Let’s have a nice hand for monuments, Part 1
The website Artificial Owl has an interesting page on man-made buildings and other structures that have been abandoned for various reasons. Some are trite and quite justifiably left behind, others have been evacuated for scary reasons, and some aren’t “abandoned” at all. They just feel that way.
One of the most haunting of the last group of sites is a work of art: Mario Irarrázabal’s “Hand of the Desert” (”La mano del desierto”), which is way out in the middle of nowhere in Chile’s mountain-cloistered Atacama Desert.
The 11-metre-tall iron and cement sculpture was unveiled 1,100 metres above sea level in March 1992, which was the same month I uprooted from Canada and moved to Thailand, and Thailand — if you dig a hole straight the Earth — is directly opposite the northern coast of Chile.
Is that stretching too far for a personal connection?
Anyway, the Internet loves pictures of Irarrázabal’s giant hands in Chile, Uruguay, Spain and Italy, but little is offered about the artist, or the fact that his inspiration is largely Catholic. I was raised Catholic too, but —
Okay, I’ll drop that one cold.
Irarrázabal, now 68, was born in Santiago and in the early 1960s studied at the seminary of the Congregation of Holy Cross and the University of Notre Dame in the US, picking up a bachelor’s degree in philosophy as well as a master’s in art.
He moved to Rome to focus on theology at Gregorian University, then to West Germany to learn from expressionist sculptor Waldemar Otto. He was back in Chile in 1969, and subsequently spent two years teaching sculpture at Catholic University.
A specialist in modelling and bronze casting, Irarrázabal also works in brass, aluminum, stone, wood and concrete, and stays close to Christian and humanistic themes, simplicity being a watchword, certainly one that’s not uncommon in modern sculpture of any kind.
As to attaching a meaning to the hands jutting from the soil, the few clues on offer don’t appear to point to much.
Irarrázabal’s first such sculpture was 1982’s “Monument to the Drowned” (”Monumento al Ahogado”), also partly engulfed in sand on Brava Beach in Punta del Este, Uruguay. It’s usually referred to as “the Monument of the Fingers” or simply “The Hand”.
Irarrázabal created it from reinforced concrete and plastic in six days, during the first International Meeting of Modern Sculpture in the Open Air in the popular resort town, where he was the youngest of nine participating artists and opted to dodge the battle for prime spots in a public square.
His hand — the only sculpture remaining from the 1982 gathering — is purportedly a warning to swimmers to leave the choppy waters there to the surfers.
I’d like to think there’s a bit more to it than that. Brava Beach may be sheathed in high-rise urbanity and reeking of suntan oil, but the underlying concept is reminiscent of that behind the tsunami memorials in Nopparat Thana National Park in Krabi, including Louise Bourgeois’ “Hold Me Close”. See them in a Dali House post here.
Humanity — drowned by nature or swallowed by its own excesses — might be a more interesting interpretation of the works. The hand raised in warning seems more appropriate in the subsequent sites Irarrázabal chose to erect them, busy Madrid in 1987 and Venice in 1995, by the tourist-caked Arsenal and the Grand Canal, as seen here.
“Hand of the Desert” in his homeland is a different story. You can see in the Google Earth views how remote it is, even if the Pan American Highway trundles past in the lonely distance.
Here it’s more like the spooky structure that the humans stumble across at the end of the film “Planet of the Apes”, which turns out to be the Statue of Liberty’s torch, all that remains of their civilisation.
Lacking an online explanation as to how a giant human came to be waving, saluting or pleading for a halt in the arid Atacama sand, it’s compelling to think that Irarrázabal and his sponsors chose the spot for its very isolation, knowing that travellers on that highway would first blink in disbelief, and then smile in wonder.
So in some settings it’s the hand of God signalling, “Stop, enough!”, and in others we get a wave, a reminder that God is still with us, no matter where we travel and how lonely we might feel.
Taking a keen interest in Irarrázabal’s sculptures, by the way, is the Hand in Art Flickr group, which is in turn worth taking an interest in.
In Part 2, “The Awakening”, Bamiyan and poor old Ferdinand Marcos.
