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Strange Statues & Sculptures

lopaka

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August 14, 2003

Dog Statue Has Its Day at Park -- With Controversy

__By Bob Pool, Times Staff Writer
The howling being heard at the Silver Lake dog park Wednesday wasn't coming from the canines chasing one another across the exercise area.
It was coming instead from animal owners who were unhappy with an unusual sculpture erected at the park as a tribute to pets killed by atomic bombs in World War II.

"In Memory of All Dogs Killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki," read the engraved plaque beneath a statue of a dog sitting atop four Roman columns.
Los Angeles parks administrators and city officials were puzzled by the unauthorized statue, apparently erected in secret. Neighbors reported seeing four people unloading it from a cart shortly before 10 p.m. on Aug. 5.

Some pet owners who use the tiny park next to Silver Lake Boulevard were outraged.

"It's a political statement. It doesn't belong in the park," Ray Singer said as his chow mix and German shepherd sniffed at the statue. "It's an antiwar statement. This is the wrong venue for this sort of thing."

Others wondered if the strange memorial was part of a reality television show, with a hidden camera filming onlookers' reactions and a microphone inside the dog statue recording their comments.

Parks officials were certainly getting an earful.
"We've got everybody calling us about it. It's not a good thing. A lot of people don't like it," said LaVerne Thenarse, a recreation assistant at the Silver Lake Recreation Center.

Workers at park headquarters were checking files to see whether the waist-high memorial had a permit. It didn't.

"If someone wants to apply for a permit for it they can," said Jane Kolb, a spokeswoman for the city Department of Recreation and Parks. "Our Planning and Construction Division has to approve it. Then it has to go to the Cultural Affairs Commission for public art, and then to the parks board."

Those placing approved statues on city parkland must pay for the artwork's
future maintenance, she said.

At the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles, resource center librarian Yoko Okunishi wondered whether the statue might be a memorial to Japanese dog breeds such as shiba or akita.

The statue apparently was made of plaster. Because when park workers showed up shortly before 5 p.m. Wednesday to confiscate it, it shattered.
No microphone was found in the pieces.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
 
I found this site interesting:

Strange Statues From Around The World

Link is dead. See later post for update on accessing the archived version:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/strange-statues.29458/post-1787986


Some are merely interesting, others pretty weird, while others are quite horrifying! I imagine myself walking by some of them and pretending to be nonchalant whilst quietly muttering "It's ok, it's not real". I'm going to keep my eyes open for any strange statues in my area, though I doubt I can top those.
 
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Cool! Nice to see the one of the shark in the roof, it's near where I grew up.
 
I reckon a lot of those wouldn't be allowed in UK because of Health and Safety regs:

"Some pedestrian might trip over that; blind people might walk into that and injure themselves; ...etc" :roll:
 
'Some people might wet themselves laughing at that' :lol:

The naughtily-altered one is clever. I wouldn't have known it wasn't real if I hadn't seen the unaltered picture first. ;)
 
escargot1 said:
'Some people might wet themselves laughing at that' :lol:

The naughtily-altered one is clever. I wouldn't have known it wasn't real if I hadn't seen the unaltered picture first. ;)

OK I'm thick, which one was altered?
 
liveinabin1 said:
escargot1 said:
'Some people might wet themselves laughing at that' :lol:

The naughtily-altered one is clever. I wouldn't have known it wasn't real if I hadn't seen the unaltered picture first. ;)

OK I'm thick, which one was altered?
...and did Techy bloke alter it?

(I'm guessing it's the one with the thumb on the wrong side....)
 
Oh, a few of them are in this city. And I´ve seen a few of the Prague ones. There´s some statues in Netherlands they could also put in. But what wonderful creativity these people have shown.
 
I found these ones most disturbing. They just seem ...unnecessary.

Woman sucked into floor

upside down horse, urinating mummy, giant black babies?

Freemont Troll *shudder*

pasty face and pointing hand of drowned body

Giant square head - why?

Virgin mother - horror!

last four photos - unspeakable horror!

