By Andrew Liszewski
While I’ve visited LEGOLAND in California, as a fan of the building blocks I still feel I must eventually make a pilgrimage to the real LEGOLAND in Denmark. And hopefully when I do, I’ll have a chance to see some of artist Kenn Munk’s LEGO graffiti before the park removes them. You see, while LEGOLAND represents a perfect copy of real cities, Kenn feels it’s actually too perfect, and has been ‘vandalizing’ the miniature metropolis over the past couple of years… but in a good way.
The thing is, the miniature city in Legoland form a perfect copy of our cities, with the exception of graffiti, it does not exist in the Lego universe, therefore I decided to tag the last untagged city in the world, but I wanted to do it Lego style and I wanted it be harmless and fun so I built impossible sculptural shapes out of Lego and visited the place with aforementioned journalist and tagged the place and a tradition was born. The objects are always just placed there or clicked on to existing parts, no glue is used, no alterations to existing buildings is made, no vandalism in other words.
In 2006 and 2007 he installed his ‘impossible shape’ LEGO sculptures, but for 2008 he wanted to add something that was inspired by pop-culture, and settled on the black sentinel monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
While I don’t necessarily endorse graffiti, particularly at a place like LEGOLAND which represents thousands and thousands of hours of hard work, I think Kenn’s pieces actually add to the park, and I look forward to seeing what he’ll create for 2009.
[ Kenn Munk dot Com ] VIA [ TOYSREVIL’S I LIKE TOYS ]
