Photo Courtesy and Property of Ben McAllister

Here's the story behind the photo from Ben:

I was walking around Frankfurt, Germany, waiting for a plane to Siberia, where I would spend 2 months. I was just photographing whatever looked interesting, so I headed toward the church tower you see on the left of the rainbow.

I was winding through a bunch of buildings, one of which was an art gallery. I looked up and saw this, atop what looked like a water storage building -- no main entrance and lots of water on the ground nearby. Everything was closed around there except a cafe. The person at the counter said she thought it was part of some art expo, but was vague. This was so out of place and 70's looking (in modern-art-central-Germany) I could do nothing but crack up.

 

After seeing this I received this email from a GBV Fan:

I have a little more info on Ben McAllister's great discovery in Frankfurt--the rainbow "Guided By Voices" sign. It is actually an art piece by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, a fairly known artist within contemporary art circles. This piece was probably part of the festivities surrounding the Frankfurt Art Book Fair in October.
 
The reason I know this is that I currently write the catalogue copy for a distributor of art books. Imagine my shock and excitement when I see one of the books that I have to write about is titled Guided By Voices, a book documenting Rondinone's work. I don't know what Rondinone's familiarity (if any) is with the best rock band of the last two decades.
 
Here is a description of the book, due out in March, published by Hatje Cantz in Germany:
 
Echoing Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre,” Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone uses the question of identity as a main theme in his multimedia creations. His works are a balancing act of ambiguities--from art to commerce, the fashionably hip to melancholic withdrawal, seduction to rejection. Exemplifying these undercurrents are his photo montages, in which he places his face onto the bodies of famous models in sometimes elegant, sometimes lascivious poses. This book documents Rondinone’s activity over the past six years, presenting a variety of works—diary entries in the style of underground comics, videos capturing the banality of everyday life, hypnotizing circle pictures, clowns, hermetic spatial installations, and monumental brush and ink landscape pictures.Ugo Rondinone was born in Brunnen, Switzerland in 1963. Since 1998 he has had a studio in the International Studio program at P.S. 1 in New York. He lives and works in Zurich and New York.