What was shown and proposed at White Box needs to be seen in Washington, to meet the top questions raised by the Sunday New York Times after the attack in Benghazi:
 
What could the US do? What did the US have in its range of options, for MORE than just deposing an autocracy and bringing in, allegedly, democracy?

The people need JOBS, they need a big vision, they need to regain a viable homeland.

This was explicitly stated:

by Iranian authorities, to Dennis Oppenheim, in 1978, for projects in relation to the UN Environmental Park, with their Army

by Iranian embassy officials in Germany, in 1985, asking foran “Islamic solution” to the Iran-Iraq war; I cited the Islamic garden
 
by the Algerian Ambassador to France, who, after viewing all the visuals we had on the Iran-Iraq war engineering, designed by Russians apparently using US earth-art ideas, asked what we could do to “restore the savannah to what is now Sahara,” with their Army
 
ARAB SPRINGS had a quote from the Koran, about how with artistry the springs could gush forth and renew the land …

We need to let the US Administration know this, as the earthworks required come from projects and proposals by:
 
Dennis Oppenheim
Michael Heizer
Walter De Maria
Robert Smithson
with over-arching paradigms
from Mary Beth Edelson and
Carole Schneemann
 
not limited to this, but as a start, indicating what the US can bring to bear in the arid parts of the world,
 

now, how to do this for a now-hostile public …

In the background of a black-and-white photo of Cindy Sherman looking alarmed there was a very important, perhaps evil, chain of events.

The chain of events led to our current economic impasse, notably with taxation, and—more seriously perhaps—to our inability to prevent Global Warming.

In the area behind her was secretly negotiated what came to be the US entry in WW I, and then the integration of a shipping-based world petroleum industry. Also negotiated there was the biggest change in our public-finance system since the founding of the USA—with results now emphasized by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The buildings are:

26 Broadway, the HQ of Standard Oil under Rockefeller; 1 Broadway, the HQ of the White Star Line; across the street and to the right, or south, the US Customs House, which until the deals being negotiated between 26 Broadway and 1 Broadway was the main source of revenue for the US Government. The income tax replaced that.

The photo tells much of the story of the USA from the Twentieth Century on.

The British, who had a maritime approach to petroleum, as opposed to the land-based approach of Germany or Russia, sought to team up with the US, i.e., Standard Oil, to effect a global petroleum empire based on sea transport, most notably from the Gulf

This empire is still being enforced, e.g., with military action in Afghanistan, Iran, and earlier (for example) in Grenada and the Falklands.

As I recall, the Standard Oil HQ is very visible, in one of her photos. The White Star Line HQ is out of the frame, and possibly so too is the Customs House. One could go there and take a photo encompassing all three buildings in the historical events.

The chief series of events was a change in US neutrality about WW I to participation, all of which was heavily facilitated by Royal Navy intelligence. In person, the decision to participate went through the then Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and the then Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt. There are a few documents about this. The British asked the US to join them in building a naval empire, or maritime empire based on petroleum, and the US complied. Thus began the “special relationship.”

This explains much of the difficulty in breaking from our dependence on oil. Also, for example, the ability of a British-Dutch company, Shell, to go ahead and drill in the Alaska Arctic, having found a way of pre-empting any legal injunctions against such.

The profits from such adventure in Alaska do not go to the US. They go to London and The Hague.

Most oil holdings in Alaska are now in the hands of British companies. Thus, our purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, meant to ward off the British, has backfired.

One can check the facts, but I believe this is roughly true. e.g., yes, BP and Shell are the biggest holders of tracts in Alaska. Exxon has a role, but not a dominant one. And yes, in WW I, Churchill organized all strategy around gaining control of the oil fields in the Middle East. When the Germans offered an armistice in Spring 1917, he found ways to make sure the US would enter the war (and tip the scales) and also launched what would become a huge—as he called it—“distraction” from the prize: Paschendaele. During that distraction, a rapid thrust was made through Jerusalem, Damascus, Baghdad and ultimately Basra. From that comes the birth of new states—all under the supervision of the British Colonial Office and their counterparts in France, with the US tagging along.

Only due to mistakes by the British with the Saudis did the US manage to gain a huge stake in that country.

The unbalanced outcome of WW I led to WW II—with its nuclear legacy …

Images anchored in the question, if the oil companies are going ahead with drilling in the Arctic, is there reason to protest? The legal challenges have already begun to be pre-empted.*

Instead, COMPETE. What they do costs $100/barrel in extraction alone (as The NY Times quotes). We can do something cheaper, and much more sustainable, just costing much sweat and tears, maybe some blood:

waterplant biomass industry to yield methane.

