coe191_boetzkes.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Well, come back, everyone to

Speaker2: [00:00:25] The Cultures of Energy podcast coming to you, not live,

Speaker1: [00:00:30] But direct from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Simone, how are you doing today?

Speaker3: [00:00:36] Did you say how since you asked, I'm doing very well and my voice is going a little scratchy or something from talking too much. Yeah. Yesterday, I had to. I had to fight off the comments of climate deniers in real time live live on radio in Edmonton. It was an Edmonton station,

Speaker1: [00:00:58] And it's like a Black Mirror episode, like a video game where you have to like, fight, fight off climate deniers in real

Speaker3: [00:01:04] Time. Yeah, and I was totally I was I was totally unwarranted. I won't say unprepared because I think I was pretty prepared but unwarranted by the journalists themselves. I was listening to because you can hear the radio going in the background as they're sort of waiting to put you on, right? Yeah. And I could hear it was AM Radio and I was like, Oh shit, right in Edmonton, which is, you know, another oil next year

Speaker1: [00:01:29] They are sharpening their knives. I was like climbing out of their oil barrels covered in oil.

Speaker3: [00:01:36] Yeah, I was a little tar sands. That's OK. But I had been I had been steeling myself as it were for that because I've also been getting some hate mail, some hate email. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:01:47] Let's talk about the hate mail. The hate mail is pretty. I mean, actually, what people would like to hear us talk about is what happened at the top of the mountain. But why don't we work backwards to that? We'll start with the unpleasant part first and end with the uplifting part. So tell us about the craziest piece of hate mail you received.

Speaker3: [00:02:04] Well, I mean, I don't know, is it? Is it crazy or it just is it just committed? I'm not sure. I mean, there's a kind of there's there's a couple of genres. I'd say there's the kind of theological diatribe, and I got a very, very long email. That's one thing that they all have in common. They're all really long. Yeah, they got a lot of tech on their hands. They got a lot of time and a lot of words like these are like seven page emails. I'm not kidding. And they always come with illustrations as well. So the first big one I got was really it was a kind of theological diatribe about how I clearly didn't have an understanding of her God, what she calls my God, right? And then she spelled out how her God is going to rain down fire and brimstone. Essentially, there will be fires wiping out the evil hordes, and it was illustrated with pages from her Bible that had a number of different colors of highlighter markers. So there's like so pink and some yellow, and then there's some silver underlining and then those little tabs that you use when you're an undergraduate and you're studying for your your exams, you put those little tabs that stick out of the side of the book and their stickers are like little post-its. And those were those said in all caps curse pointing to the curse so that that was an interesting one.

Speaker1: [00:03:21] I mean, that's disturbing a lot of a lot of levels, but I did when I saw that image thing to myself, that looks an awful lot like my copy of the Marx Engels reader.

Speaker3: [00:03:30] Well, I know it looks like your copy of the Marx Engels reader, and it looks like my copy of the history of sexuality. Except for the curse part I. It gives us the only exception

Speaker1: [00:03:41] I curse you, Michel fuku I will cost you and your terrifying

Speaker3: [00:03:46] Prose. If she only knew, if she only knew it was in the pages of that book, it would be really raining down. Some crystal

Speaker1: [00:03:53] Is what

Speaker3: [00:03:54] You're trying to say. So then, you know, but I'm kind of, as you pointed out, like to be generous like this. I don't know if this person has a mental illness or not, or if they just have a lot of religious conviction. I can't, I can't really tell. So then the other genre is the the scientific climate doubt and climate denial diatribe. So that's where this this came yesterday. This person has found one paper apparently written by two. I don't even know if they're scientists who argue that global warming is not real and the greenhouse gases cannot be causing global warming. And there is, I mean, I didn't read the whole thing again because it's like 12 pages of a bunch of bogus stuff, and I don't even want to litter my brain with it. But there was an illustration at the end and some notes on how saying that, saying that you're making a greenhouse out of gas is like making a boat out of barbed wire. What? Well, I don't know. And then, you know, and then as you scroll down, you saw there was a this was illustrated with there was a picture of Greta Thunberg in kind of sort of in a gray scale and underneath that pictures of demon children with their eyes sort of glowing white, right? And then so that was Greta's representative. That was her pick. Yeah. And then there's this other thing that took me a minute to figure out because like the semiotics of it are so rich and dynamic. So it's a. Color sort of photograph, I guess, of Jesus clearly Jesus, his body being crucified on a wind turbine, but with the head of Al Gore, and then there's a bunch of stuff about repent. But that was this was the scientific disproving of Germany's climate change theory.

Speaker1: [00:05:42] I mean, that image alone probably needs a couple of dissertations to unpack it. But in some ways, I'm not sure that's not a pro-Gore image. But anyway, let's let's leave that aside for a second.

Speaker3: [00:05:54] Yeah, but my final note on this on this mail and again, I'm not reading it because it's a little disturbing. I guess I didn't want to get into it and certainly not replying, but I will say they're always very, very polite. You know, it's like Dear Professor Health

Speaker1: [00:06:09] As they're cursing you.

Speaker3: [00:06:11] Well, yeah, I mean, there's a weird, there's a weird, there's a strange form of respect and it all.

Speaker1: [00:06:16] I'm assigning you to eternal damnation.

