Having spent several hours last week talking with Christian McLeod about his upcoming solo show at Page and Strange Gallery, for which I have written the exhibition essay, I seem to have oil on my mind, and not the messy black slick of the stuff itself, but the form of the oil drum. Perhaps the image presents itself to me as a result of McLeod’s Floodgates painting, shown below, recently completed after two years of wrestling with the subject: a lone oil barrel floats in from polluted seas, ready to twist its way through the protective barriers that keep us humans from having to deal with the consequences of our actions, the inevitable blowback from the throwaway ethic at the core of our consumer society. I find it intriguing that the view in this painting is from the outside looking in - the artist is beyond the boundaries already, floating (swimming?) beyond the floodgates. Surveying Floodgates, with its premonition of an invasion of discarded containers, I am reminded of a swim I took in the waters off Koh Tao in Thailand, on Christmas Day back in 1998; instead of being the life-affirming splash I’d anticipated, I found that the tide had turned and that the water was full of plastic bags and bits of nylon rope, the same garbage that had been so effectively put out of mind by simply being left on the beach to wash out to sea was now being returned to sender.
The subject of oil drums has caught my eye twice since then, the first time when I was investigating an artist named Roman Signer, whose work I find baffling and hilarious. His pyramid of oil barrels, 21 Fässer (21 Barrels), 2003, shown below, for some reason puts me in mind of Mayan temples, and intimates all sorts of barbaric human sacrifice to appease the gods.
Then again, while wandering around the Internet, I find “rotterdam-based atelier van lieshout’s (AVL) newest project is ‘cascade’ an eight-metre tall sculpture made from polyester. the larger-than-life sculpture consists of eighteen stacked oil drums,
arranged to stand as a monumental column, and which look as if they are descending from the sky like a waterfall. a syrupy, oil-like mass drips from the large drums, in which one can make out the shapes of anonymous human figures in dramatic poses.”
atelier van lieshout: cascade
Of course, no discussion of the subject would be complete without a mention of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work with oil barrels, dating back to their earliest art practices - there is a whole section on it on their charmingly retro website. In 1962, the artists blocked a street with oil barrels and called it Iron Curtain, and since then it has been a recurring motif, culminating perhaps in the Wall, a 13,000 oil-barrel installation installed in Germany in 1999, and the massive, architectural Mastaba piece proposed for the UAE: “The Mastaba will be a work of art made of approximately 410,000 horizontally stacked oil barrels.” Below is shown ‘Stacked Oil Barrels’ from 1958, because I love the humble materials of his early work the best, and the brilliant interplay between sculpture and found-object that the piece sets up.
