Last week, the Black Rock Arts Foundation coordinated the creation of the Panhandle Bandshell in San Francisco. In part as a recycle advocacy action, the steel armature of the bandshell is sheathed in metal car hoods, decorated with obsolete computer motherboards and backed with a wall of bottles. The project is very collaborative with artists from the Finch Mob and Rebar (The inventors of the Park(ing) project) plus landscape architect Christopher Guillard and structural engineer Mark Sinclair.
Photo: Mike Love
The making of a single building or other artworks from copies of one mass-produced object occurs regularly enough in both architecture and art. Success occurs when the multiple elements merge into an overall form producing a new tactile surface. In the best of circumstances the connotation of both the new form and the old materials heighten the experience of both. Ai Wei Wei’s void of a Chinese temple shaped by the discarded traditional wooden door matches the loss of both religion and small houses in the wave of China’s construction boom. Sam Mockbee utilized the car windshield as a substitute for stained glass in Rural Studio’s 1999 chapel. The windshield is always the most pristine part of the rusting trucks of farm America. In both works by Wei Wei and Mockbee, the repeating form is fun to examine in the new light (literally and figuratively)
Ai Wei Wei archway of Chinese Wooden Doors, 2007
Windshield Chapel, 1999, Auburn University Rural Studio, Samuel Mockbee
Car Windsheilds and Rammed Earth Walls
The Panhandle Bandshell fails to become something else. The artistic imagination is not sparked. The car hoods are just car hoods from the junkyard stacked in a new location in a mathematical pattern. The lyrical, personal choices of the artist are missing.
I don’t see the relationship between bandshell and car hood, except for the possible percussion sounds in the rain. Start to imagine that musical possibility with different sized hoods with different methods of attachments such that multiple tones are produced in the rain. Imagine the long armed wooden mallets hanging inside to “play” the bandshell like steel drums. As the bandshell is played, it might develop the missing lumps of life
Photo Paul Chinn
Make your Reservations for Burning Man
August 27-September 3, 2007 Black Rock Desert Nevada
Just North of Reno
Also sponsored by the Black Rock Arts Foundation, Burning Man must be an amazing event of visual arts and performance. I wish I could attend.
Temporary Black Rock City at Burning Man. Thousands of tents in an arc. Photo: Maurizio Niccolai
Public Art, Public Space
The Black Rock Arts Foundation supports interactive public art projects. Though we share many of the same founders as the Burning Man project (www.burningman.com), the Foundation does not sponsor Burning Man.