Speaker3: [00:06:20] You were so dear, professor, how you were quoted as saying. And then a perfect quote with all proper citation and everything. That's that. Well, I think they'll be a little bit more. Maybe not too much more.

Speaker1: [00:06:31] No, I don't. But I do. I do see that spectrum, too, and I'm not sure which one disturbs me more. The just outright crazy people who are obviously every synapse is firing and there the God center of their brain or whatever. And it could be just because they are in a heightened sense of emergency for all sorts of reasons and in a weird way are performing climate emergency, perhaps without being aware of it or the cynical people who are being paid, you know, by the fossil fuel industry and their allies to to try to cherry pick data in such a way that they can construct doubtful narratives or just simply cast doubt upon climate science. And those are the people who are saying, Well, you know the glacier. You know that glacier melted before 1950. So it's not really contemporary climate change or it's not contemporary emissions that have anything to do with it. The whole thing is just ridiculous, but again, small minority compared to the number of people who have said very nice things about the whole project and have not threatened or coerced us. So kudos to those people. Kudos to the people who did not go straight to the chorus.

Speaker3: [00:07:39] Thank you for not cursing.

Speaker2: [00:07:41] So anyway, yeah, last week was amazing.

Speaker1: [00:07:43] So let's let's talk about that for a few minutes before we wrap up. And I'll just say that the trip up the mountain went. I think about as well as could have been expected in terms of the logistics of it and in terms of the mood of it. I mean, it was a very, very lovely event and we had to invent certain things along the way. But I think it really captured everything that we had hoped to accomplish. We started with the the prime minister of Iceland and Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, saying some very kind and encouraging words about the importance of the memorial and also about what the death of a glacier indicated for the state of climate emergency more broadly. We hiked our way up over many stones holding our children behind us as they. What did they say? They accused us of abandonment and also making them climb a mountain they hadn't consented to, both of which I guess were true in a certain way. And then at the top, we had a we had little march in silence to this the spot itself. Some excellent speeches by by, under snare and order.

Speaker3: [00:08:51] Sigurdson Order, also the glaciologist who declared, OK, your quotes to be a glacier no more back in 2014, brought up to the top of the mountain or Kill Cold Death certificate, which he he read from, which was super powerful and he had filled it out. It was an official Icelandic death certificate. Put the name in there and it's funny I'm talking to him afterwards. He's like, It's really difficult to create a death certificate without a christening certificate like that. This that this glacier had never been christened had never been sort of marked as having a life in a way, I guess, a spiritual life. But he put down the cause of death as humans, so humans were the cause of occupant's death. And he's done this for several other smaller glaciers around Iceland that were unnamed. The sort of again, like the kind of the unquestioned, I guess, he unloved children. So that was powerful. Yeah, and we had some words, and I thought it was a solemn occasion, in part because we walked the last hundred meters or so in silence. That was something that André recommended as a it's a kind of Icelandic hiking or walking tradition where you walk in silence and you never turn back like you can't. You can't turn around and you think of three wishes.

Speaker3: [00:10:11] And if you do that, if you walk in silence, you never turn back. I guess you'll be granted the three wishes. So people were imagining us as they were walking and it was it had been. A tough hike up to the top right over all these rocks, it's not an easy hike, but getting centered and focusing for that last hundred metres was, I think, quite moving. And even though we had abandoned our daughter on the hike up there, which I think she kind of enjoyed actually, because she got to hang out with a big girl for that last hundred metres, I, you know, we said, Well, we'll walk with you, we'll walk right with you. But it's kind of tough going over the stones and people can get discombobulated and lost, and you're not sure exactly who's behind you. And so we started off and I was going kind of fast and I wasn't sure, and we were going going and keeping quiet. And I was wondering, I was like, if she's still behind me, like, I'm not sure if she's still behind me or if she's gotten, you know, sort of stranded further back. And I really wanted to turn around and see if she was there. But I couldn't because you can't turn back,

Speaker1: [00:11:17] Get it in your wishes.

Speaker3: [00:11:18] Yeah. Well, and also like I think that this, you know, don't look back is really a kind of it's a metaphor for sort of moving forward, stepping forward in this climatological apocalypse that we're currently existing in. We sort of can't turn back. We have to keep moving ahead with whatever solutions we can come up with. But so I couldn't turn around and that was sort of frustrating. And I. So instead of turning around, I just reached back my hand like really tentatively because I wasn't sure who was behind me. And I thought if it weren't her, it would be really weird for me to stick my hand out to some stranger behind me.

Speaker1: [00:12:00] Under the circumstances, I don't think.

Speaker3: [00:12:02] So I just very tentatively put my little paw behind me with my glove and then like a second later, I felt her little hand or I started crying. I'm getting kind of weepy now, just thinking of it. I think the mood at the top was very solemn and thoughtful and respectful and remorseful. But also, you know, a lot of calls to action because we have these young climate warriors with us and who have been doing the school strikes. And they said we had the young woman who who did her poem about Arc. And so that was inspiring. But I think it was a solemn event. It was a solemn as it could be, given how many press were there, which changes the mood about when there's a bunch of cameras and recorders around. We left the ceremony. The final closing of the ceremony was for people to take another moment of silence, to make one conviction, one commitment and one vow as to what they would do to make a positive change. Not just a wish, not just a kind of a thought like, Oh, I wish climate change would end, Oh, I want world peace. But like a real action that you can do that you will do a commitment. So that's how we kind of left it. Ok, sorry, I've been talking about.

