Beyond Doom and Gloom in Petroaesthetics: Facing Oil, Making Energy Matter

This essay argues that one of the factors holding back civilization-wide transitions to renewable energy is the widespread tendency to render petroleum and other hydrocarbons abject and abstract. Fossil fuel industry representations do this by hiding the true costs of petroculture behind the virtualization Energy; environmentalist framings do it by relying too much on petroaesthetics of doom (i.e., apocalyptic imagery) and gloom (i.e., Gothic visualizations of oil spills and rusting extractive infrastructure). The scarcity of representations of hydrocarbons that acknowledge both their life-giving and life-destroying properties, their powerful nonhuman agency in mediating practically every human and nonhuman relationship in the modern world, makes it hard to imagine alternatives to petroculture. Recently, artists have begun subverting petroaesthetic conventions in ways that counter the abstraction and abjection of hydrocarbons, including by using crude oil as an artistic medium in its own right. The oddly playful bitumen sands photographs of Louis Helbig, the bitumen-based “petrographs” of Warren Cariou, and the weird, enthralling “oilscapes” of Kathleen Thum are interpreted as meaningful challenges to the petroaesthetic status quo—provocations that matter in every sense of the word. Beyond merely promoting energy transitions, these images perform transitions as they empower viewers to see hydrocarbons as media with which all living things are deeply entangled.