Immersion in the Land of Oil
- Bree Edwards -
A visit to the Houston Ship Channel is a compelling activity, highly recommended for anyone interested in current events. Here in this petrochemical Mecca, the largest petrochemical complex in the United States, the full extent of our saturation in the oil economy can be seen, felt, smelled and fathomed.
— Center for Land Use Interpretation 1
The City of Houston is best known as the world headquarters of one of the most significant feats of human engineering: the petrochemical industry, and Houston’s Ship Channel was the key to its development into an industrial superpower. Development began in 1841 when the Port of Houston was first established, but in order to make this inland city a viable port, 50 miles of wetlands and hard clay had to be dredged.
Houston was not exactly an industrialist’s dream location at that point, but unlike most Southern cities, it found itself with a large surplus of funds after the Civil War as a result of supplying wartime goods to inland troops. This newly found wealth allowed Houston to greatly expand the ship channel at a time when materials and labor were cheap. By 1870, the federal government declared Houston an official “point of entry,” and the city’s development began to take off. Ironically, Houston’s infrastructure was again boosted by misfortune when the Great Storm of 1900 almost wiped out the city of Galveston, which promoted the need for a well-protected inland port off the Gulf of Mexico.
These were all major milestones in the development of the Houston Ship Channel, but they pale in comparison to the impact the Texas Oil Company (known today as Texaco) had on Houston, when they established their world headquarters in the city in 1905. (After all, a port is fairly unimportant without a great demand for a commodity to ship through it.) Oil provided that demand, and Texaco firmly positioned Houston and its newly developed port as the epicenter of the nation’s fledgling petroleum boom.
Over a century later, a group of University of Houston professors, staff from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts and Matthew Coolidge from the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) gathered on a fall morning in 2006 for a pontoon ride at Allen’s Landing on Buffalo Bayou. This was to be the first of several exploratory trips around the decaying industrial fringe of downtown Houston. The location was selected for a preliminary excursion because it is the precise origin of the city of Houston: Allen’s Landing is a strategic point at the confluence of Buffalo Bayou and White Oak Bayou—the spot where waterways converge before emptying into Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico—although it is currently not much more than a cement embankment.
Additionally, the Mitchell Center’s staff began talks about creating a long-term residency that would bring artists to Houston for extended periods of time, producing projects that would involve students from the University of Houston’s arts programs in interdisciplinary processes. The next step was to select the right artist or group of artists for such an endeavor. The fact that CLUI had already been researching the Gulf Coast region, combined with their open-source, semi-nomadic process, made them the perfect candidate. But it was also no coincidence that John Reed, Mitchell Center board member and director of the University of Houston School of Art, had worked with CLUI in the past or that Diane Shamash, founder of the arts nonprofit Minetta Brook, had an ongoing dialogue with CLUI about the Buffalo Bayou Project prior to her untimely death in 2006. 2 Therefore, as part of their mission to create interdisciplinary residencies, the Mitchell Center sponsored the creation of CLUI’s newest satellite facility: the Houston Field Office and Logistics Site, located on the industrial fringe of the city. After a series of negotiations and determining a timetable for a residency, CLUI laid out a plan for an ongoing study of Houston, the hub of America’s petrochemical industry.
Buffalo Bayou under U.S. Highway 59; courtesy CLUI
University of Houston students and faculty on Buffalo Bayou; courtesy CLUI
In his seminal 1957 book Interpreting our Heritage, Freeman Tilden wrote, “Interpretation is an art which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical or archival.” Generally speaking, CLUI likewise describes itself as an educational organization that acts as an information-gathering and distribution hub. A corps of independent interpreters—writers, artists, filmmakers, travelers, scientists, photographers and engineers—gathers data and conducts CLUI programs. The Center operates primarily out of a converted storefront on the western edge of Los Angeles. There they maintain a massive physical archive of unusual and exemplary sites around the United States called the Land Use Database (which coexists online via their website). In their space, they also produce publications and exhibitions that are generated from internal CLUI research and research partners. Select exhibitions include Loop Feedback Loop: Traffic Control in Los Angles, Immersed Remains: Towns Submerged in America, Formations of Erasure: Earthworks and Entropy and the current Birdfoot: Where America’s River Dissolves into the Sea, a project about dissolving land at the tip of the Mississippi River Delta.
The crux of CLUI’s praxis rests in teasing out the underlying logic and connections between disparate fields while illuminating how they are connected to our daily lives. To do this, they rely on interpretation of data—of the historical, geographic, sociological and economic structure of a given site—rather than traditional artistic production. In terms of Houston, the petrochemical industry is at the center of a global web of economic, political and ecological forces. The Port of Houston is one of the busiest ports in the United States, handling more foreign tonnage than any other port in the country, mostly oil. To understand some of the complex logistics involved in the entire cycle of oil operations, it is helpful to again consult CLUI’s newsletter, where “petro-speak” is broken down into everyday terms. Refineries on the Houston Ship Channel, such as the BP refinery in Texas City, conduct “downstream” operations, which involve the processing of raw material into gasoline, plastics and polymers, solvents, bulk manufacturing chemicals and home heating oil. Conversely, “upstream” operations involve finding and extracting raw crude that travels downstream for refining.