Speaker1: [00:13:14] Go ahead. Well, I would just say when you hike a mountain together, that's an achievement and people really revel in that collective achievement. So for sure, I mean, I think that was just as important as the feelings of remorse. And I think that, yeah, I mean, for me, it's more about the joy that gets us through than than just being sad and grief filled, because that's just a depressive spiral, which you can easily feed every time you open your media and write. The Amazon forests are all burning today, right? Right.

Speaker3: [00:13:43] I mean, well, that's why we needed to end with real action and not just, you know, like, yeah, we climb the mountain together, which is part of it for sure. Like, it is a real achievement to do that because it was, you know, challenging, I think, and we ate together on the mountain. And that's great. And I think everyone felt good about the company and who they were with and that everyone was feeling that commitment.

Speaker1: [00:14:05] Yeah, no. In the end, I mean, the action is what matters. But I think, you know, what gets you going is not just feeling sad. Yeah, and I think that's that's the important thing to underscore is that is that people took it seriously, but it wasn't like just kind of like a cry fest.

Speaker3: [00:14:22] Oh, no, no.

Speaker2: [00:14:23] And on the way back down, we we

Speaker1: [00:14:26] Exchanged tales and I met on the way up a guy who has been doing research on the lake on the top of ork, which is pretty fascinating. He was telling me about that and just sent me an email so we can hopefully learn more about what's called Blue Everton or Blue Lake, which is the new lake in the highest altitude lake in Iceland now. So the glacier is the glacier is gone, but there's a lake now, so with death also comes transformation. And yeah, so we're looking ahead to thinking about next year already. But that's, you know, TBD at the moment, and I think this thing is finally over.

Speaker3: [00:15:01] Well, maybe I don't know. I mean, at least I think America is just figuring it out, but I'm not sure.

Speaker1: [00:15:07] Maybe am radio still hasn't figured out yet, but I think that the orks story has now become part of history, which is great. But I also think our attention has to move on to other challenges that are throwing themselves in our. Faces right now, so yeah, we'll be there for that, too.

Speaker3: [00:15:23] Hopefully, no, there's not much more to be done about, OK, no orcas live, lived and died,

Speaker1: [00:15:29] But people should go visit. If you're in Iceland and you want that adventure or want to do it, you should follow the coordinates and get a GPS and go up to the top yourself. It's well worth it. It is a beautiful, a beautiful experience and there's much to see.

Speaker2: [00:15:43] So let's pivot now to our interview for today, which

Speaker1: [00:15:47] Is with Amanda Buttkiss from the University of Guelph. We are talking about her new book, Plastic Capitalism, which gets into Art and Waste and Capitalism and the Climate of Plastic, as she puts it, super interesting text, and

Speaker3: [00:16:05] It's got a super creepy and interesting piece of art on the front. That's I couldn't tear my eyes away from that absolutely beautiful but frightening.

Speaker1: [00:16:16] We won't spoil it. Yeah. And Amanda Amanda has been part of the kind of energy humanity seen for many years, part of the first generation. So super happy to finally have her on the podcast talking about her work and without any further ado, then, because I think we're running a little bit long. Simone, how what do you want to say?

Speaker3: [00:16:33] Go, Amanda.

Speaker2: [00:16:53] Welcome back, everyone, to the cultures of energy podcasts. We are more than delighted to have on the line from Guelph. Amanda Buttkiss Amanda, how are you doing?

Speaker4: [00:17:01] Hi, hi, I'm doing well.

Speaker2: [00:17:04] Well, we just want to congratulate you, first of all, on this marvelous new book, Plastic Capitalism, which has just come out from MIT. And that is going to be the main focus of our discussion today. So I will just without any further preliminaries, just hand things over to my wonderful co-host here. Simone, how

Speaker5: [00:17:22] So, Amanda, in this wonderful book? One of the things that you point us to and that is one of the larger thematics of the book overall, is the way that there's a kind of trend that you've noticed and perceived about the visualization of waste and how it's appearing in contemporary art. So as a way to kind of start us off, I thought I would ask what was the moment of recognition or realization on your part when you started to see waste within art sort of popping up everywhere, it seems?

Speaker4: [00:17:57] Oh, it was quite a long time ago. I've actually been working on this book, I think, for maybe 10 years, and I I was on my post-doc living in Boston, and I saw an exhibition by the Mexico City based artist Melanie Smith. And this was at the MIT List gallery, and I saw a piece called Orange Lush, which I wrote about in the book, and she has a really good way of showing how plastic has gotten into every sphere of life, and especially a way of visualizing how that looks in Mexico City. So that exhibition that was quite a while ago now, maybe 2007, but it struck a chord. And then after that, I couldn't not see how how plastic in particular was a form of waste that was entering into the visual field in a big way. And so a few more exhibitions after that. There was an exhibition by this Korean artist, Che Jong Hwa at the Hayward Gallery in London, and that was that was kind of a massive construction of these plastic sieves, all kind of strung together. And that also had that you had to kind of move through and navigate. So so that was, you know, those are kind of two examples, but I've seen many, many more.

