The Literature Network - Visual Arts: All aboard for a flight of fancy The Belgian sculptor-engineer Panamarenko is a poet and a dreamer. But are his rickety flying machines and ironic inventions visionary art or just kids' stuff?

Visual Arts: All aboard for a flight of fancy The Belgian sculptor-engineer Panamarenko is a poet and a dreamer. But are his rickety flying machines and ironic inventions visionary art or just kids' stuff?

Content courtesy of

From: The Independent - London
Date: 20000215
Author:Sue Hubbard

"When will men be most unlike themselves?" mused the playwright Aristophanes, who seems to have been fond of asking rhetorical questions and supplying the answers. "When they learn to fly like birds," he quipped, presumably to a bemused crowd in an Athenian agora.

Flight has, since we crawled out of caves, been one of man's most abiding fantasies. The image of Icarus falling from the sky, after his father, Daedalus's D-I-Y disaster, has fascinated artists and writers from Bruegel the Elder to WH Auden. Leonardo da Vinci was intrigued with the mechanics of aviation. As both an artist and ...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Visual Arts: All aboard for a flight of fancy The Belgian sculptor-engineer Panamarenko is a poet and a dreamer. But are his rickety flying machines and ironic inventions visionary art or just kids' stuff?

Other Articles on Aristophanes