It came from...

..another world, maybe?  Same game.

I handed this one off to Bodo earlier today, and he has not yet come up with the title, artist or location.

Pat Lang

Comments

[LA Confidential Pantload]

Looks like the Spider sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

[john in Los Angeles]

Yes, Col. This is a mid 1970s piece from the "turd in the punchbowl" school of architecture immortalized by Tom Wolfe-- the unwanted, unneeded, unbeautiful, ungainly, oversized public square sculpture to which the Western World has been subjected since the 1960s.

This type of work is produced by earnest people dressed in black and wearing square glasses.

It is peed-on by teen skateboarders and winos.

It is held to be a public nuisance by upper middle class citizens who would much rather see this type of spot graced by a fountain or (in Virginia) a Confederate General.

It is...Inshallah...temporary

[Patrick Henry]

Pat..

It looks like the 3.2 million dollar Giant Spider sculpture by Louis Bourgeois..located outside the national gallery in Ottowa, Canada..

[Patrick Henry]

Opps..Its Name is MAMAN..

[Patrick Henry]

Title..MAMAN

Artist..Louis Bourgeois..

Location..Ottowa, Canada

[pbrownlee]

Maman by Louis Bourgeois -- and it moves around quite a bit.

[pbrownlee]

Ottawa?

[Rojo]

"Maman"

by Louise Bourgeois

Outside Ottawa's National Gallery of Art.

[jang]

"Maman" National Gallery of Canada Plaza. Louise Bourgeois "gargantuan bronze spider" 2005. "Evokes a sense of security but also entrapment" She may need snow boots by Christmas.

[irene]

aaah! it's Maman. by Louise Bourgeois. I thought it was in Canada. next to the National Gallery in Ottawa. That doesn't look like the National Gallery of Canada though.

[John Powers]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Bourgeois

A Spider which sculpted by Louise Bourgeois which lives outside the National Gallery of Canada.

I just remembered I have to say when. I'm embarrassed...sometime after 1948.

[John Powers]

Louis Bourgeous, Spider, installed 1997. Outside the National Gallery Canada.

[pbrownlee]

Maman, 1999. Bronze and steel, 30 feet 5 inches x 29 feet 3 inches x 33 feet 7 inches, Edition of 6, 1 A.P. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. © Louise Bourgeois/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Like a creature escaped from a dream, or a larger-than-life embodiment of a secret childhood fear, the giant spider Maman (1999) casts a powerful physical and psychological shadow. Over 30 feet high, the mammoth sculpture is one of the most ambitious undertakings in the long career of Louse Bourgeois (b. Paris, 1911). Through a vast oeuvre spanning over 60 years, Bourgeois has plumbed the depths of human emotion further and more passionately than perhaps any other artist of our time. In its evocation of the psyche, her work is both universal and deeply personal, with frequent, explicit reference to painful childhood memories of an unfaithful father and a loving but complicit mother. Bourgeois first gained notice in the 1940s with her Surrealist-inspired Personnages: thin, vertical forms in wood or stone that evoke the human body. Installed in clusters, suggesting a small crowd or perhaps a family, the Personnages were meant to symbolize figures from the artist's past. Maman, in fact, is associated with the artist's own mother. The spider, who protects her precious eggs in a steel cage-like body, provokes awe and fear, but her massive height, improbably balanced on slender legs, conveys an almost poignant vulnerability.

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_21_4.html

[Sven]

Louise Bourgeois's Maman outside the National Gallery of Art in Ottawa.

[Bruce]

I've seen a similar sculpture by Louise Bourgeois in Bilbao.

Google images came up with pictures of several of her pieces.

I'll leave it to an expert to fill in the rest.

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=sculpture+of+giant+spider+minneapolis&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

[arbogast]

Is it an Avondale spider?

[W. Patrick Lang]

Congratulations to all. Next time, something more obscure. Feel free to nominate art targets to me. pl

[jang]

"Maman" Gargantuan 30' spider sculpture "recently" arrived at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. (Hello....it's still barbequing weather in Ontario, thank God,) Created by Louise Bourgeois, weighing 18,000 lbs. "Spiders have the ability to fabricate complex and calculated webs": Aren't you brilliant, Col. Lang: just like the propaganda machine of the GOP ,though that is no laughing matter. A web of suggestion and a chimera of deceipt the complexity of which remains largely unrecognised by the people themselves has been actively introduced which influences and biases the very thought patterns of Americans. Perceptions are swayed by techniques we do not even recognize and the very "metrics" seem to have been pre-defined. I would greatly appreciate if you would comment on the synchronization of persuasive techniques which have subtly or not so subtly been used to bolster the BushCo gestalt of "thought" pattern and who has created them. Considering that these techniques sway opinion much like the sales of Viagra are encouraged by friendly TV ads. (And I am left to say" if you have any loss of vision, please contact your Physician"). Many thanks

[EB Guy]

While I know, having seen it, that this sculpture is now in Ottawa, it looks like it should be on the approach to the Hogwarts forest. Wonder if JK Rowling ever saw it? I believe it, or perhaps it was a similar piece, was in London for a time.

[W. Patrick Lang]

jang

Not sure I had worked that out but maybe you are right. pl

[pbrownlee]

I've always thought it could use a couple of kids' swings -- one or two on each leg -- but I'm not sure most mothers would agree. A whole playgound set under and around Maman would be quite something.

[Nabil]

You should see the artistic atrocities that grace the corniche and the roundabouts in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Combine the prohibition against graven images with a garish Saudi aesthetic and you get....30 foot coffee pots, towering car wrecks, sculpted monoliths of swiss cheese. Makes this spider look like real art.

-Nabil

[W. Patrick Lang]

Nabil

I lived in Jidda and remember well the monstrosities. pl

[kim]

well, i do make statements about the present administration not doing legitimate real governing,though i'm no way expert in such matters, so maybe i shouldn't be concerned with thw questions here about "real art".

[Izz]

They made six of them, the only one I saw was in front of the national Gallery of Ottawa, I know there is one in new yok, the Other 4, I have no clue