Speaker2: [00:19:26] This is is a really fascinating project and there's much to say about plastic itself. But one of the other dimensions of the book that I find really interesting and provocative is your discussion about how, in some ways, let's call it contemporary environmentalist discourse on zero waste on the pursuit of sustainability itself may kind of impede our imagination of alternatives to capitalist economy. Could you say a little bit more about that? I feel like this is a really interesting and provocative main argument in the book.

Speaker4: [00:20:02] Yeah, I think a lot has been written about art and garbage or trash, but the way that I wanted to write about it was thinking through how art shows us something about our economies of energy use and energy expenditure. So I was it was really important to me to make a distinction between those two things. So on the one hand, the way we consume energy versus the way we expend energy. And so and that that's a little bit of a convoluted distinction, but it seemed to me that one of the facets, I mean, it kind of give a characterization of our energy economy and especially like with a particular focus on the fossil fuel economy so that we're, you know, to think about how we're in. We have a globalized economy and it's dependent on fossil fuel resources and especially the consumption of fossil fuels. And so one of the one of the ways I was trying to think about that is how we produce unseen wastes like carbon emissions, but that these are global wastes that or this is a global form of waste that nobody is really accountable for.

Speaker4: [00:21:19] And so I was thinking about that through through the writings of George Battye, who who has a series of energy expenditure. And, you know, he's a mid-century theorist, poet, surrealist. But he wrote this book on economy and energy economies. And so he's he's the person that I draw from to make this distinction between energy use and consumption. But for him, there's it's it's possible to think about these. Total waste. And at the time, he was thinking about nuclear explosions as a kind of the way that social systems produce energy to total form of waste. So he argues that we actually need to expend energy, but that the regime of bourgeois capitalism doesn't. It prohibits the use or the expenditure of energy. And instead, we have we have kind of false false forms of consumption like, say, spending money, which feels like an energy expenditure. But in fact, it leads into an economy in which we're just accumulating and never expending energy, except in these total forms. Right. So I'll just pause there. Maybe you wanted to. Maybe you had something to say.

Speaker2: [00:22:40] Well, I mean, just I think that it's really an important distinction that you're drawing on there, and it's a very creative kind of extension of baptise work to our contemporary situation. And I guess I'm wondering, to what extent do you think the artists themselves are kind of onto that wavelength that that this distinction between kind of the use of energy as expenditure and is consumption is something that they're playing around with in their work? Or is this something where you feel this is the work of the critical humanities to step in and kind of surface something that may not be entirely that the artists themselves may not be entirely aware of?

Speaker4: [00:23:16] Yeah, I think that different artists are attuned, you know, like it is a theorized of like the book is a theory of many different artworks, right? So. And I think to greater and lesser extents, like an artist like Thomas Hirschhorn, I write about this work jumbo spoons and big cake. And I think of that as pretty exemplary of a kind of perfect visualization of the global energy economy and also the forms of the forms of exploitation and sacrifice that go into that economy. So what what kind of resources does the economy draw from and then visualizing how it produces these different forms of waste? So just just as a kind of description of this artwork, it's kind of it actually is a kind of jumbo. There's a big cake in the middle, and it's there are different pieces that are wrapped up in plastic and they're kind of. And then there are these giant novelty spoons that are all novelty spoons that are a testament to the different major ideals or ideologies of the 20th century. And the spoons are dipped in blood or they're seemingly dipped in blood. And so. And so each of these, in a sense, he's trying to point to, OK, there's this underbelly to the global economy, even as we're all trying to draw from one major energy source.

Speaker4: [00:24:45] So somebody like Thomas Hirschhorn kind of shows all the different, you know, it's almost like a makeshift artwork. You can see cardboard plastic materials that people would normally associate with packaging and transport of goods rather than the goods themselves. So it's a kind of inversion of the commodity. It's more like a waste system, but then also how that economy is reliant on on the energy of people's, you know, people's life itself as a form of energy. So I'm not describing that work, maybe as well, but I would say somebody like Thomas Hirschhorn is attuned to the work of Battye or that theory. But I don't think it's like there are other artists who have been, you know, who study fossil fuel companies or somebody like Kelly Joswiak, who does this work on the plastic agglomerate. And she actually worked with with a geologist and had a hand in coining that phrase. So she's been studying the emergence of plastic and the emergence, you know, the kind of fusion of geological sediment and plastic together and also photographing plastic refineries and and and showing these landscapes where plastic is produced. So different artists plug into different, different facets of what is this very large, sprawling system that is the energy economy or that's the fossil fuel economy.

Speaker5: [00:26:15] And I think one of the important things that we see in this book throughout, and it's related to the descriptions that you've just given us of the artworks and the artists themselves is the very ambivalent relationship that artists and viewers, for that matter, have to the waste objects and representations within the works themselves. So you describe these as sometimes their aesthetic size or sometimes they're reviled or somewhere in between, right? I imagine there's a continuum, but that this is explicitly tied to a global economic regime and set of principles that you describe as a form of. Global capitalism and energy management, and I thought that this was a really provocative way of putting it, that energy management is a form of global capitalism, that it provides the bones and the infrastructure, if you will, for this global economic order. And so I wanted to invite you to to think about that or talk about that a little bit more broadly and explain how you see the the global capitalist form of energy management being enacted played out, absorbed into these artworks.

