Petrol Heads

TANOA SASRAKU What motivated you to take the oil industry as an artistic subject? Was it the branding, the oil itself as substance, or something else?

MINERVA CUEVAS It came about as a result of wanting to learn about one of the world’s most famous cataclysms, an asteroid impact that hit the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico 66 million years ago, killing 75 per cent of species on Earth – including most dinosaurs – and forming the Chicxulub crater. While researching the crater, and fantasising about the idea of scouting the area, I learned that it was discovered in the 1960s by Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, when engineers were looking for a place to drill. It was only linked to the extinction event in the 1990s. So my first interest was in that apocalyptic event, and, as Yucatán is close to the oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, I continued fantasising about finding chapopoteras (natural tar springs) in that area.

At the same time, I was interested in the US’s ambition to build a new pipeline in Alaska, and read articles about how the major oil corporations were lobbying the George W. Bush administration (and were inside it too). That’s the context in which I made my work Dodgem 2002, placing the vinyl decals of major oil-company logos on electric bumper cars. Since then, I have used tar as a material but also analysed he industry’s branding and how its advertising has evolved over time. I have a large collection of those ads and a publication related to them called Dark (Printed) Matter (2023).

Tanoa, I think those ads relate to what you have done with your piece Watchlist 2025, which you recently showed at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London: collecting paperweights produced by oil companies and using them unaltered in your work. But your piece triggers many other signifiers too, such as war, through the way you chose to display these objects on framed squares of velvet in the form of a chessboard. What made you look for such objects? Was it their connection to war?

TS The paperweights came into my life while I was searching for samples of crude oil on eBay. I wanted to explore the potential for crude oil to operate as a poetic material in my work – one that expresses death, pressure and power. Instead of a barrel or bottle of crude oil, what eBay yielded as one of the first search results was a strange, acrylic cuboid listed as a paperweight. It was made from poured clear acrylic, mixed with gold glitter at its base. Embedded within this was a cone containing Scottish crude oil, and atop the cone was a tiny, printed BP shield logo. I realised after a while that it was meant to be a crude-oil Christmas tree, with BP as the angel, celebrating the striking of oil in the North Sea in November 1975. I felt immensely grateful that this gaudy object, full of so many material and symbolic contradictions, had come into my life. This triggered two years of collecting paperweights. After amassing around 40, I found I wanted to find a way for the paperweights to antagonise one another , as they represented rival nations and companies. That led to my choice to display them as if they were pieces on a chessboard. I feel as though both of us have chosen that route of play and antagonism, rather than dictating or moralising in our handling of this subject matter. Would you agree?

MC Yes, originally Dodgem was installed at an amusement park, and turned the public into the executor of these dynamics of antagonism and territoriality as they were invited to ride the altered bumper cars.

The collection of ads, which I displayed in my 2023 exhibition In Gods We Trust, were published between the 1940s and 1970s, and they quite brutally portray the geopolitical circumstances and political involvement of the oil industry. They convey ideas of conquest, progress, consumption and growth – discourses now recognised as linked to colonial and racial capitalism. Looking at these materials, historical distance becomes tangible. There is no need to read between the lines; their discourse is blatantly imperialist. Most people, when they see these adverts, cannot believe that they are unaltered.

It is interesting that you mention the poetics of oil. I first started dipping (or sacrificing) objects in tar as a reference to pre-Columbian rituals. Some ceramic representations of gods and goddesses from that era have tar applied to different parts of the body to mark certain relations. For example, Tlazolteotl, the goddess of filth and regeneration, usually has her mouth area covered with tar, as do her priests. The use of oil as a material is ancient.

TS You mention this period from the 1940s to the 1970s, and I’m curious about how we are both dealing with era. It seems that we are mining found ephemera from the decades preceding our respective birth years. I was born in the mid-1990s, but I am fascinated with fashion adverts and corporate ephemera from the 1980s. In their messaging, they display a level of showboating and drama that is missing in our contemporary culture, perhaps with the exception of the Trump administration’s current rebranding of America. I have two older brothers who are now in their mid-40s, and so, naturally, as a child, I sought out media from the 1980s as a way to feel included in their pop-cultural lexicon and to understand them better as older men. That personal practice has bled into my studio practice and served me well when working on my show, Morale Patch, at the ICA last year. I was piecing together clues via found objects from a previous era, hoping to reveal the scaffolding of the social and geopolitical atmosphere that we are subject to today.

MC Looking for the photographs that documented Dodgem, I found the original press release from 2002. It was not a conventional press release in that it featured a series of quotes taken from the media about the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System and the Bush administration’s plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. My interest was in contemporary politics related to climate change. At that time, the climate crisis was not that present in the media like it is nowadays. I have always been interested in advertising as a public medium, and that is a phenomenon that goes back to ancient civilisations. Modern advertising is also often linked with nationalism.

Our artworks have been made 25 years apart, in different global contexts, and, in my opinion, the public perception of the oil industry has changed in that time. We have witnessed more frequent and more extreme weather catastrophes, and it seems clearer now that the environmental crisis is linked to the energy industry – even so-called ‘green energy’. Major companies have invested in energy transition and emissions management, but it has become evident that their plan in doing so is still to dominate the energy sector. In terms of the public response, we have also witnessed different international movements demanding accountability from those corporations. We are in a very dark phase now; public resistance has not had much short-term effect, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t had any effect at all. Here, I would like to mention the children and youth movements, as they will be the ones taking actions and decisions in the near future.

Did you aim to start a discussion of these issues by exhibiting your works at the ICA?

TS My primary motivation in deploying these objects filled with crude oil in the ICA was to use the gallery’s proximity to Buckingham Palace and to draw attention to the matter of imperial conquest and national identity being deeply linked to energ y acquisition.

I also wanted to start with the basics. I feel that most people have never seen crude oil with their own eyes. In its materiality, it suggests so much about what its misuse has resulted in, economically, imperially and environmentally. It can be both alluring and repellent, like blood, chocolate, perfume or some type of anonymous rot. I felt that it would be useful to position these objects as activators of desire and possessiveness in the viewer, and to see where that would then take the conversation.

Perhaps to end, Minerva, you could tell me about where you are now in your practice?

MC I recently opened a survey exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in Brazil. The exhibition is part of a yearlong programme dedicated to ecology, and the works in the exhibition articulate the notion of ‘social ecology’, a concept developed by philosopher Murray Bookchin, who has linked ecological issues to social problems since the 1960s, arguing that the domination of nature stems from the domination of humans by other humans. Since I started researching ecology, this concept has been useful in understanding more clearly the logic of the exploitation of natural resources. All the artworks in the MASP show are ten, 15, 20 years old, so I was not expecting the exhibition to give the impression of a new production, but once it was installed, nothing seemed anachronistic – everything seemed contemporary, and people’s reactions to it have made me feel like I did at the beginning of my practice. I’ve also reached the same conclusion as before: only a free and cooperative society can restore ecological balance.

Thank you, Tanoa. I am looking forward to learning more about your work.

^{Minerva Cuevas’s Dodgem Shell 2002 was presented by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee, Gerard Cohen, Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian and Ago Demirdjian in 2008 and was accessioned in 2015. It is included in the free display Gathering Ground from 4 May, Tate Modern.}

^{Minerva Cuevas is an artist who lives in Mexico City.}

^{Tanoa Sasraku is an artist based in Glasgow.}