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Citizen Powered Sculpture – Travelling Wall
by Eric Andersen
An immense solid coffin was constructed from 10,000 square concrete tiles. Each weighing 7 kilos, the tiles were easy to move but difficult to throw. Signs resembling road signs encouraged members of the public to remove one or more tiles from one end of the coffin. The signs also announced that a similar number of tiles would be added to the opposite end of the sculpture the following day.
Depending on how keen the public were, the sculpture would slowly advance across the square, perhaps towards then over the cathedral, towards the fjord, out into the water and down to the seabed, only to appear decades later in Oslo on its way to the North Pole.
During the week of the festival, the 70 tons of tiles moved a total of 6 meters and not one window was broken. The shape of the sculpture developed from domino games to pagoda towers and elaborated on the endless variations of the axis of symmetry.
Eric Andersen later negotiated with the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in West Berlin to have a permanent citizen-powered sculpture of 100,000 tiles built at Brandenburger Tor. However, the local authorities blocked its construction, fearing it would migrate across the nearby wall and head towards China. The wall in Roskilde was sponsored by stone masons SF-Sten.
1985
“The Fluxus people have placed two huge piles of rocks on the Stændertorvet square. The people of Roskilde are then, in the spirit of Gustav Wied and Spike Jones, encouraged to take a stone from one pile and move it to the other pile. If everything goes as planned the result should be a walking wall, a floating, folksy piece of architecture, and if someone is setting the course, the wall could very well begin to wander through the cathedral on its way further out in to the world.”
- Preben Hygum,”The return of Fluxus,” Information, May 28 1985
1985
Eric Andersen has an audience participation piece in the middle of the street opposite the Central Square, consisting of a huge pile of white cement blocks which can be piled up and arranged by passersby to create an ever-changing sculpture. Ben’s bed was carried there too, with a pretty girl on it, and Ben intends to sleep there tonight, preferably with company!
- Ann Noël in her diary, May 1985
1985
”One of the more apparent arguments for the Fluxus people’s presence was Eric Andersen’s walking wall in the middle of Roskilde. Imagine a neat pile of 40 tons of garden flagstones next to a couple of signs with a text by Eric Andersen telling people that they too are participating in an art project and that they are encouraged to move one or more stones from one end of the pile to the other. This way they are helping to move and form the sculpture as well as deciding in which direction the sculpture should wander. It all went very well for a couple of days. Both the local people and some famous people were moving stones as if they were slaves of the Pharaohs, but partly because the wall was heading towards the cathedral and on its way there would be crossing Ben Vautiers bed, and partly because the wall was obstructing the traffic crossing the square. Eventually the authorities put up some restrictions as to where the wall could wander. As with so many other human activities where restrictions hinder expansion, this particular art project was terminated and soon lost its dynamic.”
- Torben Weirup, “Da Avantgarde came to Korsbæk” in Kunstavisen p. 12-13, 1985
2006
One day Eric Andersen announced that his “Walking Wall” (Borgerdrevet Skulptur), was about to open and we all walked over from the hotel to a large pile of cinder blocks stacked – minimalist fashion – in the main square. People were invited to take one cinder block and move it along. The wall would walk through the city. I was unimpressed and went back to drinking and playing my music. The next morning I walked over to see how far it had moved and - POW! - I fell in love. The homely pile had transformed itself overnight into a phantasmagoric scene – medieval spires, arches and patterned pavement spread across the plaza, while the walking wall streaked aggressively in ‘dominoe’ lines that shot up and down the steps of the medieval buildings. This was a spontaneous creativity that I’d known in the intimate confines of our home and among these artists, but never seen in the public domain before. I was stunned and that work remains in my life as a paradigm for what art can do and be in the public domain. If nothing else, love thrusts from the social experience between two people into a view of the world. This was my first experience of intellectual love – I was excited. The work took grip in my mind and established itself as a feature of the landscape of possibilities that is the springboard of intellectual life.
- Hannah Higgins, RosKIDlischer Rekollektionen , 2006
April 6th, 2009
There is no way such a thing could be anything less than marvelous. It is a model for a certain ideal creativity and something i aim for in my own work…….no matter what happens is alright. It must be alright, and even more than alright. Simply. all right. Let people turn it into banality and the stretch of irony renders it “grossartig”. Let them even knock it over: that would also have an expressive force. And so on.