Marco Evaristti
The good folk of the Danish art scene are not widely known for their forays into radicalism so Marco Evaristti has taken on the mantle of 'bad boy' for them. He spray painted an entire iceberg red off the coast of Greenland in 2004 - an "artistic protest" over nuclear waste dumped by the United States near its Thule military base in the north of the Danish territory. As the second part of his red-paint 'trilogy', he now plans to rouge up Mont Blanc.
The 43 year-old Denmark-dwelling Chilean is often accused of being a shameless self-publicist but he insists the MontRouge Project is not a provocative gimmick but a statement to raise awareness of territoriality and environmental pollution. Environmental groups back Evaristti at least in the accusation that local politicians refuse to bestow national park status on the once-pristine area for fear of reducing tourism. "Who's mountaintop is it? Why am I not allowed to decorate it?" Evaristti asked me last week. "My change is visible but the change is made with a non-toxic, organic product as opposed to the change brought about by man's littering and destruction of nature. I point to France as a sovereign state polluting Mont Blanc by letting the tourist industry run wild and as a state polluting many different sites worldwide with atomic explosions."
He prefers to keep the timing of the scheme to tint the snow of Western Europe's highest peak secret "as the French authorities would stop me, labeling the idea insane". Surely not. He did, though, admit that he's aiming for the first half of this year. The Mayor of Chamonix, Michel Charlet, has described the plan as "stupid and illegal" but the artist says that he intends to go ahead with his project whether he is granted permission or not. Charlet warned him that "Mont Blanc benefits from the strictest environmental protection" and accused his project of incoherence: "You can't protect the environment by degrading a protected area", he said. Charlet has also alerted the Gendarmerie in Chamonix.
Evaristti last week confirmed however that he has already put together a 15-strong team to carry the 1,200 liters of paint mixed with water up the peak's 4810 metres where the liquid will be poured out to create a red mark measuring 2,500 square meters. He will foot the 50,000 euro bill for man-power and paint himself.
"The third part of the trilogy will take place in a desert, possibly in Morocco, sometime later this year," he told me. "Preferably a salt desert to keep the line of the colours - turning white into red - that's the aesthetic I'm going for. Then I will have marked the coldest, the highest and the warmest territory and I expect quite different results from each one. The trilogy is an ode to the brotherhood between the peoples of the world," he continued, "as red is the colour of love."
Despite the sweetness of his sentiment, Evaristti has had to keep his Copenhagen address secret for the last ten years due to threats from those offended by his work. He caused more than a bit of a kerfuffle with an exhibit in Denmark's Trapholt modern art museum that featured gold fish swimming in food blenders. Visitors were given the choice of switching on the blenders. One of them did. A Danish animal rights group took Evaristti to court, although he was later acquitted. He then invited Copenhagen drug addicts to paint using cocaine, heroin and blood contaminated with the AIDS virus. His intention was to "awaken consciences and slam a society that treated drug users as pieces of rubbish".
You can currently see an exhibition of Marco's work at the Galeria Animal in Santiago, Chile. This time, the piece that's either going to bring the crowds flocking or have them running for the hills, is a sculpture of his own excrement encased in 24 carat gold. Lovely.
Laura K Jones
All images courtesy Marco Evaristti.
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