Glen Rubsamen
Deepwater Horizon, 2019
Acrylic on Panel
40 X 30 inches
Exxon Valdez
2019 Acrylic on Panel
21 X 21 inches
Holly, 2018
Acrylic on Panel
36.5 X 36.5 inches
Photographs courtesy of the artist
This series of paintings ‘Environmental Catastrophes Top Ten’ are an investigation into our cultural need to make lists and hierarchies to codify the bad and the good. If we Google ‘Worst man-made environmental disasters in history’ the screen fills with sites offering lists. If we toggle the images button on the top of the page, the lists become images. Except for a few obvious standards (nuclear mushroom clouds) the images do not do justice to the insanity and horror of the facts. In two different paintings in this series, ‘Lessons in Darkness’ and ‘Deepwater Horizon’ the subject is smoke and fire. Both of the events depicted in these pictures: The Kuwaiti oil fires of 1991 and the 2010 explosion on the British Petroleum’s (BP) Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, caused massive fires and plumes of black smoke. They remind me of ancient sacrifices where burnt offerings were given up to the gods. The greek word ‘ὁλοκαυτεῖν’ translated as holocaust and literally meaning something that is burned up completely: its smoke rising to the heavens as an offering.
The painting ‘Deep Water Horizon’ depicts the sea and the sky almost completely blackened by fire from the largest accidental marine oil spill in the world. In ‘Lessons of Darkness’ we see a herd of camels wandering aimlessly in a world consumed by fire. The hulk of a tank is the only other clue to this armageddon. These two paintings are inspired by newspaper photographs that were published world-wide, they purposefully bring our attention to the anti commemorative qualities of press photography. In the age of smart-phones and social media everyone has become a photo-journalist. Posting in real-time photos of disasters and crime-scenes creates the opportunity for a new type of collective memory, one in which all the participants claim first hand experience of the events. Soon the distinction between personal memory and group memory might disappear all together.
To have “memory” of an event, we must experience it ourselves. Learning of an event second-hand, we acquire knowledge, but not memory. Yet, when sociologists speak of “collective memory,“ they routinely include as agents of memory those who do not have first-hand experience of a past event. “Collective memory” emerges when those without first-hand experience identify with those who do. The creation of this identification, a first person orientation to a past event that was not experienced directly, is at the crux of “commemoration”. Commemoration is a ritual that transforms “historical knowledge” into “collective memory”. But this is only the beginning of the problem, how do you commemorate something bad?