All-methane economies.

For this, begin with:

• Korea (dividing it as Scandinavia’s peninsula is divided: lengthwise)†

• Site along bird flyways (all going to the Arctic, and depending on it)
• Single out battlegrounds (areas of animal intensity: tank battles mainly)

• Retrofit advance military technology (as often occurs in human evolution)

The oil companies can soon be proven to be out-of-date. And it’s time to resolve this Korea standoff. 62 years? That’s becoming out-of-date too.

Key dates are:

1905, May 17

Norway separates from Sweden; peninsula splits lengthwise.

1905, May 27

Japan sinks most of the Russian fleet at Tsushima; effect on Korea.

1939

Nomhomon battle:  Russia defeats Japan in Mongolia; forces Japan to turn its sights on the Western imperialist powers—in order to drill for oil & gas.

1950

Russian-supplied North Korea tries to resolve the standoff with the Western imperialist powers

2012

Western imperialist powers and Russia oil drilling in the Arctic (and also in Barents and Okhotsk Seas). The planet doesn’t matter anymore, does it?

2012

Artists and scientists team up in a competition against the drillers’ actions in Black Sea, Sea of Okhotsk, Korean Peninsula, Norway and Barents, and a bird-flight corridor up the Nile into St. Petersburg, and up from Somalia via Socotra and Sistan Basin, Afghanistan into Siberia.

BIRD FORCE VS. BLACK GOLD

We don’t need gold. ‡
We need the birds. §

* Shell (not even a US company) used an extremely clever legal maneuver to make injunctions or any legal protest impossible; and of course the US Government, along with that of Russia, Norway, Holland, the UK, France and Italy are all smiling.

† The current division of the Korean Peninsula brings to mind a joke I made at a Norwegian—art opening in NY a decade ago. I wondered, what if those Russian overflights and submarine incursions into Norwegian defense space prevailed, and Russia really got hold of Svalbard; then Norway could have a Russian North and “Western” South; and the people in the North could write Norwegian the same way people in Serbia write Serbo-Croatian, in Cyrillic.

‡ John Milton described oil, or “naptha,” as the false wealth of Lucifer, and pursuit of such false wealth would lead to “Pandemonium” (Book VI, Paradise Lost, 17th century).

§ I aim to have NZ scientists explain how we need the migratory birds, and what a grave threat to planetary ecology the Arctic drilling would be.

Nothing has changed in the 40 years since 1972, when Richard Nixon was re-elected president Furthermore, the competition between Russia and the West remains as fierce as ever. Witness Putin: he wants to make Russia #1.

Nothing has changed (with one notable exception: the rise of China as the imminent #1 economic power).

So the West vs. China-Russia game goes on. There are still 10,000+ US nuclear weapons and about 10,000+ Russian nuclear weapons aimed at each other. And there is more and more nuclear waste; and there is more and more extreme drilling to get oil and gas; and there is more and more climate instability; and there is more and more death of vital species, like bees. So, it must be rather frustrating to be alive in these times.

Eurasian Scenario from 1994, the most ridiculed show of my career, now reborn. The intended graphic, not allowed, was of bird flyways through Korea and through Norway, all converging on the Arctic. The term has historical connotations.

FLY-THROUGH RUSSIA, WITH LOVE

We can fast-forward to the free-trade agreement between Russia and NZ as was implied in my remarks about Russia during a 2008 show in Wellington.

Yulia first learned of Ocean Earth from a Mute Magazine Article of 2001, in which I coined the term “beyond petroleum” (BEFORE BP trade-marked it). The article led to a followup article on Ocean Earth in the magazine of the US Natural Resources Defense Council.

The message must be that, as is evident with the giant Exxon-Rosneft deal to start drilling in the Arctic (never mind what the BBC says about polar bears, with Lennon lyrics), no significant reduction in global warming, desertfication, overpopulation, species loss, river damming, etc. has occurred, at all, and this is DIRECTLY attributable to blockage of, and the not taking seriously of, art.

NEVER, OR EVER?, IN NORTH AMERICA

In 1975, a learned man, Ernest Callenbach, wrote of how an ecological republic could break off from the USA, in the Pacific Northwest, with the name Ecotopia. A million copies of this story were sold. On April 16, 2012, Mr. Callenbach died. Much of what he described has happened (bicycles, zero or low emission cars, organic food), but a spinoff of new bio-regions in North America has not once occurred. Will that ever happen? Or never?

