Word: derelicts
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...Oakland and Berkeley on San Francisco Bay, is chiefly noted for its cut-rate property taxes, which have drawn so much industry that during working hours the population rises to 40,000. Yet in the last few months, culture-shy Emeryville has become the nation's center of "derelict sculpture." A branch of "found art," derelict sculptures are built on Emeryville's bay-side mud flats from driftwood, discarded tires, broken toys, beer cans, jugs and other rubbish - treasures of pop art, and readily come by because a high proportion of bay debris washes up there. The artists...
Most of the derelict sculptures wash away with the tide. But some are such masterpieces that they regularly cause crack-ups by gawking drivers on the nearby freeway. One is a 12-ft. gallows with the 13 steps and a hanging effigy, its neck snapped at a medically correct angle. Another is a dinosaur and pterodactyl combination well planted in the muck. Last week a 17-year-old high-schooler named Wayne Saxton finished his fifth dereliction - a mammoth Viking warrior standing almost 20 ft. high. "I like Vikings," said he, as if that explained everything...
There is - or has been - a Christ on a cross, a battered old bus, a man in a rocking chair, a huge hand, a praying mantis. Social significance marks some of the sculptures: one has the broad arrow of the British "Ban the Bomb" movement. Many derelict sculptures are abstract, weather-worn totems that look curiously free against the steel-and-stone panorama of San Francisco across the bay. Another piece forms the word love, the o supplied by a treadless tire...
...question goes, is it art? James A. McCray, chairman of the art department at the University of Cal ifornia in Berkeley, describes derelict sculpture as "unusual - but legitimate in every sense of the word." Says one local artist, John McCracken, 29: "I'm amazed at the quantity of works that has arisen out of the nothingness that was there before." Most amazing is that they are there at all, unpretentious products of a leisurely society, which prove that some waste has taste. The mayor of Emeryville did not even know the sculptures were there until a few days...
Unable to open the elevator door, the woman (Olivia) presses the panic button. In the service street behind the house an alarm begins to jangle. A drunken derelict hears it, wanders up to the kitchen door, peeks in, sees a bottle of wine vinegar, deliriously smashes a window pane, enters the house and goes staggering through it in search of liquid plunder...