Monte Christo ($5,000) Installation

The logic of Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the ‘ready-made’ merged with Robert Rauschenberg’s method of combining groups of mundane objects provided much of the inspiration for my Monte Christo piece. The principle idea is not of combining disparate objects but of combining groups of artists as the ready-made subject matter and exploring the horizon beyond their iconic art for a niche. The Monte Christo installation links Ham Steinbach’s 2006 untitled art shelf of mundanities with Michael Craig-Martin’s 1973 art shelf and oak tree philosophy together with Christo Javacheff’s wrappings and unrealized ‘Mastaba’ mountain sculpture conceived in 1977 as the largest sculpture in the world. My own 1998 art shelf has displayed innumerable mundane objects in its lifetime but the vision is not of displaying the commonplace and mundane but asserting the exceptional, impossible and unknown. The Monte Christo art shelf is therefore dedicated to the life and work of Christo Javacheff who is evoked through a dummy model of the artist wrapped in his historic red cloth beside a pastiche of his "Mastaba" sculpture which comprises 410,000 oil barrels in the sand dunes in Abu Dhabi. At 150m it would be higher than the Great Pyramid of Giza and become Christo‘s only permanent large scale work. The final item on my art shelf is a glass jar of sand and oil that alludes to the aforementioned niche beyond the 'Mastaba' and follows the principles of Michael Craig-Martin‘s though-provoking glass of water representation of "An Oak Tree", which transubstaniated is the “Ancient Forest“ that (disappeared thousands of years ago) will return when the dry spell ends in 5,000 years. To coin a phrase, it is unknown whether or not it would be quicker to sell sand to the Arabians or mount Mastaba?

Installation:Fabric on Glass

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:24 W x 30 H x 6 D in

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