German artists drag giant pen across U.S. desert

VERNAL, Utah — Two German artists wearing black suits pulling a giant metallic pen made out of foam board began this week on a roughly 250-mile rectangular route through Utah, Colorado and Wyoming as an artistic project aimed to show the contrast between the straight lines humans make and the winding lines found in nature.

Munich residents Wolfgang Aichner, 51, and Thomas Huber, 52, have been planning the trip for months and began their trek after gathering permits to walk across mostly public and American Indian reservation lands.

The painters consider themselves performers, “merely a temporary, ephemeral appearance on the horizon of an immense landscape.”

The artists will trade off in the role of pushing the pen and in capturing the journey on videotape.

“One is always the man in the suit, and the other one is doing the filming,” Aichner said.

The project grew out of the artists’ fascination with a conceptual image of a man in a suit with an oversized ballpoint pen in the desert.

The pen stands more than 4 yards high and features a small wheel at the point, which will leave a temporary imprint on the dusty ground while also providing visual scale. From a distance, a viewer might perceive the pen as regular-sized, while the man in the suit would appear tiny as a beetle, Aichner said.

Aichner called the pen an alien object among the U.S. desert landscape.

Viewers can follow the artists’ journey online at the Global Aesthetics Genetics website.

The artists plan to screen the video of “linear” in their native Munich in February. To fund the artwork, the pair received money from German arts organizations as well as art collectors.

Trent Nelson The Associated Press German artists Wolfgang Aichner and Thomas Huber pull a replica of a pen Wednesday on the first day of their art project, “Linear,” about 10 miles northwest of Vernal, Utah.