Speaker4: [00:27:23] Yeah, I mean, they're they're kind of two facets of it. I mean, one thing I was quite interested in is the way that the economy actually has an implicit morality to it. So when we think about something like the, you know what, people you know, when I talk about the paradigm of zero waste and the idea that people are doing their best actually to tackle environmental problems through models of zero waste sustainability, trying to conserve energy, they're acting on this idea that expending energy is wrong and and they're trying to not do that when, in fact, that produces a kind of impoverishment or it depletes, it depletes life, it prevents biodegradation. Or there's a there's a kind of schema going on by which ecological cycles can't function or the the ecological metabolism is perturbed. And then there's also a kind of I was compelled by this argument, and this is an argument I think Jennifer Bryce makes really clear in her book program Earth. She talks about how images and sense systems, media, the kind of media that we use to produce images and to produce media images actually become part of the environments that they're trying to sense. So there's a way that as we sense the ways that we sense or the technologies that we use to sense actually concrete into this whole nexus that that is the environment itself. And so there's a way that I think artists are introducing their own practices into environments, entering into it. So there's a kind of self-reflection, I guess that's happening. So when I think about how that might look, I was quite interested in the work of Portia Munson.

Speaker4: [00:29:23] So she's creates these. She actually has been collecting plastics for a long time, and she and she makes these installations out of plastic. She had one called the Pink Project. She has another one called Greenpeace, and she just collected all these plastics out of the same color and then kind of replicated environment. So Greenpeace, there's one called Greenpeace Lawn, and she collected all these objects that are related to lawn care, but they're made out of plastic. And then she kind of created this this lawn out of it. And so in a way, there's a kind of play on on, of course, the word Greenpeace and the way that we, we we have a care about the environment through something like the care of our yards or the care of our vegetation. But at the same time, don't see the forest for the trees in a sense, or you don't see the environment for the lawn. And so there's a kind of displacement of nature that's going on in the very depiction or representation of of the paradigm of waste that we're in, by which you know, how we even picture the environment is already infused with the waste that we're producing. And so we can't really extricate ourselves or we're always already in the midst of the waste that we're producing, even as we represent it. So there's a fundamental perspective that's immersed in in the waste we produce in the waste we produce.

Speaker5: [00:30:49] Mm hmm. I mean, there's a way in which we see how we then occupy this paradoxical position, both as fantasizing and appreciating this waste, while recognizing its its troubling existence and having to kind of straddle those two spaces. You know, I think it's really interesting. One of the other points that you make is that environmentalism in general has been of late, pretty much subsumed under the mantle of climate. Climate change, climatological ruin, climate justice. All of these questions about sustainability and the kind of topic of climate and earth systems. I think that's a really important point. You also find inspiration in addition to Battye from Old Slavoj Zizek. And I wanted to turn to one of to a point that he makes and just ask you how you feel about it. So let me just this is sort of paraphrasing, but what what he's arguing here is that what we need in the face of our denial of this? And an environmental disaster is not to return to these roots in nature, right, with capital A.. But to cut ourselves off further from it only through this kind of alienation from nature are we going to be capable of a true love of the world. And then you say, as he puts it, love is not idealization, but rather acceptance of the flaws and failures of the beloved. So true it is to see perfection in imperfection itself. So here's the here's the punch line the true ecologist for Zizek loves trash. Do you agree or disagree?

Speaker4: [00:32:27] You know, I I love this quote and I I appreciate the perspective that Zizek comes from. So yes, I agree on many counts. At the same time, even even like to love trash is too impassioned for me, and it and it actually gets quite a bit more complicated than than I think Go-Jek really is able to point to, because he's, you know, when he makes this argument and he, you know, he's published this argument in a few different forms. But I think people know it from Astra Taylor's documentary where he's, you know, where he's actually saying this and he's in a in a landfill or a waste management facility. Well, that's that's the trash that goes to the landfill, but that's different than than the kind of anthropogenic source of waste that that's going on. And that's actually a little bit difficult to love, per say. So what I get to what I like about this argument is this idea of acknowledging, you know, instead of having this ideal of nature, we acknowledge that there is this, this kind of other of ecology. There's this other consciousness altogether and it kind of alienation from nature and eventually what I get to by the end of the book.

Speaker4: [00:33:46] For me, this is a return to the ideas of Lucy and I. I'm never really far from her, but she has this, you know, she might say she has similar arguments about how one has to difference oneself from the other in order to truly love the other, and that that has a bearing on how we might view and take an ethical attitude towards waste itself, but also all the living beings of the future. So I was really quite interested in the ways that art might intervene on the ideologies of the future that are that are part of our fossil fuel regime and especially the ways that they prevent us from, you know, from planning for the future or having a future, except except through replication of the current economy. And so everybody has an argument about indifference. And so rather than saying the love of a love of trash, I have this, you know, the position that I prefer to see being carried out through art and that I think is maybe even a critical position for me is this notion of indifference. So in a sense, we're immersed in waste, but we might start to think ourselves forward from an indifferent position to that waste.

