Large Art Burn update

You will recall that I am in the beginning stages of designing a Large Art Burn for Alchemy called “Rage Against the Night.” You will also recall that I posted that I had had a very good idea for its form, and over the weekend in a lull in the inaction, I made my first ABORTIVE ATTEMPT on that idea.

Pretty clumsy and not at all what I thought I was thinking, but at least it’s not shinyperfect any more. It’s out in what we laughingly call the real world.

So what are you looking at? On the left, a half-tube about 3–4’ high that swoops up into a tower maybe 12–15’ tall. (You can see that it’s not to scale.)

As we head into GESTALT/SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION, I think the downward-slanting “arms” on the tower need to be shorter, and also the ends of the arms should be triangular so as to produce a sawtooth effect. Definitely the top needs some definition.

Burning-wise, it’s an improvement over my earlier ideas, since you can stuff the tube and tower with your flammables as you build it. I’m thinking we start at the end of the tube and let the flames work their way to the tower and whoosh their way up. Experts will have the final say on that aspect, of course.

“But, Dale,” I hear you ask, “aren’t you worried that this looks like crap?”

Not at all. As architect Frank Gehry tells his team when a project isn’t coming together, “Let’s let it sit there and annoy us for a while.”

He was talking about things like this:

Recognize it? No?

That scribble became the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. So no, I am not worried that my ABORTIVE ATTEMPT looks like crap. It’s supposed to.

Go thou and do likewise.