Petroleum and Painting: Reading Oil in Post-War and Neoliberal Expression

Can we ‘read’ petroleum, oil, and petro-culture in post-war expressive and figurative painting? Art theorist Carina Brand considers the significant material impacts and aesthetics of petroleum, as crude oil that is black, viscous, and toxic, and refined oil that becomes social and cultural in its association with ‘freedom’ and plastic commodity culture. Connecting the speculative act of painting to the speculative act of prospecting for oil, the lecture examines if paint simulated the energy on which it relied. Brand considers Matthew Huber’s work in connection with the specific atomised lifestyles of the American suburb and cultures of hyper-individualism explored in the painted subjects and specific energy of the works. Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline are approached as representative of a peak oil aesthetic while Phillip Guston, Eric Fischl and Malcolm Morley are approached in relation to oil crisis aestheticism. The lecture draws on Patricia Yaeger’s concept of the ‘energy unconscious’ to ask if the historically specific return to expressive painting responded to oil overproduction and the underproduction of environmental consciousness. Revisiting this body of work through the frame of petroleum helps us decode, and debunk, the petro-totality that continues to define both art and life.

Following the lecture, Carina Brand will be joined by art historians Ian Rothwell and Angela Dimitrakaki, University of Edinburgh, for a roundtable and discussion with the audience.

The event is followed by a reception in the John Higgit Gallery, 6-7pm.

Carina Brand is Lecturer in Visual Art at Loughborough University, where she researches interdisciplinary readings of art and culture, currently focusing on the intersections of art and petroleum ecologies. Her publications include ‘A Materialist Reading of Abject Art: Performance, Social Reproduction and Capitalism’ (2022), ‘The Necropolitics of Reproduction: Black Feminism, Mothers and the Death Drive’ in (2022) and ‘The Extractive Unconscious in Science Fiction: A Saga of Concrete and Gas’ in Strange Horizons (2022).

The event is generously supported by Devolved Research Funding, ECA. The event is organised by Global Contemporary members Angela Dimitrakaki and Ian Rothwell.

Image: Malcolm Morley, The Age of Catastrophe, 1976

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