John Gerrard’s sculpture Western Flag wants to clear the air. Which is to say it invites us into a frank conversation about the West’s patriotic obsession with biofuels. The gas sculpture is certainly striking: thick black smoke in the shape of a flag endlessly billows from a pole above a flat barren landscape in an appalling display of petronationalism and resource extraction that gestures toward the entanglement of Western democracies with fossil fuels. For a long time, I had assumed that this artwork was real and that what I had watched on my computer screen was a recording of a gas sculpture installed at the real Spindletop oil field in Texas.¹ It was only recently that I learned Western Flag is, in fact, a double haunting: the lifelike black smoke, waving in the wind, is no more than an elegant computer simulation. When a display of the simulation was installed on site at Coachella Valley, the software’s animated sunrises and sunsets ran in tandem with the real Spindletop site in Texas. Yet despite this sleight of hand, Gerrard’s sculpture is no magic trick, but rather a deftly manufactured curation of the historically vaporous infrastructures of Western modernity and the deep environmental burdens they install on environmentally fragile landscapes.

On January 10, 1901, a fierce blowout gushed oil over a derrick at Spindletop, and the wind deposited a spray of this black gold upon the white houses in the southern part of the city of Beaumont.² Now known as the Lucas Gusher, after the salt mine engineer Anthony F. Lucas, the blowout raged for a solid nine days before the field crews were able to rein in the noxious geyser. The photograph of the gusher renders legible this shocking moment of elemental rupture whereby the innards of the earth violently sprayed into the air and onto the workers milling around the base of the broken derrick (Figure 1). Fires too became part of this industrial petrolandscape, including one on the oil lake of the gusher, which caught fire nearly three months after the blowout and saw thousands of barrels of oil quickly go up in smoke.³ But fires and gushers were an occupational hazard. Spindletop may have seen its share of disasters, but it also belongs to the evolution of the wondrous petrohuman, who would eventually spill out from urban centers and into American surburbia, its shopping malls and parking lots, and the manufactured ecologies of cross-country roads and arterial highways. Stephanie LeMenager describes our contemporary moment as a “petro-utopia,” and this utopia all boils down to a lot of airborne carbon, like the one at the Spindletop oil field.⁴

So began the oil boom in Texas. The gusher must have been quite the sight. The oily spray no doubt sparked a few ideas for the hungry company barons and the workers who flocked to Spindletop hoping to strike it rich. Indeed, the photograph of the gusher recalls another dangerous encounter between airborne oil and human curiosity in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1928 speculative short story of petromodernity, “When the World Screamed.” In this story, the protagonist Professor Challenger drills into the earth’s mantel where he awakens an angry creature that blows a geyser containing a “vile treacly substance of the consistence of tar… up into the air to a height which has been computed at two thousand feet.”⁵ Monster or not, alive or not, the Lucas Gusher reveals that symbolic conference between human life and fossil fuels that would then generate a sprawling infrastructural network of roads, refineries, transportation, and local development. In Beaumont, the population rapidly swelled from 9,500 to 50,000 by the end of 1901.⁶ All thanks to an oily spray in the wind.

Spindletop would continue to produce both oil and oil fires until 1936, and then sulphur until the 1970s, by which time the productivity of the site had been fully exhausted. And it is this site, now loaded with the gusher’s elemental memory of earth, fire, and air, that Gerrard’s smoky Western Flag recalls. The simulation of the smoke on the virtual winds underscores the interlaced histories of industrial cultures and petromodernity with everyday Western life. Indeed without oil, our modern condition would be nearly impossible. “The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use,” suggests Dipesh Chakrabarty. “Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive.”⁷ Indeed. Air pollution from burning black oil and blowouts is “just” one side effect of this freedom.

Such are the toxic enchantments of black smoke and bad air. The Western Flag of black smoke is everything a conventional sculpture is not: formless, edgeless and fluid. It is for this reason that the sculpture proposes a wonderful starting point to think carefully through and with an ecologically-focused aesthetic that shocks us with its vaporous intercourse. Sculptures like Gerrard’s Western Flag defy genre and boundary. They are also miasmata, but not in the historical sense of the word. Miasma — an ancient Greek word for pollution — is an antiquated medical term which claimed, before germ theory gained traction in the nineteenth century, that “bad air” or odorous airborne particulates were responsible for ill-health.⁸ Yet modern bad air isn’t the rotting organic particulates that once steeped nineteenth-century urban rivers, but the formless condition of not knowing the glocal conditions of modern polluting industries. Bad air, in short, is an output of industrial modernity and the estranged state of the glocal whereby the multinational corporations, infrastructures, and trade networks spin their tentacles into the local substrate of culture. This glocal arrangement was certainly the case at Spindletop, where the Lucas Gusher heralded a boon for oil production in the United States on a global scale. Both art and literature gives form to some of these vaporous connections between industry and local history.

