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Bruce Munro's Sea of 600,000 Used CDs

by Matthew Zuras on June 24, 2010 at 02:15 PM

Bruce Munro's CD Sea
Even though Jeanne-Claude, wife and partner in art to Christo, died at the end of last year, large-scale art interventions don't need to disappear. Not that we're comparing the creators of 'The Gates' (2005) and 'Running Fence' (1976) to Bruce Munro, the British lighting designer and creative mind behind 'CD Sea' -- a scattering of 600,000 compact discs over Long Knoll Field in Wiltshire, England -- but it would be difficult to forget their works upon viewing this one.

Munro has been collecting CDs for the project from eager donors, and he hopes to eventually collect one million discs. He, along with 140 of his friends and colleagues, laid out the CDs in a single layer over the course of a weekend, incorporating a serpentine footpath in between. Munro sees the project as a sort of body of water that has migrated inland, reflecting the sun and moon in that glittery-rainbow way that CDs tend to do.

Land art (a term that Christo and Jeanne-Claude did not apply to their own work) typically employs elements of nature to create a massive work, and is exemplified in Andy Goldsworthy's rock monoliths and, most famously, Robert Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty' (1970). So 'CD Sea' occupies a space between land art and conceptual installation, in which the landscape becomes the canvas and the CDs become paint. Even if it's not as conceptually rigorous as Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work, which was just as interested in the bureaucratic processes involved to make the project happen as the interaction with the land itself, you have to admit that 'CD Sea' is damn pretty. If you happen to be in the U.K., the installation will be on view to the public for the next two months. [From: Neatorama]

Tags: art, BruceMunro, CD, cds, christo, ChristoAndJeanne-claude, design, installation, installation art, InstallationArt, jeanne-claude, LandArt, LongKnollField, top

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