Working the Room. Geoff Dyer
Gulf War, in 1991. She was against the war on the grounds that it was really about America’s incessant need for oil. I asked if I might have an extra blanket because, at night, it was a little chilly. ‘Oh,’ she replied. ‘You should just turn the heating up a bit.’
To express it as concisely as possible, the photographs in Oil seek to make visible the invisible connections between these two opposing views of the world, one predicated on scarcity, the other on limitless abundance. Burtynsky offers a vast portfolio of images, from oil fields to refineries, to highways, cities and industries, to recycling and eventual waste. It’s an obviously admirable, important and well-intentioned project by a serious and committed artist.
Why, then, does one baulk at it?
The problem, partly, is that the titular subject – the raw material, as it were – is so pervasive that it ends up being an alternative rubric for a Burtynsky retrospective: the photographic equivalent of an edition of New and Selected Poems in which old favourites (arranged in slightly different permutations) are supplemented by some more recent works. OK, there are no quarries or railcuts, but the Bangladeshi shipbreakers are still toiling away, the tyre piles and densified oil drums are still there … Well, fair enough, nothing wrong with a bit of recycling, but whereas Manufactured Landscapes offered a glimpse of teeming visual possibilities, the totalising vision of Oil induces a feeling of satiety. There are new things (new to me, at any rate), some of them very good, especially the Koyaanisqatsi-style views of the spaghetti tangle of freeways, the cityscapes stretching out to infinity, but once the doubts start to seep in – the suspicion that Burtynsky is photographing the crisis of peak oil and climate change like someone fluently producing company reports – they prove dangerously corrosive.
Burtynsky has long had a fondness for photographing endlessly replicated units of the same thing, whether it’s workers at identical benches in a factory, tyres or freight containers – anything, really. Individual examples can be stunning but, in Oil, we keep getting replicated instances of pretty much the same thing: multiple versions of multiple cars, multiple versions of locust-like oil derricks … We get the point. Then the point is made again with variations so minor that they appear, almost, as an indulgence. Hence the uncomfortable sensation of bloating.
Burtynsky has always avoided wrecking himself on the rocks he has photographed but his enterprise has, nevertheless, contained a lurking potential for self-aggrandisement. In an interview in Manufactured Landscapes he admitted to a compulsion to seek out ‘the largest example of something – the largest mines, the largest quarry …’ Attracted to ‘massive operations’, Burtynsky – more exactly, a Burtynsky photograph – is becoming a bit of a production. One gets the sense, in fact, that this may be as close to stadium rock as a landscape photographer is ever likely to get. There is a similar loss of intimacy, the same dependence on scale and spectacle, on the sheer scale of the spectacle. Now, of course, a crane or helicopter might have been indispensable to the creation of some of Burtynsky’s photographs but a crane can so easily become a kind of podium.
Oil invites us to gorge ourselves on Burtynsky’s epic catalogue, to gulp down image after image as warnings of impending scarcity and looming resource wars. But it’s not just the quantity, not just a case of there being too much of a messianically good thing. No, some of the individual images are stunningly bad. One of Burtynsky’s strengths has always been his subtle command of colour, whether muted and rusting or molten and blazing. In images of a ‘Truckers’ Jamboree’ at Walcott, Iowa, or of the parking lot at a Kiss concert in Sturgis, North Dakota, however, the blare of colour seems simply vulgar. Granted, these may not be the most refined or understated gatherings on the planet but, like Hamlet in his rants about his mother’s infidelity, Burtynsky wallows in and is tainted by what he observes without being able to claim the satirist’s exemption of a Martin Parr (he is too high-minded for that). The images of crowds and speedsters at the Bonneville Salt Flats, meanwhile, lack the subtlety and arid grace of rival photographs by Misrach. They also serve as a reminder that Burtynsky has rarely been at his best with people unless … Actually, let me pause here to contradict the point I am about to make. One image shows a gang of shipbreakers in Bangladesh, spread out against a near-monochrome, oil-drenched shoreline, a long chain over their shoulders, trudging from one side of the picture to the next. It’s as if John Singer Sargent’s painting Gassed – a procession of blinded soldiers, each with his hand on the shoulder of the man in front – has been relocated to a part of the world in which suffering becomes the stoic norm of an average working day. It’s a magnificent photograph – Oiled? – but the general point still stands: for the most part, people in Burtynsky serve as indicators of the super-human scale of the work they are engaged in (which becomes, in turn, a testament to the super-human importance of the work in which they appear!); either that or they’re a species of the endlessly replicated units to which he is compulsively attracted. In China Burtynsky organised a photograph of yellow-jacketed workers arranged in deep perspectival recession along a street lined with yellow factories in Zhangzhou. It was such a striking and successful picture (though not quite as striking as Paola Pivi’s controversial piece 100 Chinese – featuring just that, a hundred Chinese standing in a room – at the Frieze art fair in London, 2005) that Burtynsky decided to try something similar with a bunch of bikers in downtown Sturgis. Earlier I made a comparison with stadium rock; with this image Burtynsky has formed his own tribute band. The result seems to me entirely without merit or purpose except insofar as it is yet another gig on the world tour called Oil.
2009
I’m not entirely sure that this (see plate 7) is the picture I am writing about.
Three or four years ago … And here we have another problem. It feels like three or four years ago but time passes at such a rate that, in recent years, there have been quite a few instances when I’d thought something had taken place a couple of years ago only to discover that it actually occurred in the previous century. So it’s possible that by ‘three or four years’ I mean eight or nine.
Anyway, at some point in the last decade I was killing time – however quickly it passes there are always odd pockets that need somehow to be disposed of – at Tate Britain, cruising the Turners. Turner’s output was so huge that you are always coming across pictures you’ve never seen before. On this occasion the painting that took my eye showed – as I remember it – figures in some kind of room or cellar, confronted by a source of intense and radiant light.
Although I can’t remember when it happened or exactly what the painting looked like, I remember, very clearly, the jolt of seeing it for the first time. I took some notes that I’ve been unable to locate and which I never got round to writing up properly. I probably intended using the painting in a piece of fiction, contriving a situation in which someone encountered it in a gallery or in reproduction, or found themselves in a real-life equivalent of the scene depicted.
What kind of scene might this have been? In the late 1990s I spent quite a few nights at underground parties in venues whose settings – the cavernous railway arches near London Bridge, for example – closely resembled the architecture in the painting. Typically, there’d be a warren of rooms, the exact layout of which could never quite be committed to memory. You wandered from room to room, each promising – courtesy of the light and sound emanating from it – something alluring and magical. Often the lights made the other party-goers seem non-corporeal, spectral. Outside every set of arches you stood on the threshold of beckoning revelation. A revelation akin to the one that Turner’s painting simultaneously promises and refuses to reveal.
Since we are talking here about memory I wonder if these words – room, threshold, revelation – immediately suggest to you another cultural artefact …
Yes, exactly, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker! Having guided the Professor and the Writer through the Zone, the Stalker brings them to the threshold of the Room where their deepest wishes will come true. On the brink of being granted this defining illumination they falter and turn back. In place of revelation there is uncertainty,