On her book Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste
Cover Interview of November 13, 2019
In a nutshell
Waste occupies a paradoxical position today: it is made to be disposable, and we want to get rid of it, but we cannot. Where
at other times in history, we’ve been able to banish waste—burn it up, bury it,
or otherwise make it disappear—today, we are producing forms of waste that do
not disappear. While we still have a drive to waste, waste therefore perpetually
returns to us, often in toxic forms. Art gives us many perspectives—from the
intimate to the global—of these eternal returns of contemporary waste.
This is a book about contemporary art and
what it has to tell us about our production and consumption of waste. It charts
a general preoccupation with different forms of waste in contemporary art, and
it considers how artists use waste to critique, express, and imagine the global
ecological condition. The book analyzes waste from an aesthetic perspective,
and thinks about art as an ecological form, and specifically a form of waste.
Addressing diverse artistic practices from
around the world, the book features artists from the United States, Canada and Mexico,
to Brazil, South Korea, China, and Europe, I consider artworks that are
situated in landfills, installations made entirely out of fluorescent plastics,
performance and body art that engage waste materials, as well as documentary
photographs and films that track the movement and accumulation of
non-biodegradable waste. So the scope of the book is expansive.
An important facet of the argument is that
the forms of waste we have been producing since the mid-20th century are deeply
tied both materially and ideologically to oil capital. The rise of the global
oil industry has put us at an impasse: we are situated between a cultural imperative
to conserve and recycle energy for ecological reasons such as climate change, but
we are also subject to an economic imperative to expand oil production, and with
it, oil consumption, on the other. How can we both burn oil and conserve energy?
Art shows us how the material wastes of the cultures of global oil express
exactly this dilemma. Waste keeps coming back in toxic forms.
The book includes a genealogy of waste art
from its modernist origins to its contemporary global and ecological conditions.
It begins with an analysis of the politics and representation of gleaning and
ragpicking in art in the nineteenth century. From that starting point, I
discuss more recent forms of waste handling in art, including interventions in
landfills, exchange-based practices, ecologically-charged natural history
displays, and visual practices involving plastics. These aesthetic forms show
the emergence of a new waste imaginary that struggles with the scale of climate
change and its effects, the global scope of oil capital, processes of
anthropogenesis which change the nomenclature of life itself, and the
possibilities of resistance and ethical response that emerge from this fraught
terrain.
The best way to read this book is to look
at the artworks! The book is beautifully designed, and the sequence of the
images articulates the movement of the argument. But more than this, the book
is attentive to the language and poetics of theorists and artists dealing with
waste, elemental philosophy, and even the aesthetic dimensions of the oil
economy itself.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Waste occupies a paradoxical position today: it is made to be disposable, and we want to get rid of it, but we cannot. Where at other times in history, we’ve been able to banish waste—burn it up, bury it, or otherwise make it disappear—today, we are producing forms of waste that do not disappear. While we still have a drive to waste, waste therefore perpetually returns to us, often in toxic forms. Art gives us many perspectives—from the intimate to the global—of these eternal returns of contemporary waste.
This is a book about contemporary art and what it has to tell us about our production and consumption of waste. It charts a general preoccupation with different forms of waste in contemporary art, and it considers how artists use waste to critique, express, and imagine the global ecological condition. The book analyzes waste from an aesthetic perspective, and thinks about art as an ecological form, and specifically a form of waste.
Addressing diverse artistic practices from around the world, the book features artists from the United States, Canada and Mexico, to Brazil, South Korea, China, and Europe, I consider artworks that are situated in landfills, installations made entirely out of fluorescent plastics, performance and body art that engage waste materials, as well as documentary photographs and films that track the movement and accumulation of non-biodegradable waste. So the scope of the book is expansive.
An important facet of the argument is that the forms of waste we have been producing since the mid-20th century are deeply tied both materially and ideologically to oil capital. The rise of the global oil industry has put us at an impasse: we are situated between a cultural imperative to conserve and recycle energy for ecological reasons such as climate change, but we are also subject to an economic imperative to expand oil production, and with it, oil consumption, on the other. How can we both burn oil and conserve energy? Art shows us how the material wastes of the cultures of global oil express exactly this dilemma. Waste keeps coming back in toxic forms.
The book includes a genealogy of waste art from its modernist origins to its contemporary global and ecological conditions. It begins with an analysis of the politics and representation of gleaning and ragpicking in art in the nineteenth century. From that starting point, I discuss more recent forms of waste handling in art, including interventions in landfills, exchange-based practices, ecologically-charged natural history displays, and visual practices involving plastics. These aesthetic forms show the emergence of a new waste imaginary that struggles with the scale of climate change and its effects, the global scope of oil capital, processes of anthropogenesis which change the nomenclature of life itself, and the possibilities of resistance and ethical response that emerge from this fraught terrain.
The best way to read this book is to look at the artworks! The book is beautifully designed, and the sequence of the images articulates the movement of the argument. But more than this, the book is attentive to the language and poetics of theorists and artists dealing with waste, elemental philosophy, and even the aesthetic dimensions of the oil economy itself.