Peter Fend
The Ocean, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway, 2021
Installation view

Peter Fend
Offshore Oil Rig, 1993
Prototype for the harvest of Macrocystis algae
PVC, rope, metal, fabric, plaster
Dimensions variable

Peter Fend
The Ocean, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway, 2021
Installation view

Peter Fend
Africa-Arctic Flyway, Museo Nivola, Orani, Italy, 2020
Installation view

Peter Fend
Africa-Arctic Flyway, Museo Nivola, Orani, Italy, 2020
Installation view

Peter Fend
Africa-Arctic Flyway, Museo Nivola, Orani, Italy, 2020
Installation view

Peter Fend
Africa-Arctic Flyway, Museo Nivola, Orani, Italy, 2020
Installation view

Peter Fend
Potential Worlds 2: Eco-Fictions, Migros Museum, Zürich, Switzerland, 2020
Installation view

Peter Fend
Delancey Street Goes to the Sea No. 1-3, 1979
Marker on paper mounted on board
3 parts, each: 59 × 39 ½ inches (150 × 100 cm)

Peter Fend
Delancey Street Goes to the Sea No. 1-3, 1979
Marker on paper mounted on board
3 parts, each: 59 × 39 ½ inches (150 × 100 cm)

Peter Fend
RAPID Logo, 2000
Lightbox
24 ½ × 71 ⅔ × 6 ⅔ inches (62 × 182 × 17 cm)

Peter Fend
RAPID Methane Gas Station, 2000
Plexiglas, neon lamp
59 ¾ × 24 ¾ × 9 ¾ inches (152 × 63 × 25 cm)

Peter Fend
Manifesta 13, The Park: Becoming a Body of Water, Consigne Sanitaire, Marseille, France, 2020
Installation view

Peter Fend
Manifesta 13, The Park: Becoming a Body of Water, Consigne Sanitaire, Marseille, France, 2020
Installation view

Peter Fend
Manifesta 13, The Park: Becoming a Body of Water, Consigne Sanitaire, Marseille, France, 2020
Installation view

Peter Fend
Manifesta 13, The Park: Becoming a Body of Water, Consigne Sanitaire, Marseille, France, 2020
Installation view

Peter Fend
Crime, 2020
Collage

An urge to replace the marketing term “Prime” with “Crime” came from personal experience.

At first, there was suspicion, even alarm, about a brand claiming to offer all the books that one could rightfully want to read. Why, I wondered, are they telling me of what they’ve selected, and they neither offer nor acknowledge anything else? This denies the rationale for a book, to be a record of opinion and knowledge from one among millions of authors.

Next, there was an event with my daughter. We were in a bookstore, looking at books in German that might be useful to her, since she had an early childhood in Germany and could speak the language, but hadn’t learned to read it. With help from the bookstore staff, we found some dozen books, then made a selection. I offered to pay. She said, “No, we’ll go home and get them on Amazon.” I barked back. “No, we’re not getting them on Amazon. The shop here has given you a comfortable space in which to look at what they’ve selected, you’ve been able to make some decisions; we’re paying here and taking with us what we selected.” In mind were calculations of what ordering on Amazon would ecologically cost: (1) the manufacture of second copies of the same books; (2) the second shipping in and warehousing of the second books; (3) the second inventory removal and transport, possibly by plane, certainly by truck, to a home; (5) the cardboard packaging; (7) the haulage and dumping of that packaging. All these actions, with huge material costs, would not happen if the original transaction went ahead, at 300 calories expense. Amazon, I calculated, was feeding parasitically on the intellectual labor of others who select, display and speak on behalf of the books.

Years later, when I saw a tabloid headline about a chronic subway-ride ‘swipe’ provider, I tweeted that the swipe-seller, offering a subway service to a rider at no payment to the provider, was doing what Amazon does—-only Amazon is much worse: it also causes an expenditure of three times more fuel, space and timber than in the original transaction. Now witness where Amazon works, on city sidewalks and parking slots: it survives only with extreme avoidance of normal labor and workspace costs. Lawyers in several continents, especially Europe, try to find ways to stop such abuse. They file that sources of goods are spied upon, then mimicked and replaced, in what amounts to intellectual-property theft.

