This 4,000-year-old headless statue of King Entemena of Lagash was returned to Iraq by the United States in a July 2006 ceremony. Seven years later, the FBI still places a premium on information regarding some 7,000 to 10,000 Iraqi artifacts that went missing during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. An estimated 15,000 artifacts — everything from pottery to headdresses — were looted from the Iraq National Museum at the time. Syria and Jordan have since returned thousands of pieces.

The 2.5-foot-tall stone statue, one of the most important pieces stolen, entered the U.S. by way of Syria thanks to an operation involving the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to multiple news reports at the time.

10- Thirteen Pieces From Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

In a major boost for the campaign, the band are promoting the fund raising appeal on their official website.

DD8 Music, a community music group based in Bon Scott’s hometown of Kirriemuir, have set a target of £50,000 to erect a bronze life-sized statue of the rock star in the centre of the Angus market town.

The appeal was launched ten days ago at “Bonfest”, the annual celebration of the “Highway to Hell” singer in Kirriemuir. And already more than £12,000 has been raised.

Graham Galloway, the chairman of DD8 Music, said the support from the band was “massive” for the fund raising campaign.

He said: “The response has been huge but it’s not quite good enough because we are trying to raise the money through the ‘Kickstarter’ scheme and we have only a limited funding window and if we don’t raise the money by the end of the window we won’t get any of the cash.

“We have raised a great amount already but we have only 21 days left to raise nearly £38,000.”

Mr Galloway continued: “We have already had donations from across the globe. And we are hoping for a snowball effect from the promotion of the scheme on the official AC/DC website. They don’t just put anything up there so that’s a big thing for us. AC/DC has such a huge fan base.

“We are not necessarily looking for huge donations from people. But if we can get lots and lots of small donations and hit a critical mass we should be fine.”

He added: “Pledges are coming in from across the globe. AC/DC are one of the biggest bands on the planet so it’s not surprising really.”

DD8 Music has already commissioned Ayrshire based sculptor John McKenna to design and sculpt the memorial statue. His previous works include the statue of legendary manager Jock Stein outside Celtic Park. Bon Scott already has a street named after him in his home town and there is also a memorial plinth to the singer in Kirriemuir.

JM Barrie

DD8 are hoping to erect the bronze statue to Bon in the town’s main square, next to the statue of Peter Pan which honours another of Kirriemuir’s famous sons, JM Barrie.

Said Mr Galloway: “We are going to hopefully orientate the two statues so they complement one another. Peter Pan is playing the pipes so we have already got the musical connection there and we can have Bon singing along with him.

“Folk in Kirrie are very proud of Bon’s connections with the town and in recent years it has just got stronger and stronger. We have been running the Bon Scott Festival since 2006 when the memorial stone was unveiled.

“And this year the whole town really got behind Bonfest. All the local shops had a special AC/DC displays in their windows and it was great.”

£50,000

The posting on the AC/DC website states: At the 2013 Bonfest in Kirriemuir, Scotland, the funding campaign for the Bon Scott statue to be erected in Bon’s hometown has been started.

“By June 5th 2013, a total of £50,000 must be collected in order to make this effort possible.

“Now, the AC/DC community is being invited to help fund the statue project! For more information and to pledge to contribute a donation toward the Bon Scott statue project:http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dd8music/bon-scott-statue-kirriemuir”

Bon Scott was born Ronald Belford Scott in Forfar in July 1946. His parents, Chick and Isa, ran the bakery in Bank Street, Kirriemuir, and stayed in Kirriemuir until 1952, when the family emigrated to Australia.

Bon formed his first band, The Spektors, twelve years later and performed in a number of other groups before replacing Dave Evans as lead singer of AC/DC in September 1974, joining founding members Angus and Malcolm Young who had emigrated from Glasgow to Sydney in 1963.

He died in 1980, at the age of just 33, after choking on his own vomit following a night’s heavy drinking in a London nightclub, only months after the release of the group’s seminal album “Highway to Hell.”

AC/DC paid tribute to Bon on their following album “Back In Black”, which went on to become the second best-selling album of all time, after Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

A 1982 article in The New York Times gave a snapshot of the pieces rising from the flats at the time: “a 25-foot wheelchair, erected by a group of handicapped sculptors; a quarterback preparing to throw a pass; a Jesus on a cross; a sailing ship; a dragon; a cake announcing ‘Steve Loves Susan’; a notice for a tall people’s convention; and a sign that says ‘Make Art, Not Ads.’ ”

“It was a Surrealist tableau of a pretty weird kind,” Ms. Bove, 42, recalled the other day in her Brooklyn studio. “Coming to that as a kid opened a huge channel for me about what art in public could be.”

