While over in the UK last week, my girlfriend took me to see Antony Gormley’s “Another Place” art installation on Crosby Beach.  No, that guy standing in the picture above is not really a guy, but a six foot tall rusted cast iron figure, complete with rusted cast iron penis, and is one of about a hundred or so figures stretching over two miles and looking out into the Irish Sea.  Apparently it’s proven effective, as Irish migration to the UK has slowed recently, although I’d like to think this is probably the result of the Irish economy eclipsing the British one.

As you can see in this photo, the figures aren’t entirely attractive, and taken all together as they face the sea, the installation leaves you with a desolate feeling, no doubt helped by the autumn sun low in the sky, the clouds overhead, and the 60 mph winds picking up sand and blasting you in the face so that at least a few layers of skin were stripped away during our visit.

I suppose you can always bring up the question of what art is, and whether or not this is art (my rule with visual art is that if I could have made it, it’s not art).  The statues serve primarily as a tourist attraction these days or as dangerous obstructions for people who’d actually prefer to use the beach for water sports recreation. If nothing else, the damn things are just a wee bit creepy.

Boredom a More Appropriate Theme for This Year’s Budapest Giant Poster Exhibition

This is a rather strange and pink sculpture on the wall of the Kálvin tér underpass in central Budapest. I’m not going to say what it resembles, but if you thought what indeed you’re thinking, well you’re the perverted one, not me!

I won’t even pretend to know what’s going on over here. My sister thought it looked like bodies going into a dog house. Being a historian, the idea of a crematorium came to mind. Being in Poland, those kinds of crematoriums came to mind.

It was part of some open air art exhibition in a central square in Poznań, but this was the only work that left me feeling a little creeped out. I can’t say what it’s actually supposed to be, as all the accompanying information was in Polish, and as I’ve said earlier, I don’t know Polish.

It could of course be a visual representation of the Ethiopian origin myth, in that God made clay figures, put them into an oven, and that’s how he made man, but somehow I doubt that’s the case.