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8/19/03: Superbacana

•I came upon this image last night via Greg.org and was quite powerfully reminded of Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg project in Detroit. Follow the credits back from Greg to a post on Wooster Collective, and sure enough, it turns out that this Detroit News column through which the tank piece was discovered came from Heidelberg.org.

A witness to the tank in Iraq conveyed the following -

The sergeant, who didn't have permission to be quoted by name, said a pack of what looked to be 10- to 16-year-olds "were having a great time and were so proud. They waved at everyone who passed and had paint on everything." He assumed adults were in charge, but he didn't notice any. What he did see was an explosion of color from the treads to the dome-shaped turret.
On the front of the tank, beneath the barrel of the 100mm main gun, half a dozen smiling people hold hands in a field of flowers. There's a purple wheel near the right front and a yellow one in back.

Pinks and blues cover the base of the turret. Flowers swirl up the barrel and more flowers dot the pavement. What you'd think of as a fender, if you weren't looking at a tank, has pale blue hearts and a sort of white shamrock against a field of orange.

It looks like it was painted by children with no training and no plan. It looks fabulous.

To Gattorn, it's a reminder that "so much life and hope comes from the simple things people do in the face of death."

•I was probably about 12 or 13 years old when my dad took me to see the Heidelberg's first incarnation before it was demolished by the city of Detroit in 1991. It consisted of a pair of houses in one of Detroit's nearly vacant east side neighbourhoods, among mostly burned out shells of former buildings. It was covered in polka-dots, bright paint, and surrounded by various sculptural contraptions pulled from junkyards and re-animated - a colorful dream world/ ghost world in the middle of cruel neglect where the obsolete consumer objects of the past reclaimed their original fascination. Seeing it through those car windows was a seminal moment for me - still a kid enamored of the surrealism of comic books and Salvador Dali, it was when I first learned that art can exist more meaningfully beyond the sanctioned space of museums and frames.

Twelve years later, and I've yet to accomplish this idea of art outside of sanctioned spaces (or any art for that matter). But it's a wonderful feeling to see the digital photos of that inspired tank in Kirkut and be reminded of my original fascination with images before I started reading too much about them.

Also found along the way...

•Nigerian political posters from the exhibit Other Africas [via incoming]

•A brilliant graffiti gallery at Stencil Revolution.

•It's difficult to pin down exactly why the site Human Descent - a collection of many, many photos of digitally combined species - is so subtly repugnant.

•Brain Eno on how to lie about Iraq.

•Cool French comics.

•Lots and lots of WPA posters [via conscientious].