Monday, August 6, 2012

Sculptor Rogers thinks big - literally

In China, he laid the figure of a horseman across the hills of the Gobi Desert using 1,000 members of the People's Liberation Army. Near a 12th-century castle in Slovakia, he constructed ribbons of rock that form the outline of a spindly legged horse, a symbol from a 2,000-year-old coin found nearby. In the Mojave Desert, his crew of local workers and Mexican stonemasons had to deal with 100-mph winds while building an abstract American Indian hunting symbol, a circle with a line through it. In the Antarctic, at the foot of the Dakshin Gangotri Glacier, he built a temporary "Rhythms of Life" image, using local gravel on a frozen lake. When he was in the business world, he also taught logistics at a local university, expertise that came in handy when organizing projects involving hundreds of workers in Spartan landscapes. In 1979, he took a bumpy plane ride across the desert of southern Peru to look at the mysterious Nazca Lines, created on a dry, windless plain 1,500 years ago. Primitive people etched huge geometric figures as well as images of hummingbirds, sharks, monkeys, spiders and humans into the surface of the Earth by scraping away the red soil to reveal white earth below. The most staggering collection of Rogers's art lies in the rocky hills of central Turkey, near the town of Goreme, where Rogers has built one of the world's largest sculpture parks. No detail is too small for the former logistics professor, down to providing water, hundreds of pairs of gloves and first-aid stations on site. Rogers insists on giving women the same wages as men, although this has caused some grumbling on a couple of sites. Rogers picks sites that have - in his view - historical significance and spends a long time - years, in some cases - persuading local officials to allow him to spread his massive artworks across their hills. To develop a symbol from the local culture, he works with elders, cultural officials and museums to find a design that resonates with the community. William Fox, a leading authority on art and the environment, says: No one is really drawing on the planet like that, in that way, and certainly not at that scale and certainly not with this bimodal business: The viewing of it would reveal the effort and sensitivity I employ to ensure that the work sits properly in the landscape and that the process and resultant structures are embraced by the local community.

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