Condemned Art

Also on Ionarts: Inventor Art (April 2, 2005) Artists' Squat on the Rue de Rivoli (March 31, 2005) Saving Outsider Art (September 13, 2004) Maison Picassiette and Other Oddities (December 17, 2003) Saint Elizabeths (November 26, 2003) Rock Sculptures (August 4, 2003)

File this under odd art projects from around the world (well, mostly France). A recent article by Sophie Landrin (La "Maison du chaos" sommée de revenir à l'ordre, February 21) in Le Monde describes the work of an art collective, Salamander Spirit, which has transformed an abandoned house near Lyon into an art project (my translation and links added):

Is this the end for Chaos Mansion? On Thursday, February 16, a court [the Tribunal Correctionnel de Lyon] ordered Thierry Ehrmann, the owner of a middle-class house in Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or (Rhône), transformed into a work of art, to put his house back in order. For four years, this iconoclastic businessman, owner of Art Price, a world leader in the online cataloguing of art sales, has been working on "deconstructing" his former 17th-century country home to make it into a "monumental collective art work," working in several stages on the theme of chaos.


Some fifty artists, including Ben, are coordinating their participation in this undertaking. Carbonized walls, façades recovered with corpse heads, a portrait of Bin Laden and his right-hand man Ayman Al-Zawahiri, crashed airplanes, melted luxury cars, a response to Ground Zero in New York, rivers of lava and blood: hundreds of idlers parade through each weekend in this village located about ten kilometers from Lyon, to assist in the metamorphosis of this war landscape.

For now, Ehrmann has appealed the ruling, which allows him to continue the work for now. Lunettes Rouges covered this on his blog earlier (La création artistique doit trouver sa forme dans la loi et l'expression de la volonté générale, February 18), and the post has a long string of in-depth comments attached to it.