ABSTRACT
There is a historical narrative in Venezuela that has regarded the arts, and by extension culture, as a resource to be exploited like oil. The most eloquent is a statement made by Venezuelan visual artist and playwright César Rengifo in an interview to daily newspaper El Nacional while working on a mural for the military in 1973:
We are like oil: a reserve; but in Venezuela we have yet to be put in motion. (Rengifo, 1973, p. 12; translation by the author)
In the midst of the oil boom and The Great Venezuela of President Carlos Andrés Pérez, Rengifo asserts his value as an artist by positioning himself as a mineral resource, to suggest that the Petrostate would invest in artists like him, and culture more generally, only if they were akin to a reserve of crude oil. Rengifo’s statement illustrates the clout oil carries in defining the relationship between the Petrostate and culture in Venezuela. The discussion developed in this chapter reveals how a particular understanding of culture is privileged by the national oil industry under Petro-Socialism. It does so by examining the advertisement campaign launched by PDVSA La Estancia in 2013 titled Transformamos el petróleo en un recurso renovable para ti (We transform oil into a renewable resource for you) through the semiotic lenses of Charles S. Peirce’s Semiosis and Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part provides a review of George Yúdice’s proposition of the expediency of Culture as a Resource which enables its use for economic, social and political purposes. The second part provides an overview and context of PDVSA’s advertising campaign; it also describes the visual and textual components of the adverts. The third part develops the theoretical underpinning for the semiotic analysis of the visual element of the adverts. It looks at the public art depicted and the giant oil worker using Charles Peirce’s Semiosis. This is then followed by the semiotic analysis of the verbal text of the campaign using Barthes’ Theory of Mythical speech to elucidate the intended meanings behind the slogan ‘We transform oil into a renewable resource for you’ and thus what notion of culture is mobilised by PDVSA La Estancia. Finally, the analysis of the visual and verbal components
draws on George Yúdice to look into the discursive construction of oil as a renewable resource to examine how the adverts construe the notion of Culture as Renewable Oil. The chapter argues that culture then becomes inextricable from land, akin to a mineral deposit, and tightly controlled by the Petrostate. The inclusion of giant oil workers in the adverts, and their interactions with the urban spaces depicted, point to a re-signification of the city as an oil field, in an explicit attempt at naturalising a direct and somewhat mechanistic relationship between oil, culture and the city.
