Another Piece of Winged Public Art
Yes, the connection is wings. I was going to say “in a more normal context” but it’s not often that you come across a very publically accessible plane-crash site (thankfully).
This scene was spotted in Bruges in 2012 and was part of the Kamarama art project. It was quite late in the day when I arrived to stay there for a few days, so there are no people looking at the apparently crashed aeroplane. The signs of close examination by interested people can however be seen in the image above, judging by the worn out grassy area around the wings. I’m not sure what could be further understood from closer inspection of the object, but I guess there’s a natural fascination with such unusual objects which means people are drawn towards them. The question I sometimes ask however after being able to get close to such things is along the lines of, “What now?”, or even, “So what?”/”Is that it?”
I believe the artist had a slightly different motive for creating the installation. The blurb associated with it states, “Yves Obyn created a very special art work for Kamarama. It represents a crashed Beechcraft Bonanza. A fanatic built his own airplane but because of the poor construction, it quickly crashed. The spectator is a disaster tourist, causing a congestion in the heart of Bruges due to the curiosity factor.”
The last sentence suggests the artist was more interested in the reaction of people to the installation, or indeed how many people might be interested in seeing it and/or moving closer to it (and causing congestion in the street). I think a “disaster tourist” might be one who is fascinated by disasters as well one who causes congestion. A similar situation might be the slow moving queue of vehicles on a motorway that often occurs when passing an incident on the opposite carriageway. There is no reason to slow down but fascination takes over.
I just took the photo as a record shot really, a holiday snap, and then I wondered what people thought about it and why they apparently wanted to get so close to it. It’s quite refreshing to learn that the artist seemed to just want to provoke mass interest and then perhaps see how people reacted to it. It is indeed a striking sight, a broken modern object surrounded by nice old buildings, but for me it did really fall into the “So what?” category. Perhaps I needed to see it with people around it.
One reason why it’s being shown here is that I have very few photos of winged objects, the only credible connection I could think of making with the last photo! Luckily I was able to make something out it that says something about human nature. One day however I might just keep the blogging aspect of this very simple and say, “There was green in the last photo and there’s green in this one.”