Wants: slick, combustible desk chauvinism
A fortnightly meditation on something for sale
1977 Alaska BP Crude Oil Paperweight. Available from eBay ($119.99)
As all good foragers and collectors know, it’s often in the search for something else that we make our best finds. En route to what we think we want, we crash into the thing we really want.
This was the case when the artist Tanoa Sasraku — who has been known to mine the landscape of Devon, her birth-county, for ancient pigments — was searching eBay for crude oil. She wondered: can a civilian procure this deeply symbolic gloop?
It turns out, as Sasraku told us on a Zoom call last week, that the answer was yes, but not quite as she expected. It’s only available in very small measures, encased within paperweights once given as corporate gifts. And so, the pursuit of one thing yielded another. “I just thought it was the perfect little landscape sculpture,” she said.
There is a strange beauty to this particular block, animated by the contrasts it contains: a jet-black teardrop suspended in a glass cube; a commodity — defined by its uses — encased in an object that’s practically useless. Of course a paperweight ostensibly exists to secure paper, but really, this cube’s purported vocation has always been a bogus cover. Its real purpose is simply to exist, a testament to the owner’s connection with a triumph.
This inky soupçon was pumped out via the 800-mile-by-48-inch Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, whose immense course from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez is printed on one face of the cube. Here is the conquest of man over nature, rendered for desktop display: millions of hydrocarbons, thousands of man hours, hundreds of miles, one cube.
Such objects bear witness to the things that desk-owners of yore wanted to be known about them. Today, to telegraph one’s connection to such a project would feel like an example of self-snitching. Like cuddly OxyContin plushies, the paperweight celebrates a glory which might better have been kept in the shadows. That might explain why it’s on eBay.
To brag is, in any case, one of the most basic human impulses, and some transgressions are too good to go unboasted. If you wish to become this drop’s new owner, you too can secure paper with one of the first drops of oil pumped through a pipeline which, at its 1980s peak, transported ~2.1 million barrels of crude per day.
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The example seen here is one of many available on eBay. You can find out how Tanoa chose to deploy her collection in her forthcoming exhibition, Morale Patch at the ICA in London.