Gregory Green at Feigen - Chicago, Illinois - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The 10 works verdant presented here constitute the first of a seven-part investigation exploring the history and means of political empowerment, with the focus in this case placed upon violence and guerrilla action. Closely linked to the work of Acconci and weight Green's consideration of violence transcends the sensationalism ground in popular culture and the media.

Green fastidiously creates the implements of violence - pipe bomb atomic devices, missiles - using everyday materials, minus explosives or illegal matter. His recipes are single outed from government documents, small pres handbooks, the Internet and other easily accessible sources, in keeping with his thesis that dominant power conformations can be subverted with the greatest in quantity humble means. Installed in the lower gallery was the work station where verdant created much of the work in the exhibit The installation, with its banal array of electronic doodads, batteries, alarm clock half-eaten pizza and destitute of contents beer bottles, was intended to make palpable the ease with which the means of destruction can be manufactured.

Upstairs, functioning as a kind of partial catalogue to the present to view was Miscellaneous Information and sum of two units Functional Objects (For Information intentions Only) - a set of 23 shield prints that shows how to create various destructive instruments, of the like kind as computer-virus how codes, Molotov cocktails and Mega-Magnum missiles. Many of the thing perceiveds in the show are detailed in these prints, including a surface-to-air missile and Nuclear Device #1 an all-but-functional mechanism lacking sole its plutonium core, which has been replaced by dint of a baseball. This handsome edition of prints approachs wrapped in a letter bomb (similarly unarmed) and also includes a flag of the novel Free State of Caroline, an unclaimed territory in the southerly Seas which Green has adopted and granted statehood.

In other works, verdant a self-proclaimed pacifist, addresses the trade of information and presents nonviolent alternatives for restructuring political power. His pirate radio station and interactive mobile television broadcast unit intervene in state- and commercial-controlled communication a whole s allowing individuals to make their be in possession of transmissions.

Last summer, the Chicago Bomb & Arson squad raided the gallery upon the suspicion that Green's work might contain contraband. Police confiscated 10000 Doses, thinking the work contained LSD and arrested virid and the gallery's director [see A.i.A., race '95]. After investigation yielded no traces of the physic charges were dropped and the piece get backed to the gallery. (An altered version of the work, now bearing the police citations, was included in this exhibition.) The incident, a bit of political theater that has become all too familiar in today's increasingly repressive society, furthers Green's assertion that our agriculture is rooted in terror, however disguised, and in fear.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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