But the perpetrator seems to want more than just swipe payments. He wants to gain dominance in what people read, view, hear and think. The aim is that of Big Brother: control of thought. Thus, a major newspaper is bought, and money is poured into transforming its readers into a “community”, all bound by allegiance to a “definitive source of fact and opinion.” A booming podcast service would be purchased, so that what goes on between your ears is selected. The control extends even to those who never buy from Amazon, such as me. A year ago, a writer with whom I collaborated asked me to write a review of her book, on Amazon. But Amazon told me, apparently due to what I had tweeted earlier, that I did not meet the minimum requirements for suitability as a reviewer. Emails also came in daily from Amazon about my “account.” How soon will “1984” come to be? Maybe that’s intended: Amazon once automatically deleted all e-book copies of “1984”; after much rancor, they restored it, but said that they would do so only if instructed by the US Government. Oh?

-Peter Fend, 2020

Peter Fend
AFRICA EUROPA BRÜCKE, Oracle, Berlin, Germany, 2015
Installation view

Peter Fend
AFRICA EUROPA BRÜCKE, Oracle, Berlin, Germany, 2015
Installation view

Peter Fend
AFRICA EUROPA BRÜCKE, Oracle, Berlin, Germany, 2015
Installation view

Peter Fend
AFRICA EUROPA BRÜCKE, Oracle, Berlin, Germany, 2015
Installation view

Peter Fend
to be built, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Germany, 2015
Installation view

Peter Fend
Documenta Flag, 1992
Print on fabric
118 × 78 ¾ inches (300 × 200 cm)

Peter Fend
REBELS ARE REASONABLE, Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York, New York, 2014
Installation view

Countries are in question again. Remember: every country has a flag: every flag represents, in high abstraction, that country’s place. But each place, as we learned from Earth Art and Duchamp’s Urinal, has a slope to something more essential to us all: the Sea. We revise the flags in relation to the Sea.

In response to tribulations with Documenta, the artist decided in 1992, when invited a second time, to replace the official flags of the three-month public event with his own. These flags would not be without reason. But they would also be challenging the current power setups. Some thought of them as a joke. No: they could become programs for future evolution of every site reflagged. Recall that a flag is specific to a place, so it becomes a highly-abstracted landscape painting of that place. What is to be done, place by place, to address planet problems? The first flags identified programs for Germany, the EU, the Northern Hemisphere Americas, Asia and the Southern Hemisphere. Next came flags for the UN, centered on the South Pole and not the North, and Switzerland, purchased by Zurich City’s wastewater (water runoff) administration. In 2007, in another spurt, flags were produced for: Libya, Cuba, Poland, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, China. The last flag was flown large size outdoors in Shanghai—and remains an enduring proposal for that country’s now-controversial expansion into the Sea.

These flags, in 2014, present solutions, place by place, to global problems.

NOT PRESENTED, BUT ALWAYS POSSIBLE, IS THE FLAG OF THE UNITED STATES.

This flag is a landscape-painting. It represents, in very abstract form, the 13 original colonies, as stripes, and the current number of states, as stars. Each has a representative location. I have applied my usual Duchamp-Urinal model to the US, to identify some 60 or so catchments into which waters and nutrients flow. To register this as a US flag requires a very-small modification: instead of 50 stars, place 60, or maybe 63. Probably no one but a US citizen, indoctrinated in the US flag from childhood, could have imagined the works here shown.

Countries are in question again. Remember: every country has a flag: every flag represents, in high abstraction, that country’s place. But each place, as we learned from Earth Art and Duchamp’s Urinal, has a slope to something more essential to us all: the Sea. We revise the flags in relation to the Sea.

In response to tribulations with Documenta, the artist decided in 1992, when invited a second time, to replace the official flags of the three-month public event with his own. These flags would not be without reason. But they would also be challenging the current power setups. Some thought of them as a joke. No: they could become programs for future evolution of every site reflagged. Recall that a flag is specific to a place, so it becomes a highly-abstracted landscape painting of that place. What is to be done, place by place, to address planet problems? The first flags identified programs for Germany, the EU, the Northern Hemisphere Americas, Asia and the Southern Hemisphere. Next came flags for the UN, centered on the South Pole and not the North, and Switzerland, purchased by Zurich City’s wastewater (water runoff) administration. In 2007, in another spurt, flags were produced for: Libya, Cuba, Poland, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, China. The last flag was flown large size outdoors in Shanghai—and remains an enduring proposal for that country’s now-controversial expansion into the Sea.

These flags, in 2014, present solutions, place by place, to global problems.