A pair of arched pipelines designed to help regulate product flow at Rohm & Haas’ Deer Park plant. This piece of land was once part of Dr. George Patrick’s Deepwater Farm, a historically significant place that briefly served as the seat of power of the Texas Republic immediately after the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. Courtesy the CLUI Photographic Archive, 2003.
After determining the structure for their residency with the Mitchell Center, CLUI procured a trailer that would serve as the group’s Houston Field Office, containing a workspace and classroom for residents and students. The Buffalo Bayou Partnership, a nonprofit that oversees improvements to the bayou, granted permission for the field office to be situated on one of the properties they manage. The site, formerly a junkyard, also houses several city-supported greening operations, such as a tree-planting operation and a boat charged with the Sisyphean task of skimming the bayou for debris.
The residency commenced in January 2008, when Matthew Coolidge returned to Houston to conduct research on the navigable waterways of downtown Houston and make necessary improvements to the field headquarters. Coolidge brought with him a boat from CLUI’s Northeast Regional Office in Troy, New York, and used this as the means of transportation for several explorations of Buffalo Bayou with students from the University of Houston’s School of Art, College of Architecture and Creative Writing Program. These excursions provided a great setting for discussions on wastewater, heavy industry, wetland reclamation engineering, urban park design, Homeland Security and a general introduction to Houston’s navigable waters.
Steve Rowell, a native Houstonian who divides his time between Los Angeles and Berlin, was the second CLUI researcher to arrive on site. Rowell focused his research on the lifecycle of Houston’s oil industry, from well to refinery to corporate headquarters. Rowell led a field trip to the BP refinery in Texas City. (It is worth noting that BP was the only oil company that granted Rowell permission for an onsite visit.) While the group was sincerely interested in getting a closer look at the dynamic and sometimes dangerous day-to-day operations of the refinery, most of their guided tour focused on the BP Field Headquarters, described by Rowell as a hybrid between a corporate office and a Kmart-style, big-box building.
It seemed that of all the CLUI researchers, Rowell had to contend with the most direct skepticism and inaccessibility. Like military secrets, most operations in the petrochemical industry are “sensitive” and closed to the public as a matter of “national security” or “internal restructuring.” Even the Houston Ship Channel, the site that originally attracted CLUI to Houston, is now restricted to official personnel as the result of Homeland Security measures. In response to these obstacles, CLUI will begin gathering aerial data of the ship channel and surrounding oil refinery operations this summer. (Aerial photography is a mode of observation CLUI commonly utilizes when producing material for exhibition because it provides a unique and omnipotent perspective.)
The final CLUI researcher to stay at the Houston Field Office and Logistics Site was Erik Knutzen, whose work focused on the industrial edge of the city, both in terms of industry and its natural (although polluted) environment. By focusing on the raw materials that create an urban giant like Houston, with its vast highway system and seemingly unstoppable sprawl, he decided to tour concrete factories along the bayou, one currently in operation and one long abandoned. For these excursions, the group made the conscious decision to travel on foot. Walking through this semi-wild and abandoned urban fringe allowed the group to take a closer look at the hardy vegetation that survives—and in some instances thrives—in this area. Walking the city’s edge also enabled them to do a little urban foraging of their own. Mulberries were in season—a crop that some homeless people living in the area pointed out to Knutzen.
There are several proposed future uses for the CLUI Logistics Site, including transforming it into an oil-themed Sculpture Park and Junkyard Drive-In where people can sit along the bayou, with the skyline in the distance, watching car-related films. But ultimately, the formidable consortium of organizations that joined together with CLUI and the Mitchell Center to make this project happen will determine the future of this site, hopefully harnessing the energy generated by this residency.
My own interest in CLUI stems from the experiential and democratic process they employ. Their projects beckon us to leave the confines of the gallery or museum and (re)engage with the built environment. In this praxis, there is a transitive and generous exchange between the specialist (artist) and the audience (student participants, general public). While their mission is to simply observe and interpret unusual and exemplary sites across the United States, CLUI’s presence has awakened a wonderful and contagious curiosity in the Houston art world—an energetic and engaged curiosity that will hopefully keep bringing artists and residents down to Buffalo Bayou, the ideal vantage point for critical reflection upon—and visualization of—this metropolis’ development and future.
In spring 2009, Blaffer Gallery will present an exhibition of CLUI’s Houston-based research and the Mitchell Center for the Arts will host a CLUI-facilitated interpretative tour of the region.
1. Center for Land Use Interpretation, “Amidst A Petrochemical Wonderland: Points of View Along the Houston Ship Channel,” Lay of the Land 27 (Summer 2004).
2. The public art project initiated by Diane Shamash and the Buffalo Bayou Partnership has been reinvigorated by curators Andrea Grover and Sandra Percival, who will also launch their Confluence project along the Buffalo Bayou in 2009.