She was born on the 28th of February 1991 and named Aaliyah, the exalted, days after Saddam’s retreating forces set fire to the oilfields in Kuwait. From their apartment in Mayfair, the baby Aaliyah’s mother held her close to her bosom as she watched on TV the inferno their home had become. It was the picture of the dead birds, their little beaks protruding from the sticky oil slick that struck Ummi the hardest. For days she could not forget the sight of the beaks choking up and so she wept into her little girl’s squirming body, into her scent of baby powder and baby soap and the girl absorbed all that she could, the wails and the whimpers, though she would never be able to say I remember. No, Aaliyah wouldn’t be able to recall the panic of the gas attacks or the highway of death or the plumes of smoke, all in fuzzy television pictures. Or even the skies as they turned dark, the nights themselves lit up like hell, the black lakes of oil leaking out to sea or the soldiers’ bodies charred to charcoal in their trucks, their skin, hair and metal no longer distinguishable. No, all she remembers today are Ummi’s stories for Ummi saved the papers of the day and instead of bedtime fairy tales, told Aaliyah about the invasion when she was three, four, five, six and it was only when the demons of black seas and fire balls began to haunt Aaliyah’s dreams did her Baba step in and tell Ummi no more of this.
The black seas seeped into her veins though and Aaliyah made crude her life’s work because it was under its epic phenomenon that she came to gain her consciousness of the world and because she grew into a melancholic, emo type–the black eyeliner becoming her gray eyes so well–she turned to art to get inside the skin of the slick. She couldn’t get past its materiality, felt it throb in her pulse points, the dark slime, the pearlescent holographic streaks swirling like psychedelic shapes in her mind’s eye and she saw herself rising from them, a prophet of what the black gold would bring to the desert; Corvettes and Camaros first, tall spires of glass like crystal in the sky then eventually fire and brimstone, she predicted, the apocalypse itself would come. She wrote songs about it, about the spurt of black, the earth’s own ejaculation, a marker, she reckoned of eschatological messianic time, recorded them with a studio in LA and called herself PetroSlut for a little while. Her synthy beats and syncopated lyrics of effortless rap twinning English and Arabic told of all that came after the war; a teenhood in Kuwait City, the feel of the Toyota Landcruiser’s AC blast in her face, Aerosmith for Armageddon playing on the Discman for days on end and her own salty fingertips brushing against a girl’s lips sweetened on the smack of RC Cola.
Eventually she turned to performance art, got serious, dropped the nickname and for her first grand production she learned synchronized swimming and filmed herself in a dark lake wearing an iridescent bodysuit that shimmered black, blue, green, pink to look like what else but the slick itself as the title track from the 1999 James Bond The World Is Not Enough played in the background. Part beauty, part gorgon, she swam round and round then emerged from the water, her skin sheathed, long black hair plastered to the skull and as she opened her mouth fire erupted in her eyes and the screen dripped to black but only after the audience saw the mole under her left eye that looked like a teardrop and made her appear like a saint crying for the sins of the world which in a way she was being a contemporary artist and all that.
It was a James Bond reference again for her next performance, you know the scene, Quantum of Solace, the Goldfinger homage, Miss Strawberry Fields drowned naked in crude and her body left glistening black as a warning on the bed in Bond’s hotel room in La Paz. Aaliyah lay on a hotel bed in the middle of a blue chip gallery, her skin covered in the shiny black as the New York it-crowd walked around, sipping white wine spritzers, never reds because reds stain the polished concrete flooring and nodding to each other saying yes, indeed the girl had done something spectacular yet again. Even Jerry Saltz called her the artworld’s baby-faced killer.
And tonight the spectators have come again, in their hundreds to this biennial in the Saudi Arabian desert to see the last piece in the trilogy because Aaliyah knows that the good things, the epics come in threes. Giant, as it is called, appropriates and transforms a single scene from the Rock Hudson, James Dean, Liz Taylor 1956 starrer of the same name, the scene in which Dean’s coyote-like Jett Rink strikes a well on his property in Texas. Sopping in black oil, Rink drives up to Southern old-money Hudson’s Bick Benedict and tells him My well came in big, so big, Bick and there’s more down there and there’s bigger wells. I’m rich, Bick. I’m a rich ‘un. I’m a rich boy. Me, I’m gonna have more money than you ever thought you could have!
The first scene is Aaliyah as Rink in a white kandura–the whole act having been transported to Arabian lands you see–the moment when the well begins to spurt oil, a blowout, a geyser of black liquid and she lets the darkness cover her body, laughs with white teeth, bathes in it till she is soaked to the skin. She stumbles around, like she’s drunk, which she secretly is on syrupy black market bourbon and because also she has to convey, through the character’s body, that Rink’s life and life itself, life on earth, the very notion of it will never be the same again. Fade to black. Copiously stained now, Aaliyah jumps out of a jalopy and climbs the pristine white steps of a Southern style plantation home and what’s a Southern style plantation home doing in the Arabian desert you ask and the answer is simple, it’s pastiche of course. Aaliyah leans her hand thick with black on a white column, says her line and because there is no Rock Hudson stand-in here, she speaks directly to the audience not with a Southern twang but in a thick guttural Arab accent, her Baba’s voice which she has always been able to pull so easily, her own being so deep and husky. Just like Dean does in the movie, she strikes a few punches but into the empty air then jumps back into the beat up truck and drives into the dusty sun kissed dunes. The audience applauds, gets to their feet and there is chatter of carte blanche Turbine Hall commissions, Venice pavilions, Guggenheim solos over wine glasses filled with sparkling apple juice, the desert being dry in more ways than one. In the green room set apart just for her, The Artist Formerly Known as PetroSlut pulls on a cherry vape as the black toxic too unsafe-for-skin burning goop drips down her body and onto the floor, where it gathers into a thick glutinous pool. What are you? she whispers to it. The earth’s blood or its tears?