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Picturing a Crude Past: Primitivism, Public Art, and Corporate Oil Promotion in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2012

ROSS BARRETT
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Abstract

This essay examines the first monument dedicated to the US oil industry, the Drake Memorial in Titusville, Pennsylvania (1899–1901), as an influential project of corporate self-representation. Commissioned by Standard Oil, the memorial shaped a public image for the petroleum industry that addressed concerns about the sustainability and social effects of oil capitalism, and established the key terms for a promotional discourse that would circulate throughout the twentieth century. This discourse, which I call “petro-primitivism,” reimagined the ultramodern oil industry as an extension of timeless practices rooted in an imagined archaic past. By shaping a primitivist spectacle that figured oil as an eternal component of the natural world and a primordial object of “human” endeavor, I argue, the Drake Memorial encouraged audiences to take the long view on oil: to adopt an expansive perspective that reconceived oil as a timelessly abundant element, and the boom-and-bust oil industry as an age-old venture. These tropes proved useful to the industry throughout the crises of the early twentieth century, reappearing in corporate displays and filtering into the rhetoric of industry advertising and publicity. Accordingly, I examine two later projects that appropriated the themes of petro-primitivism: the Sinclair Oil exhibit at the 1933–34 World's Fair, and Sun Oil's exhibit Oil Serves America at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia (1953–c.1962). Echoing the earlier Drake Memorial, these displays employed strategies drawn from public art and civic architecture to organize collective experiences around the image of oil. By examining these popular exhibits alongside the Drake Memorial, I aim to offer a new account of the promotional culture of the early petroleum industry that explores the intersections between the traditional arts and industry publicity and illuminates the vital role that cultural representations played in accommodating twentieth-century Americans to the dynamic structures of petro-capitalism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2: Special Issue on Oil Cultures , May 2012 , pp. 395 - 422
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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3 In tackling the early cultural projects of Standard Oil, this essay aims to complement the excellent work done by Ulrich Keller, John Ott, Roland Marchand, and other scholars who have addressed Standard's later patronage of modernist photography and painting. See Keller, Ulrich, The Highway as Habitat: A Roy Stryker Documentation, 1943–1955 (Santa Barbara: University Art Museum, 1986)Google Scholar; John Ott, “Landscapes of Consumption: Auto Tourism and Visual Culture in California, 1920–1940,” in Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, eds., Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 51–68; Marchand, Roland, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

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27 The Oliens’ helpfully incisive account of early conservationism appears within a text otherwise devoted to a curiously defensive and elaborate apologia for Standard Oil. Olien, See Roger and Olien, Diana, Oil and Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Petroleum Industry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 120–27Google Scholar.

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36 See also “A Shaft for E. L. Drake,” Washington Evening Times, 7 Oct. 1901, 3.

37 Standard Oil's displays at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 similarly invoked petroleum's past; both included painted murals depicting “the discovery of oil.” See Report of the Commissioner-General for the United States to the International Universal Exposition 4 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 120; The Exhibit of the Standard Oil Company of New York at the Pan American Exposition (New York: Standard Oil, 1901), online at www.panam1901.org/mines/standard_oil.htm.

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54 Millions See Weird Sinclair Dinosaurs, 6.

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57 Oil Serves America: A Presentation by Sun Oil Company (Philadelphia: The Company, 1960), 5.

58 Period reviews reaffirmed the nationalist emphasis of the display; see, for example, “Educational Oil Exhibit,” World Petroleum, 24 (1953), 174.

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63 Ibid., 25, see also 15–21, 31–35.