Monday, August 22, 2011

Magnum Opus

I recently discovered this:   





 Micheal Hiezer's "City".  A giant sprawling peice of land art made of accurately piled mounds of sand, combed valleys and monumental concrete structures.  A project that's been in the works since the 70's and is still underway.  These pictures are only a fragment of one of 5 complexes that make up "City".  I don't even know how to accurately describe whats happening other than it's beautiful and huge and ceremonial and  historical.  Oh yeah, and you can see it from space: 


Zoom In Here!


which for now is pretty much the only place you can see it from as the artist is with-holding it from the public until it's complete.  Which is pretty awesome in itself. 


Basically it just makes me really happy to see things being built like this now with such an insane level of craftsmanship and this extreme devotion to just one thing. 


I can't help but be reminded of this:

Ferdinand Cheval's "Ideal Palace"  which if you know me I was completely obsessed with for a lot of my time in thesis and for many of the same reasons I love City.  The Ideal Palace was the project of a postman who collected stones for years on his mail route and eventually turned them into this amazing structure, spending the rest of his life essentially building his tomb out of concrete and his collected rocks by hand.  I'm in love with him pretty much.  What can I say, I'm a sucker for a lone obsessed outsider quietly building extremely awesome things, all the time, for their entire lives.

(and I can't even finish a painting these days!)

You can read more about City Here it's a long article but it's pretty fascinating. 

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