Fossil-Free Cultural Production: Contesting Petrophilanthropy in Contemporary Environmental art and Media

Abstract

Fossil-Free Cultural Production:Contesting Petrophilanthropy in Contemporary Environmental art and Media Annie Bares (bio) In a time of ongoing climate crisis in the U.S. Gulf Coast and beyond, South Louisiana artists and culture workers have responded to the host of material, aesthetic, and ethical problems that accompany "petrophilanthropy," a term used by ryan mitchell and the Settler Colonial City Project to denote philanthropic activity of the oil and gas industry funded either by corporations or by individuals or private foundations whose wealth derives from oil and gas extraction.1 In this essay, I analyze art and media by hannah chalew and ana hernandez—including painting, sculpture, social media posts, and other projects—that define petrophilanthropy as a site of aesthetic and environmental struggle. These artists reappropriate petromodernity's representational practices and artifacts, which include mapping, aerial photography, sponsorship, tagging, and incorporating petroleum products into their artwork. ana hernandez's countermaps that mark extractive industrial disaster find conceptual analogues in community [End Page 255] GIS projects. hannah chalew's Becoming With: A Rhizomatic Solar Cart traverses the city's public spaces without using oil, emblematic of a wider artistic vision for a fossil-free culture that assembles as it critiques. While these aesthetic modes are not solely the province of the oil industry, these works of art reference visual cultural artifacts associated with extraction directly. I refer to their acts of reappropriation and recontextualization as instances of critical tagging, critical mapping, critical incorporation, and fossil free-ing of artistic materials. The art and media assembled here travel in varied arenas, from galleries to parks to social media platforms, prompting public knowledge production. Collaborations between artists and environmental organizations produce live and virtual collectivities that question petrophilanthropy's logics by using acknowledgement and tagging critically. These artist-activists do not stop with the now familiar revelation of imbrication; they query how the oil industry uses philanthropy to appropriate the domain of the aesthetic and its strategies for disobedience, and they respond in kind by reappropriating the oil industry's aesthetics. Their creations and the media surrounding their work draw attention to oil corporations' use of arts funding mechanisms as a "social license to operate" at the expense of Louisiana's environmental and human health.2 PETROPHILANTHROPY Petrophilanthropy, unlike the term "greenwashing," registers how oil funding operates not only as an ideological veneer but as a cultural form, meaning that it conditions cultural patterns and habits of aesthetic experience. Philanthropic decisions about what gets funded and what does not set the value of artwork and determine which artists' careers are viable. Because of this influence, I extend the term "petrophilanthropy" beyond the typological to name a set of social relations that equate oil extraction's forms of exploitation and dispossession with benevolence. Petrophilanthropy, as Mitchell and Settler Colonial City Project's use of the term suggests, is not only limited to how philanthropy influences cultural institutions and philanthropic transactions. Chalew and Hernandez best demonstrate how philanthropic transactions enable forms of artistic production [End Page 256] while simultaneously foreclosing possibilities for artists and arts institutions to represent damage wrought by the corporations and foundations that fund them. "Petrophilanthropy" names a set of social relations that are obvious in one sense and underconsidered in another. The term describes the intuitive relationship between the liberal humanism that philanthropy connotes ("love of man") and the extractive anthropocentrism that comprises petrocapitalism. As such, petrophilanthropy is not only a practice and field of philanthropic activity but also a set of social relations defined by capitalism's forms of exploitation and dispossession beyond wage labor. In Louisiana's petroracial capitalist regime, Black and Indigenous residents have been historically excluded from the financial benefits of the oil industry while also being disproportionately subjected to displacement and environmental racism via industrial development. Oil-funded art projects can have the effect of shoring up the image of the industry by endowing it with "symbolic capital," Pierre Bourdieu's term for the form of capital that individuals or institutions organize to demonstrate the legitimacy of their profit-earning endeavors. Following Bourdieu's formulation, philanthropy allows donors to accrue social capital and in turn to accumulate more material capital.3 Petrophilanthropy, then, acts...