Still Life With Stone and Car Millers Point, New South Wales, Australia
By Team MavEtJu on 11-Jan-18. Waypoint GA11617

Still Life With Stone and Car

At the roundabout of Hickson Rd and Pottinger St is the sculpture "Still Life With Stone and Car" by Jimmie Durham. It is one of the few artworks in the world which have a warning sign around it that it is an artwork!

It was created at the forecourt of the Opera House for the 2004 Sydney Biennale, when he dropped the stone onto the car using a crane, and then it was moved to this roundabout in Walsh Bay for an outdoor sculpture display.

The artist, Jimmie Durham, a Cherokee from Arkansas, said of this work:

"Like most of my recent work, this piece is concerned with monuments and monumentality, but also with 'nature'; that implacable hard stuff. In the first instance I am using the stone as a tool; to change the shape of an object. But I also, as usual, want to make stone more light, more moveable, even if it is in a fairly horrible way - like a road accident.. I do not think the piece is humorous; even though it turns out to be. The kind of face painted on the real version will, of course, depend upon the shape of the stone, but it will in any case be placid, and neither 'realistic' nor cartoon-like. To my way of thinking if the stone is simply a stone without a face it becomes a gesture but with the face painted on it, the work develops a strange narrative. "

For more background, see this SMH article.

When logging this virtual, please add a photo of you and/or your GNSSr at the place of the crash going all "ooooh nooooo!!"

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