The desert heat is known to produce some wacky hallucinations, but if you see two men dressed to impress while dragging along a gigantic pen from behind, it’s no mind game.
Munich artists Wolfgang Aichner (51) and Thomas Huber (52), set off on a 400 mile journey across the desert landscapes of Utah, Wyoming and Colorado on September 13, carrying along an oversized sculpture of a ball point pen, measuring four meters long. Why? For the sake of art!
“This is a performance work of art, the sculpture is part of it. It’s a huge ball point pen used to draw a line. The landscape is a big piece of paper,” Aichner told press before starting the 26-day journey. “Human beings making rational thoughts, making the straight line. There’s nothing like that in nature. The boundaries of the states are also imaginary created by thought, we’re doing something similar.”
People interested in tracking the journey can do so by visiting the project page at linear2107.org, but what would be a more fascinating way to follow the trek, according to Aichner, would to get a real world view from the way up in the sky, where he thinks at just the right distance, the pen could be perceived as a normal size object with tiny beetle-like humans carrying it along.
