Twenty years ago, John Gerrard photographed an oil spill off the coast of Ireland. Since then, he has been obsessed with the politics, geography and aesthetics of hydrocarbons.
In his 2022 series “National Petroleum”, the Irish artist traced the outline of countries like drifting oil slicks on the global ocean. The 196 NFTs were both alluring and unsettling, the allure of their iridescent sheen undermined by the disasters they depicted. His genius was that a country’s oil consumption determined the size of its spill: the bigger the polluter, the greater the beauty.
Jean Gerard, National Petroleum (2022). Photo: Pace Gallery and Art Blocks.
Gerrard’s latest bugle call is “World Flag”, launched by Pace Gallery’s Web3 platform Rhythm Back in partnership with Art Blocks on June 28. In structure, it echoes “Petro National”, offering NFTs for every country in the world, and trading oceans for deserts and oil slicks for flags.
Its visuals, however, are more austere, its messaging more brutal. If oil spills have tipped towards abstraction, smoke flags, which stand exposed in dull landscapes of endless sand, are figurative and offer no such relief. Gone is also the luxury of high resolution with the entire project adding up to 112 kilobytes.
The images are austere, the idea of a country claiming a totally arid territory absurd. And that’s the point, humanity is knowingly rushing towards ecological disaster. With “World Flag”, Gerrard has integrated politics into the aesthetic, here he also integrates it into the mechanics of the sale. Flags will be sold in order of carbon dioxide emissions, based on 2019 data from ClimateWatchstarting with China and ending with Fiji, which signed a legally binding commitment achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
Jean Gerard, World Flag #30 (Venezuela) (2023). Photo: John Gerrard/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“‘World Flag’ is set in what I call ‘future deserts’ – a hot, lifeless world we are hurtling towards burning 100 million barrels of oil a day,” Gerrard told Artnet News, noting the frustrating inaction he had witnessed on three UN Climate Change conferences he had attended. “Trapped and competing with their nation states, we have no collaboration or consensus on consumption.”
There is of course a tension between the anti-carbon message of the project and the reality of its footprint. In response, Gerrard donates 10% of proceeds to a non-profit that restores a temperate rainforest in Ireland, which, for the record, ranks 73rd in carbon dioxide emissions.
Gerrard sees “World Flag” as an extension of a triptych of smoke flags built into major game engines over the past half-decade. It all started with the “Western Flag” of 2017, which imprinted a black-feathered flag in the virtual sands of Spindletop, Texas, the oil-rich terrain that gave birth to our addiction to hydrocarbons. It became the first NFT in Los Angeles County Museum of Art collection earlier this year.
Jean Gerard, western flag, (2017). Courtesy of the artist.
Next came ‘Flare’, a work that turned Gerrard’s brooding gaze to the scorching oceans and was staged alongside Cop26 in Glasgow and later at Pace.
The most recent is “Surrender”, one of 15 artists’ responses to climate catastrophe on view at the Hayward Gallery in London until September 3. It offers a puffy cloud of white vapor against the backdrop of California’s Mojave Desert. It’s openly in conversation with Gerrard’s national flags, though the precise tone of the interaction remains ambivalent. Is it a marker of defeat in the face of climate ruin or something more hopeful, a nod to the power of renewable energy, a flag under which we must all rally?
See more World Flag artwork below.
Jean Gerard, World Flag #21 (United Kingdom) (2023). Photo: John Gerrard/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Jean Gerard, World Flag #163 (Gambia) (2023). Photo: John Gerrard/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Jean Gerard, World Flag #1 (China) (2023). Photo: John Gerrard/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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