Just very ugly disembodied parts

Links are dead. See this later post for original or substitute images based on salvage dips into the Wayback Machine.

https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/strange-statues.29458/post-2069645


Where I'm from I've never come across structures quite so - unusual. Maybe that's partially why they bother me so much, but I cannot imagine encountering these on a regular basis, say on my commute to work for instance. Would drive me crazy. There's a psychology study in here somewhere.
If anyone knows the story behind any of these statues please share.
 
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There is a statue in Copenhagen which looks like a man peeing up against a building.
 
Ebbsfleet White Horse: What should it be called?
The giant white horse set to dominate the landscape around Ebbsfleet should be called Equus, Cantus or Chalky.

By Chris Irvine
Last Updated: 8:06PM GMT 11 Feb 2009

These are just some of the suggestions by Daily Telegraph readers who have both embraced the news that the £2 million 164ft high (50m) Ebbsfleet Landmark sculpture will be built as well as looked upon it with cynicism.

A number of Telegraph readers suggested the horse should be called Eyesore, comparing it to Eeyore, the depressed, pessimistic donkey in Winnie the Pooh. :(

Others simply believe the White Horse should be called the White Elephant, alleging it will be a waste of money similar to The Millennium Dome in London when it was first built. :roll:

Harry Meade, of Chippenham, Wilts, said it should be called the GM Horse.

He said: "Just before the train comes into sight of the horse, passengers see a big sign saying "Welcome to Britain, home to GM food research". A minute later they see a 164' high horse staring at them." :D

RJ Ludlow said: "Name the big white horse' Anglia' which is the Roman name for England - we could do with some national spirit to get us away from present times!!!"

In a reference to the Antony Gormley designed Angel of the North, Gabrielle Neal suggests "Neighbour of the South".

Around 60 million people will see the horse every year, which will stand by the busy A2.

It is intended to put the area on the map as it gets its own international station on the new high-speed Eurostar line between London St Pancras and Paris.

More than twice the height of Gormley's 66ft high Angel, the white horse, designed by Mark Wallinger, will be Britain's biggest single piece of art.

But a number simply suggest the horse should be called Eric, in honour of the pub joke - a white horse walks into a pub and asks for a Scotch.

"Now there's a funny thing," says the barman, "You, coming in here and asking for a Scotch. Do you know there's a whisky named after you?"

"What?" replies the horse, "Eric?"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... alled.html

Any more ideas? 8)

PS The Matt cartoon shows the horse with a roadside sign nearby

- "Manure £1 a bag"
 
rynner2 said:
..(the Ebbsfleet Horse) is intended to put the area on the map as it gets its own international station on the new high-speed Eurostar line between London St Pancras and Paris.

More than twice the height of Gormley's 66ft high Angel, the white horse, designed by Mark Wallinger, will be Britain's biggest single piece of art...
On last Friday's News Quiz, Dave Gorman suggested that rather than have a 160 ft horse a longish way away, they could save a couple of million quid by just getting a real horse and putting it on the platform.

Actually, I like bloody great statues. One of my ambitions is to see the Rodina or Motherland statue at Volgograd, the biggest of them all, which is apparently breathtaking. But that's for another thread, somewhere.
 
It looks so 'Lost city, 20,000 leagues under the sea' I feel it's ok to put it in Fortean Culture!

Amazing new artificial reef in Mexico made from sculptures of real peopleBy Richard JamesLast updated at 7:13 PM on 11th October 2010

The underwater installation has been created by British artist Jason de Caires Taylor who used real people to create the 'life casts' made from materials which encourage coral to grow.

It is hoped the new sculptures will produce a coral reef system and attract a variety of aquatic creatures to the Cancun and Isla Mujeres National Marine Park.

The new installation off the east coast of Mexico has been created by British artist Jason de Caires Taylor
Standing around: The artificial reef will include a total of 400 statues by the time it's completed

The project, entitled The Museo Subacuatico de Arte (MUSA), is aiming to ease pressure on nearby natural reefs which are struggling to deal with the half a million water-going tourists who flock to the area every year.

Commenting on his unique installation, Mr Taylor said: 'We wanted to make it adventurous and on a really grand scale. It's a symbiosis of humans and nature living in this cycle in harmony with each other.

