Monday 29 March 2010

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

29th March
Barbican Centre
London

This installation at the Barbican consisted of around 30 Zebra Finches flying around a curved room with guitars and cymbals on stands plugged in to speakers. They managed to create some fantastic sounds as they landed on the guitar strings or attempted to make a nest by wedging grass between them.



Bringing animals into the gallery space is something that Mircea Cantor has also experimented with quite a few times. In 'Deeparture' a deer and a wolf are left alone in a room of a gallery and the work is a film which shows how they react to one another, the deer being very on edge and the wolf behaving very nonchalant.

Monday 8 March 2010

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

Running Fence Sonomo Snd Marin Counties, California, 1972-76


Whilst working on my current project - erecting a stile over one of the side gates at Kelvingrove Park Bandstand, I was advised to look at the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, most notably 'Running Fence'. This piece is a tremendous realization resulting from endless negotiations and raising issues addressing ownership, boarders, temporality, individuals vs. the state.


Running Fence, 5.5 meters (eighteen feet) high, 39.4 kilometers (twenty-four and one-half miles) long, extending East-West near Freeway 101, north of San Francisco, on the private properties of fifty-nine ranchers, following rolling hills and dropping down to the Pacific Ocean at Bodega Bay, was completed on September 10, 1976.

All parts of Running Fence's structure were designed for complete removal and no visible evidence of Running Fence remains on the hills of Sonoma and Marin Counties.

As it had been agreed with the ranchers and with the County, State and Federal Agencies, the removal of Running Fence started fourteen days after its completion and all materials were given to the ranchers.

Running Fence crossed fourteen roads and the town of Valley Ford, leaving passage for cars, cattle and wildlife, and was designed to be viewed by following 65 kilometers (forty miles) of public roads, in Sonoma and Marin Counties.