The Art Newspaper, November 2013
Think local, act global
By Anthony Haden-Guest, New York
I hear talk that the art world isn’t so much globalised as atomised. Okay, but those atoms really buzz around. Ethan Cohen, whose 19th Street gallery makes Chinese art a strong suit, was talking with the mayor of Linzhou, a town in Henan province. The mayor told Cohen they wanted to do something to celebrate World Peace Day last year. He brought in Andrew Rogers, the derring-do Australian land artist, who came up with two projects that teleport the venerable theme of people-in-a-landscape slap-bang into the 21st century. A video in the gallery shows 7,500 Chinese deploying red and yellow banners as a Fibonacci sequence and a dragon. “The government of Linzhou paid for 7,500 people to participate. They provided meals, a bottle of water, toilets, security, 180 buses. The actual assembling basically took just five hours.” When last I spoke with Rogers, he was on a project in Utah. Call it atomised globalism.
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