Speaker2: [00:35:10] One of the really fascinating things about the focus on ways start here is the way in which art itself has a kind of symmetry with waste, right? I mean, a lot of art is not a sight for like productive use of capital or for the accumulation of capital and bourgeois economy. Of course, there are exceptions and kind of the one percent of artists who whose work, you know, become highly valuable commodities and are treated very preciously and so forth. It's different, but you could say a lot of art. A lot of art is wasteful. A lot of art doesn't seem to have a kind of productive role in the bourgeois economy or capitalist society. In other words, there's a certain kind of kinship between art and waste. I guess that I think you're getting at here. That's kind of fascinating. And I wanted to to ask you if you could talk a little bit about that and whether this this kind of kinship between art and waste actually allows for any particular kinds of critical leverage, you think?

Speaker4: [00:36:08] Yeah, I think that's where a history of art is actually really important. I think for thinking through ecological modes of being that there was always this conflicted relationship between art and art and economy, but especially art and and function. You know that everything, everything has to work and everything is working towards capital accumulation. So artists started, you know, this goes all the way back to the 19th century to kind of enact their own, enact their own misuses or dysfunctionality their own wastefulness. And so, you know, I. Cite a few examples, like the new realist French artist Arman has has this has a piece that's just it's a big cube of plexiglass filled with electric razors and all of them in a state of dysfunction or disuse. And so there's a way that it's that it's trying to, you know, it's kind of making a play on. Here's an aesthetic object, a perfect cube, but it's actually just replete with waste. And so so that history is there. But I think it's also hard for artists to. I think a lot of artists are many of them that I spoke to, you know, they actually were trying to create a practice and not just an object, but create a practice that would that would in some way alleviate the anxieties like the ecological anxieties.

Speaker4: [00:37:40] And so in a sense, they begin with this like, I want to use trash because it's, you know, it's, you know, I want to engage this as a material. But then of course, they realize that the material just leads to a much larger system. And then it becomes actually it becomes more interesting for art. But that's the point at which the art starts to point to a kind of hyper objective way. Or it starts to it starts to give us a sense of a waste scape, something that is far reaching into the future. One example of this, I think, is Tara Donovan, who does these installations that look like landscapes and they're and they're made up of plastic cups just sealed together. And there's a way that she kind of invokes a world that is totally devoid of life or which in which waste has has displaced life altogether. And so I think that's that's the way that artists are are able to kind of apply themselves in this speculative position. So they're looking forward and they're looking at looking at the way that materiality stretches forward and independently of us as well.

Speaker5: [00:38:53] Amanda, I mean, one of the other things you point out is that again, I mean, I think there's variation, of course, between artists and between their works, I'm sure. But one of the points that you make very powerfully is that many artists find a certain pleasure or a gratification in the sight of waste and perhaps plastic waste in particular, that there's a kind of fascination or fetishization, perhaps with the existence of it, the representation of it, the omnipresence of it. And I'm struck by that, that kind of pleasure in seeing waste. The gratification of it also reminds me of the other mattei, perhaps most famously in his work crash with the inability to kind of look away from the gore of of the crash site, right? Or to think through, for example, the story of the eye where he has sadomasochistic, you know, inability to turn away becomes, you know, very, very vivid throughout that story. That narration. And so I wanted to ask you what? What is what is the sadomasochism of plastic?

Speaker4: [00:40:06] That's a great question. Yeah, I do think that there's something that there's a sadomasochistic underpinning the one that strikes me. I mean, I'll speak about this one. Yeah, this one strikes me as the most sadomasochistic for me. Chris Jordan has a series of photographs, and I think most people would be very familiar with the picture or the photograph of the albatross. It's an albatross carcass and it's opened up and you can see tons of plastic objects in it. And this is part of a he did a documentary on the albatross and and a photographic series. So to me, that image is is painful to see. I, you know, it's it's painful to see animal bodies into penetrated with human wastes and, you know, to see the to see the whole waste predicament visualized in these terms, knowing that the albatross is endangered and then learning as one might from from Chris Jordan, that albatross can't help themselves. They just eat plastic and there's no way to control their ingestion of those objects. And it just seems to be a foregone conclusion that they'll be that they'll be an extinct species before too long. I think that they do. What is sadistic about an image like that is it doesn't tell you what you can do about it. And in fact, it might put you in a state of paralysis. And this is to get back to the idea of denial that we might be in so much, you know, that are that we might be so depressed about our inability to do something that it just becomes a self. Touring cycle, so this is and to me, that is a bit sadomasochistic, like to keep looking at painful images and to keep reigniting a situation in which you're just in a in a in a downward spiral.

Speaker4: [00:42:06] And yet we can't look away, and I think that's to me, there is something in that like there's more than just a sadomasochistic cycle, at least in the postulation of an image like that as art. It's not just to say we're bound up in it, though we are. I mean, that's I think that is an important and important way that art is operating. We are bound up. But I think it's also the question what is what is sadistic and what is masochistic? Well, you know, what is what is sadistic? I can't have a thought when I see this image that would give me any rest or give me any peace or make me feel OK about it. And in fact, I'm going to keep punishing myself or I feel so responsible for this, but I can't do anything right. But then I think there's a way that to begin to see oneself as entangled actually, and to actually see it in an intimate way like that actually enact a kind of undoing of the subject and a rethinking of oneself in in that intimate contact with materiality. And so the sadomasochism that's that's a sadism against the subject, but we are thinking of ourselves now is more than just our subjectivities. We're thinking of ourselves in our in our deformation as well as our formation. And even if that is terrifying, I still think that's the that's a kind of productive rupture, I guess I'll say.

