Giant pink sheep in the Puerta de Alcalá

I think the only thing the Puerta de Alcalá is missing is a giant pink sheep. Here's why.

Around November 20th every year, shepherds bring their flocks of sheep directly through the center of Madrid, in between these two stone markers (mojones) on the eastern side of Plaza Alcalá. This is supposed to be quite a scene, and it's a tradition that dates back to 1273 during the time of King Alfonso X. Livestock owners founded an organization that was empowered with keeping open livestock paths throughout the country, enabling the sheep to move between the northern and southern provinces and avoid the cold weather.

The pathway marked at Puerta de Alcalá is one of the last of nine remaining in Spain. If you go to look for the mojones, they are really easy to miss. One is to the left of the entrance to Retiro Park, and the other is on the northeast corner of the Plaza de la Independencia.

All of the livestock paths were of varying width, but the widest at 75.23 meters are knows as cañadas reales (royal livestock passageways). The width between the two markers is ceremoniously measured by the shepherds each time they bring their flock into the city, reasserting their rights and confirming the path established 800 years ago.

So back to my giant pink sheep idea. We all need something that disconnects us from our everyday lives sometimes, and encourages us to see our surroundings in a new way. Madrid, as viewed through the arches of the puerta de Alcalá, soaring up the Gran Via, has an entirely different cadence with a giant pink sheep in the foreground. It allows city dwellers to break from reality and enter a bright, colorful fantasy city.

The installation creates its own narrative while at the same time uncovering an existing, forgotten one. Like the artworks I've posted on this blog, this intervention uses an existing viewpoint, and offers a way to experience the landscape with a point of comparison. The visual comparison is any aspect of the form: color, material, shape, angle, scale, etc. The possible material I could use reminds me of my beloved Breyer horses that I used to play with incessantly as a kid - impossibly smooth plastic.

The giant pink sheep would coincide with the actual running of the sheep in November and there would be at least one where the flock enters Madrid (above), and possibly others at different points along the trail.

Flux/S, Richard Galpin and Joseph Beuys

Flux/S took over an open urban space at Strijp-S in Eindoven that looks otherwise unappealing to do some pretty fantastic activities. Let's see, there's an open symphony (everyone brings their instrument and starts playing), hula hooping, twister, and other play date favorites.

This is the third edition of the arts festival and they chose this spot in response to recent developments. This reminds me of similar festivals in New York that I've talked about in recent posts on psychogeography, except this festival has a unifying principle. It is a commentary on the meaning of public space in our cities, and one of their main intentions is to start a dialogue. I, for one, have had many philosophical arguments about urban design while twisting myself into a knot on a large dotted mat. But seriously, I get it. I think the intentions behind this festival are strong, and reminiscent of the original political and social rebellion that was the intention of the Situationist International and Fluxus movements. Artbomb, above, is a good example of their quietly aggressive protest, and the festival itself feels like a collective demonstration by visitors and residents of Eindoven who choose to participate.

How can we rethink our city environment, and how can art create an entirely new experience? One of the answers that I'm exploring in my work is - how can we create an entirely new experience with what is already there? Whether people themselves form the artwork, or their stories, or offering a new lens through which to see the city.

Artist Richard Galpin installed Viewing Station on the High Line in May, and I was in the middle of a project in Times Square to frame certain elements in the environment to "quiet" the experience and to meditate on your surroundings, so I was blown away by this. He takes the geometry from separating layers of photographic prints to create the abstract cut-outs. The actual view that Viewing Station frames is an interesting choice - let's just say it's only interesting through a kaleidoscopic lens like this. The power of this installation to disconnect the viewer from everyday reality and see architecture in a number of ways - by focusing on the abstract geometry, or blocks of color - is a novel re-combination of our familiar surroundings. And really friggin cool.

New York City is an open air museum, and I especially love when artists can push that further to make it even more of one. Not necessarily in a giant oversized sculpture way, or even the Sol Lewitt retrospective in City Hall park, which I thought was conventional - disappointing because I adore his work, but something subtle, that makes us take a second look. This happened to me when I was walking on West 22nd street with a few friends. I saw large naturally carved basalt stones, each placed directly adjacent to an oak tree. I realized later that it was Lynne Cooke and Dia Art Foundation's continuation of Joseph Beuys 7000 Oaks. In his words: "My point with these seven thousand trees was that each would be a monument, consisting of a living part, the live tree, changing all the time, and a crystalline mass, maintaining its shape, size, and weight. This stone can be transformed only by taking from it, when a piece splinters off, say, never by growing. By placing these two objects side by side, the proportionality of the monument's two parts will never be the same." 

The juxtaposition of regenerative tree with inert stone is a strong environmental message intended to shake people's consciousness, and he also wanted the work to grow and expand beyond its original inauguration at Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany in 1987. The goal of this social sculpture was also give everyone the ability to create art by planting trees, and also to "extend the traditional role of the art gallery so the gallery extends out into the city”.

Joseph Beuys, 7000 Oaks. West 22nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues in New York City.
Photo: Ken Goebel. From Dia