ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that "oil" might be envisioned as a plague, a form of affliction which, at times, is wrapped up within a staged propaganda production with the labels "liberation" and "progress." Isa Genzken's work addresses a wide range of dehumanizing outcomes of living in an increasingly digitized and dematerialized world, including those associated with diminished creative and critical capacities associated with intimacy, with material production and people. Genzken provides a stage for outsized American ambition and arrogance, but one that encourages a certain kind of wide-ranging conceptual and intuitive speculation—stubbornly resistant to being confined along national or historical lines. While securing scarce resources and improving their own security, the oily perpetrators package their persecutions with larger-than-life narratives, with glorified monuments, with heroic characters. Genzken's use of modified dummies and dolls is firmly rooted in Dada and Surrealist soil.
