“I grew up as a classic atom bomb baby,” says 36-year-old artist Gregory Green, the son of a military air traffic controller. “When I was a little kid in France we did “Duck and Cover’ underneath the school desks. Living in Europe, I was literally living in the battlefield of the cold war.”
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In the front window of the gallery Feigen Incorporated, Green has hung a jumbo-sized recipe for organic LSD. Inside sits his sculpture 10,000 Doses–made up of 12 bottles of the stuff, but it contains a vomiting agent and a neutralizing solvent that make it ineffective. Other Green works include Suitcase Bomb, Suspicious Looking Package, and Paraffin Sawdust Incendiary.
Though Green propagates do-it-yourself terrorist tactics, he hardly advocates terrorism. “The only thing it’s done well is create a forum for an individual to speak from or identify a previously unidentified group,” he says. “But at the same time it creates enemies.” Striking civilians, he says, has been “a two-edged sword” for terrorists. “An obvious and easy choice for a terrorist group to make is to redirect their activities away from the population and towards the infrastructure. If rather than killing my brother you made me not have electricity for two days I would hate you a lot less.
A sampling of Green’s art is now on view through August 11 in a group show at Feigen Incorporated, 742 N. Wells. Call 787-0500 for more.