'The main objective is to discharge quite a lot of the tourists who visit Cancun. Over 750,000 people come here every year to visit the marine park and that puts a huge pressure on the natural reef.

'The idea was to take some of these people away from the natural reefs and obviously minimise their impact on them, so we wanted to draw them to an area that was originally barren without much sea life.

'We want it to be very accessible to snorkelers and divers and we wanted it to be accessible from Cancun, nearby Isla Mujeres and different parts of the surrounding community.'

The 36-year-old artist said the original plan was to use 200 statues but later it was decided to install a total of 400 on the seabed, of which 350 have so far been anchored.
Mr Taylor claims the statues are meant to represent a 'cross-section of society' with the casts made from local Mexican people.
The sculptures have been made from a special type of cement which is 10 times harder than the normal kind and has a neutral PH, which is favourable to corals.

The statues are reinforced by rigid fibreglass with similar properties to rock so they remain in place.

Anchored to the rocky sea bed 10 metres below the surface using a special drill, fused together and weighing over 120 tons in total, it is hoped the new reef can even weather out hurricanes and storms that regularly hit the area.

Link to original story (with pictures) in the mail

And this is the artists website with loads more photos:
http://www.underwatersculpture.com/page ... ciosa.html

Mr P
 
Can you imagine how that could mess with the heads of future archeologists? ;)
 
This was the best I could find for a statues thread, but have a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_Memorial

I read about that statue in a Reader's Digest compilation published in the 1970s, when it said it was uncompleted and was represented by a painting of what it was going to look like. Now I would have thought it was nearly finished by now, nearly half a century later, but nope, have a look at the photo at the link, all they've got done is the face! Doesn't seem to be an abandoned project, either. Very odd.
 
Heres a statue of a figure supposedly taking a bribe.

fotos-1879877h360.jpg


At the HQ of the Argentinian Ministries of Health and Social Development.

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1690504-monumento-a-la-coima-edificio-evita
 
This was the best I could find for a statues thread, but have a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_Memorial

I read about that statue in a Reader's Digest compilation published in the 1970s, when it said it was uncompleted and was represented by a painting of what it was going to look like. Now I would have thought it was nearly finished by now, nearly half a century later, but nope, have a look at the photo at the link, all they've got done is the face! Doesn't seem to be an abandoned project, either. Very odd.
I was just up there and it's quite impressive. The reason it is taking so long to complete is because it is not state or government funded. It is funded entirely by private donation and so forth. The guest center has a large and lovely collection of Native artifacts. It's not because the builders are slackers it's because America has a complicated and usually shameful relationship with Native Peoples.
 
I was just up there and it's quite impressive. The reason it is taking so long to complete is because it is not state or government funded. It is funded entirely by private donation and so forth. The guest center has a large and lovely collection of Native artifacts. It's not because the builders are slackers it's because America has a complicated and usually shameful relationship with Native Peoples.
I understand that a lot of Native Americans are themselves opposed to the sculpture (for some reason).
 
Here's the statue of the explorer Matthew Flinders at Euston station.

It shows Flinders in a very active pose, accompanied by his cat Trim. Trim gets lots of love and strokes from the travelling public. I always give him a little head-rub as I pass.

OK, nothing really weird, but wasn't it nice to include the cat in memorial! :)
 
I understand that a lot of Native Americans are themselves opposed to the sculpture (for some reason).
Fascinating- the same case, then, as with some of the stricter branches of Islam?

Without falling down the firey pits of racist stereotyping, I wonder how that squares with totems and shaman masks, both of which I consider to be scuplture?

A much-stranger highly-Fortean statuetic concept was grabbing my attention online recently, but my last mobile device disaster has lost me all my references to it.

I cautiously re-offer it up here, with plenty caveats as to the absolute provenance of the idea (please don't shoot the messenger- but you won't, because you're an open-minded Fortean).

What this theory was proposing is that there are many statues in Europe (of a post-classical, post-renaissance origin) that are physically-impossible to have produced.

What intrigued me about this gripping, improbable assertion is, firstly, the way in which the concept was much-more nuanced than the tired old 'sky-gods-made-the-pyramids-and-standing-stones' faux types of propositions.

