The Petroleum Manga: A Project by Marina Zurkow
- Edited by Valerie Vogrin, Marina Zurkow
- Illustrated by Marina Zurkow
Published on February 25, 2014 by punctum books
- Pages
- 172 pages
- Languages
- English
- Dimensions
- 5.98⤫11.69 in.
- ISBN (Paperback)
- ISBN: 978-0-615-96596-3 (Paperback)
- BISAC subject codes
- BISAC: CGN004050
- Thema subject codes
- THEMA: THFP, XQA
The Petroleum Manga, first conceived of and rendered as 10-foot banners printed on Tyvek for gallery installation(opens in new tab) 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 by a variety of poets, fiction writers, and theorists 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.”
Contents
Frontmatter (i–viii)
Forward (1–1)
Duncan Murrell
Past Life with Wooly Mammoth (5–5)
Melissa Kwansy
My Jams (6–7)
Hali Felt
Half (10–10)
Lucy Corin
Petroleum Troubador Machine (15–15)
Maureen N. McLane
Chicken Shit (16–17)
Matt Dube
Meth (21–21)
Lucy Corin
The Plastisphere (24–24)
Max Liboirin
Three Scales of Plastic (26–27)
Derek Woods
Rubber Chicken (31–31)
Susan Squier
Floats (32–33)
Elizabeth Crane
Body (37–37)
Lucy Corin
Pacifier (38–38)
Lydia Millet
The Heap (40–40)
Rachel Cantor
Freeze Box (Mama's Got A) (49–49)
Lucy Corin
Ghost World (52–53)
Una Chaudhuri
Watering Can, High Density-Polyethylene (56–56)
K.A. Hays
Industry (58–59)
Melissa Kwansy
Wipe That Face Off Your Smile (62–63)
Elena Glasberg
Vast Field of Discernible Objects (68–69)
James Grinwis
Intimations of Immortality in a Petrochemical Harp (72–73)
Joseph Campana
Georgian Heat (75–75)
Nancy Hechinger
Parachute (78–79)
Christine Hume
Plastic Flower (81–81)
Cecily Parks
Sacrament (84–84)
Kellie Wells
After (89–89)
Lucy Corin
Sails, Hull, Jibs (92–92)
Lucy Corin
Plexiglass Chair (98–101)
Timothy Morton
"A Camera's Not Expression, It's Part of the Spectacle": 5 YouTube Videos (102–103)
Michael Mejia
The Fish That Was Not Just a Fish (108–109)
Doug Watson
Perpetual Pastoral (113–113)
Gabriel Fried
Immortal (116–118)
Ruth Ozeki
IV Bags (122–122)
Nicole Walker
The Story of Oil (128–129)
Abigail Simon
Violent Reactions: Part I (132–132)
Oliver Kelhammer
Organic Life & Other Myths (134–135)
Seth Horowitz
Violent Reactions: Part 2 (138–139)
Oliver Kelhammer
Plastics and Plasticity: The Ugly, the Bad and the Pretty Good (142–143)
David M. Johns
Potential: A Questionnaire (146–147)
Valerie Vogrin
Taxidermy Forms (148–148)
James Grinwis
What Does Calm Say (151–151)
Melissa Kwansy
Petro Chemical Agentissimal: A Synthetic PolymeRhythm (152–155)
Jamie "Skye" Bianco
Postscript: Once Were, Now Are, Will Be (156–157)
Marina Zurkow
Biographies
Valerie Vogrin is the author of the novel Shebang (University Press of Mississippi, 2004). Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, The Florida Review, Natural Bridge, Black Warrior Review, and Esquire, among other publications, and she is also the winner of a 2011 Pushcart Prize. She is currently an associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she also serves as prose editor of Sou’wester and Director of Peanut Books.
Crossing multiple disciplines with her practice, Marina Zurkow(opens in new tab) builds animations and participatory environments that are centered on humans and their relationship to animals, plants and the weather. Engaging audiences using film and video, sculpture, print graphics and public interventions, Zurkow’s work is by turns humorous and contemplative. Through the experience of her projects it is clear that nature has long been a stage upon which we project ourselves, making ourselves other. Marina Zurkow is the recipient of a 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She has also been granted awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is on faculty at NYU’s Interactive Technology Program (ITP), and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Crossing multiple disciplines with her practice, Marina Zurkow(opens in new tab) builds animations and participatory environments that are centered on humans and their relationship to animals, plants and the weather. Engaging audiences using film and video, sculpture, print graphics and public interventions, Zurkow’s work is by turns humorous and contemplative. Through the experience of her projects it is clear that nature has long been a stage upon which we project ourselves, making ourselves other. Marina Zurkow is the recipient of a 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She has also been granted awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is on faculty at NYU’s Interactive Technology Program (ITP), and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Genres
- Anthropocene
- Art+Aesthetics
- Thought Experiments
Keywords
- ecology
- illustration
- manga
- nature
- petroleum
- philosophy
- poetry