invisible oil

Back to Black

By Fraser Denholm

A FEW weeks ago some of my Aberdeen-based friends on Facebook began posting a video of Aberdeen in the mid-fifties. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImILu6YvEA4) The video showed a glimpse of the forgotten town, a cityscape at once both familiar yet startlingly alien.  This was a different Aberdeen to the one that exists now: astonishingly clean and almost exclusively constructed from granite - a stone synonymous with the city; a low-rise city with a skyline consisting of steeples from its numerous churches, spires from the world-famous Marischal College and the towers of the Town House and the Castlegate’s Citadel.

Almost a year ago I began work on my own film about Aberdeen, with a very different focus than the Youtube clip of the 1950s. (http://vimeo.com/20513540) Run Down Aberdeen could have been looking at a different city. An Aberdeen coated in grime and litter, the granite facades crumbling, churches whose steeples once provided the skyline are now mostly bars and clubs, the Town House and Citadel overshadowed by rotting sixties office blocks, modernist concrete tower blocks and contemporary high-rises.

What separates the two films and acts as a watershed between the two Aberdeens is undeniably the discovery of North Sea Oil. While the pre-oil Aberdeen was certainly more quant, clean and architecturally consistent, it was a city on the verge of collapse. The major industries of the time; paper, textiles and fishing were in decline.

Ernst Logar’s recent publication Invisible Oil - based on his exhibition of the same name and three month residency at Aberdeen’s Peacock Visual Arts - explores the relationship between the North Sea Oil Industry and the rest of the city. The relationship between public and private spaces which is becoming an ever-more contentious issue for the city.

Logar’s Invisible Oil exhibition examined the impact of the oil industry on Aberdeen and wider Scotland. Large scale photographic prints document a series of temporary sculptures made by Logar along Aberdeen’s beach. Likenesses of rigs and platforms constructed entirely out of junk washed ashore or discarded on the sands. The structures, named after deprived areas of the city: Tillydrone; Northfield; Torry; Logie; Woodside; were left on the beach for the tide, representing the destructive presence of the platforms. Once they have outlived their usefulness they will be abandoned to the elements, their component parts let to be claimed by the North Sea or returned to the beach as litter; junk.

In the centre of Peacock’s gallery space sits a barrel of crude oil, the real global currency, encased within a Perspex vat and elevated to prominence on a plinth which is at the same time representative of an oil rig and the Saltire. Facing the drum, on a prominent position on the Gallery wall is a map of Scotland, where one would expect to see roads highlighted in primary colours there are pipelines. It depicts the route oil and gas takes from the North Sea fields, across the country, through refineries like Grangemouth and on south into England and west, through Galloway to Ireland.

While the exhibition shows the power and importance of the visible crude – the pipelines, the rigs, the 158.987294928 litres of Venezuelan black gold – it also casts an eye onto the invisible aspects. Beginning with the Perspex container, our eyes are cast to another gallery wall which is filled with Logar’s correspondence with some of the many companies involved in oil exploitation with headquarters in Aberdeen.

As part of his residency, the artist aimed to gain access to the less public aspects of the Oil and Gas industry, in particular Wellheads and analysis labs. Unfortunately for Logar many of the companies he approached were reluctant to grant access and part of his photographic research led to him being stopped by representatives of Grampian police.

The publication contains essays by writer Karin Kneissl, artist/facilitator Peter Troxler, researcher Alejandra Rodriguez-Remedi and a foreword by Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker co-chair of the UN International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management. These, combined with Logar’s own research photographs, show the real focus of the artist’s interests. Through it we see the massive impact of the oil industry on Aberdeen, physically and metaphorically. The industry has encroached on the city’s architectural, economic and industrial fabric, but the city and its citizens have not been permitted to return the gesture.

Peter Troxler’s essay describes how the very presence of the industry has driven out all others. Property, land and the very cost of living in Aberdeen have been driven higher and higher by the vast amounts of money which flow through Aberdeen, rendering the city off-limits to industries with no relation to oil.

The north east’s right-wing blinkered, business-championing papers roll through the presses at Aberdeen Journals, continuously boasting about the prosperity of the city at the expense of the rest of the world due to high oil prices, or that the average Aberdonian has more money in his/her pcoket than residents of other Scottish cities. While the city thrives on its statistics and averages which drive up its own conceit of itself as an economic powerhouse, those statistics are skewed by a small percent of the population raking in fat six or seven figure salaries.

Aberdeen’s mainstream ignores the fact that the city is one of contradictions, in particular its’ large and growing divide between rich and poor. The self-involvement of the Aberdeen mainstream and its disdain towards the rest of Scotland causes the rest of Scotland to ignore Aberdeen as a lost cause.

Invisible Oil shows us the contradictions in the self-appointed Oil Capital of Europe. Through his investigations into the relationship between public and private spaces Logar exposes the disparity that is the reality of Aberdeen and its reliance on that finite resource. The debates about the relationship between public and private spaces, between the oil industry and the city of Aberdeen have never been so relevant.