OUR LOVE AFFAIR WITH OIL FOULS ALL IT TOUCHES
ARTISTS LIKE SHEPARD FAIREY HAVE RAISED ALARMS FOR YEARS
There’s little less subtle than oil rigs on the horizon, oil spills on a shoreline and oil profits in the art world.
Drive the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass and you can gawk at the light-as-alabaster crown resting atop the Santa Monica Mountains, the Getty Center, founded by one of America’s preeminent oil fortunes. (It was threatened in 2019 in one of California’s ever-worsening wildfires, driven by today’s hotter and drier climate.) Over at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which itself sits on oil and gas deposits, visitors until 2018 could walk through the BP Grand Entrance, so named for the British energy conglomerate that donated $25 million to LACMA in 2007. The deal came with a gaudy touch of public relations. “The roof of the BP Grand Entrance is topped with solar panels capable of generating 100,000 watts of electricity, which will be used to power Urban Light, Chris Burden’s specially commissioned outdoor sculpture comprised of 202 vintage street lamps,” the museum said in a statement at the time. Three years after this solar gesture, one of BP’s deep-water rigs exploded, killing 11 workers and unleashing 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. In recent years, as carbon emissions have continued to grow and trap more heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, environmental activists worldwide have engaged in increasingly spectacular demonstrations calling for museums to divorce themselves from similar major oil and gas donors. (LACMA’s entrance is now called the Smidt Welcome Plaza, after another donor.)
Oil doesn’t seem to bring out the subtlety in anything or anybody, including artists. In 2010, in response to the BP oil spill, fashion photographer Steven Meisel scandalized some with a Vogue Italia magazine spread of model Kristen McMenamy lying lifelessly on a Los Angeles-area beach, clad in a tulle dress by Ralph Lauren and surrounded in black goo. The magazine titled the spread “The Latest Wave.” “She keeps her skin golden thanks to Self Tan Face Bronzing Gel Tint (to wear alone or with foundation): it takes care of the skin, while giving it a hint of color,” the magazine noted of McMenamy’s look, as is common for spreads. “Carbon, anthracite, and all of the earthy shades ‘dress’ her eyes.” The women’s news site Refinery29 reacted skeptically: “Creating beauty and glamour out of tragedy seems quite f— up to us, not to mention wasteful and hypocritical, seeing as thousands of dollars of luxury clothing was flown in, and then subsequently ruined for the shoot.” The feminist site Jezebel added of the “awful” shoot: “Is it ever appropriate to use a distressing catastrophe as a vehicle to shill luxury goods?” The magazine’s editor, Franca Sozzani, responded: “Why not? After all, there are films, artistic performances, theater pieces on violent events that surround us, why should a magazine be uprooted from reality, giving a stereotyped image of a glamour that is an end in itself?” It seemed another way of saying that oil sticks to whatever it touches, which is everything, including museums and fashion magazines.
Shepard Fairey’s 2014 print “Paradise Turns” is far from the artist’s most noted work — that credit goes to his “Hope” portrait of Barack Obama and his André the Giant-inspired “Obey” line. But it’s the one most prescient this month in Southern California, where the coastal ecosystem is trying to recover from oil spilled from a ruptured underwater pipeline near Huntington Beach. “Paradise Turns” borrows from the Soviet constructivist and socialist realism influences Fairey is known for (a lot of Soviet art was not known for subtlety, either) to produce a simple image of a man and a woman relaxing on the beach, in front of a menacing cluster of oil derricks. Dark water laps aggressively at the couple’s feet. “Enjoy paradise,” the image commands, “until the tide turns.” The image is reminiscent of a 1930s postcard from Playa del Rey showing beachgoers frolicking in front of a forest of derricks — an ominous juxtaposition today, but a tableau of joy and industry to an observer back then. “There are plenty of oil wells out this way,” one postcard writer said in 1935, according to a copy on file at Pepperdine University. “Very pretty scenery.”
“I’ve done multiple pieces based on oil spills in general, but that piece and the one called ‘Slick New Wave’ were inspired by oil spills off the California coastline,” Fairey said in a statement to The Times issued through a publicist. “‘Paradise Turns’ was inspired literally by how there were oil derricks right on the beach in places like Playa del Rey in the past. The image was inspired by the juxtaposition of the oil derricks and the beautiful coastline in Playa del Rey and meant to be more metaphorical in general about the lack of foresight and vision when it comes to the need to transition away from fossil fuels to avoid environmental destruction.”
Although the 2014 works — both of which are sold out on Fairey’s website — are meant to compel to action, it’s hard to compete with the political impact of the imagery of the real thing. Irish philosopher Edmund Burke knew this in the 1750s: “Choose a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favorite actors; spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations; unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting, and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy.” Images of oil on the shores of Huntington Beach quickly prompted calls to more strictly oversee U.S. offshore drilling, if not end it forever.
But even after the spill, there were those eerie photos of Californians enjoying paradise. A surfer stretching in the sand next to a seagull as neon-vested crews with shovels scour the waterline. A girl running, playing in front of the workers. A family stepping into the water. Beaches, museums — some people can look past all the oil, as long as the views are pretty enough.