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news release July 2002

500 Pounds of Common Earth 1 Metre Cubed, Transylvania to Los Angeles
by Roman Vasseur

first exhibited at the Austrian Cultural Forum London in Summer 2000 has now reached it's 'final' destination. It's westward wandering has taken it to London via Hungary, Austria and Germany, Dublin (Project, 2001), New York (Art Resources Transfer Inc., 2002) and Los Angeles (Raid Projects, 2002). 'The Artist' reports:

After entering the Unites States at New York, 'The Consignment' existed briefly in the city as an 'art exhibit' at the gallery of Art Resources Transfer Inc. 'The Consignment' has now arrived in Los Angeles where a reception was held at Raid Projects Gallery on the evening of Saturday 3 August to mark its arrival there. California is designated as the final destination of 'The Consignment'.

In California, meetings were held between 'The Artist' and representatives of the Centre for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) based in Los Angeles concerning the Centre's offer of a storage facility located in the Californian Desert at 35¡ N, 117¡40' W, near Edwards Airforce Base. The site has been visited and assessed and a decision made in conjunction with CLUI to go ahead and deposit the crate in the high desert at this secure facility. Shipment will be made on 9 September. 2002 Equipment will be installed at the desert storage facility to enable constant online surveillance via the project website.

New essays by Nicola Cotton (Beyond Cratehood) and Tom McCarthy (Shipping the Disaster Home) are are available online from Vargas Organisation. A publisher is being sought in Los Angeles to produce the final and complete document of 'The Work'.

Los Angeles Times wrote, 'Vasseur makes an enduring impression, and his work sends broad messagesÑthat art is but a box we fill with our own projections. It's a story that we choose either to believe or reject, and a smuggling act that calls for subversion, subtlety and surprise.'

Artist Roman Vasseur's project entitled 500 Pounds of Common Earth, Transylvania to Los Angeles, orginated in May 2000 in the Borgo Pass in the country of Romania. It has wended its westward journey by road and rail, sea and air via Vienna to London where it was exhibited at the Austrian Cultural Forum (June 2000), thence to Dublin where it was exhibited at Project Arts Center (September 2001). Very careful preparations were made for its importation to the United States in view of official concerns about phytosanitary protection. However, the artist has stated that his aim is to "avoid any reference to myths or fictions commonly associated with its place of origin." After its brief sojourn in New York City (until July 25th), the consignment continued west to artist-run space Raid Projects in Los Angeles, where it resided until the end of August 2002. The arrival of the Earth in Vienna was greeted with confusion, apparently because the trucker who shipped the crate from Romania, effectively, had smuggled it. It arrived in the Austrian capital as it were, "without papers". Roman Vasseur wrote from Vienna, "The woman at K**** Transport in Vienna is telling me that the problem she is having is that, technically speaking, the consignment does not exist and is therefore an 'illegal immigrant sitting in her warehouse,' because it has not originated in the EU, nor is there any proof that it originated from outside the EU. In her 14 years experience of moving goods from Eastern Europe she has never known a shipment of this size to come across the border without being stopped and inspected." A way was found for the stateless parcel to receive accreditation and for it to continue by air via Munich to London where it was given refuge at the Austrian Cultural Forum. David Burrows, reviewing in Art Monthly, wrote that Vasseur's 500 Pounds of Common Earth "might have passed as an innocent piece of post-minimalist sculpture or a homage to Walter de Maria. Exhibiting a work that comments on immigration and the European Union risks didacticism but Vasseur avoids this by allowing the narratives that the box accumulates on its travels to suggest complex allegories."

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Additional information:
 http://www.austria.org.uk/art/archive/roman_vasseur/earth.html
 http://www.earthconsignment.org/ Press
 for details see http://www.artretran.com