Calderesque Shadows above the Oilfields and Taphographic Authority

“Alter your course” was the last message from Iranian naval authorities to a UK-flagged oil tanker before seizing it in the Strait of Hormuz (19 July 2019). As US-Iran political tensions escalate in the drone-monitored Gulf, these events render a picture of today’s petroleum-based topography. In the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Alexander Calder’s drone-like iconic Orange Fish (1946) shadows Noriyuki Haraguchi’s Matter and Mind (1977)—known as Oil Pool—disclosing neglected histories of the Cold War and American soft power in oil-rich countries. The links between American interest and cultural influence in Venezuela and Iran were explored through Calder’s art by Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck and Media Farzin in their collaborative series, Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect (2007-2009). Further calderesque references are made in Tehran-based artist Barbad Golshiri’s Calder for Dead Children (2010), a mobile hovering over oil-burnt grave markers, and Oil on Canvas (2018), “oil-soaked” portraits of Iranian Supreme Leaders hung adjacent Orange Fish. In Mosaddeq’s Cenotaph (2015–present), Golshiri, self-proclaimed “taphographer”, unearths the figure of democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq (1951–1953) and his long-denied political legacies in official narratives of Iranian oil nationalization.

In the midst of the US-UK joint military efforts in the Gulf, a shift in geopolitical authority urges revisiting the history of Cold-War motivated CIA/MI6-led coup (1953) and the countervailing forces of petroleum and aesthetics. This paper examines methods of art-historical authorship in altering the course of history while contesting the voice of authority.