Alan Stanton
One rock on top of another rock #1
16 July 2013. In London's Kensington Gardens.
The granite boulders remain balanced in place by gravity.
Scuplture/installation by Peter Fischli and the late David Weiss. One of a series of sculptures arranged through the nearby Serpentine Gallery.
The two women and the boy in the photo were other visitors to the Gardens.
These Rocks Are Fakes
This rock-on-rock installation will stay in Kensington Gardens until 6 March 2014. Many people who view my Flickr pages won't have a chance to visit London and see this sculpture. But please don't be too disappointed. Because these are fake rocks. As I will explain.
In any case, I recommend the far better photos, very detailed information, and a video interview with Peter Fischli on the Serpentine Gallery website.
I saw this and other websites after my visit on 16 July. And then began to wonder if I'd have appreciated the sculpture more by visiting the websites first. Or would it have been the opposite: to lessen the impact?
I also viewed the Arup website. This explains that the company:
“working in close collaboration with The Serpentine Gallery and Peter Fischli … made
the installation possible by using state of the art LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging)
surveying technology on the rocks at their original location in North Wales. 3D printing
technology was then used to produce exact physical models at one twentieth of the
scale to explore different balanced configurations of the two rocks.”
In other words, these are not original balanced rocks but a highly accurate and technically sophisticated small-scale model - or larger than usual maquette - of the North Wales originals. Putting it another way, they are a mechanical reproduction. And therefore no more original than a tea-towel* with a picture of the rocks printed on it.
Anyway, who cares? It was a lovely day and I was exploring London with my niece, visiting from abroad. So a walk in Kensington Gardens was a pleasure. But had I been on my own, perhaps I should have skipped a trip to the reproduction boulders. Instead I could have just read the newspaper articles; and enjoyed viewing the websites giving the engineering details. And especially the photos, information and video interview with the artist on the Serpentine Gallery's site. Plainly these are now the reality of Art.
_________________________________
§ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Walter Benjamin's essay in Wikipedia.
§ * The tea-towel analogy is "found art" (objet trouvé) from Grayson Perry's Reith Lectures.
One rock on top of another rock #1
16 July 2013. In London's Kensington Gardens.
The granite boulders remain balanced in place by gravity.
Scuplture/installation by Peter Fischli and the late David Weiss. One of a series of sculptures arranged through the nearby Serpentine Gallery.
The two women and the boy in the photo were other visitors to the Gardens.
These Rocks Are Fakes
This rock-on-rock installation will stay in Kensington Gardens until 6 March 2014. Many people who view my Flickr pages won't have a chance to visit London and see this sculpture. But please don't be too disappointed. Because these are fake rocks. As I will explain.
In any case, I recommend the far better photos, very detailed information, and a video interview with Peter Fischli on the Serpentine Gallery website.
I saw this and other websites after my visit on 16 July. And then began to wonder if I'd have appreciated the sculpture more by visiting the websites first. Or would it have been the opposite: to lessen the impact?
I also viewed the Arup website. This explains that the company:
“working in close collaboration with The Serpentine Gallery and Peter Fischli … made
the installation possible by using state of the art LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging)
surveying technology on the rocks at their original location in North Wales. 3D printing
technology was then used to produce exact physical models at one twentieth of the
scale to explore different balanced configurations of the two rocks.”
In other words, these are not original balanced rocks but a highly accurate and technically sophisticated small-scale model - or larger than usual maquette - of the North Wales originals. Putting it another way, they are a mechanical reproduction. And therefore no more original than a tea-towel* with a picture of the rocks printed on it.
Anyway, who cares? It was a lovely day and I was exploring London with my niece, visiting from abroad. So a walk in Kensington Gardens was a pleasure. But had I been on my own, perhaps I should have skipped a trip to the reproduction boulders. Instead I could have just read the newspaper articles; and enjoyed viewing the websites giving the engineering details. And especially the photos, information and video interview with the artist on the Serpentine Gallery's site. Plainly these are now the reality of Art.
_________________________________
§ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Walter Benjamin's essay in Wikipedia.
§ * The tea-towel analogy is "found art" (objet trouvé) from Grayson Perry's Reith Lectures.