November 18, 2006

Mystery Solved


line

A number of weeks ago, my wife* asked me if I had noticed a long, wavering line of thin red/orange paint running along the sidewalk of one of our neighborhood blocks. I hadn't noticed but the next day I looked for it and found it. And then, as the weeks passed, we both began to see it "everywhere" (everywhere to us being about an 8 block radius from our Bowery-area apartment) and the "why" began to nag at us big time.

Finally, thanks to TimeOut New York, we have our answer:
“It” is an art project that gives new meaning to the phrase writ large. Its creator is a street artist who goes by MOMO—an ID you could confirm if you bothered to fly over lower Manhattan, since that intriguing red line spells out his nom de guerre from one side of the island to the next...

He began working on the project over the summer, spray-painting from his bike to create the tag, which starts at Pier 59 on the West Side, then loops through the Meatpacking District, the West Village, the East Village and the LES, before terminating at East River Park near 13th Street. “I wanted to try something truly monumental,” he says, likening the piece not to mere graffiti, but to such classics of Earth art as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and James Turrell’s Roden Crater. “It’s bigger than either of them,” he points out, only half-serious. He says the tag is already disappearing in spots, which suits him fine. “Eventually it will wear down, but it will become more mythical that way,” he says. “Sort of like Manhattan itself.”
Check it out:


Tag
(Click to watch MOMO's movie)


map
(Click for MOMO's website)

*Note: Those are not my wife's legs pictured above. Trust me, my wife's legs are a helluva lot sexier. Not that it's any of your business.

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