Street artist Mark Jenkins makes, among other things, awesome human sculptures out of tape and then dresses them and puts them in public places. His latest project is The Golden Ass. In an area of Barcelona packed with “golden statue” type street performers, he constructed a sculpture that looked like a human in a horse costume. Everyone who encountered it assumed it was a performer being incredibly still.
He writes:
“…it’s much easier to make pretend people than to pretend to be a sculpture all day.”
Very cool, though the artist is understating with “it’s much easier to make pretend people”. I saw the human sculptures, and they are frighteningly realistic.
That’s a really clever and beautiful prank and piece of art! Provokes a lot of thought.
Mark Jenkins does some pretty awesome stuff. Check out the Storker project on his site – really makes me want to make some of those plastic babies
That’s hillarious, people seeing that it’s been there all day!!!
Well, I’m from Barcelona and the fact is that as soon as people realized that they can get money from tourists, there are a lot of bad human sculptures around here.
The prank is quite funny, but a lot of bad human sculptures get money here with a similar lack of effort.
I hate the trend of human sculptures that has popped up in cities world-wide. I went to Barcelona last December as part of a backpacking extravaganza and in the middle of the week in the middle of the winter the streets were lined with crappy sculptures. What happened to street _performers_ jugglers, musicians, acrobats?
When i stopped and listened to a violinist in Venice i tipped him. When i listened to a saxophonist in Lincoln i tipped him, and when I saw a juggler in Paris i tipped them, but those human sculptures are usually just a joke (though occasionally one will be pretty darn nifty).
I hate to take away from the point, but check out the girls at 3:28 in the video, damn!