Rooftop Shark Exhibit
Image Source: Flickr
The best art strikes you at your core and delivers a very personal insight into the artist’s intent. Rembrandt’s Christ’s Descent from the Cross, for example, reaches out to its (presumptively Christian) audience and inspires with the thought of sacrifice and grief. The touching memorial at the former site of the Oklahoma City federal building uses 168 empty chairs to make visitors feel the physical absence of those who were killed in the bombing. The stark simplicity of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall speaks for itself.
With that in mind, let’s play a guessing game. What the hell was the point of this thing:
Image Source: The Guardian
This installation, which consists of a roughly 200-pound fiberglass shark dropped headfirst through the roof of a row house in Oxford, England has been in place – despite the objections of the local council – since 1986. There’s nothing in particular going on inside the house, and no particular explanation on the outside of what the whole thing is supposed to mean. Even the name, Untitled 1986, is no help.
Image Source: WeekendNotes
Could the installation be a subtle commentary on resource depletion and over-exploited fish stocks? An attempt to highlight the danger of nuclear war? A chilling preview of the inevitable shark uprising?
It’s actually that second one. The artist, John Buckley, dedicated his freelance monument on the 41st anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing as a critique of the arms race and nuclear power. Buckley’s justification for the form is that nuclear war is something that drops unexpectedly out of the sky in much the same way sharks don’t.
Charming Street Scenes Become Chilling Underwater
Image Source: All things environmental
Just west of the Caribbean country of Grenada, on the sandy bottom of Molinere Bay sits a unique art installation that has been gradually expanding since its opening in 2006: the Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park.
Image Source: BBS Culture
Begun with the best of intentions by a British artist named Jason deCaires Taylor, the park now provides visitors with an ample supply of nightmares, mainly due to a phenomenon known as the Uncanny Valley. The idea is that human beings are comfortable with human forms, and that we’re comfortable with totally nonhuman forms like a robot vacuum cleaner.
Between the two forms, however, lies a valley in which objects (or people) manage to look human enough to trigger our “human” response, but remain sufficiently unlike humans that they become deeply disturbing. Casting dry concrete molds of living people, then dropping them into the ocean and letting sea life colonize them is the best way humans have yet devised of plunging into the Uncanny Valley, and the artist responsible for this park shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.
Image Source: What Weekly
In order to experience this valley yourself, you have to actually go to Grenada and rent scuba gear. Some of the statues are under 25 feet of water, which is hard even for snorkelers to reach. The project consists of several installations, mostly depicting naturalistic life scenes, and every single one of them becomes a macabre horror after the nudibranches colonize them.
It’s not clear that this was the intent of the designer, at least not before the park opened in 2006, since so many of the figures are largely unadorned human figures. Some pieces depict children playing and some depict slaves who were among the earliest residents of the island. Whatever thematic intentions went into the first few statues, however, seems to have gone out the window for the later ones, as more recent additions have been designed to take advantage of the colonizing sea life.
Image Source: Katie Long Ceramics
To be fair, the extra surface area these statues add to the sandy bottom of the bay make a great place for coral to get established, and the monument helps lift pressure on the other reefs by diverting tourists to the far side of the island. On the other hand, just look at this:
Image Source: theromantictraveller
