Once, in a Blue Moon...
Once, in a Blue Moon...
This is not what it looks like. The blue squares have been painted on the walls, floor and window of this building! And they're not really squares: they only look square from this one very special point of view. If you don't believe me, go here:
More fun art... but this is exactly what it looks like! It's a desk and chair built by the sculptor Giancarlo Neri. It's 9 meters high and built from 6 tons of steel and half a ton of wood. It was put here on the Hampstead Heath in London in June 2005, and moved back to Italy in October of that year. It's called The Writer.
'Nothing' is hardly ever really nothing. Here is an 'empty' drawing by the famous abstract expressionist Robert Rauschenberg. But there's a fascinating story behind it, and it caused a wave of shock in the New York art community, because of how it was made. And this story somehow is the drawing. Read the story here:
In 1965, in his studio in Warsaw, Roman Opalka began painting numbers from one to infinity. Starting in the top left-hand corner of the canvas and finishing at the bottom right, the tiny numbers were painted in rows. Each new canvas took up counting where the last left off.
There were slight changes as he went on. At first he painted white numbers on a black background. In 1968 he changed to a gray background, and in 1972 he decided he would gradually lighten this gray background by adding 1 per cent more white to the ground with each passing detail. "My objective is to get up to the white on white and still be alive." He hoped this would happen at 7,777,777.
In July 2004, he reached 5.5 million.
The final number he painted was 5,607,249. He died on August 6, 2011 at the age of 79.
© 2012 John Baez
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu