Categoriearchief: Visual Arts

Alienated Nature

Panamarenko
Archeopterix

Panamarenko

In his art works Panamarenko brings the wonderful world of technics and natural sciences back to life. In this way the dream of free and unhindered move, and the aesthetic aspect of the scientific analysis regain their place in the world they belong to: the world of the human being determining its position within the nature. In his projects the artist freely and inventively plays with the formal rules of mechanics and physics.
Owing to the unrestrained development of scientific knowledge the complexity of the idea of nature did also proportionally increase. This is the reason of the paradox that the human being of today is alienated from nature of which it nevertheless always deepened its knowledge.

Raven’s Variable Matrix, 2000

panamarenko raven

Meikever, 1975

Stone Age

Stones are the core of our planet. You can find them almost anywhere in what we call our ‘natural environment’ (mountains, desserts, oceans). Homo Sapiens created two new kind of stones: bricks and concrete. Slowly they are taking over the natural environment.

stones

stone

Maarten Vanden Eynde, ‘Genetologic Research Nr. 3’, 2003

river

Genetologic Research Nr. 3 was made in France during the international symposium Art & Nature which was dealing with the river l’Hers that runs through the village of St-Colombe. Several stones out of massive blocks of bricked wall were created and displayed in the current of the river. As more and more big city beaches are being submerged by human made stones, these contemporary stones were introduced in the acient French village as a memory for the future. On two other occasions they were dispayed inside as separate sculptures.

tent

‘Genetologic Research Nr. 5’, 2003 (40cm x 25cm x 25cm)

Heerlen

Cadillac Ranch

ANT FARM (Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, Doug Michels)

Build in 1974, Cadillac Ranch was made up of ten Cadillacs, ranging from a 1949 Club Coupe to a 1963 Sedan, buried fin-up in a wheat field in Texas. The piece was contructed in four days using a motorized back-hoe and low-tech surveying tools. On the fifth day the work was unveiled. In the tradition of readymades, the work uses mass-produced parts which have symbolic overtones. The Cadillac was a status symbol in 1960s America, indicating that the owner was financially succesful and had therefor ‘made it’. By using the Cadillacs as mere component parts of a work, ANT FARM subverted their symbolic function. The piece functions as a kind of cemetery, a comment on social values as well as their deathly polluting effect on the environment.

ranch

ranch 2

Tree Mountain – A Living Time Capsule

Agnes Denes

A Huge man-made mountain measuring 240m long, 270m wide, 28m high and elliptical in shape was planted with 10.000 trees by 10.000 people from all over the world at Pinziö gravel pits near Ylöjärvi, Finland, as part of a massive earthwork and land reclamation project. The project was officialy announced by the Finish government at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro on Earth Environment Day.<5 June 1992> as Finlands contribution to help alleviate the world’s ecological stress. Sponsored by the United Nations Environmental Program and the Finnish Ministry of Environment, Tree Mountain is protected land to be maintained for four centuries, eventualy creating a real (virgin) forest. The trees are planted in an intricate mathematical pattern derived from a combination of the golden section and pineapple/sunflower patterns. Tree Mountain is the largest monument on earth that is international in scope, unparalleled in duration, and not dedicated to the human ego, but to benefit future generations with a meaningful legacy. Tree mountain, conceived in 1982, affirms humanity’s commitment to the future as well as to the ecological, social and cultural life on the planet. It is designed to unite the human intellect with the majesty of nature.

mountain

tree mountain

The Lightning Field

Walter De Maria

The Lightning Field, 1977, by the American sculptor Walter De Maria, is a work of Land Art situated in a remote area of the high desert of southwestern New Mexico. It is comprised of 400 polished stainless steel poles installed in a grid array measuring one mile by one kilometer. The poles-two inches in diameter and averaging 20 feet and 7½ inches in height-are spaced 220 feet apart and have solid pointed tips that define a horizontal plane. Only after a lightning strike has advanced to an area of about 61 m above the The Lightning Fielf can it sense the poles. The experience of the work directly in nature, the effect of the changing light, the shifting space, heat and the sense of waiting for a specific event (the lightning) heightens the viewer’s sense of scale and time.

