Free the Little People: In a recent street-art experiment, one artist posted giant and unpleasantly realistic cut-outs of himself all over Nehru Place in Delhi, briefly startling the normally blase citizens of the capital. A more sophisticated, and permanent, version of this is Slinkachu's Little People Project. |
Slinkachu sculpts tiny, near-perfect human figures and leaves them around London and Manchester where people might serendipitously stumble on them. If you squint at his two tiny golfers in the rough, it looks as though one's trying to cheat by moving his ball to a better lie. His little people have been found under ATM machines, or popping up on drain covers. They have gone urban camping, or stalked electrical plugs with rat-like tails. |
At a recent gallery opening, one of Slinkachu's exhibits, "Coke", was repeatedly vandalised. This showed a mannikin snorting cocaine through a rolled-up dollar bill that would have been as large as a telescope from the small coke-sniffer's point of view. Slinkachu noted that both the dollar bill and the coke were stolen "" several times "" by art-loving members of the public. One wonders how the thieves reacted when they discovered that the "coke" was cornflour powder and the dollars Monopoly money. |
The Little People Project: http://little-people.blogspot.com/ |
Wooster Collective, for more street art projects: www.woostercollective.com Wrap it up: Christo and his wife and collaborator, Jeanne-Claude, wrapped their first public building in 1961 (Stacked Oil Barrels, Dockside Packages at Cologne Harbor, if you really want to know) and haven't stopped trying to giftwrap the world since then. |
By 1969, they had wrapped the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago "" some architecture buffs have argued that the Chicago museum is so ugly that it should have stayed under wraps "" and an entire coast at Little Bay, Australia. In the '80s, they surrounded islands near Florida in pink fabric and wrapped the Pont Neuf in Paris. |
Though Christo and Jeanne-Claude refuse to accept ideas from outsiders "" they see themselves as original artists who would not execute someone else's design "" I hope they'll come to India soon. They may never get permission to wrap the Taj Mahal, but surely no one would object if, say, the usual clamour of India's Parliament were to be temporarily silenced under a veil of reinforced polyester fabric. |
Christo and Jeanne-Claude's website: http://christojeanneclaude.net/ |
Send in the Cows: On an otherwise normal day in 1999, the residents of Chicago discovered that their streets had been over-run by painted, fibreglass cows. They had Swiss artistic director Walter Knapp to thank for this; in 1998, Knapp decided for some reason that getting artists of a particular city together to paint cows would be a great fund-raising idea. |
As "moo-seum" jokes proliferated, the CowParade idea took off, travelling from Chicago to New York, London and Edinburgh. I kept company with one rainbow-hued specimen in a London park; she reminded me of bovines on Delhi's streets, except that she was a lot less smelly. Over the years, CowParade became something of an urban phenomenon, and the fibreglass creatures should soon be in Istanbul, Marseilles and Rio de Janeiro. |
But they haven't always been welcomed. In 2004, a Swedish outfit called The Militant Graffiti Artists of Stockholm kidnapped one of the fibreglass cows, arguing that these cows were "Not Art" but advertisements. In a deeply regrettable turn of events, members of the MGA held power drills to the cow's head "" and eventually decapitated it. The pro-cow will be relieved to learn that no fibreglass cows have come to harm in the years since. |
CowParade: http://www.cowparade.com/ The MGA cow sacrifice page (with graphic video, alas): http://www.artliberated.org/?p=cases&id=27 |