From The Boston Globe, “Earlier this week, 1.5 million people filled the streets of Berlin, Germany to watch a several-day performance by France’s Royal de Luxe street theatre company titled “The Berlin Reunion”. Part of the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Reunion show featured two massive marionettes, the Big Giant, a deep-sea diver, and his niece, the Little Giantess. The storyline of the performance has the two separated by a wall, thrown up by “land and sea monsters”. The Big Giant has just returned from a long and difficult - but successful - expedition to destroy the wall, and now the two are walking the streets of Berlin, seeking each other after many years apart. I’ll let the photos below tell the rest of the story.”
From Independent.ie: “Since he saw Dresden being bombed as a boy, Victor Langheld wanted to know ‘why these things happen’. So at 25 he went to India to try to find the answer. The result is a unique sculpture park in Co Wicklow. Alison Bourke reports In a field, behind a raggedy hedge near Roundwood in Co Wicklow, live six giant granite Indian elephants, a fasting Buddha, and a huge forefinger.
Two examples from the UK artist/doodle-bug Charlotte Mann. What does she need to create her incredibly convincing trompe l’oeil? Just black markers and a blank wall.
It’s commonly known that Frank Lloyd Wright served as inspiration for the Howard Roark character in Ayn Rand‘s The Fountainhead. Last weekend, though, the LA Times made note of the lesser-known correspondence between the two that preceded that book’s publication.
Wright, it seems, wasn’t initially eager to meet with Rand (maybe he sensed, even then, their ideological differences?), but their letter-writing “evolved into a robust exchange of ideas as well as this: a preliminary rendering of a ‘cottage studio,’ in colored pencil on paper, that the legendary architect crafted for Rand.” The rendering (above) apparently left quite an impression on her:
The house you designed for me is magnificent. I gasped when I saw it. It is the particular kind of sculpture in space which I love and which nobody but you has ever been able to achieve. I was not very coherent when I told you what kind of house I wanted—and I had the impression that you did not approve of what I said. Yet you designed exactly the house I hoped to have. The next time somebody accuses you of cruelty and inconsideration toward clients, refer them to me.
My views on Rand’s Objectivism aside, it’s too bad the cottage studio was never constructed. While preparing for the filming of King Vidor’s The Fountainhead, Rand flirted with moving out to Los Angeles, but ultimately decided she was better off in Manhattan.
One of Rand’s early letters went to great lengths to assure Wright that her Roark was not about him per se, “My hero is not you. I do not intend to follow in the novel the events of your life and career.”
Well, if Rand had followed Wright’s career, it would certainly have been interesting to see how her novel might have accommodated the below ‘56 clip from What’s My Line. In it, the master architect plays the game show’s “mystery guest.” (That’s Rat Packer and JFK brother-in-law Peter Lawford blindfolded on the right.)
About Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, ” Born in England in 1962 and raised in Nigeria, Yinka Shonibare currently lives and works in London, where he has gained international attention by exploring issues of race and class through a range of media that includes sculpture, painting, photography, and installation art. Adopting a richly complex, unconventional approach, Shonibare lampoons the concept of achieving status through what might be called cultural authenticity. His works, simultaneously innocent and subversive, address a range of cultural and historical issues and, in the process, blur the boundaries of design, ethnography, and contemporary art.”
Crazy! Launch photographer Ben Cooper used a sound-triggered camera to capture this intense shot of the launch of a Delta 4-Heavy rocket from close range. His lens was destroyed!
About artist Anne Hardy: “Hardy’s images appear to be photographs of existing places but they are quite the opposite. They are actually carefully constructed sets, created by the artist in her studio, which she then photographs. The subjects of Hardy’s artworks are usually objects or junk which she has found in markets, DIY shops, urban skips or jumble sales. The type of objects she chooses have ranged from large antlers, brightly coloured cables, old Christmas trees, light bulbs, American basketballs, orange balloons, scientific test tubes and even butterflies. Hardy puts these everyday objects together and transforms them into unusual, almost dreamlike, environments which can be unnerving with their themes of abandonment and desolation. The fabricated scenes of Hardy’s work reflect and comment on modern life in the western world, how people try to manipulate the space around them and how objects bought can too frequently be taken for granted or thrown away.”