Stills from the video ‘God bless America’ (2002) by Tadasu Takamine.
Tadasu Takamine and his lovely assistant shared a room with a huge clay face for eighteen consecutive days. Before the eye of the camera, they ate, slept, read, had sex and made continuous changes to the face, animating it to keep time with a scratchy, halting recording of the American patriotic classic “God Bless America”.
‘The fountain of prosperity’ (2007) by Michael Stevenson
The Fountain of Prosperity (2007) is a reconstruction of the ‘Moniac’, a machine designed in the late 1940s by New Zealand economist Bill Phillips to illustrate the concept of monetary flow in national economies. A fixed volume of red-dyed water, representing money, is pumped through a system of transparent tubes and sluices into clear chambers representing factors such as ‘surplus balances’ and ‘International Monetary Funds’. Regarded as an extremely developed tool for analysing economic functions, 15 of these devices were built and shipped around the world. Stevenson discovered that one of the machines was acquired by the Central Bank of Guatemala in 1952, and has imagined what it might look like today. His replica is corroding and leaking, and the chamber marked ‘held balances’ is empty, suggesting that the economic model it represents is on the verge of collapse.
Read more about the project here.
Nasan Tur, ‘Berlin says’ (2009)
Hundreds of graffiti sentences collected from the facades of Berlin walls, sprayed onto one wall over and over again.
Some examples:
Sandra I love you
KRIEG IST TERROR
FREIHAT FÜR ANDREA 8.3.08 14 UHR U-EBERSW.
PKK PKK
MASSAKA
Mutta sacht wir brauchen nich«nachWannsee in«t Freibad –
Wenn der Sprengwagen jefahren is, könn«wa ja uff de –
Strafe in«t Wasser pantschen det Kost Keen Fahrgeld
SEX
Soldaten sind Mörder
No Respect
Opfer
NEID
Understand?
Dein Stift ist eine Waffe
Seid nett
‘Shooting into the corner’ (2009) by Anish Kapoor.
Installation at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2009). A canon shoots 11 kilograms heavy wax balls into the corner of the next room.
This is a picture of the apple ‘species’ that Billy Apple is growing in New Zealand. A spotless, perfectly red apple that’s supposed to hit a grocery store near you sometime in the coming years…
