Research

Tenacious Resins and Residues: Oil Propaganda in Architectural Digest During the Energy Crises of the 1970s

From its inception in 1920 and until 1965, AD was a California-local, entirely visual magazine, but under magazine mogul Cleon T. Knapp Knapp’s ownership (1965–1993), it expanded to feature international content. Over the years, the magazine, funded through advertisements, became known for its quality images and idealized photography of human-free, carefully curated, two-dimensional homes that seek to elicit the desire to own and occupy these spaces, which become symbols of a life free of labor, mess, and misery. The polished pages of AD implicate the viewer as the one who owns these spaces rather than the one who maintains them: the white owner, not the racialized subservient laborer. The magazine’s value is thus as a commodity of racialized and classed desire; its existence verges on being irresistible yet unattainable. As such, AD has contributed to maintaining a vision of the good life that hinges on conspicuous consumption—particularly energy in the form of cars, air travel, suburban living, and planned obsolescence. A dream whose realization has simultaneously been detrimental to the possibility of life in a time of ecological crises.

Of Architecture and Hope: The Citadel Theatre of Edmonton and the Cruel Optimism of a Bygone Petroleum Age explores how one of the largest theaters built in North America in the twentieth century represents a form of petroleum-driven “cruel optimism,” a concept introduced by Lauren Berlant. Drawing upon a wide range of primary sources from the City of Edmonton Archives, the Provincial Archives of Alberta, the University of Alberta Archives, and the private archives of the family of theater cofounder Joe Shoctor, Banafsheh Mohammadi provides a detailed analysis of the design and materials of the Citadel Theatre as a means of examining how they exemplify a distinctive twentieth-century form of petroleum-based aesthetics.

Landgrab, Oil, and White Futures from Canada to Saudi Arabia

St. Paul, home to the world’s first and only UFO landing pad, is a small town in the Canadian province of Alberta. The Line is the currently under-construction mega city in Saudi Arabia which, upon completion, will have its own very moon. Built almost fifty years apart, these two cities tell an uncannily similar tale: land grab, oil extraction, and the construction of white identity. In this article, I draw parallels between these two cities to reveal how they epitomize the mechanisms of petrocolonialism and in doing so manufacture a future that is particularly white, further marginalizing indigenous communities.

American Petroaesthetics: A Killjoy History of the National Gallery of Art

This article is about the role of petroleum-based philanthropy in the formation of American aesthetic sensibilities by focusing on the history of the National Gallery of Art. By demonstrating that the National Gallery of Art has only come to life at the expense of working-class lives, devastation of lands, and exploitation of petroleum and aluminium resources, I argue that it has shaped American aesthetic sensibilities in a particular way that I refer to as petroaesthetics.

I have identified this historical account of the National Gallery of Art as “killjoy.” Borrowing the term from feminist theorist Sara Ahmed, I define killjoy art history as an act of self-reflection in which art history investigates its problematic moments without any intention of righting them or proposing a progression towards a “better” outcome. Killjoy art history as complaint allows us to stay with the problematic moments that have engendered violence and loss.

AESTHETIC RELIGIONS: ON THE THEOSOPHICAL ROOTS OF ERANOS

Publication of Thought Forms (1905) gave Theosophy, as promoted by the Theosophical Society, a strong visual component. Thought-forms were visual inscriptions—albeit partial—of the uniting reality. Images, as such, became central to Theosophy.

Eranos, the early 20^th century meeting of scholars of religion in Switzerland headed by amateur art historian Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, can be viewed as a religious phenomenon too. Eranos had a strong visual component; from 1934 until 1954, its meetings were accompanied by exhibitions of images collected from across the world, all of which represented the topic of the annual meeting. These images were central to the scholarship produced by the Eranos scholars. An insistence on the manifestation of a singular universal religious reality in images and historical interactions between figures of the two movements render Eranos an offspring of the Theosophical Society.

The Ethical Necessity of Taking Brownfields Seriously: An Invitation to Move toward the Un-doing of Environmental and Social Injustice

We live in an epoch called the Anthropocene, meaning the destruction we have brought upon the earth is literally inscribed in our environment. I argue it is our ethical responsibility to acknowledge our destructiveness and move toward reversing that. To that end, I will focus on space as a limited resource. I understand space as that which is always produced, historically, by human urbanity. After the Enlightenment, the process of human urbanity’s destructiveness has taken an accelerated speed. The concept of infinite growth, however, clashes with the finite resources of the earth. In this article, I argue for our ethical responsibility in the face of this finite resource. Brownfields are paradigms of our history of destructive making. They are also part of the limited resource of space on this planet. One way we can act ethically in the face of this limited resource is to work toward remediating brownfields, which will take us one step closer toward environmental and social justice.