Artist seeking $387,000 grant to bury decommissioned Boeing 737 underground

If the thought of flying makes you anxious or afraid, there are several ways that you can handle those feelings, including determining what triggers your fear, seeking online treatment through the Takeoff Project or, um, burying an entire Boeing 737 underground. British artist Roger Hiorns, a one-time nominee for the country's prestigious Turner Prize, is doing that very thing and hopes to get a £250,000 ($387,309) grant from Arts Council England to do it.

Hiorns has spent the past four years finding the perfect decommissioned jet to bury underground at a less-than picturesque site near Birmingham, England that has been described as "industrial wasteland." Hiorns, who is not at all making this stuff up, says that the large-scale installation will "amplify the contemporary anxiety which the object holds over us" and will somehow be constructed to allow visitors to the site to go seven meters underground to sit in the plane's seats and walk on top of the fuselage. Hiorns said:

I’m presenting a space that’s deeply familiar but filled with anxiety and increasing the level of anxiety by placing the compressed atmosphere of an aluminium shell underground. The hole will lead people towards an adverse experience.

And – weirdly enough – Hiorns isn't the only artist who wants to dig a massive hole and drop an airplane in it. Since 2012, Swiss artist Christoph Büchel has tried to raise $1.5 million (!!!) so that he can bury a Boeing 727 in the Mojave Desert near Boron, California ("It isn't a race to be first to bury a jet," Hiorns huffed).

Hiorns has previously used aircraft parts in his work. He has filled the engines of a Boeing EC-135c with crushed anti-depressant pills "in a sculpture contrasting global security and individual well-being." In 2009, he atomized another airplane engine – as in literally turning it into dust – and spread the remnants across the floor of London's Tate Gallery. At the time, Richard Dorment, the chief art critic of the Telegraph, wrote:

A machine so powerful it can keep a huge plane in the air has been reduced to a flood of soft black, gray and silver particles. A heavy industrial object on which human lives depend has been, as it were, cremated - a process we take for granted with living things, but can’t imagine happening to a complex mechanism like this.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hiorns doesn't like to fly, admitting that he only does it once every couple of years. So maybe we should recommend the Takeoff Project instead?