Colorful welding and the aesthetics of ruins

 

From Sculpture in Civic Center Park Exhibition:

¨In August 2013, the Newport Beach City Council authorized the City Arts Commission and City staff to implement a temporary sculpture exhibit in Civic Center Park. The City Council approved the installation of ten sculptures in Phase I of the project and additional ten sculptures in Phase 2. The sculptures installed in year one are on display for two years and will be removed and returned to the artists in 2016. Those installed in year two, or Phase 2, will be removed in 2017.¨

Here I´m showing some details from the sculpture ¨Pretty Boy¨ by David Buckingham.

And this is not that I´m delighted with the sculpture but with its details. I took a lot of pictures of the welding and colorful metal, while thinking how this sculpture will end up in more than one year. What the artist will do with the remnants.

 

Because if you look in detail, the sculpture has corrosion everywhere already, and maybe this is part of the artist´s intention, that the demon (it´s a demon) would honorably die when he has to be removed from the park.

It also reminded me Albert Speer´s ideal of ruins:

¨ Albert Speer, el arquitecto de Hitler, avanzó sobre el tema en la década del ´30, proponiendo la idea de valor de las ruinas, en su publicación ¨Die Ruinenwerttheorie¨ (La Teoría del Valor de las Ruinas), donde el edificio debía ser diseñado de tal manera que en caso de su eventual colapso, dejaría en pie ruinas estéticamente agradables que pudieran perdurar sin mantenimiento. Speer, no sólo construyó el modelo del Zeppelin en Nuremberg, sino que también mostró cómo aparecería en ruinas luego de cientos de años. Su expectactiva residía en que los restos torcidos de hierro despertaran el mismo heroico entusiasmo que los grandes edificios del pasado que habían conmovido a Hitler¨. 

From my article About the Aesthetics of Ruins, in Spanish, Albert Speer, who was Hitler´s archictect, advanced on the subject in the 30´s proposing the idea of a value for ruins, in his publication ¨Die Ruinenwerttheorie¨, where he stated that the building had to be designed in such a manner that its eventual collapse would leave aesthetically pleasing ruins that could endure without maintenance. He, not only built the model of the Zeppelin in Nuremberg, but also showed how it would look like in ruins, after hundreds of years. His expectation was on the twisted steel that would encourage the same heroic enthusiasm than the great buildings of the past that had moved Hitler.

 

After all, my pictures are showing ¨Pretty Boy¨ parts as abstract art. 

All pictures by Myriam B. Mahiques, please do not reproduce without my permission.

 

These are the legs of  ¨Pretty Boy¨ and the grass behind