“What do you mean by energy?” That was the question that answered my question: “Have you seen any art about energy?”
I’ve been getting ready to launch this blog, Alternative Currents, and what better way, I thought, than a visit to Houston’s Texas Contemporary Art Fair. You might say that to be in a Texas state of mind is to have energy on the brain.
For a series of reasons I’ll discuss in the future, I’ve found myself thinking more and more about the connections between art and energy. My sense is that artists across a range of media have for some time been adding to global conversations about energy’s uses and futures. Perhaps it’s time to pay some attention. This blog is my way to do so.
Some artists leap to mind quickly for me, like Marina Zurkow or Andrei Molodkin, both of whose work I encountered in Houston’s rich art scene. Of course, it’s a city saturated in energy money. So many arts institutions would not exist without the energy industry, which is a fact so obvious in Houston it’s quite easy to pay it no mind.
But let’s return to my opening question–“what do you mean by energy?” I happened to ask someone working a booth at the art fair if he had seen any art related to energy. And I realized as he asked it, and as I prepared myself to begin asking a lot of people this question, I needed to flesh out an answer. Here’s that attempt with a few examples from the art fair.
It’s so easy to drift off into metaphor. We use the term energy to describe many things–the way a painter leaves traces of effort in brushstrokes or the dynamism of line in a particularly well-composed photograph. The word traces its origins back to ancient Greek, energeia, which had a range of references including vitality in spoken or written language.
Naively I combed the art, looking for “energy,” whatever that might be. There were certainly works that flagged the consumption of energy. I don’t just mean art that uses electricity (lighting, motors, etc.) but rather art that foregrounds consumption, such as an artfully lit light bulb by Amanda Moss.
Some works seemed to neutralize consumption and operation, like James Drake’s Snakeskin Engine, a motorcycle engine (you guessed it) covered in snake skin, more like an accessory than a device that translates energy to speed. This work echoes an earlier sculpture, Artificial Life in the Valley of the World (1993), which features an automobile engine coated (or swallowed? enveloped?) in python snakeskin.
Other work flagged production and extraction of energy, like photographer Alex Slade’s Plains Pipeline LP Pearsonia Station/ Nature Conservancy Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, Osage County, OK (2013).
But still, I wondered, where’s the eureka moment? The moment when–pardon, dear reader, the pun–the light bulb bursts into incandescence over my head or in front of my eyes. I realized what I was looking for was eerie, disconcerting, and utterly familiar. Over the next few blogs, I’ll discuss some findings as a way of grasping toward a language for the arts of energy.
But I can’t leave just yet without a word about the marvelous Shay Kun, whose painting Good Vibrations (2007) appeared like a vision before me just as I was about to give up. Kun is an artist of marvelously inappropriate juxtapositions. So many canvases appear to be saturated by the conventions of the Hudson River school but supplemented with non-sequiturs. In Eradication, a lovely stand of lakeside trees shares the stage with a killer whale leaping out of the lake as a pair of soldiers slide down ropes from a hovering helicopter.
In Good Vibrations (2007), a serene mountain lake finds its gauzy glory interrupted. At the edge of the lake is poised a drilling platform outlined in vibrant blue. Just behind it, in the mountains above, we see mining equipment. And nearer the foreground we suddenly can make out what seems to be the wreck of a car colored the same vibrant hue as the platform. Kun’s roughly contemporary Melting Midlands witnesses two whales leaping from an explosion–most likely a mushroom cloud–blooming amidst an otherwise pastoral playground of mountain, stream, and tree.
What’s Shay Kun up to? Kun describes these works as “hybrids of absurdities” and yet these images haunt with a feeling of dis-ease that, strangely enough, documentary-style images of ecological destruction no longer hold. Sometimes, absurd is the only way to go.
