Third Rail

The Inglewood Oil Field is a two square mile oil field deep beneath the hills that cuts laterally across the heart of Los Angeles and has been exploited for its petroleum reserves for over 85 years. Now run by the Houston-based Plains Exploration Company (PXP), the Inglewood Oil Field is the largest active U.S. oil field found in a dense urban environment. Several community groups have been lobbying to have the site join the adjacent parkland in the “One Big Park” plan. This site raises questions that are intimately tied to the way Los Angeles understands itself and exemplifies a broader set of contradictory cultural logics found at this critical time of global economic and environmental transition. It is a site that brings together issues of global energy policy, media technology, environmental sustainability, urban space, water scarcity, transportation, community dialogue in the public sphere and the lack of public and green space access in the greater Los Angeles area. There is a lack of public awareness, community participation and cultural engagement of how the forces at play at this site affects the city at large.

In February, 2011 Third Rail will be collaborating with the Ala Plastica collective (La Plata, Argentina) during their two month residency at Outpost for Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) to produce a project around the Inglewood oil field.  Ala Plastica, acting as both artists and a NGO, has been working for the last twenty years around social and environmental justice issues among communities and institutions. Their work could be defined as “slow activism” in that their dialogical work with communities, the mapping out of living/working spaces and the understanding of adjacent corporate interests is developed with an attention towards duration and site-specificity.

A current turn in art and cultural production has begun to actively rethink the way in which dialogical and collaborative practices carry new possibilities for the progressive development of the issues being confronted by those affected by damage to their local environment.  The belief is that an approach to cultural practice is required that not only speaks to, but includes and listens to the myriad voices contained within an issue. The various cultural and artistic organizations involved in the Inglewood Oil Field are working collaboratively in a way that requires a critical reevaluation of how artistic and dialogical methodologies can best be put into direct action that will lead to real material effects. Often referred to as “dialogical work,” this effort to challenge the safety-zone of where art and cultural practices have historically been sought (the artist’s studio, museums and institutions, the academy) is a reflection of larger changes in the way a public can participates in art and cultural production.  The success of social networking projects and the ease with which art and other forms of learning are now made at home and shared freely is matched by experimental, collaborative efforts of artists seeking to engage the public on its own terms.