Speaker5: [00:43:39] Hmm. I mean, the thing about the Albatross two that is so resonant, I think metaphorically, it may be on the truth of the creature itself. Consuming plastic is that, as you said, it's a kind of an extinction story or a prolific story of extinction. But it's also the albatross is wasted, if you will, with the the story of its own burden rights. The kind of it's a metaphorically burdened, the burdened bird that hangs across our backs. And I'm looking at this image right now. It's an x ray of a dead albatross filled with human waste of plastics, a kind of unidentifiable things. And as disturbing as it is, I kind of going back to the quote, it's almost as though the bird loves us too much. Like it's a kind of excess of appreciation, if you will, of of human detritus and the production of plastic that it loves. It loves us so much that it's it's eating, it's eating us. And there's a kind of a, I don't know, a strange sort of psychodynamic story at work there. I think, too, that we could read into it because that's that's really reading into it, but it's interesting. So thank you for bringing our attention to these pieces.

Speaker4: [00:44:59] I like that, in fact, that it makes it the more the more the albatross or all. All the creatures are, in a sense, pitiful for their co-existence with us. The more we, the more it becomes clear that we're like sadistically extinguishing them and that that's I have no problems thinking about that as as in operation through our economy, for sure. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:45:26] Amanda, there are a lot of different types of waste of just thinking of the materiality of waste for a minute. There are a lot of different types of waste and you really have focused here. And I think this is like the contemporary, charismatic landscape of waste parks alone. It with plastic, right? It's plastic materiality of plastic is being really important to waste. And of course, plastic, as we know, emerges and generalizes in a certain way across the human landscape in the middle of the 20th century, precisely as a way not to waste oil, right, to use all the oil and use all the oil products that aren't going to petroleum. And now we'll make all these plastics at the same time. So I want to I want two questions. I guess the first is when does art catch up with plastic? In other words, at what point do we move from from examples like Monet's rag picker into some of the types of work that you're more interested in? What are the first kind of what is the first waste plastic art or some of those projects? And when did that happen? And then, you know, on the question of time and duration and ubiquity, are there projects that you think are? I mean, maybe this is just at some level a matter of personal or critical preference, but are there some of these projects that you think have been able to capture those temporal spatial ontological dynamics of contemporary plastic more effectively? I mean, it's so hard, as you say, it's like a climate like CO2. It's really hard to to see it to. Visualize it to make it knowable in a kind of resonant and immediate way. So I'm just curious to hear your thoughts about some of the works you think of and able to do that particularly effectively.

Speaker4: [00:47:01] Yeah, I mean, I see plastic coming through, like already in the 1960s, you know, there were lots of artists that started to think about disposability culture. Andy Warhol was one of them. The French realists, like I mentioned Arman, and I think there was a kind of, you know, there was an influx of plastics and an enthusiasm for disposability. And then I think that there was a kind of second life of plastics, which I would say started emerging in the 1990s. And I think of it as related to the Gulf War, but indirectly. And I and I hesitate to peg it to any to peg that dating to any particular artwork. But I would point towards in terms of like, the way that an artwork might speak to the dimensionality of plastic. There's there's the Thomas Tarasenko, which I write about on Space-Time Foam. And so that he creates kind of a massive installation that of three tiers of a kind of thin, thin plastic film. I guess that that viewers or visitors, I guess, were meant to climb on and in and through and out. But that kind of billows out as they move through it and which becomes a kind of whole system so that if you kind of move in one direction, then the whole, then the whole plastic sheet is going to is going to billow outward and affect one another. What another person is trying to is trying to do kind of in another spot so that it's a kind of plastic spatial system. And there's a way that I think plastic produces new relation cities through this kind of spatial temporal interaction or that's what's being thought through. But there's also I mean, I want to point to I write about the artist Brian Young'uns work and and he has one that's actually from 2002.

Speaker4: [00:49:06] So the early 2000s and he made a work called cytology, and there's a reference to Moby Dick and it's a whale skeleton, but it's built out of plastic chairs. And there's a way that that that whale skeleton. You know, I argue that there's a kind of he's calling, you know, he's he's citing Moby Dick and this, you know, the kind of grand narratives of whale hunting. But as an indigenous artist, he's also pointing out the ways that those grand narratives have have affected indigenous communities and. And I link this to a whole kind of political conflict with with the macaw on the West Coast vis a vis their practice of whale hunting. And this is, I think, becoming even more. You know what I what I suggest is that the that what are now kind of the Big Oil countries, you know, they've created conditions by which whale by which to by which they have a command of the oceans, a command of whale hunting and and have actually depleted depleted whale populations significantly so that they actually have enforced laws against the macaw and other indigenous communities against whale hunting. So when we see a whale skeleton out of made out of plastic chairs, there's a way that it suggests the kind of the domination of not just an animal life, not just a particular animal body, and it's interpenetration by plastic, but also the whole political environment as well. And that's something that I think is is important to think in terms of climate change, that it's that it's, you know, it's all the it's the environmental conditions, it's the element of air. It's animal bodies, animal lives. But it's also this other it's this other political situation, and it's also the dominance of oil countries and oil governments.

