Eco-centric art

In December, unusually high temperatures had more than one person quoted on TV as saying "Gotta love this global warming!"

Regardless of such tongue-in-cheek remarks, global warming is a hot topic these days. But no matter what your stance is on the subject, The Andy Warhol Museum's latest exhibition, "6 Billion Perps Held Hostage! Artists Address Global Warming," is sure to get you thinking about it.

Not only does it bring up a variety of viewpoints, but it's a visual and intellectual stunner. Among the highlights is Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang's "Black Fireworks," a video of a performance in which the world-renowned artist created a "black rainbow" over Edinburgh Castle in the summer of 2005 using 2,000 custom-made black firework shells.

This, of course, was done during the day, inverting the common night fireworks display into a daylight spectacle of black smoke.

"It's inverting fireworks, something like a wordplay on the inversion of air pollution that occurs in Los Angeles, and that which occurred locally in Donora in the 1940s," says Matt Wrbican, archivist at The Warhol and curator of this show.

Over the past four years, Wrbican has kept his finger on the pulse of eco-centric art and, over the past year, he assembled this remarkable show from the works of a dozen artists and artist groups.

It's remarkable because, in spite of its free catalog in the form of a tabloid newspaper with the show's title reading like an alarming headline, it presents a variety of viewpoints about the hot topics centered around global warming.

Most hilarious are the inclusion of two "SurvivaBalls," inflatable, spherical white suits that have three sets of nub-like protrusions that make them look like oversized grubs.

Created by The Yes Men, a group of artist-activists, they are meant as prototypes whose "communication systems, nutrient gathering capacities and defense mechanisms" ensure the safety of corporate managers from Mother Nature.

The Yes Men are known for impersonating some of the world's most powerful corporate executives at conferences, on the Web and on TV, taking to task every large-scale organization from Dow Chemical to the World Trade Organization, by suggesting that they place profit above everything else.

Here, they not only present two of the suits, but photographs and support materials used for a conference they crashed on catastrophic loss in May 2006 at the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island, Fla., presenting the SurvivaBall as an alleged project of the military contractor Halliburton.

Close to home, Pittsburgh artists Ann Rosenthal, Suzy Meyer and Steffi Domike fill one corner with their installation "Food, Carbon & the Commons," which gives viewers a relative look at how much carbon dioxide is dispersed into the atmosphere, based on how far food is shipped from the grower to the consumer.

Taking the form of an oversized bar graph, it's far from art, looking more like a high school science project. Nevertheless, the point of the piece is clear.

"The difference between having coffee from Nicaragua versus having coffee from Sumatra is pretty amazing -- 84 pounds of carbon dioxide per week for Nicaragua, versus over 200 per week for Sumatra. The idea is that the less things travel the better it is for our eco-system."

However, those seeking real art will likely be satisfied with six paintings by California cartoonist and computer-game artist Hugo Kobayashi that put together symbolic imagery and landscape like pictograms; an amazing replication of Australia's dying Great Barrier Reef done completely in crochet by Australian sisters Christine and Margaret Wertheim, of the Institute for Figuring; and a series of larger-than-life oil paintings by former Pittsburgher Greg Kwiatek, now in New York City, that are large-scale representations of various debris that has washed ashore of Louds Island, Maine, which the artist has photographed while visiting there.

Then, of course, as always the work of Andy Warhol is included, here most notably in the form of Warhol's "Endangered Species" prints, as well as a few of his disaster paintings.

Which is why Wrbican says, "Artists are very tuned in to the world around them, and in a way I see this (exhibition) as a continuation of the landscape tradition. You know, if you look at the Hudson River school painters such as artists like Albert Bierdstadt, who was in love with the grandeur of nature -- I don't see this as being in the different."