In 1978, Peter Fend entered the art world with maps of eco-regions being saltwater basins. These appeared at shows of Collaborative Projects.  Jenny Holzer noticed the work. She asked Fend to join her in a six-person artist team intent on “functional” projects. She also chose to cooperate with a gallery exhibiting the basin maps, the Peter Nadin Gallery, to co-produce an 11 x 17 white-on-black poster with a Fend drawing of North America in its saltwater basins, a word-stack by Fend as a title, “POLITICAL ECONOMIES AFTER OIL,” and a four-line heading by Holzer. She called for a “reorganization” of the “political and economic” space in North America. In the gallery, the drawing of a reorganized North America was painted on the floor, and on that painting were painted, in the same white color, the names of Lawrence Weiner, Peter Nadin, Louise Lawler, Dan Graham. Was everyone named endorsing such a new political and economic division of space? Was anyone wanting the “reorganization of existing elements” to be thus?

As we all know, nothing like this “reorganization” of territories in North America has occurred since 1975. Such types of division, by ridgeline, were more common for centuries earlier. The basin of Hudson’s Bay, delineated as shown here, was the territory of the Hudson Bay Company, founded 1670. The original 13 colonies had as their western border the ridge, shown here, separating the Mississippi basin from the Atlantic Seaboard. Up until the early 19th century, the Continental Divide did separate the claims by competing empires. Upper and Lower Canada were fairly much the basin of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Wars wiped out these divisions. These include the Revolutionary War, the War with Mexico, even the US Civil War.

Maybe it’s feared that any attempt to move towards such “reorganiation of existing elements” would cause a war. Such fears have blocked open discussion about how the political economies of the US, Canada and Mexico, and maybe also Mesoamerica, could change in territory. The head of Russia’s top diplomacy school has predicted that these countries will break up, or reconfigure. He cites both economic and ecological pressures. Could his predictions become true, without (much) violence? Sweden and Norway separated along such lines, of one sloping this way, the other sloping that way, without a shot being fired, in 1905. Could such “reorganization of existing elements into more functional configurations,” with different slopes to different seas, also take place? And should it? We could ask Jenny Holzer now what she thinks. Or will the scenario of Ernest Callenbach remain, at least in territory, just a fable?

Having dealt with US policy vis-a-vis alleged terrorists, could Jenny Holzer be asked about her contribution to this re-division piece, and whether she now thinks anything like it could, or should, come to be?

The US, Mexico and Canada have formed a North America Free Trade Association (NAFTA). Why could not this be expanded, for all of North America, and then be divided into “political economies after oil”? Over the next, say, thirty years—when oil will largely be gone.

Response to the discovery, in Cuxhaven, Germany and the Galway area, Ireland, that algae harvested in the water can more efficiently stay in the water, and be processed and stored below sea-level—towards efficient ocean industry.

The discovery was by me of Irish peasant practices. This is contrary to what has been proposed as a method of harvest by companies like Bio Architecture Lab. I don’t believe that anyone has come up with the idea of harvesting at or below the surface of the water, and of processing there.

What I witnessed in Ireland was that algae cut in the intertidal zone would be collected by a net and be hauled, in the water, to a landing. I know of no literature on this.

I believe the submarine idea, which goes further, is unique, and I would like to protect that.

Recently two German utilities have pulled out of large nuclear power-plant projects for the UK.

2007-2008: I said that the large nuclear power-plant projects would not work, and that the money could be better spent on renewables. Sally O’Reilly, a critic in the UK wrote, after seeing my show in London on alternatives to four new nuclear reactors, that “the role of art in matters of such gravity as nuclear power, or the retrofit of military technology… [I had proposed building algae-collecting submarines]… must be called into question.” Now, in the Financial Times, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund is quoted as saying nearly identically what I said five years earlier.

Use Russian military technology, e.g., harvesting submarines and small ballast-tank submersion rigs, plus—very important–concentrating all methane production on the methane aircraft, now being developed by Tupolov.

As you know (depending on what your press sources are) there’s been a bit of a tussle between Russia and Germany for protective custody, and medical treatment, of the Sleeping Beauty of the Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko. I thought Germany did not have any heroes available for her rescue. Unlike Russia, which has Putin. Or maybe Medvedev. Putin made a noble offer of rescue, offering to host her, but the cruel knights in Ukraine said No. As for heroes from Germany who can rescue Tymoshenko?

I mean, how can Angela Merkel rescue a beautiful damsel in distress? Or Guido, or who is foreign minister now? Not exactly a knight. Or Gauck? (That guy Guttenberg could have been perfect, but then he had a flaw.)