Gerrard’s virtual sculpture is exactly the kind of bad air that I want to address in this essay. Bad air — or what I call gaseous modernity — is what leaves us breathless. By gaseous modernity, I am not suggesting that we live in a shapeless, interdependent society, marked by volatile relationships.⁹ Rather, I propose that gaseous modernity is a fluid, mutable form of modernity that underscores the global and historical imprints of industry, corporate infrastructures, and politics onto local environments and local peoples. While these global imprints are often felt keenly on the local or regional level, they are also not immediately understood, for the connections between global industry and local conditions are often invisible, illegible, or even deliberately obscured. This invisibility makes it difficult for us to see the proverbial wood for the trees. In Western Flag, for example, the simulation of sooty particulates is certainly a nod toward our zealous combustion of fossil fuels. Indeed, it is hard not to apprehend this artwork as a comment on global warming when the burning of fossil fuels has been a major contributor. But if we were to move beyond a reading of the visual content, I wonder what it would mean to attend to the aeriform virtuality of the artwork and to wonder curiously what the simulation reveals about the early twentieth-century global drive in energy exploration that has had real world implications for local ecologies.

Maybe I’m overreading Western Flag in the same way I failed to grasp the artist’s contextual statement on the work. Still, gaseous modernity may be a way to understand how the glocal, or the interlacing of the global and local, functions in art and indeed in other aeriform artistic expressions. Full disclosure: I am borrowing a term here from the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, albeit in a slightly different key. Liquid modernity, argues Bauman, underscores the state of the modern condition whereby “patterns and configurations” of modernity are such that they are no longer fixed or “self-evident” since the patterns themselves are numerous and conflicting. “The liquidizing powers have moved from the ‘sys¬tem’ to ‘society’, from ‘politics’ to ‘life-policies’,” he argues, “or have descended from the ‘macro’ to the ‘micro’ level of social cohabitation.”¹⁰ I find this idea tantalizing, although I think the patterns, rules, and structures of our modern corporate society are even more vaporous, gaseous, and airy than we realize. It’s often very difficult to visualize clearly the infrastructures of our global society when we’re wholly integrated and complicit with them. This invisibility can leave our sense of the relationships between local ecology and the global market, between the local and global, as formless, reductive, and even bereft.

I mentioned earlier that both art and literature give form to the vaporous connections between industry and local history. Santos Perez’s poem “The Flatulencene,” Philip Levine’s “Smoke,” Michael Pinksy’s installation Pollution Pods,¹¹ and the Smog-Tasting Project¹² are excellent candidates to study the aesthetic expression of gaseous modernity. However, I want to go home instead and turn to a poetic sequence from the 2000 collection Markings by New Zealand poet Cilla McQueen. Here, I want to unpack how a poet attends to bad air and aeriform global networks in a poem that appears highly structured on its surface. Let me ask two more questions: how does one give form to what resists form? What really is in the air in modern ecopoetry?

It’s the smoke in Cilla McQueen’s work that really interests me. Or at least, the image of the smoke, emitted from a smelter’s chimney stack, thrown violently against the backdrop of the sky. Smoke resists easy narratives even as it points to the presence of a fire: someone has to generate the heat, someone has to maintain it. Someone’s labor is involved. Smoke, whether benign or malignant, is sweet or bitter. It can be fragrant like incense or toxic like a cigarette. If substantial enough, the presence of smoke may indicate that something is being produced or fashioned, like white gold or aluminum, using vast amounts of energy.

Let’s back up for a moment. Cilla McQueen is a New Zealand poet, who served as poet laureate between 2009 and 2011. McQueen lives in the small coastal town of Bluff at the bottom of the South Island and not far from Tiwai Point on the tip of Bluff Harbour. Bluff only has a population of 1800 but, more significantly for my purpose here, it is also home to New Zealand Aluminium Smelters (NZAS) — known locally as the Tiwai Point Aluminium Smelter — which is among the largest industrial works in the country (Figure 2). NZAS is owned by Rio Tinto, a multinational mining company with operations in thirty-six countries, and Sumitomo Chemical Company, which is based in Tokyo, Japan.