NOT PRESENTED, BUT ALWAYS POSSIBLE, IS THE FLAG OF THE UNITED STATES.

This flag is a landscape-painting. It represents, in very abstract form, the 13 original colonies, as stripes, and the current number of states, as stars. Each has a representative location. I have applied my usual Duchamp-Urinal model to the US, to identify some 60 or so catchments into which waters and nutrients flow. To register this as a US flag requires a very-small modification: instead of 50 stars, place 60, or maybe 63. Probably no one but a US citizen, indoctrinated in the US flag from childhood, could have imagined the works here shown.

Peter Fend
ALGERIA, 2014
UV inkjet print on aluminum
12 × 18 inches (30.48 × 45.72 cm)

In 1985, the Algerian Ambassador to France, after three meetings with us to study our satellite observations of the Iran-Iraq war, revealing vast earthworks similar to US earth art but designed by Russians, asked if we could propose similar vast earthworks to restore the Sahara Desert to what it was long ago: animal-rich savannah. This led to detailed proposals for the Grand Erg Oriental (into Tunisia) and Grand Erg Occidental (through Mali). Following through became tough with the civil war. We could do that now. In the east, we could remove soil runoff in sub-sea-level sinks to gradually restore what Herodotus described as a giant Gulf of Triton. In the west, we can restore inland salt seas in what’s now Mauritania, working to open up flows to the Atlantic. Nutrients from the northern coast get harvested and turned to biofuel or food in the Gulf of Gabes, vindicating the ambitions of Carthage. (Research since 1985, Paris; first shown in 1994, Vienna, with sequels in Pescara and Milan, and “Arab Springs” at White Box, NY, 2011.)

Peter Fend
RUSSIA, 2014
UV inkjet print on aluminum
12 × 18 inches (30.48 × 45.72 cm)

Russia is so huge that it’s frequently open to encroachments: from Europe, from China and Japan, from the arid South. Let it restructure along two main ridges: the Urals, separating Asia from Europe, and the Lomonosov Ridge bisecting the Arctic Ocean, highlighted by Putin with an undersea flag-planting in 2007. Also, the ridgeline practice, already a custom, can distinguish Russia from the desert basins of Central Asia; the UN Secretary General stresses that those regions need their own management. With the regions shown here, concentrate on the soil flowing down to the sea, including added nutrients, including tundra meltoff, to reap huge amounts of biomass offshore. Russia is rich in ocean life It need not be dependent on fossil fuels. It has prepared for a post-petroleum future, perhaps by chance, in deciding to make methane its main transport fuel. (This three-part division answered a request of a Russian securities trader for a “restructuring,” 2014.)

Peter Fend
JAMAICA, 2014
UV inkjet print on aluminum
12 × 18 inches (30.48 × 45.72 cm)

Great runners are bred there, and a huge musical force bursts out from there, but–due to Western development and mining–the main environmental problems are said to involve water quality and waste disposal. Mapping of Jamaica into its four main coasts began when the head of the North America office of the UN Environment Program, from Jamaica, asked me to map the entire Caribbean: 1982. Can such mapping extend into national policy? Social cohesion is strong; such a goal can be reached.

Peter Fend
OCEAN COMES TO US, 2014
Video
3:23 min (looped)

Peter Fend
OCEAN COMES TO US, 2014
Video
3:23 min (looped)

Peter Fend
IT MAY LOOK GOOD, 2014
Aluminum sign with vinyl decal
24 × 36 inches (60.96 × 91.44 cm)

Peter Fend
SOCIAL CHANGE, 2014
Aluminum sign with vinyl decal
36 × 24 inches (91.44 × 60.96 cm)

Peter Fend
SAVE YOUR SOIL, 2014
Aluminum sign with vinyl decal
36 × 24 inches (91.44 × 60.96 cm)

Peter Fend
Über Die Grenze, Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York, New York, 2012
Installation view

Peter Fend
Über die Grenze: May Not Be Seen Or Read Or Done, 2012
Collage (color laserjet copies, b/w laserjet copies, magazine pages, maps), colored pencil, ink and architectural tape on paper
12 works, each sheet: 50 × 38 inches (127.00 × 96.52 cm)
Dimensions variable

Peter Fend
Über die Grenze: May Not Be Seen Or Read Or Done, 2012
Collage (color laserjet copies, b/w laserjet copies, magazine pages, maps), colored pencil, ink and architectural tape on paper
12 works, each sheet: 50 × 38 inches (127.00 × 96.52 cm)
Dimensions variable
Detail

