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Andrew Rogers Rhythms of Life – A Global Land Art Project by Silvia Langen Prestel

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2016-Silvia Langen Essay – Prestel

Rhythms of Life – The largest land art project in the world

Since the 1980s, more and more spectacular land art projects are being created far away from big cities and for the first time outside of the United States and Europe. Although these art landscapes can normally only be reached with great effort, the synthesis of nature and art obviously fascinates a great many people—artists, visitors, and local residents alike. In the truest sense of the word, working in an open landscape gives artists space to freely think, experiment, and work in new, greater dimensions. They are in a direct and permanent dialogue with the environment, which is itself a work of art whose infinite facets are constantly reinvented in harmony with the time of day and the seasons as well as with the weather. Ideally, art and nature not only enhance each other but ultimately merge to become a new and unique gesamtkunstwerk. The internationally renowned Australian sculptor Andrew Rogers has succeeded in doing this with Rhythms of Life. Since 1999, he has produced fifty-one land art sculptures in sixteen countries, across all seven continents; these stone structures are thematically interrelated. Rhythms of Life is Andrew Rogers’s life work. The largest contemporary project of its kind in the world, Rogers has introduced a new dimension into land art the global work of art.

GEOGLYPHS AS GLOBAL ARTWORK
They are archetypal symbols of civilization in the most extreme topographies be it the Gobi Desert, the South American Altiplano, the African steppe, or the glacial ice of Antarctica where the artist makes a mark in the truest sense of the word: he builds them into the open landscape as geoglyphs, gigantic drawings and structures from local rock. Andrew Rogers goes to the limits of what is possible with respect to their dimensions. His sculptures are deliberately arranged in such large proportions so that they are clearly recognizable on satellite images from space. With Rhythms of Life Andrew Rogers frames his personal artistic answer to the big questions of our society, which is faced with enormous challenges: globalization with the threat of the loss of collective memory and independent cultural identities, with climate change, new technologies, and increasing commercialization.

THE TOPOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT
Like Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, protagonists of the first generation of land art artists in the 1960s, Rogers consciously anchors art in the landscape in a lasting way. Land art only explains itself in a topographical context. Andrew Rogers also wants to provoke, to challenge viewers to reflect on the past in reference to the present and the future and to act responsibly and oriented toward positive values. He therefore creates highly aesthetic sites that invite one to contemplate. “It is about the importance of the perspective that we are caretakers and have responsibilities to those around us and to those who will follow,” Rogers explains. “We receive the environmental consequences created by our predecessors.  In turn we leave a consequence for our descendants. The present will be reflected in the future. If we have regard for our earth, what should be the criteria we live by?” As an Australian who himself lives in a country in which nature is omnipresent, working with and in nature is a matter of course. Surrounded by the whole gamut of highly diverse………..

Continue reading the entire essay attached.

Atlas Obscura

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ATLAS OBSCURA – PLACES

YUCCA MESA, CALIFORNIA

Rhythms of Life

An artist’s vision for connectivity spans seven continents and 16 countries.

Rhythms of Life is a breathtaking Earthworks sculpture installed in 2008 by the world-renowned Australian sculpturist, Andrew Rogers.

The structure can be seen near the intersection of Old Woman Springs Road (SR 247) and Aberdeen just five miles north of Yucca Valley in California.

Rogers, who is a distinguished artist, exhibits his work internationally with his larger Earthworks sculptures found in numerous private and public collections across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the United States, and Australia.

Rhythms of Life—perhaps the work for which Rogers is best known—is part of a larger project that forms a chain of 51 massive stone sculptures around the world. The sculptures are meant to be seen from two vantage points: from the ground—as a series of stone structures—and from above to show off the structure’s larger form.

To-date, the project currently spans seven continents, 16 countries, and has involved over 7,500 people who assist in the construction of the structures. Rhythms of Life is a collaborative endeavor that relies on the local community to both construct the sculpture as well as ideate the symbols to be included in the Earthwork.

Know Before You Go

Follow SR 247 / Old Woman Springs north five miles until you come to Aberdeen. Turn right on Aberdeen and immediately find a spot to turn around, park, and look west towards the hills to see Earthworks. Or turn left onto the dirt Old Aberdeen Road, park, and look up. You’re welcome to get up close to the sculpture, but leave your vehicle in the dirt lot and walk up.

Click here to see the full article: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/rhythms-of-life

Cirque du Soleil Art Garden

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Cirque du Soleil has just unveiled an Art Garden  adjoining their international headquarters in Montreal. The garden features 16 major works of art from artists around the world.

Andrew Rogers has a strong, continued presence with Cirque du Soleil with the large scale Rhythms of Life sculpture being the feature of the entry to the head office.  Two of his large-scale sculptures are featured in the grounds of their international headquarters and the new Art Garden. Weightless 5, and Unfurling are on display for public viewing.

