Event overview
This lecture will consider the meaning and perception of plastic, a material that has seen a sharp increase in visibility in contemporary art of the past two decades.
Critical Environments Visual Cultures Public Programme Spring 2015
This lecture will consider the meaning and perception of plastic, a material that has seen a sharp increase in visibility in contemporary art of the past two decades. I argue that plastic rests at the intersection of the economic, ecological and aesthetic dilemmas which characterize our critical environment. I link plastic to an unseen stratigraphy of production and consumption generated by the global oil industry. More strongly, I show how plastic discloses the current paradigm of energy management, and its coextensive definitions of waste. The artists featured in this study visualize how automatic and autopoietic processes of global wasting (processes of machinic heterogenesis) extend into waste environments (wastescapes). In this way, plastic gathers together the seemingly dissociated registers of a restricted energy economy and ecological crisis.
Amanda Boetzkes is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph, Canada. Her research focuses on the intersection of the biological sciences (particularly ecology and neurology) with visual technologies and artistic practices of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. She is the author of The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and co-editor of Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Ashgate Press, 2014). She is currently writing a book entitled, Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste, which analyzes the use and representation of garbage in contemporary art, and how waste as such is defined, narrativized and aestheticized in the age of global capitalism.
‘Critical environments’ names several senses. If the (Greek) krinein is to sift and kritikos is the ability to discern, then we are faced with the work of interpretation. Yet if we turn to the Latin criticare, then those environments are diagnosed as gravely ill. We know that what we call the ‘environment’ is indeed in a state of crisis – acidification renders the oceans increasingly inhospitable to life; deforestation threatens both local ecologies and global climate maintenance; the appetite for meat eats up land as well as nonhuman life. Many of us choose not to know this, or perhaps maintain the fetishistic logic of knowing that comes with simultaneous disavowal. Corporate interests ranging across agriculture, pharmaceuticals, fossil fuels, and the super-saturation of all forms of media hamper the work of interpretation and the possibility of agency and intervention.
The event is free, no booking is required and all are welcome.
Series chairs: Lynn Turner & Wood Roberdeau
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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12 Mar 2015 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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