But I see that the Sleeping Beauty’s daughter came to the castle in Berlin, most notably the Charite hospital tower (happily no longer next to the barbed wire and watchtowers of the Wall) and they found a female doctor to do the job. But that’s only the beginning.

Now, here’s a chance to be a hero.

As it turns out, the long-nurtured view that Ukraine should have two parts, one for the Gulf of Odessa, and one for the Sea of Azov, with or without the Upper Don (depending on salinity in the Black and Caspian Seas), aligns with the giant Operation Zitadelle of 1943, being the tank battles along an axis from Orel to Kursk to Kharkov and aligns with the biggest battle of English-Empire troops with Russia, at Sevastopol, with an eastern margin for the entire catchment which was once labeled Ostmark and, well, could have stopped just short of Stalingrad—to save many lives such that we see the high-points of confrontation still ablaze, and such that one can continue with the story of Sleeping Beauty’s incarceration in Kharkov, and the complete collapse of credibility of Ukraine in Europe, Eastern Europe and the world, not least in its investibles, so that one says, okay, we divide the Ukraine in its two hydrometric areas, and we proceed gloriously into a post-fossil world, producing bio-gas from waterplants in the giant reservoirs and in the Sea of Azov and in the Gulf of Odessa, both out to the southernmost point of the Crimea, very romantic, while the big bad boys try to ruin the planet by drilling for gas and oil up north, in the Arctic (the NYTimes had an op-ed on how they would destory the planet) leaving the Sleeping Beauty, after awakening from her hunger fast, and after receiving much-needed help from a female doctor from Berlin, open to a business proposition with an image of the two parts of the Ukraine now sitting in a drawer at the Galerie Christian Nagel.

When I tried to show this in London  in 1994, it was physically removed from the wall. And destroyed. When I tried to show it in Manchester in 2004, at Cornerhouse, it was again removed, physically, from the wall. But it was not destroyed. It was saved. And it was shown for the first time ever at Galerie Christian Nagel, in a show addressed to the then US Secretary of State called “Parallele Projekte” and it was published, for the only time ever, in Kunstforum, their Klimawandel issue.

Recently, in Art in America, this image was again removed from view. A photo was shown with the review, but the photo was cut in half, and the half with this proposal for the Ukraine was removed. It could have been a mistake. I think more likely it was a Western view that anything about the East may not be shown. This happened also in 1999. Someone from the government came in and said that nothing could indicate that the areas shown and mapped were in Yugoslavia.

But that goes along with the press coverage on Tymoshenko. The Western press repeatedly discusses how the Western countries tried to rescue or help the Sleeping Beauty, but only once was anything said of attempts by the Handsome Prince from Russia, from the East, with that name like Rasputin but shorter: Putin.

I’d like to use this image as evidence that art has a message and that art can save her country by making it be divided into two Urinals after the Marchand de Sel (Marcel Duchamp) so that she can awaken to a new day created by the ideas of artists in our time making piece in our time and not more wars.

Can the piece become a gift to the Sleeping Beauty along with my letter of July 1999 to the Government of the Ukraine, which smashed certain attempts to sell them nuclear-reactor technology.

Your fellow American,
Peter Fend

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The new work is on 120 x 90 cm paper, surrounded by copies of the very-effective 1999 letter to the Ukraine, the  OEDC news articles in the London Times and elsewhere, and news articles on Tymoshenko now, in view of the initiative by Vladimir Putin to come to Tymoshenko’s rescue, providing that she recover in Moscow, is to up the ante.

Above: RENEWABLE METHANE SUPPLY FOR UKRAINE NORTHERN BLACK-SEA BASIN IN HYDROMETRIC SECTORS ALIGNING WITH EAST-WEST SPLITS.

Image shows Stalingrad, Orel, Kursk, Kharkov,Smolensk and Sevastopol battlefields and rationale for a Catholic-Orthodox split, with respective hydrology; the tug of war now is between Germany and Russia for “saving” Tymoshenko with remark that all technologies are developed by Ocean Earth.

Below: A SOLUTION PROMPTED BY ACTIONS OF JULIA Tymoshenko.

A reference to the German-media phrase, “her body is the battleground” which takes us well beyond Marina Abramovic.

Part of any sale receipt goes to making a dossier for the Russian, Ukrainian press and politicos. There is a price for saving the “sleeping beauty”: renewable methane industry, instead of fossil. Unfortunately for Germany, they have no “knight.” They only have Angela Merkel. Their President, Mr. Gauck, is too fuddy. But Russia has several “knights” who could dramatically come to the rescue.