Lightning Field

Genetologic Research Nr. 5bis, 2003 (100cm x 100cm x 450cm) 1km long

Maarten Vanden Eynde Dakpark

Maarten Vanden Eynde

Bospolder Tussen Dijken, 2003, by the Belgian sculptor Maarten Vanden Eynde, is a work of Land Art in a remote area of Bospolder Tussendijken, near Rotterdam, The Netherlands. It is comprised of 34 wooden beams installed in plastic tubs and covered with earth. Each pole is 450 cm in length and weighs, together with the tub, about 500 kilo. The whole work stretches out over 1 km. The wood is bended, twisted and stretched because of the weather conditions and the changing of seasons.

boom-alleen

Joseph Beuys

Beuys’ planting of 7000 oak trees troughout the city of Kassel for Documenta7 embodied a wide concept of ecology which grows with time. 7000 trees were planted next to a basalt stone marker. Beuys stated that the project is a ‘movement of the human capacity towards a new concept of art, in symbolic communication with nature.’ The first tree was planted in 1982; the last tree was planted eighteen months after Beuys’ death at the opening of Documenta8 in 1987 by his son Wenzel Beuys.

‘I believe that planting these oaks is necessary not only in biospheric terms, that is to say, in the context of matter and ecology, but in that it will raise ecological consciousness-raise it increasingly, in the course of the years to come, because we shall never stop planting.’

‘I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet.’

-Joseph Beuys, quoted by Johannes Stuttgen, 1982

7000 oaks

beuys

beuys2

The Earth seen from the Moon

Maarten Vanden Eynde

The Earth seen from the Moon (2005) is a work made for an equally named exhibition curated by Marco Altavilla in the Cesare Manzo Gallery in Pescara, Italy. It’s a bruised UN blue helmet with all the placenames that are given to the moon copied on the exact same location as on the 3D map of the moon. The bumps correspond with the seas and the craters. In the exhibition, the helmet was inside a closed space, and spinning around when pushed on a button. You had to look at the helmet through a telescope.

The Earth Seen From The Moon, 2005 (25cm x 20cm x 20cm)

un-helmet

The Moon is the Earth only natural satellite. It is a barren, heavily cratered world, lacking water or an atmosphere. Tidel forces have ensured that the same side of the Moon now always faces the Earth. As the Moon travels round the Earth in the course of a month, it undergoes the familiar cycle of phases. The Moon shines only by reflected sunlight; the proportion of the sunlit side visible from Earth depends on the relative alignment of the Sun, Earth and Moon, which changes continuously over the Moon’s orbital period.
The terrain on the nearside falls into two basic types: the heavily cratered, light-coloured highlands, and the darker, more sparsely cratered maria (seas).

The maria have roughly circular outlines, a relic of their formation in the early history of the Moon by the impact of large meteorites.
The way the Moon formed is uncertain, but it has existed as a separate body for around 4,500 million years. Early in its life it became hot and molten. As it cooled, the crust formed but it was heavily cratered by impact of large numbers of meteorites, the largest of which created the mare basins. These subsequently filled with dark basaltic lavas. Significant volcanic activity then ceased, at least 2,000 million years ago.
The mean distance from Earth to the Moon is 384,400 km. The Moon’s radius is 1,738 km; mean density is 3.34 g/cm3.

moonmap

Growth Rings of Wooden Beams

Giuseppe Penone

Among the central members of the Arte Povera group, Penone was perhaps the one most drawn to organic materials. In a series of sculptures begun in 1969, for instance, the artist chiseled through the growth rings of wooden beams to excavate tender saplings from within.

