Gregory Green

My name's Gregory Green, I'm an artist and my primary medium is sculpture and sort of a social performance art.

The tools of my trade are essentially anything you find in a hardware store or in a pharmacy or in a child's toy store. Most of the materials utilized for building the work that I'm building are very common basic materials, from plumbing materials to electrical materials to kitchen timers to basically anything. For instance, here I'm working on a pipe bomb. It's a bit of a pretty one but its parts are actually from bar railings; everything else comes from your basic hardware store. If I were actually filling it with explosives, the explosives would be made from things that are taken from pharmacies and from toy stores.

"Nuclear Device #5 (Plutonium 329, 5 kilotons)" 2000

But my work varies quite a bit and the tools really are dependent on the project. This is your basic standard pipe bomb which is really just any closed container that has any sort of material that expands very, very quickly inside of it, and something to activate that material, i.e., a detonator and a power supply and some sort of triggering system. Whether it's a timer triggering system or any other sort of booby trap sort of system. For instance like airplane bombs, the triggering system is usually an altitude trigger.

What's the difference between this and art? If I was photographing an actual bomb, would that be art? I think of it as representational sculpture. You can also think of the work as sort of social performance in a way.

"Suitcase Bomb #29" 1996

I've already risked arrest around the world. I've been investigated by the Dutch secret service, the FBI, various police departments in the United States, the postal service in the United States, the German police, the French secret service, the British police and I don't know who else. But I'm in a sense a known entity now. They know who I am. They know what I'm doing. They know that I'm not a psycho-bomb builder and violence is not a strategy that I would choose. Though right now in New York the WTO meeting is happening, and the protestors are out in the street, and in a way I'd rather be there than here. That is a valid strategy, disseminating true and open information is a valid strategy. But using bombs, using violence, no. That only undermines any moral position, any sense of right.

The events that have recently happened, September 11, actually make my work more relevant, more pertinent to our world. This next century is going to be defined by what is going to be a long and never-ending war and ever-escalating war against terrorism. I've been doing this work and talking about these sorts of issues for the last twelve years. In a way I've been warning people about the potential for these sorts of things. Building the bombs, building the nuclear bombs, building guided missiles, building all of the very violent works that I've built and just being a product of classic museum school education, sort of basically is a warning sign that if some yahoo from Brooklyn, with no technical training, can do these things then anybody can do them.

This particular bomb and actually all the pipe bombs and the bomb work in general work in many different ways. This one is sort of ironic. It's like a luxury bomb. A rich man's bomb. That's the reason for the Rolex, that's the reason for the pretty brass pipes. It's sort of like a sad joke in a way. It's about the idea of the seduction of violence. It will be a beautiful bomb. American media, Hollywood, is all about the seduction of violence and spectacle. The idea of spectacle is highly related to my bomb work. When you look at one single bomb, the viewer is not going to know what my moral position is. They're just confronted with this very violent, very aggressive object, and then they're left to figure out what in the world is going on. One of the agendas within all of the bomb work and the reason that I started with the bomb work, was to create a sense of conceptual terrorism. By not knowing what it is and encountering it in a gallery you assume that you're safe in a gallery. So it has to be some sort of conceptual game. And terrorism if you break it down into its simplest, basic parts, it's really an event of extreme spectacle, that creates a form of media interest for the perpetrators of those events to then make some sort of statement.

Greenpeace is one of the most brilliant terrorist organizations in the world. When they unfurl a thirty-story banner down the side of a building they immediately bring the media in and then they talk about issues. The bomb work was one of the strategies within my work. It's not been quite as successful in the United States because the media does not cover culture very well. But in Europe I would use these exhibitions to enter into the media whether it's radio, television or print, and then talk about alternatives to the use of violence and the reality of the potential for violence out there. It was essentially a game for me to get on the media and talk about the issues that are truly important for me.

I was a classic nuclear bomb baby. I was born in 1959 and spent most of my childhood in Europe which was going to be the battleground for the third World War, which would be a war that would very quickly and very shortly move to nuclear levels. I always believed that I would never live past the year 2000 because we'd probably end up in some sort of great battle that would end civilization. That sort of power relationship and my own sense of helplessness within that power relationship has defined a lot of the ideas in my work.

An individual without a sense of power is a broken individual. I think it's very, very important that all of us have a sense of power. When we think about historically the abuses that have been perpetrated by established systems of power, governments or whatever institutions, in a way this is where my work becomes very American. I think that all of us should have an avenue, a way to overturn oppressive systems.