Bust Bash

was a catharsis carnival for the oil bust

2015

This real estate fly through video advertising a catharsis carnival for the oil bust, features games composited onto drone footage of a defunct oilfield services campus

These “festival grounds,” are on 136 acres located just two miles east of Downtown Houston, were occupied by KBR, an intermittent Halliburton subsidiary. It a featured family wellness center and amenities. During the creation of Bust Bash, the same site was also being memorialized in a rooftop mural on the new massive ExxonMobil corporate campus in which houses 10,000 employees in Spring, TX.

At the time I made this

I was in dialogue with Betsy Beasley and their manuscript for Expert Capital: Houston and the Making of a Service Empire, on the impact of Houston based oilfield services corporations on international labor standards.  

Richard Florida’s Creative Class ideas were ripe.
The celebrated utility of cultural workers to vibrantify blight, sexy up sprawl, manufacture World Class Status, and “attract and retain” the workforce of major industries was formalized within Cultural Plans and National Arts Funding strategies.

Houston's cultural capital was being boosted just as its economic bubble was deflating. Arts grants in Houston were given on a tourism basis, as in, the Hotel Occupancy Tax competitively funded artistic projects according to how many people from outside the city limits your work impacted. So works were selected that boosted tourism, entertained conventioneers, provided lifestyle enhancement and recruiting amenities, and supplemental emotional support services to people who visit Houston and stay in a hotel. Those people are largely convention attendees and largely oil patch workers. *

According to such funding structures, we, as artists, worked for that workforce.

Here in Houston, that workforce is ever in flux with the commodity price of oil. At the time it was low with the fracking bust, and each time I’d go out I’d meet another young person who had moved here for work, now laid off.

Bust Bash renders the celebrated utility of arts and cultural workers to attract, retain, and entertain the top talent working for major industries, and proposes nothing more outrageous in scale, tone, or ambition than what regularly occurs at the Offshore Technology Conference, Superbowls, city industry festivals, or Creative Placemaking projects. Bust Bash enthusiastically exacerbates the uses to which festivals, public-private space, and art are put in relation to workers' productivity, because I was terrified of it.

At the time I was earnestly organizing for artists to get paid equitably, and organizing with Houston artists against Creative Placemaking - or artists being used as the shock troops of gentrification, and organizing for representative racial equity in the arts of a town that was ignoring or co-opting its most impactful social practices, created by people of color.

I was also frustrated with being “the Houston artist” that visiting artists would consult about their attempts attack or infiltrate “Big Oil,” deploying educational or interventionist projects here, then returning to places where it is possible to be employed outside of that industry. In contrast, my POV is sourced from, reflective of, and built within the backyard of the world’s largest petrochemical hub. Bust Bash employed an art worker already tasked with performing reproductive labor for this industry to more acutely imagine a psychology playground for the overlooked population of industry employees who already work inside of such impermeable powers. It helped to illustrate the nightmare.

I guess that was a lot, but I also became eerily fluent in the language of aspirational real estate media while binge watching fly through videos, then learned 3D modeling and compositing software. I was working in Donald Barthelme archives and his use of corporate and bureaucratic language as drag populated my thoughts, and this spoof let off some steam.

*unless they are medical tourists, more on that here

My family history that tracks intimately with the oil industry, and my the backyard is the world’s largest petrochemical hub.

Questions for working in Houston:

What was artistic practice for human animals, at the naming of the Anthropocene, in a city which is itself a sculpture made by advanced neoliberal capitalism? 

How does this sculpture’s forms foster both advanced coping strategies and discreet resistance within unsurveilable (sprawl) and unsuspected site (belly of the beast)? 

How does this city, branded as a model for the new economy, employ art in order to credential itself as a global hub of not just energy, but also power?