Cool Hunting

Barbara Kruger fans, if you’ve missed your dosage of art blended with polemic, welcome it back with the Greenpeace Global Warming Project, hosted by British multi-media art collective Blacksmoke Organization. Artists contributing to the project were all asked to incorporate Greenpeace’s yellow and black Danger Global Warming tape into their work.

An installation by UK artist Dave White titled, “We Come in Peace…Do We F$$K” is one of the most dynamic pieces. (Pictured, click for detail.) On the wall behind White’s 3-D environment sits an almost animated painting of a tank on the move, Anime-girl pink hearts fluttering around it. In front, sit oversized sculptures of artists’ paint tubes and industrial paint cans – the toxic tools of creativity. Between the two elements, White ties culpability of aloof artists to the War in Iraq – a war about buttressing an environmentally hazardous lifestyle in the artist’s discussion.

Execution of pieces in the show ranges from traditional mediums to art as public action. Philippe Starck contributes a portrait in what appears to be, cooling artic water. The Way/Fear no Art does wonderful cow cut outs. One of Vopstars’ many interventions ‘vandalizes’ a BP gas station sign with the tape then changes the gas prices to read “hot.” Bruce LaBruce’s human sculpture, "Mummy Says Global Warming is Dangerous", engages the industrial hazard aesthetic of the tape while contemplating egocentric humankind as temporal creatures.

Blacksmoke’s show might also be a signal that ‘three more years’ and the rapid warming of global disillusionment, (add the recent election in Israel), is churning a new era of activist art, a-la late Regan years. In the same vein, at the nexus of form, function and fun, the future look of products designed to turn global warming around is sure to be an industrial design candy shop.

Work from the Blacksmoke Organization/Greenpeace collaboration can be viewed at the Blacksmoke online Gallery. Danger Global Warming tape can be purchased for £6 in the Blacksmoke Shop.

Contributed by Kristopher Irizarry

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