Word: rafting
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...perhaps Fairweather's most fragile assemblage was of three old World War II aircraft fuel tanks and a silk parachute he found while living on a Darwin beach in the early '50s. These formed the basis of a 3-m raft and sail he later attempted to navigate across the Timor Sea, with the vague intention of returning to Europe. Instead, 16 days later, he washed ashore on the western Timorese island of Roti, where, in exchange for pieces of his sailing vessel, Fairweather was offered food and shelter. What nearly killed him in effect became his life raft...
...Fairweather's 1952 journey proved to be the defining moment in his career, the stepping-off point for his later great abstractions, but the raft was quickly forgotten. Now, in a feat befitting the noble nuttiness of its originator, a fellow Antipodean has recreated it as a piece of "readymade" sculpture. New Zealand-born, German-based Michael Stevenson, 40, has built a career from the quirks of art history, teasing them out as art-museum "exhibits." Artist or anthropologist? For the 2003 Venice Biennale, he reassembled New Zealand's failed four-wheel-drive vehicle, the Trekka, as a humorous gesture...
...voyage, including maps meticulously hand-painted by Stevenson. Starting off in Sydney last May, "Argonauts of the Timor Sea" traveled to the U.K. in November, where the artist recruited a band of local Sea Scouts to (unsuccessfully) sail the vessel off the coast of Kent. From Aug. 27, the raft completes its unlikely journey at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (NAK), an art space in northwest Germany...
...precious. The tussle over the origins of the Lapita and Polynesian people has boiled for more than a century, from the 1885 publication of New Zealand scholar Edward Tregear's widely debated theory that Maori were of Aryan descent, to Thor Heyerdahl's attempt, in his epic 1947 raft trip from Peru to Polynesia, to prove that South America was the Polynesians' homeland...
...Lawrence of Arabia springs to mind.) But the movie he is making now is particularly treacherous. "What's the old cliché?" he asks. "Don't act with children and dogs? Well, try children, dogs, horses and hounds, coal miners, a motor car formerly the property of the late George Raft, and a fox. Try acting with that lot, which I did the other day. Verrrrry tricky." O'Toole, 72, knew when he signed up for the remake of Lassie that there would be a collie, a massive hunt scene in which his character would chase a fox down a coal...