(11-Meter Tree), 1989

penone

Penone made this work using a chainsaw and chisel to cut back the layers of growth from a single timber beam. He worked carefully around the knots to reveal the internal structure of narrow core and developing branches. The form of a young tree is exposed, while part of the beam is left untouched to signify its status as a manmade object. By returning the tree to an earlier stage of its growth, Penone reverses the effects of time.

Maarten Vanden Eynde

Since 2000 Vanden Eynde is working with trees and the remnants of them: wooden beams and sticks. In various attempt to reassemble a tree he used the ever present year rings as natural reference and starting point for his attempts.

Pre-Genetologic Research, 2000 (100cm x 100cm x 450cm) one piece

Maarten Vanden Eynde eschatology nr 2

Pre-Genetologic Research: Stam-Boom, 2001 (100cm x 350cm 100cm)

Maarten Vanden Eynde stam boom

Genetolocic Research Nr. 2&4, 2003 (30cm x 50cm x 180cm)

Maarten Vanden Eynde Genetology nr.2&4

Genetolocic Research Nr. 23, 2005 (50cm x 50cm x 5cm)

Maarten Vanden Eynde Genetology nr.23

With Genetologic Research Nr. 9 Vanden Eynde made the opposite movement by creating a beam from a branch. The wood fibres of the heavy oakwooden branch are followed creating an organic and impossible curved beam. The work was part of a series where wood was being tortured and transformed by machines. The metal boxes on both sides are the only reminders of human interference.

Genetologic Research Nr. 9, 2004 (50cm x 50cm x 250cm)

Maarten Vanden Eynde Genetology nr.9

Modern Archaeology

Mark Dion

Mark Dion is an explorer, naturalist, archaeologist, botanist, historian, and artist all rolled into one. His recent art actions and museum installations have focused on archaeological digs at unusual sites, deemed “historically insignificant” by local historians. A recent dig on the bank of the Thames River in London revealed interesting, if not significant, objects such as medicine bottles, animal bones, pottery shards, and several messages in bottles. As with other dig recoveries, Dion categorized the Thames material and presented it in curiosity cabinets (a term describing the display cases used for cultural artifacts and oddities in the seventeenth century) at the Tate Museum in London. Unlike an archaeologist who scientifically classifies objects to reveal their historical significance, Dion creates his own categories that may tell us more about contemporary culture than that of the past-color, for example, may put a sixteenth century, yellow porcelain fragment next to a Juicy Fruit gum wrapper.

New England Digs, 2002

Mark Dion

Maarten Vanden Eynde

‘In 2004 I went to Tajimi, Japan to master the art of traditional ceramic making. I learned to make a tea ceremony tea-cup, the most valuable ceramic art object, and destroyed it. I labeled it ‘Genetologic Research N.18, 2004 A.C., Tajimi, Japan’ and presented it in a typical conservation-like museum context. It was very hard to explain my motives to the Japanese visitors of the exhibition taking place at the end of my residency, who considered the broken cup as useless. A stonethrow away from the room where my work was shown, in the same building, people where selling little pieces of very old cups on an antique market for extravagant prices. Right now, in 2006, the work is history and as much part of archaeology as any other found object’.

‘Genetologic Research Nr. 18, 2004 A.D., Tajimi, Japan’, 2004
(35cm x 35cm x 20cm)

Genetologisch Onderzoek - Maarten Vanden Eynde

In 2005 I went to Rome, Italy, just after IKEA declared that their catalogue was now the most printed book ever in human history. They beat the bible in the same week as the big boss of IKEA beat Bill Gates and became the richest man on earth.
I descided to preserve an IKEA sample for future generations and dug it under ground in Il Foro Romanum, the old historic center of the Roman Empire. It is an open air museum, where archeologists are digging for eternity.

‘Preservation of IKEA tea cup’, 2005

Genetologisch Onderzoek - Maarten Vanden Eynde