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When in 1949 a hero of socialist labour struck oil in the midst of the Caspian Sea a new chapter opened in the history of hydrocarbon exploitation in Azerbaijan that was to shape the petroleum imaginary of the Socialist Anthropocene. A utopian city on stilts was built for the Soviet pioneers of the offshore oil industry, equipped with dormitories, a technical school, libraries, shops, a hospital, cinema, gardens and a lemonade factory.
Oil Rocks was a magnet for artists who in the 1950s made the strenuous journey to witness the heroism of oil workers in their battle with the elements to extract Caspian “black gold”. This presentation considers the representations of Oil Rocks in socialist art as an exception to the general invisibility of the petroleum industry in modern literature and art. How can we account for the prominence of oil drilling imagery in Soviet Azerbaijani art and what does it tell us about the petroleum imaginary of the Socialist Anthropocene? What was the significance of the shift from the ethos of “commanding the Earth to serve Socialism” characteristic of socialist realist “oil” paintings to the more nuanced attitudes to nature detectable in severe style works of the late 1950s and early 1960s? How have artists addressed the social and environmental consequences of industrial modernity’s invisible dependence on hydrocarbons?
Maja and Reuben Fowkes are art historians, curators and directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. They work on the twentieth-century art history of socialism from Eastern Europe to Central Asia and contemporary artistic engagements with ecology, climate and the Anthropocene. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and East European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), a special issue of Third Text guest-edited by Reuben on the “Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism” (2018) and Maja’s monograph The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015). Maja is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Consolidator Grant project on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) (2022-27). Their teaching at UCL History of Art includes modules on Art History for a Climate Emergency and Contemporary Art and Climate Change, and they also contribute to an interdisciplinary module on Anthropocene Studies. Their curated exhibitions include “Colliding Epistemes” at Bozar Brussels (2022) and “Potential Agrarianisms” at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021), and they led the Getty Foundation project Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art History (2018-22). They publish extensively in peer-reviewed journals, edited books, exhibition catalogues and on contemporary art platforms including Art Monthly, Texte zur Kunst and Springerin, and they co-host the SAVA podcast Left to be Desired.
