Art in the making

For their designers and perhaps even their operators, forklifts are often objects of art. Now, however, they are being taken to an even higher level of art appreciation at Sculpture Projects festival in the German town of Meunster.

One of the highlights of the fourth festival is an exhibit by German-born British artist, Gustav Metzger.

Taking art out of the gallery and onto the streets, Metzger's "sculpture" consists of a real-life forklift that carries a handful of stones or bricks around the town for three months.

Confused? Well, according to festival organisers, the meaning is pretty obvious: "By presenting the spectator with a machine and adding the factor of randomness, Gustav Metzger is promoting a radical extension of accepted unproductive notions of art," a spokesman explains.

Readers lucky enough to visit Münster over the next 107 days will have the chance to see a man driving a forklift to a local hotspot, step off the vehicle, go inside the building and use a password to activate a computer program that will inform him, by means of a random generator, how many stones he has to take to a certain location in the city. And those who miss the result can catch it online after the driver posts an image each day.

This is not Metzger's first brush with forklift art. His last acclaimed London exhibition involved collecting bales of newspapers in the basement of an old building near Hawksmoor's Spitalfield church in East London. The papers then cascaded off the machine. And what was the message there? It all aimed to mirror "the wasteful, repetitive, unproductive nature of most of the 'work' in capitalist societies", according to the gallery which staged the event.