ASTRONOMICAL                                                                                      

ASTRONOMICAL - Mishka Henner

My Birthday present a set of the Amazing ASTRONOMICAL by Mishka Henner a scale model of the solar system. It is a hands on visual interpretation of our solar system, each of the 6,000 pages represents a million kilometers.




New Scientist spoke to Henner :

Mishka Henner is an Artist living in Manchester he is known for his appropriation of images from Google earth, and Street View.

Mishka Henner's Less Americains sits next to Robert Frank's The Americans on my shelf

I also own Mishka Henners, Less Americains, where he erases 83 photographs from Robert Frank's photobook, The Americans. The book by Frank was first published in Paris, France and was called
Les Americains (The Americans).

In Henners book, which he described as a homage to Robert Rauchensberg and his drawing, Erased De  Kooning, he has erased parts of the images leaving shapes and textures which are beautiful and interesting in themselves. There has been a lot of controversy about the book, The Guardian's Sean O'Hagan described it as "either inspired or provocative-to-the point-of-insulting to the original".

A review by Jeffrey Ladd in Time magazine ended by evaluating the work in relation to Jack Kerouac's own words written in the 1958 introduction which accompanied the first US edition of Frank's book:

What poem this is, what poems can be written about this book of pictures some day by some young new writer high by candlelight bending over them describing every grey mysterious detail.