Armand Fernandez's 5,000-ton pyramid of war outside the Lebanese ministry of defence, at Yarze, above Beirut
He originally offered his armoured monument to the city of Strasbourg during D-Day celebrations in the early 1970s. Unsuccessful, Mr Fernandez then offered his work to the Israelis in 1983, a year after Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon, which killed about 17,500 people - most of them civilians, more than 500 of them Israeli soldiers - but the offer apparently fell on stony ground once more .
Mr Fernandez was working on the repair of Beirut's war-damaged classical museum last year when he discovered that the Lebanese - always prone to sign up an international artist --were looking for a monument that would express "a hope for peace".
Its very unveiling being timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the birth of the Lebanese army.
The end of the 15-year Lebanese civil war in 1990 meant that the national army found itself the largely unhappy recipient of more clapped-out armour and useless field guns, real tanks, artillery pieces, mortars and armoured vehicles, than any other military force in the region; it willingly gathered together the detritus of a hundred militia battles - tanks and artillery which had helped to level the centre of Beirut, some of whose ruins still stand in the baking heat below Yarze - and hoisted them into Mr Fernandez's 10-storey concrete pyramid.
http://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/08/hope-for-peace-monument-in-yarze-lebanon.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/tribute-to-peace-or-plain-tank-sandwich-1594198.html
this is Long Term Parking, 1982, in France http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2010/03/long-term-parking-art-by-arman.html
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