The work is a cornerstone of what could evolve as BIS DER GRENZE, or

BIOLOGY OF WARS

To the right, it’s noted that attempts to exhibit or publish this same idea were PHYSICALLY BLOCKED, by physical removal of works from the wall, in free-world outlets like: Marc Jancou Gallery, London 1994; Cornerhouse Gallery, Manchester, 2004; and Art in America (deletion from image), 2012.

The work has been exhibited and published only in Germany… until now, at (thank you, Dennis Oppenheim, for describing this fate): Peanut Underground—certainly not Frieze.

The timetable is URGENT: Tymoshenko could die soon, and that would shatter all manner of global political order. The coincidence of critical battlefield, or “decision sites”, with the hydrology of this part of the Black Sea is very helpful. As you might know, the whole battle for legitimacy of Tymoshenko has been over the price paid by the Ukraine for methane gas (natural gas) from Russia.

Peter Fend
Ocean Earth

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und nicht weiter

To the edge, and no farther. To paraphrase Goethe: genius is knowing where to stop. A series of works prompted by current events. Revelation of where the soldiers went too far, and if they had just stopped a few km short of where they went (and died), evolution could have gone forward and we would have reached harmony with nature—the other species.

Stalingrad
Verdun
Kursk/Kharkov/Orel
Saratoga
Dien Bien Phu
Nomkomon
the final campaigns before Appomatox
Waterloo
Teutoberger Wald
Bardai, Chad
trench line of WW I
current use of Persepolis in Iran

This is prompted by my current piece at Peanut Underground splitting the Ukraine in half, right along the rift of huge East-West battles (1943, 1855, 1814, 1942).

ACTION IN RESPONSE TO THE Tymoshenko HUNGER STRIKE

More than…
Abramovic
Peter

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More proof that the art world, in its extreme conservatism, has become blind. This was my offering to Tymoshenko.

I thought she was sexy, and I said so, and I thought she needed support in her battle with Putin.  But the conservatives here in the West want none of that (as if my sexual feelings are illegitimate), and they only want to show already encrusted ideas. Now Tymoshenko is on a hunger strike.

Any effort to show my plan for the Ukraine for self-reliance in methane energy (the fuel over which she is imprisoned) has been time and again LEFT OUT of the public discourse. Or even an article in Art in America.

I don’t think this is due to “conspiracy.” I think it’s due to blindness.

As we can see from the review, much was written on the basis of what was heard or read, and not what was on VISUAL DISPLAY. Not one word was uttered, for example, about the physical proposals being made.  As if physical proposals are not allowed for consideration.

What do I have to do now? Showing inside the art world is like showing inside a coffin.

Once again art misses the train of history, and bogs itself down in a trivial pursuit called “art history.”

If Tymoshenko dies, we can blame the art world, not the government in the Ukraine.

Peter

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Angry about impotence…

What’s the difference between Randall’s Island (the prison island for the rich) and Rikers Island (the one for the poor)?

In 1999, as I displayed in that piece about the Ukraine, I gave a dossier to the Ukraine Government that, and you can check the diplomatic calendar about this, caused the Ukraine Government to send the German trade delegation trying to sell nuclear reactor technology back to Germany. So, I somehow communicated by going directly to the UN Mission of the Ukraine.

It’s time for a prison breakout.

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A sizable challenge is needed.

It’s a challenge by renewable hydrocarbons against fossil.

The challenge can begin in places without much fossil assets, but with very large amounts of renewable-hydrocarbon assets, i.e., fermentable waterplants… this includes the Ukraine.

To start this, organize the Ukraine into its water and nutrient-accumulation districts, or hydrometric areas, then build up a biomethane industry.

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The Financial Times reported that the annual conference of Eastern European countries, which was in Poland last year and was even attended by Obama, has been “postponed” because only four countries chose to go this time:  Moldova, Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania.  Poland had no choice, given the European Cup being there and in Ukraine.  Moldova is a tiny neighbor blocked from the sea by an extension of Ukraine. Slovakia is a police state, very harsh. And Lithuania… dunno. In essence, none of the former Eastern Bloc countries wants to attend.  Ukraine is boycotted.

The article also says that the European Cup organizers may choose to not attend any games in the Ukraine… strange. So now, all of Europe is getting into the discussion.

No mention is made of a hunger strike, nor of any talks with leaders in either Russia or Germany.

We have in our possession a document that discredits Germany as it was, when it was exporting nuclear technology.

As for now?

One could expand the installation and turn it into an ongoing

UKRAINE
ACTIONS
INQUIRY

and arrange an event with the Ukrainian community.

They must wonder, too.

Thanks,
Peter