Refined Material: Petroculture and Modernity in Venezuela"Beginning with the oil blowout in 1922 that is considered the moment that marked Venezuela's entry into a 'modern' era, Refined Material explores the integral relationship between Venezuelan oil industry and artistic production. In this groundbreaking study, Sean Nesselrode Moncada examines Venezuela's mid-century art and architecture in an argument that reinforces the inextricability of the rise of a capitalist and centralized state from life, activism, and art. Oil provided the crucible for national reinvention, ushering in a period of dizzying optimism and bitter disillusion as artists, architects, graphic designers, activists, and critics sought to define the terms of modernity. Looking at five different but interrelated case studies--a print magazine, a planned housing community, a luxury hotel, a kinetic museum installation, and a documentary film--this book brings forth a novel reading to the renowned Venezuelan modernist canon and reveals how the logic of refinement conditioned the terms of development and redefined our relationship to nature, matter, and one another"-- |
Contents
Designing Oil | 33 |
Refining Amuay | 75 |
Building the Vista | 117 |
Vibrating Nature | 165 |
Killing the Well | 207 |
The Ooze of History | 253 |
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY | 333 |
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS | 351 |
Common terms and phrases
abstraction Amuay Architecture artistic Asfalto Infierno Ávila Ballena Bewogen Beweging BUILDING THE VISTA Caribbean Carlos Cruz-Diez Carlos Rebolledo Center Centro ciudad construction Coronil Courtesy Creole Creole Petroleum Corporation Creole’s crude cultural Daniel González Denise René Designing Oil economic El Nacional Caracas El Universal exhibition Farol FIGURE film Fundación Gerd Leufert Gómez Hotel Humboldt housing Ibid ideological Jesús Rafael Soto Jesús Soto journal Judibana kinetic art Lake Maracaibo landscape Latin American magma Marcos Pérez Jiménez material Modern Art modernist mural Museum of Modern Nacional Caracas narrative Nedo oil camps oil industry Otero Owings & Merrill painting Paraguaná Paris Pérez Jiménez petroculture petróleo petrolera photograph Plexiglas political postwar Pozo muerto Quiriquire Rayado Refinery Refining AmuAy Roberto Burle Marx social Soto's sowing the oil space Stedelijk structure Techo tion Tomás José Sanabria transformation urban venezolano Venezuela Venezuelan modernity VIBRATING NATURE visual York