The Petroleum Manga, first conceived of and rendered as 10-foot banners
printed on Tyvek for gallery installation is now reproduced in book
form.
Originally, manga was used in Japanese to refer to
whimsical drawings or picture books. Long before Manga was a
multi-billion-dollar-a-year comic book industry, there was Hokusai's
thirteen-volume manga, depicting everything from trees to demons, from
squirrels to shingles. This was the work that inspired the form for
Marina Zurkow's own crazy amalgam depicting a taxonomy of products
derived from petroleum.
Remaining true to this inspiration, this
book compiles a curious array of imaginative-philosophical texts
illuminating, illustrating, fabulating, and riffing upon a wide range of
petrochemical-based objects and ideas. This "collection" maps new webs
of relations between us and these seemingly ubiquitous yet often
unremarked objects, along the lines of a fanciful petro-poetics.
Fanciful,
yet dead serious. As Duncan Murrell writes, "...our plastics will live
forever, no longer able to decompose, while we become molecules again.
When we are long gone, there will still be plastic clown masks circling
in the Pacific Ocean. This, and not our great works of art and
literature, will be the persistent legacy of life on earth, these
objects crafted out of life's own ancient flesh."
Contributors
(in order of appearance) include: Duncan Murrell, Melissa Kwanzy, Hali
Felt, Lucy Corin, Maureen N. McLane, Matt Dube, Max Liboiron, Derek
Woods, Susan Squier, Elizabeth Crane, Lydia Millet, Rachel Cantor, Una
Chaudhuri, K.A. Hays, Elena Glasberg, James Grinwis, Joseph Campana,
Nancy Hechinger, Christine Hume, Cecily Parks, Kellie Wells, Timothy
Morton, Michael Mejia, Doug Watson, Gabriel Fried, Ruth Ozeki, Nicole
Walker, Abigail Simon, Oliver Kelhammer, Seth Horowitz, David M. Johns,
Valerie Vogrin, Jamie "Skye" Bianco, and Marina Zurkow.
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