I WAS STANDING IN an aboveground parking garage in Los Angeles with an international group of scholars. Peering over the edge, we looked down on a nondescript concrete platform visible only from this spot within the mostly windowless Beverly Center, a high-end shopping mall across from Cedars-Sinai. Even if shoppers bothered to look from this vantage point, they probably could not identify the series of blue wellheads topped by a mobile rig, all hidden from adjacent streets by a simple retaining wall. The site’s tiny footprint inadequately conveyed the scale of the operation below: It hosts no fewer than fifty-four oil wells.
This tour of hidden drill sites was led by Peter Ekman as part of the Petrocultures 2024 conference, which ran May 15–18. Ubiquity and concealment were twin themes of the gathering, which brought together researchers—many of whom are also activists—from across the humanities, arts, and social sciences to examine the role of fossil fuels in contemporary culture. The conference is the flagship event of the Petrocultures research group at the University of Alberta in Canada, founded in 2011 by Imre Szeman and Sheena Wilson. In addition to the conference, the group’s activities include workshops, publications, and a podcast, all of which examine how contemporary culture is entangled with the energy economy. Such a broad mandate means that participating researchers are bound less by a shared method or subject than by a shared mission to imagine a future after oil.
The conference is a roving event; this spring’s edition, “Oil Cities and Post-Oil Cities,” took place the week after graduation on the campus of the University of Southern California, organized by local faculty and graduate students who scrambled to respond in real time to the unfolding Gaza solidarity protests leading up to the end of the semester. Of the approximately three hundred participants scheduled to attend, about 20 percent dropped out, with at least half of those describing their withdrawal as a response to the actions of the university administration.
Inside the classrooms, attendees participated in some of the most genuinely multidisciplinary discussions I’ve experienced, with the hushed urgency of sailors bailing water from a lifeboat. Whereas most academic conferences are notorious for their showboating, passive aggression, and scrapping over limited resources, attendees of Petrocultures 2024 were committed to resource sharing and mutual support in the face of a military-industrial topic that does not invite study. The presentations were full of useful data visualizations from platforms like Visualizing Energy and from working groups like PITCH whose members envision a cultural sector without oil or its money. One researcher generously connected me with corporate archives that I had not been able to locate on my own since, unlike the conventional objects of cultural study, energy companies and government agencies don’t encourage people digging through their files.
Impediments to the energy humanities include not only corporate obfuscation but also the technical impenetrability and grandiose scale of the topic, especially for researchers trained to think about contained cultural objects like films or books. Some scholars analyzed media produced by the oil industry itself. But more often, the talks concerned cultural producers, like J. G. Ballard, whose knowledge of technics was secondary to their ability to depict the experience of a world consuming and consumed by oil. Carina Brand, for example, argued that the fiery, erotically suburban works on view in the 1981 exhibition “A New Spirit in Painting” at London’s Royal Academy of Arts were symptomatic of an energy unconscious reveling in the excesses of both oil paint and commuter culture as expressions of the neoliberal belief in the right to cheap, plentiful petroleum. An illuminating talk by Charlotte Leib tracked the historical linking of American parks funding to extractive industry, thereby perpetuating a dynamic of destruction and incommensurate restoration.
I attended the conference to facilitate my research into the late-career work of Bauhaus designer Herbert Bayer, who was an art consultant for the Atlantic Richfield Company from 1966 to 1985, during its construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Much of Bayer’s work of that era celebrated energy and dynamism in its most abstract sense, employing a style reminiscent of hard-edge painting and Minimal sculpture. The popularization of energy-centered ecological models in the 1970s coincided not only with the geometric turn of contemporary art but also with the increased reliance of the United States and developing countries on fossil fuels. That reliance imposed an elaborate but fragile system of international trade to support the extraction, circulation, and processing of valuable energy sources. In addition to the use of literal energetic systems in such canonical works as Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, 1977, or Helen and Newton Harrison’s Lagoon Cycle, 1974–84, the energetic system formed the basis of a compositional pedagogy popularized in the 1940s that analogized the visual field to an electromagnetic one. The postwar tendency to value abstract relational thinking over the appreciation or production of contained things, which culminated in Jack Burnham’s theory of “systems esthetics,” was an outgrowth of European traditions within geometric abstraction and perceptual psychology. As a result, I was especially attentive to the frequent recourse to a language of “abstraction” that ran throughout the event, and to its negative connotations in this context.