Peter Fend
Über die Grenze: May Not Be Seen Or Read Or Done, 2012
Collage (color laserjet copies, b/w laserjet copies, magazine pages, maps), colored pencil, ink and architectural tape on paper
12 works, each sheet: 50 × 38 inches (127.00 × 96.52 cm)
Dimensions variable
Detail

Peter Fend
Über die Grenze: May Not Be Seen Or Read Or Done, 2012
Collage (color laserjet copies, b/w laserjet copies, magazine pages, maps), colored pencil, ink and architectural tape on paper
12 works, each sheet: 50 × 38 inches (127.00 × 96.52 cm)
Dimensions variable
Detail

Peter Fend
Über die Grenze: May Not Be Seen Or Read Or Done, 2012
Collage (color laserjet copies, b/w laserjet copies, magazine pages, maps), colored pencil, ink and architectural tape on paper
12 works, each sheet: 50 × 38 inches (127.00 × 96.52 cm)
Dimensions variable
Detail

Peter Fend
PARALLEL PROJECTS, Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, Germany, 2005
Installation view

Peter Fend
PARALLEL PROJECTS, Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, Germany, 2005
Installation view

Peter Fend
PARALLEL PROJECTS, Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, Germany, 2005
Installation view

Peter Fend, with GLOBAL FEED
REVERSE WARMING, Spacex, Exeter, UK, 2004
Installation view

Peter Fend, with GLOBAL FEED
REVERSE WARMING, Spacex, Exeter, UK, 2004
Installation view

Peter Fend, with GLOBAL FEED
REVERSE WARMING, Spacex, Exeter, UK, 2004
Installation view

Peter Fend, with GLOBAL FEED
REVERSE WARMING, Spacex, Exeter, UK, 2004
Installation view

Peter Fend
POST-PETROLEUM FUEL STATIONS: RAPID RESPONSE
American Fine Arts, New York, New York, 2000

Peter Fend
GLOBAL WARMING
RAPID RESPONSE
Nikolai Fine Art, New York, New York, 1999

Peter Fend
GLOBAL WARMING
RAPID RESPONSE
Nikolai Fine Art, New York, New York, 1999

Peter Fend
GLOBAL WARMING
RAPID RESPONSE
Nikolai Fine Art, New York, New York, 1999

Peter Fend
OIL-FREE CORRIDOR
45th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 1993

Peter Fend
OIL-FREE CORRIDOR
45th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 1993

Peter Fend
SITE SIMULATOR, TIVAT BAY
American Fine Arts, New York, New York, 1992

Peter Fend
SITE SIMULATOR, TIVAT BAY
American Fine Arts, New York, New York, 1992

Peter Fend
SITE SIMULATOR, TIVAT BAY
American Fine Arts, New York, New York, 1992

Peter Fend
SITE SIMULATOR, TIVAT BAY
American Fine Arts, New York, New York, 1992

Peter Fend
SITE SIMULATOR, TIVAT BAY
American Fine Arts, New York, New York, 1992

Peter Fend
MEANS TO WEALTH
Tanja Grunert, Cologne, Germany, 1992

Peter Fend
MEANS TO WEALTH
Tanja Grunert, Cologne, Germany, 1992

Peter Fend
A NEW WORLD ORDER / BEACH PARTY
American Fine Arts, New York, New York, 1991

Peter Fend
A NEW WORLD ORDER / BEACH PARTY
American Fine Arts, New York, New York, 1991

Peter Fend
KLEINE FRAGEN
Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, Germany, 1990

Peter Fend
KLEINE FRAGEN
Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, Germany, 1990

Peter Fend
COMPLETION OF THE WAR
American Fine Arts, New York, New York, 1989

Peter Fend
COMPLETION OF THE WAR
American Fine Arts, New York, New York, 1989

Peter Fend
COMPLETION OF THE WAR
American Fine Arts, New York, New York, 1989

Peter Fend
GLOBAL SYSTEM
Chase Manhattan Plaza; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, New York, 1982

Peter Fend
GLOBAL SYSTEM
Chase Manhattan Plaza; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, New York, 1982

Peter Fend
GLOBAL SYSTEM
Chase Manhattan Plaza; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, New York, 1982

Peter Fend
AROOM
DEFIN
EDNOT
BYITS
WALLS
BUTBY
APUMP
Peter Nadin, New York, New York, 1979