“We should be thanking BP. It would be a disaster for the arts if BP withdrew its support.” Painter Anthony Fry
A number of small art collectives have commonly gained noteriety over the past few years for their guerilla (or should I say gorilla) tactics of gaining their message across to the pubic. The new era of ‘instamax’ or as Fujifilm likes to call their instant polaroid, INSTAX culture has become more and more evident. A society in which people seek to share their opinions or make comments through instant events with maximum effect.
(London Evening Standard)
Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, last month poured “Oil” and threw feathers a a party hosted by the Tate art gallery in London to call upon the gallery to end its relationship with BP, in a similar act of “INSTAMAX” a group called Culture Beyond Oil has poured “Oil” at the British Museum in front of a large carving of the human head. In a twist of irony the beautiful glossy substance becomes an art work in itself, drilling for oil is in fact something in which nature did not necessarily / obviously derive from our ancestral existance, the black substance becomes something which captures all the metaphors and symbolism of all things mysterious and bad? The act of throwing feathers symbolic of the thousands of lost birds. Oil Paintings, Feathered artist brushes, Black Paint. In some ways the act of protest has in fact failed through its positive relationship with the work that comes as a result of each “Oil Spill” the fact that it is considered a spill instead of a controlled release of oil makes it the ever more beautiful, the black substance of death reminding the viewer of the black plague and the associations of death, and the irony of watching Oil Tankers and Oil Stations painted in beautiful white makes me wonder how different the companies consider oil to the public perception of the substance.
In my later posts I will show you the Petrol Station that I’ve been working on. Lets all toast with a glass of olive oil…. to Richard Wilson’s Oil Room (although for Health and Safety I think he used molasses)
Did Molasses really kill 21 people in 1919 in Boston? I mean how can something so tasty do such a thing! This is a brilliant excerpt from Wikipedia.
Near Keany Square, at 529 Commercial Street, a huge molasses tank 50 ft (15 m) tall, 90 ft (27 m) in diameter and containing as much as 2,300,000 US gal (8,700,000 L) collapsed. Witnesses stated that as it collapsed, there was a loud rumbling sound, like a machine gun as the rivets shot out of the tank, and that the ground shook as if a train were passing by. The collapse unleashed an immense wave of molasses between 8 and 15 ft (2.5 to 4.5 m) high, moving at 35 mph (56 km/h), and exerting a pressure of 2 ton/ft² (200 kPa). The molasses wave was of sufficient force to break the girders of the adjacent Boston Elevated Railway’s Atlantic Avenue structure and lift a train off the tracks. Nearby, buildings were swept off their foundations and crushed. Several blocks were flooded to a depth of 2 to 3 feet (60 to 90 cm). As described by author Stephen Puleo:
Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage. Here and there struggled a form — whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was… Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings — men and women — suffered likewise.
Never before has food been so dangerous to man, the container is always the bad part isnt it? plastic wappings, paper packaging, fridges, tupperware.
Next post… the London Beer Flood! (this is true!)
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