Naoya Hatakeyama. Japanese. Born 1958. Artist extraordinaire.
It's easy to translate Naoya Hatakeyama's blast series as a critique of man's wanton destruction of nature and its capacity to do so in nanoseconds, undoing what has taken millions, even billions, of years to form. And yet, whenever the two confront each other (i.e., Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Stan, Tsunami of 2004, Pakistan Earthquake of 2005, et al.), it's human frailty that's exposed.
Rocks break bones, crush skulls, extinguish entire families, bury villages.
But this is Pruned, and we're slaves to whimsy.
Introducing Geoff's Earth-Fountain©: “it spits gravel and freshly tilled soil up into the air in dizzying patterns.” It's Busby Berkeley meets the Bellagio meets the Jardinator© meets a disused surface strip coal mine.
While others go on and on about phytoremediation and brownfield parks and research parks and re-wilding the mine as a design program, Pruned will instead be producing a showcase extravangaza to outdo all past and future Olympic Games opening ceremonies. Adventures in the Mantle. The thunderous, gyrating Earth-Fountain© will be the star. Seven shows a week plus a Saturday matinee. Precisely timed and calibrated, something you can't say about Old Faithful.
Some Appalachian mining towns are already privy to a mini-Earth-Fountain© showcase. Each time a section of the nearby mine gets blasted away, pellets fling upwards at supersonic speed only to rain down on Main Street, on houses, on people. Daytime meteor shower. One can argue that they have a greater visceral experience and therefore a deeper understanding of the landscape than say, someone strolling through a park on a Sunday afternoon.
Or in the outskirts of Dubai? Adventures in the Empty Quarter.
POSTSCRIPT #1: Geoff is the purveyor of BLDGBLOG.
Naoya Hatakeyama @ artnet
Naoya Hatakeyama @ L.A.Galerie Lothar Albrecht
La Machine de Marly
Datafountain
Stadium City: or, Naoya Hatakeyama, Part II