Also in Utah: "Sun Tunnels" by Nancy Holt.
I haven't posted a "vlogbrothers" video on here yet, and this seems as nice a one as any for the unititated. Brothers John and Hank Green are pioneers in the act of turning youtube into a bona fide educational aid with love. They've also managed to keep up a weekly tradition of sending each other macroscopic little musings like the one below. Here, John touches on a couple of subjects close to this blog: not just the monolith in Utah that was discovered on Tuesday then went missing on Sunday, but its place in the greater tradition of Enormous Object Arrangement. This primary artistic impulse, which I described as "looking cool", and to which I attributed the building of Stone Henge, John identifies as "the mysterium tremendum", meaning it's the mystery that thrills. That sense of mystery doesn't have to come from not knowing who the artist is though, it can come from... Well I don't know where it comes from. That's the mystery. Maybe whatever animal part of our brain first felt hope is just triggered when we recognise the work of something other than weather, even if we made the thing ourselves. But I don't know. That's why I'm irked when people talk about Science versus Religion in terms of "what people need", without ever mentioning Art. As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it: the wider humanity's circle of knowlege, the larger its circumference of ignorance. Atheists aren't going to run out of mysteries.
Could it have something to do with the out-of-placeness of these works of art, so to speak? As in, not only you wouldn't expect them to be there, they also look strangely incongruous in the context of an otherwise deserted/non-anthropized location. (Added maybe to the sheer size of the objects themselves, and that no context is given as to their intended purpose/meaning.)
ReplyDeleteOn a smaller, far less impressive/mysterious scale, here's a couple of works of art placed without any sort of context or explanation along a path in the woods. (There were others, even more obscure, but my camera just can't seem to cope with bad lighting.)
Thanks for that! Out-of-placeness also fires delight, and is something these pieces have in common. They almost feels like a reward for exploring. Like in Skyrim.
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