Not a naive underestimation of human creativity and wit, but instead a set of (apparently) detailed semi-scientific analyses of a number of large extant statues, made from stone or metal as recently as say 1650-1850 for which no technological explanations as to their method of construction are known, nor can yet be determined.

Quite aside from guild secrets and lost artistic techniques, this struck me as being a fascinating Fortean mystery staring Us contemporary creatures straight in the face.

I struggle to fully recount precise details or a specific example, but here goes:

  • Bronze statues of layered complexity that are topologically-impossible to cast. Metal representations of cloth, silk, mesh, hair, that are integrally-cast, with subordinate levels of inaccessible impossible perfection (undercuts, hidden detail, perforation, cross-sectional accuracy) beyond any level of explanation
  • Details on stone carved statues that as well as being anatomically-perfect include levels of detail such as skin pores, veins, layering, again defying any degree of meaningful explanation as to method
  • Massive scales of structures presented at heights upon vast pillars (please: I'm as reductionist and doubting as the next Fortean inquisitor, probably much more so....there had been some serious modern-day physics and maths analysis applied to attempting an explanation as to methods of installation (based upon every conceivable mechnical leverage/heights/counterbalance method, obviously using modern computational modelling, and the examples they considered couldn't even begin to be explained)
I think we're talking Italy, France, Russia, possibly Germany. Less so Britain or Scandanavia.

I wish I could rediscover the original articles. Surely someone on FTMB has also stumbled upon them, or this tantalising concept (which I'm struggling to recount, here).

And please: in responding, let's not just use knee-jerk defensive demystification, here. Of course, we are all grown-ups on this board. The truth is all that truly counts.

We understand, as a foundational context, that latter-day previous societies had vast resource pools of people, and all the time in their world.

This appears to be something perhaps substantively way beyond that (so, no "they used sand ramps and wet rollers" pseudoreductionist apologeticas, please)
 
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I agree with you (not just because of my Ancient Aliens leanings). There are a lot of odd statues and even paintings that bring the phrase "not made by human hand" to mind. One off the top of my head is the Italian 'artist' who made corpse sculptures so disturbing and lifelike they used to say he learned from the Devil. I think back in the late 1700s. But we will never know how he did it because he died young, his technique died with him and only a couple pieces are left. Which is good/bad because they are kind of morbid and gross.
 
:glee::glee::glee:
 
Relevant Section:

Luis Jiménez, a New Mexico sculptor, died in 2006 after the a piece of the horse fell on top of him, pinning him to the ground, local news station The Denver Channel reported at the time. He was 65.

He had been working on the sculpture for more than the decade when the accident occurred, and received $300,000 commission. At the time, he was facing lawsuits for not finishing the artwork on time.

It was later assembled and displayed at the airport, to the horror of Denver citizens.

"The horse's cobalt color, glowing red eyes, and fierce face immediately attracted public ire," according to Slate. "In addition to railing against the Blue Mustang's ugliness, Denver residents have voiced concerns that the horse is cursed due to its role in Jiménez's demise."
 
Russian farmer makes statues out of animal poo

Mikhail Bopposov is the farmer behind the unusual creations in the village of Uolba in north-eastern Russia’s Sakha Republic & gets his inspiration to create his poo sculptures from the Chinese calendar.

Video link is dead, so it's been removed. Go to the webpage linked above to see photos of the farmer's poo sculptures.
 
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Rooster, chili peppers, and corn ... An obviously interrelated set of elements ...

Chinese resort erects giant rooster made of chili peppers
A Chinese resort unveiled a 20-foot-tall rooster statue made out of chili peppers and corn cobs.

A video filmed at the resort in Linyi City, Shandong Province, shows the giant rooster statue with its body composed of red and green chili peppers and its legs made from corn cobs.

The statue was made in honor of the city's chili crop, which was recently harvested.

Locals said the city has been a major source of chili peppers for more than 200 years.

SOURCE (WITH VIDEO): https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2018/0...ter-made-of-chili-peppers/1391538070154/?sl=5
 
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