Oil Media. Changing Portraits of Petroleum in Visual Culture between the US, Kuwait, and Switzerland

Hindelang, Laura (2021). Oil Media. Changing Portraits of Petroleum in Visual Culture between the US, Kuwait, and Switzerland. Centaurus, 63(4), pp. 675-694. Wiley 10.1111/1600-0498.12418

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This article examines three cases of mid-20th-century oil media—oil-related imagery, iconographies, and media—in visual culture: a series of popular science books entitled The Story of Oil published in the US, an oil-themed set of Kuwaiti postage stamps (1959), and an art exhibition in Zurich (1956) titled Welt des Erdöls: Junge Maler sehen eine Industrie (World of Petroleum: Young Artists See an Industry). While depicting crude oil in its natural habitat was a common photographic theme in the early 20th-century United States, the material discussed shows that, by the mid-20th century, crude oil no longer had the same visual presence. The iconography of oil in the three case studies came to rely increasingly on images of oil infrastructure and on context-specific depictions of living within petro-modernity or petro-culture, meaning lifestyles fueled by cheap fossil energy. However, it is not just the changes in visual representations of petroleum that matter; any debate about the visibility and invisibility of petroleum has to take into account the very media through which petroleum has become visually communicated—that is, the precise forms of oil's mediatization. The aesthetic negotiation of petroleum through media-based visual representations has been crucial for the dematerialization of fossil matter in its conversion to fossil energy, as well as the decoupling of sites of extraction from sites of production and consumption in the public imagination. As petro-culture has morphed into national or even global culture (rather than representing just one possible energy source among many), oil media has paved the way for our intimate relationship with fossil energy-dependent lifestyles, which is one of the biggest drivers of climate change.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Art History > History of Architecture and Historic Monuments
06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Art History

UniBE Contributor:

Hindelang, Laura

Subjects:

400 Language
400 Language > 490 Other languages
700 Arts
700 Arts > 720 Architecture
700 Arts > 740 Drawing & decorative arts
700 Arts > 770 Photography & computer art

ISSN:

0008-8994

Publisher:

Wiley

Language:

English

Submitter:

Laura Katharina Hindelang

Date Deposited:

01 Feb 2022 10:24

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 16:03

Publisher DOI:

10.1111/1600-0498.12418

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/164431

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/164431

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