Alfred Presents · Artist Showcase Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017 — John Gerrard

John Gerrard

simulation, real-time software · Art Blocks, 2022 and 2023 · x.com/john__gerrard

“My brain has been networked to the internet — to data — since my formative years as an art student.”

— John Gerrard, Right Click Save, June 2024

I remember standing in the club asking myself: “if computing does this to music, what will it do to visual art?” At that moment, I made a commitment to computing as my primary art form.

— Right Click Save, interview with Whitney Hart, June 2024 — a Manchester club, early 1990s, an art student from Tipperary
Practice since
2000s
Medium
Real-timesimulation
Shown at
ThyssenDesert X · Dark Mofo
The market row here is small on purpose: two Art Blocks projects, both sold out — Petro National, 196 works, June 2022, contract 0x64780ce53f6e966e18a22af13a2f97369580ec11, and World Flag, 195 works, June 2023, contract 0xea698596b6009a622c3ed00dd5a8b5d1cae4fc36. The longer anchor is still the exhibition record: the Museum of Modern Art (permanent collection), Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid, COP25, 2019), Public Art Fund at Lincoln Center (New York, 2014), Desert X (Coachella Valley, 2019), Dark Mofo (Tasmania, 2023) — and LACMA, which accepted Western Flag as the first NFT in its permanent collection and had to open a wallet to do it.
Visit johngerrard.net
The Art Blocks work trades. The simulation the artist is known for was given to a museum, and that copy is not for sale.
The work · 2017

A flag of black smoke, over an exhausted well

The site

Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas)

Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017 depicts the site of the 'Lucas Gusher' - the world's first major oil find - in Spindletop, Texas in 1901, now barren and exhausted. The site is recreated as a digital simulation and placed at its centre a flagpole bearing a flag of perpetually-renewing pressurised black smoke. … The simulation is non-durational (having no beginning or end) and is run live by software that is calculating each frame of the animation in real-time as it is needed.

Studio text, johngerrard.net — two passages joined by an ellipsis
The market

Western Flag (NFT) · Petro National · World Flag

I released Western Flag as an NFT so quickly, at such a scale, that it was bad for me mentally. I took fright, stepped back, and took time off. … But then the next thing was coming into Art Blocks and doing it in a much more orderly way, with a piece called Petronational. … by the time Art Blocks happened, I felt I could make 195 works because of the shift from proof of work

John Gerrard, Waiting To Be Signed #070 with Whitney Hart, July 2024 — three passages joined by ellipses; “Petronational” is his spelling in the transcript, the project is titled Petro National on Art Blocks
The performance

crystalline work (arctic)

A 365-day performance by a virtual robot at the arctic north pole: 24 archetypes a day, 8,760 across the solar year, running in WebGL. Described by the artist in interview; no edition, chain or contract is published here because none was verified.

Alfred's summary of the artist's description, Right Click Save, June 2024

The simulation runs in step with the real place: the sun comes up when it comes up in Texas, and the days lengthen and shorten with the seasons. A work made in 2017 that predates the market it is now filed beside — evidence that the form is older than the category.

In his words

Why the browser, and where the subject comes from

For me, the web browser is a key interface for public art. WebGL is a rich cultural vessel for communicating with the public, and the blockchain allows for the distribution of the work to a broad audience, spreading the core ideas, and enabling ownership in an entirely new way.

Right Click Save, interview with Whitney Hart, 20 June 2024

I have this vivid memory from when I was around six or seven of walking through the neighbor's cornfield, holding my mothers hand, with all of the puddles full of dead, pale, and bloated earthworms after the farmer had sprayed his fields with chemicals. I had a front-row seat to the toxicity of petro-agriculture that has indelibly shaped my worldview and artistic career.

Right Click Save, interview with Whitney Hart, 20 June 2024

Follow this practice as it moves.

Alfred tracks collections. There are two here, both closed editions on Art Blocks. This profile exists because a reading room about digital art that omits Gerrard is telling the story from 2021 onwards.

Visit johngerrard.net