Beechcraft Travel Air: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

 

A light plane as part of art work by artists Claire Healy and Shaun Cordeiro called Stasis being installed in front of the MCA Pic: Nic G Source: The Daily Telegraph

 

A light plane as part of art work by artists Claire Healy and Shaun Cordeiro called Stasis being installed in front of the MCA Pic: Nic G Source: The Daily Telegraph

When you aim an aircraft at a city building, it automatically hits everyone's 9/11 button.
 
That's the dilemma faced by Blackheath artists Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, who yesterday supervised the installation of their orange Beechcraft Travelair in mid-swoop on the lawn outside the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

"It's very hard to escape [the 9/11 inference],'' Cordeiro said. "But when people are going to look at it, what other reference do they have?''

Stasis, as the Healy and Cordeiro artwork is called, was actually inspired by the 19-year-old German Mathias Rust who in 1987 flew a light aircraft from Helsinki to Moscow, foiling the full might of Soviet air defences and landing right next to Red Square.

Rust said he wanted to build an "imaginary bridge'' between the East and West, then in the grip of the Cold War.

"It kick-started the fall of the Soviet Union, in a strange way,'' Cordeiro said.

Stasis, like Rust, demonstrated the unlikely power of the lone dissenter, he said.

Stasis is part of a survey show at the MCA called Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro which opens on Thursday.

It's not the first time the artist couple has canibalised an aircraft in the name of art. Their exhibition also includes Par Avion, comprising a Cessna 172 which was cut into 70 pieces, posted to Sydney from San Francisco and reassembled on the gallery wall.

There are 18 works in the exhibition incuding Future Remnant - a stack of partially-assembled IKEA furniture propped up with a life-size replica of a dinosaur skeleton.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au