The Art Garden was created to enable the local community to interact and enjoy the art pieces in a public setting. The Art Garden also features a vegetable garden and a labyrinth, built by Cirque du Soleil employees.  The Cirque du Soleil art collection and Art Garden provides an inspiring, creative and stimulating environment for employees and visitors through contact with the arts.

To read more about the Cirque du Soleil Art Garden, view the full Art Public Montreal article here: https://artpublicmontreal.ca/en/2017/06/cirque-du-soleil-unveils-an-art-garden/

And for more information regarding Andrew Rogers’ sculptures displayed through Cirque du Soleil, head to the following link:

https://artpublicmontreal.ca/en/artiste/rogers-andrew/

Rhythms of Life

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Since 1999, Andrew Rogers has produced the world’s most extraordinary contemporary land art undertaking – Rhythms of Life, successfully demonstrating how art and nature can enhance each other. This land art project is of a mega scale, 51 sculptures across 16 countries spanning all seven continents. It has involved more than 7,500 people over 16 years. The culmination being Antarctica as the final link: the seventh continent.

For Rogers, the actuation to create these pieces of art – a chain of stone sculptures, or geoglyphs, – that have taken form across mountains, valleys and plains around the world, started from an idea to denote separation from the ordinary and provide contemplative settings. A particular purpose of the Rhythms of Life land art structures is to establish consecrated space, provide an impetus to show linkages between structures and environment, and to allow for contemplative narrative around the search for heritage.

It is with the consideration that each creation will erode over time leaving traces of both monuments of culture and those who imagined them. Therefore, Rogers works to use only local materials, which are readily available to construct each sculpture, ensuring local flora is undisturbed. Each creation is conceived of with the assistance of local communities including elders, local workers and experts.

Rogers land art project is, “art created by many people for many people”.  His geoglyphs were inspired by one of the earliest forms of land art: the Nazca lines in Peru. Rhythms of Life is a contemporary land art project of a scale and scope unprecedented in modern history.

Eleanor Heartney describes Rogers’ undertaking: “The geographic and historic sweep of the works constructed as part of the Rhythms of Life project is unprecedented in its scale and ambition. Taken together, the geoglyphs have been erected in every kind of climate, and have responded to geographical environments as distinct as Nepal’s Himalayan Mountains, China’s Gobi Desert, the volcanic mountains of Iceland and the harsh Israeli desert.”

The ultimate goal was to form a connected set of drawings on the earth visible from space, to have the first use of satellites to capture a connected set of contemporary sculptures around the earth, and to utilise Earth Observation sensors to acquire high-resolution satellite imagery from altitudes between 500-800kms (310-500 miles) above the Earth’s surface.

Silvia Langen: “Rhythms of Life is Andrew Rogers’ life work. The largest contemporary project of its kind in the world, Rogers has introduced a new dimension into land art – the global work of art.”

Portal to Another Dimension

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An excerpt from Phoebe Hoban’s essay  about the Rhythms of Life land art project

In a contemporary world where the digital age rules, from pictures made perfect through Photoshop to our all-pervasive social media, how can an artist preserve and communicate his pure sense of wonder? If you are Andrew Rogers, you do it with people, places and stone. Rogers’ passion for finding remote, unspoiled spots on which to build structures that commemorate human history and our ancient, common bond, seems boundless; and his apparently endless energy and curiosity are embodied in his Rhythms of Life project.

Jules Verne’s famous character, Phileas Fogg went around the world in just 80 days. It has taken Rogers a lot longer to circumnavigate the globe. But Rogers has left a lasting memorial to the local culture—and to his own aesthetic philosophy–in each exotic location. (And like the fictional Fogg, he has made excellent use of hot air balloons—not to mention small planes, helicopters, motorized hangliders and satellites–since his work is best seen from above.)

Rogers’ Rhythms of Life, a unique global land-art initiative, began 14 years ago, and now includes 50 large-scale land-art works, built in 13 countries that span 7 continents. In order to create these far-flung installations, the artist has engaged the collaboration of over 6,700 people, from a remote nomadic tribe in Namibia to an army of Chinese soldiers in the Gobi desert. He has employed technology ranging from large earth-moving machines to computer models to cutting-edge GPS systems. But it is the humanistic aspect of his project, linked not just by its artistic intention, but by its participatory nature, that is one of its most distinctive—and profound—features.

A Day on Earth is the most complex and ambitious of the structures. This impressive corridor consists of twelve 9-meter-tall columns, each inscribed with a set of humanistic values (like Commandments) leading up to an imposing 64-foot tall arch that looks like the portal to another dimension. The colonnade of columns is spaced according to the mathematical ratio for the Golden Ratio (1:1.618) famously used in the Parthenon. A second Golden Ratio governs the width and length of the corridor of columns.

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*Phoebe Hoban has written about culture and the arts for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, ARTnews, and The New York Observer, among others.

 Her biography of Lucian Freud, Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open, was published simultaneously by Amazon and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April, 2014. Her biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat: Basquiat, A Quick Killing in Art, (1998) was a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.