McQueen’s poem “Tiwai Sequence” directly engages with the presence of the smelter in her hometown. Composed in five sections of predominantly quatrains, the poem methodically follows McQueen’s visit to the smelter with a group of tourists led by a tour guide called Karen. Despite being a formally structured poem, McQueen’s commentary is formless and subtle, indirect and nuanced with the poet’s critique hidden between the lines. Karen chaperones the group around the various sites at the smelter, while the poet offers the reader dry facts about the smelter’s operations along with concealed commentary on the guide’s greenwashed tour:

‘Has the greenhouse effect been considered,’ asks a man,
What about rising sea levels?’ Karen smiles blandly. (42)

Poor Karen. Those weren’t rhetorical questions. But Karen’s smile reads volumes. The smelter’s presence in Bluff has been simultaneously welcomed and highly contested. Smelting aluminum requires enormous amounts of energy. The Manapōuri Hydro Station, some ninety-one miles away from Tiwai Point, supports the smelter’s enormous power needs (Figure 2). By-products from smelting include carbon dioxide and toxic ouvea premix. In 2014, over 10,000 tonnes of ouvea premix was secretively stored offsite in a disused paper mill on the east bank of the Mataura River, forty-four miles away from Bluff. When mixed with water, ouvea premix produces highly toxic ammonia gas. In February 2020, floodwaters from the river nearly breached the mill, prompting a major civil defence emergency and threatening the health and safety of local residents and a local Te Kohunga Reo center (a Māori language school).¹³ In other words, Karen’s bland smile masks the fact that NZAS is a big deal when it comes to toxic waste in small rural communities.

“Tiwai Sequence” is the poet’s most direct engagement with environmental criticism relating to the glocal aluminum industry in Bluff. Elsewhere in the collection, we learn that the poet’s home faces the harbor port and the smelter’s smokestack. “I can’t escape,” the poet complains,

that vertical mark, dead centre of the landscape.
It looks like a big cigarette. (27)

Some folks can’t breathe easily in the town. The smoke from the smelter is described “as white plumes streaming south-east into milky cloud.” (29) The white plume is hardly harmless. “Most of the emission,” the poet says, “is CO2. It is a small amount of fluoride that discolours the plume,” which sometimes blows over the town despite the guide’s veiled insistence to contrary. (42) Still, Karen attempts to offer a positive spin on the air pollution:

’Note how the grasses are leaning on the beach,’ says Karen.
‘That’s the prevailing westerly, one of the reasons
why we chose this site. Any residue of harmful substances
merely blows out to sea.’

But that, I think, is not the only wind we get in Bluff.
In the easterly, when they pump out smoke at night
it drifts straight over us. ‘What is that mound?’ I ask.
‘That is some dross,’ says Karen. ‘Naturally, there is some left over.’ (41)

As Eva Horn points out, we become conscious of the air as a medium when we notice “its disruption.”¹⁴ We cannot help but see air pollution when it is thrown against the backdrop of a small-town night sky. Indeed, McQueen’s poem is a violent rupture of New Zealand’s mythic clean, green imaginary that is so integral to the country’s national identity. New Zealand is neither clean nor green. It is not a lush wilderness. As Kevin Dew notes, the tourist industry along with composers, artists, and poets have thoroughly nurtured this colonial symbol of ecological purity at the expense of the country’s industrial and political complexities.¹⁵ Case in point is the smelter’s location. The surrounding area is home to the critically endangered Foveaux looper moth and the vulnerable Foveaux shag. McQueen’s quiet honesty in her poem, like Gerrard’s Western Flag, wants to clear the air from this dishonest mythic rendering of the nation’s self-image to propose the hidden spaces of disgruntlement toward a multinational corporation’s indifference toward local populace in Bluff. Karen’s bland comment, “Naturally, there is some left over,” is regurgitated corporate rhetoric that underscores this contrast between what is natural and what is manufactured, between purity and pollution. If we take the poet’s tone at face value, Karen’s downplaying of the dross mound is simply an extension of a corporate ideology that sweeps its toxic problems aside. The words “merely” and “naturally” carry a lot of weight. But our tour guide, Karen, has the last word:

‘The Company makes every effort to preserve the habitat
of rare dotterels breeding in the nearby marsh.’
The End. We are dismissed. (43)

“Tiwai’s Sequence” really points to the crux of the problem: the damaged ecology indicates a loss of local sovereignty to an international industrial complex, which in the case of NZAS has often been framed as a national good. The abrupt end to Karen’s tour suggests we shouldn’t question the Company’s motives.

