Aesthetic Interchange
Reader Rich (sig?)-alerted me to this dispatch from Alissa Walker about an incredible piece of guerrilla wayfinding on the freeways of Los Angeles by artist Richard Ankrom, which lasted for the better part of a decade.
The curious denouement to the story is that the carefully pre-aged sign was taken down by CALTRANS, and then replaced with a “real” version. Ankrom was unable to locate his original, which has been turned into scrap metal destined for China.
Somehow this put me in mind of a recent line from Arthur Danto’s book on Andy Warhol, vis a vis the famous Brillo Boxes: “The challenge was to explain why Warhol’s box was art while its look-alike in common life was not.” (Danto thinks you cannot, hence pop art’s disruptive presence in the continuum of art history).
Perhaps it’s time for CALTRANS to institute an artist-in-residence program.
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This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Traffic Signs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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January 18th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
The change was made in part because the interchange from the northbound 110 and the northbound 5 has had a “smart lane” (perhaps not the right description) where during the rush hours, there are two lanes for people to change over, instead of just one.
Historically, the interchange has been one lane (fast lane) with a long backup complicated by people who wish to skip waiting in the lane by driving in the #2 lane and then making a quick dash into the interchange at the last moment.
It was always “challenging.”
January 18th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
” …to explain why Warhol’s box was art while its look-alike in common life was not”.
Jorge Luis Borges explored this brilliantly in a short story called “Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote”, which examines passages from the fictitious author Menard’s version of Don Quixote, and explains why it is superior to the identical original.
January 20th, 2010 at 3:33 pm
There’s an old story in the San Diego Union Tribune about the creation of a unique highway safety sign that was created by Caltrans graphic artist John Hood.