September 17, 2008
Greenpeace, Mark Jenkins Take Responsibility for Polar Bears
Via a reader tip, Fox 5 reports that Greenpeace has taken responsibility for the polar bears that have been mistaken for suspicious packages around town over the last week. Indeed, if you go to the Greenpeace homepage, it turns out that not only was Greenpeace responsible, but they actually did it in collaboration with street artist Mark Jenkins -- so both of our guesses were correct!
Greenpeace has unveiled a collaborative art project with well-known street artist Mark Jenkins. The project highlights the shared plight of polar bears and humans in the face of global warming. We hope these polar bear street art installations help people draw a deeper and more immediate connection to the reality of the crisis.Given how much media attention the fake bear bomb scare got yesterday, we can safely say this tactic was a big success for Greenpeace. It's also not the first time they've sent a polar bear to Washington.Jenkins, a Washington, D.C.-based artist who creates sculptures primarily from packing tape, has earned international recognition for his street art installations, many of which feature astoundingly realistic human figures. For this series, Greenpeace and Jenkins added polar bear heads and ragged clothing to human figures to convey a sense of displacement and homelessness. To date, four sculptures have been deployed throughout the D.C. area in locations chosen to reach a variety of audiences and address different aspects of the global warming crisis. One bear bore a sign reading “S.O.S.,” while another had signs saying: “Victim of Oil Addiction” and “Global Warming Refugee. Help a brother out?”
“My intention with this project was to leverage my street installations to promote awareness about the issue of global warming and the plight of the polar bear,” said Jenkins. “It was our shared goal that the public would develop empathy for the polar bear as they have for the homeless which we see as two connected issues.”
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i haven't heard Obama or McCain mention any concern for polar bears (Sarah Palin wears polar bear fur undergarments), so i'd say their f*#&ed.
i'd be happy to host one of them at my house as long as it's toilet trained and can survive on somr sort of Purina product. who needs a handgun when you have a polar bear to protect you from intruders?
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“It was our shared goal that the public would develop empathy for the polar bear as they have for the homeless which we see as two connected issues.”
This statement makes a false assumption that people have empathy for the homeless. If polar bears start screaming and cursing at me for spare change and pooping outside of my office door, I'm going be a lot less sympathetic to their plight.
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I'd be a lot more sympathetic to these bears if they were pandas and were tastefully shaved. Down there.
There are so many layers of stupid going on in this story--from Greenpeace sticking "art" wherever it feels like, to the whole connect-the-dots-between-homelessness-and-global-warming mental masturbation, to the neighbors who wouldn't know guerilla art if it peed in their faces, to the bomb squad not knowing WTF is going on. And you just know some clown is going to steal these things and sell them on eBay, or put them on the international stolen art market, where some billionaire art necrophile will spend millions to acquire "the bear that shut down DC" and lock it up in his villa, along with his snuff films and Japanese sex androids and rare Jeff Koons l80-foot H.R. Puffinstuff sculpture made entirely out of raw meat and boogers.
I'm afraid to get too close to this story for fear the layers of stupidity will cause it to collapse into a black hole of stupidity from which nothing, not even intelligence, can escape.
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@ Monkey Do you know if that clown needs a roommate? He sounds like he could be a lot of fun. Let him know that I can do amazing things with "cookies" and "equitable housing loans" and "guys with the last name of Lehman".
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so gotham!
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Lesson learned: don't sit still for too long in this city or the bomb squad might blow you up.
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Those Greenpeace girls with clipboards like to flirt with me at Metro Stations? They have good taste. FREDTERP
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greenpeace has been known to blow things up on occasion, as well as spike trees marked for logging (bouncing chainsaws back into logger's faces), and generally don't care about humans as much as "nature". So, my only problem with the bomb squad disassembling something greenpeace did was that it brought widespread media attention to greenpeace's exploitation of homeless humans for the profit of animals.
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Am I the only one that thinks those things look like giant rats not small polar bears?
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sticks - Greenpeace doesn't do those things. You're thinking of Earth First! Maybe!
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damn hippies. *shakes fist*
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Reid, not rats. Beagles.
Yeah, Earth First! does the monkeywrenching and the treespiking. Greenpeace mostly harasses Japanese whaling boats. PETA, on the other hand, does all the sexy animal torture porn videos and "Did you know that you have five pounds of undigested meat in your colon?" door-to-door canvassing shakedowns and their breath stinks of sprouts and coffee and that two-packs-a-day of cigarettes they puff while freezing to death in their Chucks on the loading dock.
I take it having the bomb squad blow up Mark Jenkins isn't an option? Because 'atsa some a-spicy performance art!
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FREDTERP, they flirt with everyone.
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sticks - there are a lot of radical anti-logging groups, but Greenpeace isn't one of them. Chain themselves to a tree, maybe, but they would not do something to intentionally injure a person.
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uh, is the 'nature canada' banner ad with the three polar bears above this article intentional or just great timing?
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TLB, not with me they don't.
They may have low standards, but apparently they have standards nonetheless.
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tlb: shhhhh, you'll hurt his feelings.
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So, are these "bears" simulations or simulacra?
Trick question. They're NEITHER. They just suck.