I recently had the chance to visit this roadside oddity in Arizona. It's located about 20 miles east of Kingman on Route 66. Artist Gregg Arnold created it in 2004, modeling it after the giant heads on Easter Island. He created it, he said, "because the place looked like it needed something like this."
1961: Artist Niki de Saint-Phalle attached bags of paint to her paintings and then shot at them with a .22 caliber rifle, causing the bags to burst and the paint to ooze down the canvas. She called these her "shooting paintings."
She explained:
I shot because it was fun and made me feel great. I shot because I was fascinated watching the painting bleed and die. I shot for that moment of magic. . . Red, yellow, blue — the painting is crying the painting is dead. I have killed the painting. It is reborn.
The "portable oasis" of Belgian artist Alain Verschueren consists of a small, plexiglass greenhouse that he wears over his head. He came up with the idea around 2005, but only got attention for it in 2020, due to Covid, when he began wearing it around town instead of a mask.
I'll give Verschueren the benefit of the doubt and assume he wasn't aware of Waldemar Anguita's "greenhouse helmet," patented in 1986. The two ideas are basically identical.
Dave Fambrough made headlines back in 1978 for turning cars into giant spiders. I'm not sure what's become of him since then.
According to NV Racing News, as of 2015 one of Fambrough's spider cars could be seen on the roof of Scudder's Performance Racing garage in Sparks, Nevada.
To see the book, the can must be opened with a can opener, presenting the owner with a dilemma: do they want their artwork to be ‘original’ and leave the can sealed, or do they open the can to see the book inside. We had hoped to use a sardine tin, with the little key to open it, but could not find a source. During the search we found a local business, Dave’s Albacore, which had an old canning machine salvaged from Cannery Row. They were willing to can the book for us, saying ‘drop it off on a Friday and we will can the books first thing Monday morning, and hopefully that way they won’t smell too much like fish.’
Posted By: Alex - Tue May 17, 2022 -
Comments (3)
Category: Art, Books
1937: I don't know how Khrushchev would have felt about the Mother Goose mural painted on a wall at the Glenn Dale Sanatorium outside Washington D.C., but health officer Dr. George Rhuland felt it was "grotesque" and ordered it painted over. I think he was eventually overruled.
I'm not sure what he found objectionable about it. Perhaps he didn't like the modernist style.
11/19/37: Berenice Cross, young Washington, D.C., artist, working on a WPA mural in Washington, Nov. 19th, which she hopes will not become another bone of contention. The fate of her "Mother Goose," the mural in the Glenn Dale Tuberculosis Sanitarium, which was ordered painted over by Dr. George Rhuland, District of Columbia Health Officer, after it had been up for a year. He characterized it as "grotesque" and unsuitable to the dignity of a public institution. Miss Cross modestly admits that it has its faults, but that the children in the sanitarium like it. Russell Parr, the District WPA art project head, is indignant over Dr. Rhuland's order and claims that it is illegal, as the mural is government property.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.