As an artist John Gerrard has been fixated on the politics, geographies, and aesthetics of hydrocarbons ever since.
In his 2022 series “Petro National,” the Irish artist cast the outline of countries as oil slicks adrift on the world’s ocean. The 196 NFTs were at once beguiling and unsettling, the allure of their iridescent sheen undercut by the catastrophes they depicted. Its brilliance was that a country’s oil consumption determined the size of its spill: the bigger the polluter, the greater the beauty. Gerrard’s latest clarion call is “World Flag,” launched by Pace Gallery’s Web3 platform Pace Verso in partnership with Art Blocks on June 28. In structure, it echoes “Petro National,” offering NFTs for each of the world’s countries, and exchanging oceans for deserts and oil slicks for flags.
Its visuals, however, are starker, it’s messaging blunter. If the oil spills teetered towards abstraction, the flags of smoke, which stand exposed in dull landscapes of endless sand, are representational and offer no such relief. Gone also is the luxury of high-resolution with the entire project adding up to 112 kilobytes in size.
The images are austere, the idea of a country claiming an utterly arid territory absurd. And that’s the point, humanity is knowingly racing towards ecological disaster. With “World Flag,” Gerrard baked politics into the aesthetics, here he also works it into the sale’s mechanics. The flags will be sold in order of carbon dioxide emissions, based on 2019 data from Climate Watcher beginning with China and ending with Fiji, which signed a legally binding commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