Impediments to the energy humanities include not only corporate obfuscation but also the technical impenetrability and grandiose scale of the topic.
Of particular interest were the panels that addressed economic conventions of the oil industry as bellwethers for our changing attitudes toward the environment. One presenter, Thomas Pringle, speaking on the economic concept of “existence value,” cited Sara Holiday Nelson’s research into environmental economists who constructed chilling “artificial decision-making contexts that would elicit individuals’ ‘willingness to pay’ for, for example, the existence of a sea otter or a coastal ecosystem, or their ‘willingness to accept’ compensation for its destruction.” Forms of compensation were just one example of a widespread discourse of fungibility, especially carbon offsets, which delocalize the impacts of extraction, effectively diluting real or potential harm by recontextualizing it within a much larger global energy system.
The keynote paired talks by media theorist Heather Davis and environmental humanities scholar Stephanie LeMenager, who delivered gutting assessments of the efficacy of petrocultural studies. LeMenager revisited claims made ten years prior in her book Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (2014). A foundational text in the energy humanities, Living Oil carefully documented oil’s permeation of contemporary life, attending to the structures of feeling that characterize our intimate relationship to energy, such as attachment, love, fear, and grief. The book ended with hopeful curiosity about how people were working through the difficult realities of oil in their own regions. By contrast, LeMenager’s keynote read her past self as a privileged subject in the process of anticolonial awakening, in a state of “near realization,” and partaking in the Obama era’s “flickering revival of liberal myths of hope.” This was despite knowing, per Priya Jaikumar, that “there is no inevitable telos to history, no future day of reckoning, no historic arc that bends toward justice.” The LeMenager of 2024 is instead confronted by unconcealed racism, ecocide, and genocide. What once existed within a cultural unconscious is now “a sort of unmasked and raw knowing” rather than a “haunting,” acting as “a spur to grief [and] also a spur to a kind of reactionary violence in some.”
LeMenager called upon her influential coinage petromelancholia to mark the shifts in her thinking. In 2014, she defined the term as the “feeling of losing cheap energy that came relatively easily” or the longing for outdated fuels like coal as metonyms for a white, masculine culture in crisis. The gentle sadness of that loss has now curdled into a virulent and violent resistance to change: “For isn’t petromelancholia the ground condition for enraged grieving of white settler innocence that animates our contemporary politics? What is petromelancholia if not another accelerant to genocide?”
Davis likewise questioned the power of cultural studies to intervene in our current state of eco-political emergency. Nevertheless, her paper theorized the aesthetic category of the “iridescent” as oil’s perverse answer to what ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose has called the “shimmer.” If the latter reminds the viewer that they are “part of a vibrant and vibrating world,” thus connecting them with ancestral power, the “iridescent” is similarly alluring but turns that ancestral power—our “fossil-kin,” as Davis put it—against us. Citing artist Jessica Segall’s installation Human Energy, 2023, which turned an oil field into a cruising ground for pleather-clad performers, Davis argues that we are all implicated in the “crimes against nature” that Chevron’s pump jacks—not the queer performers—represent. The pleasures that oil and plastics afford us are, as Davis describes them, luminescent lures drawing us into the eco-suicidal settler-colonial project.
During a subdued Q&A, the moderator asked the speakers to reflect upon how cultural studies might contribute to conceptualizing the future—and, perhaps, to a sense of hope. “I don’t truck in hope anymore,” replied LeMenager. Davis similarly advocated “less hope and more persistence,” describing resistance as a kind of irritant that refuses to yield space. As consolation, both speakers found solace in the community that acts of resistance—however futile—can create, and acknowledged the classroom as a place to practice, as LeMenager put it, “a different form of being together, a different form of sociality,” noting “I think I’ve abandoned hope for joy and for commitment.”
Melissa Ragain is an associate professor of art history at Montana State University and a curator at Tinworks Art in Bozeman, MT.