But whether NZAS is a national good is moot. In 1960, Consolidated Zinc (ConZinc), an Australian aluminum company, entered into an agreement with the New Zealand government to build both a smelter and a hydropower station using water reserves at Lake Manapōuri and Lake Te Anau. Three years later, ConZinc, which had merged with Rio Tinto, withdrew from building the power station when costs of the project exploded, prompting the government to take over the station’s construction. The smelter and power station opened after a series of protracted negotiations between overseas parties in 1971, but not before the cost of the power station blew out to NZ$130 million. While the impetus behind the joint building projects is both politically complex and vast — I won’t rehearse the entire history here — the fever for white gold coincided at a time when the government was keen to develop the Manapōuri Hydro Station as a source of cheap power while diversifying the national economy, which was still largely agricultural.¹⁶ Making aluminum is highly energy-intensive. The smelter, we learn from McQueen’s poem, “uses the same amount of electricity as Auckland.” (42) In 2014, the smelter accounted for 15 percent of all electricity produced in the country.¹⁷ But Tiwai was and still is about the illusion of modern industrial progress. Indeed, as Rio Tinto proudly proclaims on their website: “We produce materials essential to human progress.”¹⁸ In this light, the discolored white plumes at Bluff is an extended symbol of that energy-intensive transnational program for both industrial development and human betterment.

It’s astonishing that the smelter was even built, much less at the bottom of a far-flung island nation. Since New Zealand doesn’t mine the raw materials needed to produce aluminum, these resources must be imported from different parts of the world. “Carbon anodes are made on site out of petroleum coke,” says the poet,

from California and liquid pitch from Korea.
At the operating temperatures of 970 degrees
the oxygen burns with the carbon anode block
to give carbon dioxide, which is cleaned
and expelled through the 137 metre high chimney. (41)

As for the bauxite, from which pure aluminum is produced? Well, that material, McQueen tells us, “comes to Bluff by sea from Weipa in the north of Australia.” (41)¹⁹ The smelter, in other words, depends on international infrastructures, on systems, trade routes, and forms of management thousands of miles away in another part of the world. NZAS, as the poet suggests, represents a smelting of multiple global localities that are brought together — and colonized — by way of multifarious transnational relationships required to produce an ingot of aluminum. Conflict, however, sharply concretizes the divides between local specificities and the smelter, between the colonized ecology and a multinational corporation. Finally, McQueen has the last word on Karen:

Once this was the site of a Maori toolmaking factory.
Now the aluminium smelter covers the area entirely. (43)

Earlier, I posed the question: how does one give form to what resists form? It turns out that the question is hard to answer. If the local is no longer truly local and specific, as McQueen seems to suggest, then places like Bluff are melting pots for vaporous encounters between dotterels, dross mounds, bad air, and the multinational partners that alter both atmospheres and landscapes.

I’m aware that this essay navigates a fine line between public critical writing and the private, because I grew up in Invercargill, New Zealand, a stone’s throw away from Bluff (or about fifteen miles). I am very familiar with the imprint of the smelter in the imagination of the local and regional community. As far as I can remember, the smelter was always there in the backdrop like a discolored white plume thrown against the night sky. It is one of the largest employers in the country and contributes some NZ$400 million to the local Southland economy. As a kid, I thought the smelter was a big deal. NZAS is a big deal. But local troubles are often signalled by global economic headwinds. The smelter’s proposed closure in 2021 will prove devastating for one of the less prosperous regions of the country (although not the poorest).²⁰ Due to rising energy costs and a fragile global aluminum market, Rio Tinto is projected to lay off 1000 workers once their operations wind down. Until that happens, as one employee of the smelter notes, “everything is sort of up in the air.”²¹ Maybe that’s the real blow when multinational corporations finally disentangle themselves from local environments. Some people — and some wildlife — will breathe more easily when the smoke clears. Others will not.

Work Cited:

McQueen, Cilla, Markings, (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2000).