Ghawar, Azadegan, Kashagan. Are these names familiar to you? Your life depends on it. Perhaps the names, ExxonMobil, BP and Shell ring a clearer bell? The companies that exploit the great subterranean seas that support our way of life. For now.
In my studio, the stretcher bars stand bare in a corner waiting for new canvas, while an oil embargo has been imposed and I have reverted to charcoal. The golden linseed oil which holds my pigments has been put away while I try to learn more about crude oil money and geopolitics.
"Of course it is about the oil" has to be one of the most often repeated phrases of our times. I nod as if to say, well, yes, obviously, but meanwhile I'm thinking, yes, okay, I know it is about the oil, but how exactly? As I am reading Serious Literature on the subject, my painter's mind starts churning images. I begin to draw lines between dots, create narratives, map out a world where, as you know, it is all about the oil.
Those who know their history are doomed to repeat it, so here I go again: High up on the Mato Grosso plateau lies the city of Petropolis. Like Simla in the Himalayas, it is an incongruous collection of unlikely architecture from a lost empire. The grand hotel looks like a Tyrolian chalet, the church is in the neogothic style, beaux arts villas line the streets around a neoclassical summer palace with its art nouveau glass house - which is perhaps the most surprising building of all in a place with more bio diversity than the rain forest. But I digress, for this Petropolis has nothing to do with petrolium, it is named after the Braganza Emperor of Brasil, Dom Pedro, whose family relocated from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro when the political climate got a little too hot in revolutionary Europe, and when the tropical sun rose in Rio, the Imperial entourage retreated to the cool mountains, to their Petropolis. However if we return to Rio, we'll see something else, just out of the famous tourist shot of Sugarloaf Mountain, a gigantic oil rig in the bay with the name Petrobras emblazoned accross its industrial steel frame. This Petro is very much about oil. The petrolium of Brasil. Other petrolium producing nations have come up with similarly catchy names even if their petrolium belonged to another nation, like the British kindly protecting Persian petrolium. But we are beyond that now.
Picture the scene, Westphalia 1648, bored with battling over old ideologies, Europeans hit upon the idea of the nation state. Since then national borders have been extended, disputed and moved, countries have invaded and colonised one another in an orgie of exploitation, but the basic principle of geographically defined states has not changed. Individual states have at different times sought autonomy in self sufficiency or in elaborate trade agreements with one another- or just naked imperialism. But it was essentially all about land. The primary resource was human labour and the basic fuel was food. Humankind needed land to grow. Landowners were power holders. Then, Industrial revolution. Machines. Political revolution. The internal combustion of old regimes and then; 1848. Perhaps the ideologies which fired the imaginations way back then have fizzled out, but something happened which ignited a change beyond the wildest political dreams. Even the Russians missed that revolution. Drilling for oil took place in Baku in 1846, but Czar Nicholas didn't get to know about it until 2 years later. Then the Nobels and Rothchilds moved in. And the Russians caught up.
And then, at the very beginning of the most violent century in human history, the Americans joined in. New century, new power. Texas hit oil and for a brief moment America took the lead and made the most of it. Back in London, the first Lord of the Admiralty, the Nobel prize winning author of Great Man history, changed his mind and lost the British Empire. It was all about the oil. Winston Churchill decided that British war ships should convert from coal to oil fuel. Britain had plenty of coal but no oil. Time to make friends in the Middle East. Gertrude and Lawrence flirted with Faisal while Winston had a cigar with the Shah, but Roosevelt trumped them all and Saudi America ruled the world. A power hybrid, the Great Petropolis at the centre of a whole new world map.
As with maps of old, unchartered seas are often home to great monsters, so this new map had its creatures of the deep. Whereas in the old world, humans worked the land to feed themselves, in this new world humans have become dwarfed by some Wagnerian nightmare, drilling deep into the ground to feed the great machines. Like Churchill's warships, these machines are primarily created to protect 'strategic interests' that is, a great oil guzzling war machine has been created to secure oil supply, this great leviathan has risen from the underworld and moving accross the land in a ferocious battle for self preservation. Even if the names of the oil fields under ground are not so well known, everyone has heard of the battle fields, Baghdad, Basra and now Tripoli, Luanda next?
But the great beast is fighting a losing battle. A new map has been drawn. under ground. The new world is easily divided. Forget first, second or third worlds. Forget developed or developing countries. It is all about the oil. Either you have it or you don't. Either you buy or you sell. Surplus or deficit. The battle lines are easily drawn. North America, Europe, India and China are buying. The Middle East, Russia, South America and Africa are selling. That is the power distribution of our world. The terror that we are fighting is our own. The simple realisation that we are powerless. Nevertheless we shall go on fighting until the last drop of oil. And everybody knows.
And I'll be stretching my canvas, reaching for the linseed oil and decide between raw sienna or burnt umber, while I contemplate the lines in the most important piece of graphic art I have ever seen. The graph shows two lines, one the rapidly declining and finite supply of fossil fuels - that is all the hydrocarbons, not just oil; and the ever increasing human demand for energy. The lines crossed in 1986. To imagine that this is just another recession to be overcome is ludicrous.
Then I remind myself that oil is itself solar power. Stored for millions of years, a 'Trust fund' if you like, of photosynthetic energy preserved in the earth. An immense source of wealth from long long before human history even began, which we have spent in what? six generations. On what? War and destruction. Then I try to imagine what we could have done. How this great wealth could have been spent. The success of a species depends on its ability to adapt to its environment not its ability to destroy it. For all the lustre of the Great Petropolis, I think we need to walk in the sun once more.
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