Art in America

The World’s Premier Art Magazine
Global Warnings, by Suzaan Boettger,
Art in America, Issue No. 6, pp. 154-161, 206-207, June/July 2008.

Xavier Cortada: The Markers, 51 colored flags along 500 meters of the moving ice sheet that covers the South Pole, performance documented in video, 2007.

Excerpt from Boettger’s Global Warnings article on page 156:

Also participating in both the “Melting Ice” and “Weather Report” were the Harrisons, Jordan, Cuban American installation artist Xavier Cortada and American video artist Andrea Polli.  The last two exhibited works from their polar projects in both shows.  Cortada’s videos and 8-by-10 inch photographs document a trip to the South Pole early in 2007 as part of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. There he installed bright flags to mark human events in Antarctica during the past century.  More pertinent to the show’s theme -beyond the voguish locale for artistic expeditions– were his documentation and the residue of a strangely ritualistic performance in which he placed 24 identical men’s black shoes around the South Pole.  From each he drew and read a statement from an individual living in one of the world’s time zones (such as:  “I tell my wife, the day the mountain loses its snow, we’ll have to move out of the valley.”  Jose Ignacio Lambarri, farmer, Urubamba Valley, Peru).

Click here to view pdf: Art in America: Global Warnings