Victor Enrich has created some playfully surreal portraits of real-life buildings with his digitally enhanced photos .The Barcelona-born artist recently put his architectural visualisation day job on hold to take stock of his professional situation. But in the process his imagination became unleashed and these images – or imaginings – are the stunning results of his highly-productive career break.
Buildings have always been an important for Enrich. His grandfather and great grandfather were both in construction and by the age of 18, Enrich already mastered Autocad, a software application for computer-aided design in 2D and 3D. He studied architecture at university and, on graduating, found work through his teachers.
“My teachers, all architects, became my first clients,” he says. “I was on top of the world, being asked to do renderings, renderings and more renderings, getting fast and easy money by doing something that I had learnt before university.”
Looping 2007 Riga - "View from the Latvian movie director Liga Gaisa´s window facing the River Daugava. The bridge bends upwards when reaching the energy of the water. In the other side of the river, the TV building. In those years, a big pharaonic highway bridge was being built 2 miles south. The budget of this bridge was 3 or even 4 times the original while the society of Riga was starting to suffer from the the beginning of a deep crisis."
But Enrich soon realised that the more he worked like this, the more dissatisfied he was becoming.
“I had become an expert technician but was using zero per cent of my imagination," he says. “I had to make a radical decision, so I stopped working, and lived on my savings, starting a process of reunion with myself through CG (computer graphics). It began as a simple technical exercise to see what my real skills were about. Then, slowly, all my imagination started to flow.”
This process has seen Enrich live in Riga, Latvia and Munich, Germany, the settings for the above artworks, in addition to – and probably most influentially – Israel. Below, Enrich takes us through some of his work inspired from his time in the latter country.
Deportation: “The State of Israel considered that my being an artist was an activity that I couldn’t do with a tourist visa, so I had to leave. In this last project I transformed the three Aizrieli towers into three big sirens. Israel is a country of sirens, and on the special days like the Holocaust day or the Memorial Day, the sirens’ characteristic sound takes your breath away.”
Medusa: “The Orchid Hotel. The balconies try to reach the best view towards the sea. In those days, I was swimming in the beach every morning, and one day I got attacked by a giant jellyfish.”
Mersand: “The left wing intellectuals of the city gravitate towards the Café Mersand. It is the maximum expression of the Tel Aviv bubble, apparently unaware of all the conflicts that are taking place with Palestinians just few miles away. I decided to implement this bubble concept by isolating the building on top of a rock, in the middle of a desert.”
Shalom 2 Tel Aviv 2009: "Dedicated to the most emblematic, and tallest for many years, skyscraper of Israel. His shape always invited me to zip it up and down and what’s inside… This view is taken from the window of a 2 floor house located in the historical Neve Tsdek (Oasis of Justice) neighbourhood…the house is an astonishing private museum of Madkot, the Israeli beach tennis, with more that 1 hundred rackets."
For more information on Victor Enrich, please visit:victorenrich.com/gallery
SUNDAY MARCH 25 2012
Metropolis II - A Dynamic Scale City (and the Ultimate Model Train-Car Set)
Chris Burden knows how to take his art to extremes. The Boston-born artist once had a friend shoot him in the arm in a gallery for his 1971 piece, aptly titled ‘Shoot’. Three years later, Burden performed ‘Trans-fixed’ where he was nailed to the back of a VW Beetle (as you do).One of Burden’s latest offerings, ‘Metropolis II’, is also car-related, though any personal distress that he has put himself through for this creation will simply have been down to the hours he has had to invest in, and the sheer scale of, what is being hailed as a mechanical masterpiece.
‘Metropolis II’ is an intense and a complex kinetic sculpture, modelled on a fast-paced, frenetic city that straddles the present and the future.
Steel beams form an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of 18 roadways, including one six-lane freeway, and HO scale rail tracks.
Miniature cars speed through the city along translucent roads at a scale equivalent speed of 386km/h (240mph). Every hour, the equivalent of approximately 100,000 cars circulate through the dense network of buildings made from glass, ceramics, wood and even Lego.
It took Burden and his chief engineer Zak Cook more than four years to create ‘Metropolis II’ including research, development and construction in Burden’s California studio.
Burden confesses to no real interest in transport or urban planning – more toys in fact – but he wanted to embark on such a massive undertaking because he and Cook had spent so much time and effort on developing ‘Metropolis II’s forerunner.
‘Metropolis I’, which had a mere 80 toy cars bombing around on single-lane highways, was sold to a Japanese museum that exhibited it for six months before locking it away.
‘Metropolis II’, on the other hand, has been loaned to Los Angeles County Museum of Art for display over the next decade by a collector who bought the sculpture at the end of last year for millions of dollars.
Apart from the sheer size of the installation, there are intricate touches that reflect the detail and endeavour that has gone into designing the cars and the roads.
For example, traffic flow has been maximised and vehicular disasters minimised by using lane dividers that act as natural brakes for the cars on corners.
The cars have also been specially manufactured in China to Burden’s specifications, which include extra strong axles.
When the cars get to the bottom of a hill, magnets in the track catch on and pull them back up a slope to the top.
Despite all these refinements, ‘Metropolis II’ still requires two full-time attendants while it’s running, one standing in the centre of it and one outside to monitor traffic flow.
“I’ve seen spectacular pile-ups involving cars that spill off the road and derail trains,” says Burden of his creation. “Every hour, 100,000 cars circulate through the system, so you’re going to get some glitches. It’s not digitised.”
In real life though, that is how Burden wishes all roads will be – digitised.
Indeed, ‘Metropolis II’ is certainly no utopia; for a start green spaces are conspicuous by their absence and the landscape is more reminiscent of a city of the future conceived last century, rather than one thought up today (in fact, it is a little like that which features in the 1927 Fritz Lang film ‘Metropolis’).
“Only in the speed of the cars is this the city of the future,” says Burden. “The city of the future is that every car is going to be controlled. Rigidly controlled. Controlled by Google, not by a driver.
“It’s insane that somebody’s who’s drunk or having a heart attack or is a teenager on speed can drive a two-ton diesel projectile. It’s insane! My dream for the city of the future is that the cars go faster and be totally automated.”
Burden adds: “Metropolis II is not about making a scale model of anything, it’s more to evoke the energy of a city, and the sound is a really important part of it. I love hearing that the cars are going at 230mph. It provides a tension, more than anything else. It’s not just seeing the cars go around, it’s the noise level.
“The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the speeding toy cars, produces in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic, active and bustling city. We wanted to make it truly overwhelming. The noise and level of activity are both mesmerizing and anxiety provoking.”
You can experience some of that noise and gain an excellent insight into the project by watching Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s documentary film (above) that followed the creation of ‘Metropolis II’ in Burden’s studio.
For more information on Chris Burden’s work, please visit: www.lacma.org/video/directors-series-chris-burden
