We’ve been away! We went to Lisbon and visited the MAAT while we were there. The collection that was on show in one of the buildings was super weak and very unengaging; 2-dimensional work in every sense, not even trying to be anything else.
However, the exhibition titled Eco-Visionaries. Art, Architecture, and New Media after the Anthropocene was excellent! Had some familiar works in it which were fun to revisit such as the Superflex film where they flood a McDonalds.
And then also some new works such as ‘Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas)’, which is a work by John Gerrard and is a digital simulation of a flag perpetually-renewing pressurised black smoke and marks the site of the Lucas Gusher, the world’s first major oil find in 1901, in Spindletop, in the middle of the Texan desert. The computer generated Spindletop runs in exact parallel with the real site in Texas throughout the year: the sun rising at the appropriate times and the days getting longer and shorter according to the seasons. The simulation is run live by software that is calculating each frame of the animation in real time as it is needed. Western Flag symbolizes our reliance on oil. It’s everywhere, it is one of the forces behind climate change and yet it remains invisible.