If there is any scrap of Manhattan real estate left that could be said to feel as wild as the mud flats of an industrialized bay, it is the final undeveloped section of the High Line, from West 30th Street to West 34th Street, which looks like the rest of the elevated park did during decades of dereliction: beer cans, old birds’ nests, scraps of rusted pipe, splintered railroad ties and wild crab-apple trees sprouting from the track ballast.

Beginning in early May Ms. Bove will seed six of her own creations among this chance accumulation of urban fragments and flora, entering into one of her first experiments in public art. But the pieces will sit in a kind of limbo between public and private space: anyone wanting to visit will need to buy a $6 ticket online (thehighline.org) from the High Line, which will begin on Wednesday to schedule small-group tours of the sculptures over the next year, allowing access past the fence that now seals off the section.

Ms. Bove (pronounced bo-VAY) has become a highly sought-after artist during the last decade for work that sits at an unusual intersection of sculpture, Conceptual assemblage and design, evoking both a real cultural era — the 1960s and ’70s, as bohemian idealism was unraveling — and a kind of never-never land of Modernist fulfillment. A piece might simply be a spare arrangement of paperback books and magazines on minimalist wall shelves, accented with a peacock feather or a seashell sculpture, like something from an elegant Jungian therapist’s office.

Ms. Bove, who is to have a solo exhibition of new sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in July, said that when Cecilia Alemani, the High Line’s curator and director of art, approached her a couple of years ago about outdoor work, she found the idea of making what too often earns the epithet “plop art” almost comical.

“I think of public art as sort of fraudulent — something supposedly for everyone that uses a really elitist language that makes it seem as if it’s only for people already familiar with that language,” she said. “You never look right at them. You’re going to work and you pass them, and they repeatedly punctuate your consciousness. It’s like you have a relationship with them that you’re not even aware of.”

But then, she added, the preposterousness of the idea came to seem like a dare. “How do you get past it?” she asked rhetorically, smiling. “You just do it. You lean into it.” She made large-scale pieces for the Venice Biennale in 2011 and several outdoor pieces for Documenta 13, the art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, last year. But the High Line offered a rare opportunity to situate art where it was never meant to be seen, on near-wild land whose existence so close to Midtown made it seem almost like a Surrealist sculpture itself.

The section, which extends several hundred yards around the West Side rail yards, will not be completely renovated into parkland like the rest of the High Line but will be opened to the public in 2014 with only a walkway erected along its length to allow people to see what the line looks like in its feral state. “This will be really the last chance to see this part of the line this way before it changes for good,” said Ms. Alemani, who became interested in Ms. Bove for a project because “the landscape already has all these sculptural elements, stacks of iron beams, rolls of chain-link fence, that kept making me think in really unexpected ways about Carol’s work.”

Ms. Bove’s best-known pieces seem delicate enough to balance on a pin, but she has long been interested in the category of materials that Robert Rauschenberg, art’s great scavenger, called “what was available” — junk, primarily urban. During a reporter’s recent visit to her studio, near the Red Hook waterfront, the eroded springs of an old mattress that she had “harvested” from the street sat on the floor for her contemplation.

Later, on a visit to the High Line, she showed a reporter a mound of trash that she described admiringly as looking as if “it had developed its own ecosystem.” A few of her six pieces on the rail line, which were installed last week, toy with the idea that they might have grown there — a minimalist geometric work, for example, using only welded-together I-beams, straddling the old rails. But other pieces, like two blindingly white tubular curlicues that she calls glyphs, look like things that wandered in from a Kubrick movie, utopian and sinister in equal measure. These works also play around, partly reverently and partly satirically, with some of the most admired plop art of the 20th century, by artists like Alexander Calder, Alexander Liberman and Tony Smith.

“Sometimes I’m in the ’60s, in a kind of late-flowering moment, but then sometimes I’m all the way back in the ’20s,” Ms. Bove said. “It’s a lot of fun — I’m a formalist now!”

The contours of the real world, however, keep crowding in. As she walked the High Line last week during the installation of her works, she stopped to look long and hard at a beautifully rusted roll of chain-link fence slumped on the side of the rail line that would eventually need to be cleared for the walkway.

Ms. Alemani seemed to intuit her designs. “If you want it,” she said, “it’s totally yours.”

To read more visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/arts/design/carol-bove-claims-a-stretch-of-high-line-with-sculpture.html?_r=0