This was our presentation to the Cultures of Energy seminar at Rice today. Joe Campana, me, Aynne Kokas, Derek Woods.
Joe and me: beauty and ugliness: oil pipes (beauty of landscape is about hiding them!) versus wind farms (that farmers don’t want messing up their horizon) relationship between beauty and energy
me; different scales and spatiotemporal rhythms required: Marina Zurkow--just taking that simple hydrocarbon ad and multiplying it
nature coloring books: use of kitsch concept of MESOCOSM
And an engagement with things that are considered somewhat marginal to or provocatively on the side of the aesthetic: food; the Klingberg mandala -- disturbing but not in the usual ways; products, shopping looking at issues of consumption and taste consumerism possibility space
Joe: it’s a nice segue from the previous Catastrophe cluster presentation. The group formed as a way of thinking about how artists think about energy in a variety of media. Before I even knew I had an interest in this, as an arts writer reviewing various shows around town, I realized I had stumbled into an interesting network.
Andrei Molodkin, Crude: I encountered his work at the Station, a gallery that presents works directly engaging sociopolitical themes.
He served as a Soviet soldier guardian oil convoys Cold War II: text and images of his work long trips for food, heating: slathering bodies in excess crude just to stay warm circulation of oil >> his practice oil pumping through various figures and letters movie: popping of compressors, series of letters filling with oil abandoned gas station with “revolution” in Russian written outside
Yes we can / Fuck you (and other phrases) figures of Christ flushed with oil hand of the Statue of Liberty (all encased in plastics << oil)
Pincus; energy versus fuel art materiality, crude
Statue of Liberty head gun shot like compressors: oil appearing and disappearing all around you <> hypnosis
Diverseworks, Marina Zurkow
Necrocracy: rule of the dead, the dead being hydrocarbons the sinkhole in Wink Texas--the video makes noises!
Mitchell Center for the arts and the Center for Land Use Interpretation Houston as the hub of a massive energy network, production distribution commerce art can be understood in a similar way
Joe realized that this kind of art did have something to do with him...
Energy: Overdevelopment and the Illusion of Endless Growth only references to the arts are << simplistic beauty and ugliness
art <> PR and beauty <> positive change: too simplistic
Clean Coal ads! the ripped semi-nakedness GE energy ad. “Harnessing the power of coal is looking more beautiful every day” ecomagination sexy and griminess--very sexy, a very complex range of pleasure and disgust
30th Anniversary of Koyaanisqaatsi: Reggio and scores by Philip Glass slow motion, time lapse, other forms of landscape cinematography
humiliation of language; different modes require different types of communication
If art can’t provide easy 1/1 relations some gains from appeal to beauty and appeal to art but...
two years of energy arts: first theme is consumption second theme is urban geographies
back to Marina Zurkow; inadvertent fascinations and attachments is this simply decline? no-growth economy what is it to anticipate enervation
Neo/Geo 1-IV, schematics of an oil drill; small room that felt like a disco a set of algorithms producing: a drill goes down and sometimes finds oil... beauty << ugly
hazmat suits for kids: a disturbing scale; might make you laugh
the hydrocarbons horribly multiplied
Mesocosm: extensions in time, things just go on, but it’s markedly different because of the slow thinking
virtual ecosystem simulations forcing you to think about the forms of attention you pay to things
Petroleum manga banners our plan is to print up a bunch of them take, modify, and send back Tyvek helps with endurance
Outside the Work (a translation of “hors d’oeuvre”)
invasive species tasting by Zurkow approaching these questions through food
Tim will teach an undergraduate course on consumption and ecology
Derek: Zurkow likes to play with the cute different from industrial pollution landscapes eg Burtynsky’s huge tire piles is the feeling of depression or the sublime the only thing that’s useful? 2014-2015: course about the geography of Houston itself Center for Land Use Interpretation: a bit like land art; drawing on Herzog; New Topographic photographers interesting maps and index cards in the land use database: photos and a brief description of what it is since 1994 Petroscape Texas Oil: Landscape of an industry Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center archive of different viewing devices as viewing windows on the urban geography of Houston disarming naivete: no gloss between a river and river of slag
Aynne Kokas Trader Joe’s Anthropomorphic Map of Houston, hyperlocal project--a forty mile walk broken up into 4 mile chunks walking with the two artists in hazmat suits The Human Tour not exactly lovely: looks more like a near future dystopia Light Surgeons: Cynthai Woods Mitchell Center. British artists. Super Everything piece. Houston: Energize project; could be synchronous with Zurkow Shrimp Boat project, Galveston Bay--adjacent to the refineries. Allows artists and scholars to go on a shrimp boat and spend the day “hyperlocal flows” Aynne’s course in the fall called Global Environmental Media: section on Houston
Q: what about the commodified, sellout qualities (I’m paraphrasing this question) of the geographical work? me: there is the lineage of Situationism and Psychic Geography Aynne: the shrimp project is when you encounter it not to do with exploitation, but rather working with artists whose livelihood is in fact shrimping
Gwen Bradford: what are the aesthetic themes here, digging deeper? Joe: ennervation Derek: history of materials me: coexistence and boredom (plus the more immediate anxiety)
Joe: what are you thinking of? (to the audience)
Gwen: at least two mentioned the theme of scale and complexity, the befuddlement of looking at how the world is changing so quickly; we are massively outstripped as individuals Jameson: the tools of philosophy grew up in a simpler time and now we need new tools for understanding how individuals interact
Derek: that is a good point. If you want to be aware of where you waste goes it does get really hard to delimit what an action is
Q: kitsch. Form. The culturally peripheral forms that they tarry with like the manga. The vernacular. Vernacular landscapes in architecture. Vernacular formal dimension of this stuff too? Representational stuff. Forms that are adequate to the landscapes that are being looked at. It stands to reason that they would be hybrid or unauthorized? “Bad” or depreciated forms. Our efforts to be adequate to eco. Versus the deadly serious earnestness--to open up modalities of art that just that.
Derek: that’s one reason I want to play with the CLUI model.
Alexander: I wonder about something. Videos, photographs, printouts. There is a relationship between forms of innovation and the possibility of scale that has something to do with reproducibility. The idea that Zurkow would be everywhere on campus. Or the idea of going to a specific place.
Joe: the form question is very complex. The odd neutrality of the manga. The odd schematic neutrality of the manga and the kitsch objects. There is a weird relation between those things. The odd ubiquity of Mesocosm: they are not identical << algorithms computing. They would be similar environments playing out different possibilities.
Alexander: assumptions about what art works. It’s not like the sublime is over--but there might be something else going on and the way one imagines scale or innovation.
Joe: it wouldn’t be about rejecting all aesthetic terms. Even the simple ones presented problems for description. Hopefully it will be interesting to see them become more nuanced and complicated.
Derek: a lot of the CLUI pieces are too large to put in a museum.
Alexander: but that’s it, right? The point would be to go out and see it. It seems counterproductive to take photographs--because you can’t reproduce it.
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