Speaker2: [00:51:08] I wanted to ask just on that note, I mean, I think we're also living in an era in which we're seeing plastics begin to proliferate beyond petroleum. I mean, there are all sorts of bioplastics to grow plastics, all kinds of plastics that are out there that are supposed to replace the problematic source feedstock, but still offer us this ability to have all these marvelous little things and in a way to maintain the culture of disposability that we've talked about already. And I'm wondering if you found artists out there who kind of are working with those utopias or is this still a little too nascent?

Speaker4: [00:51:46] I haven't encountered it personally, though I wouldn't be surprised. If artists started coming my way and telling me about what they're doing, I don't know that it's so much nascent as it is. What might what might be the concern is that there's a kind of surface technological solution to a much more, a much more complex and entangled problem. So there are there have been lots of energy alternatives to oil. But that doesn't mean that they have been even a drop in the bucket compared to the fossil fuel economy. It hasn't necessarily allowed them to get any traction for plastics, even though there are there are solutions, there are bioplastics. I'm not sure that. I'm not sure. I mean, I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it come through in relation to art. But if it did well, I don't know. I actually always catch myself if I start predicting what the form will be, because it's my pleasure to leave that to somebody else and to actually get enthusiastic about what the what the critical position might be. I do think that there's a sense in which I do talk about other kinds of works that involve, you know, burning up forms or or simply disposing of the artwork or wasting it in other ways, right? And that's not bio. That's not it's not so much interested in the technicality of biodegradation, so much as it.

Speaker4: [00:53:20] What's interesting is that it produces this kind of anomaly in the in the in an economy that's so intent on accumulating and readjusting energy. So I talk about Antony Gormley's Burning Man in which, you know, and he did this in a community and so in the south of England and invited people to bring all their any objects that they wanted to part ways with and built this massive burning man and then burned it. And the the kind of narrative of that artwork is is the sense in which people who are in precarious. And for many people, they were kind of trying to cross the border. They were, they were. They were not citizens or there was there were different kinds of political conflicts, but that they had a a need to get rid of the past and open the way for a different kind of future. And that and I think that that the the need for energy expenditure is tied to that need to take hold of take hold of the economy and stop its foreclosure of the future. And so if there was a different, a different paradigm of plastic that emerged from plastic itself, I think it would be related to to that kind of matter, you know, to create some kind of opening rather than a material that cloaks suffocates future life.

Speaker5: [00:54:47] This is the English Burning Man reminds me a lot of tradition in Santa Fe, New Mexico, called the zebra, which happens. I forget what time of year, but it's very much like this giant man, and you come and put all your worries and grief and anxieties from the past year into the body, and then they burn it up. It's a really interesting tradition. It sounds kind of similar to the piece is the work that he's doing on Burning Man in England. I wanted to think a little bit more too about expenditure. We've been talking about this and of course, that's really central for Battye. And I wanted to go back to this idea of the Colonel Sun that he's interested in, and this kind of fits nicely with our celebrity theme of reveal a couple of months ago now when we were getting all solar rise together. So the Colonel Sun is a way for Battye to think through this complete relinquishment of energy. It can. It can never be held onto. It can ever be stockpiled, but rather it moves through a kind of loop of biotic forms. So the way that that occurs is that sunlight, solar radiation and heat are absorbed by plants through photosynthesis, and then they get eaten by plant eating animals, by herbivores, and then those get eaten by carnivores and which die.

Speaker5: [00:56:08] All of it dies and then the insects come and they die and become soil, and the process begins again. So it's this kind of closed loop of one organism to the next, which is a fascinating way to think through solar energy or solar radiation, I think. But you also write that that plastic in particular, that plastics futurity is precisely is is precisely its existence as a tensile mass that refuses growth and degeneration. So how do we take a tai's loop, this kind of biotic loop of generation degeneration transformation and connect it to plastic, which? Seems to be resistant to degeneration, but also resistant to growth and but is its own kind of strange, weird looping us, right? It has its own sort of closed circuit of materiality, its own corporeal loop of non degeneration. Can you give us a juxtaposition between those that kind of the operation of the Colonel Sun and the operation of plastic as a material form?

Speaker4: [00:57:17] That's a good way to put it. Yeah, I wish there was a way that the colonel's son could. I mean, this is this is the this is the thing. It's like the carnal son is, you know, Battye shows how this heterogeneous energy is dangerous. It's threatening its Kirst. It's unrelenting. The juxtaposition, I think, I mean, I think to leverage that against plastic is to show quite how powerful plastic is that it can resist that. It's a kind of in a sense, I think it's like a condensed form of celebrity, right? Like, yeah, that's exactly how it becomes what it is. So that's that's pretty dreadful. Yeah. But but I think that what? Ok. So at this point, so you know, the carnal son is utopian and plastic is the dystopian version of it. But what what I think handling plastic thinking about plastic does is show these topologies that were actually involved with right. It shows us our own the way in which we exist in ecologies, in a way that dismantles our autonomous subjectivity. We're not just surrounded. I mean, in a sense, there's the cover of my book, you know, a couple and all their things wrapped up surrounded, suffocated in plastic. But then there's there's a way of that. We kind of that's a starting point, but we actually have to think our way through.

Speaker4: [00:58:56] It's actually a much it's a much more penetrated position that we're in. Plastic. Is there microplastics? We breathe them in. They're becoming a part of our cellular structure. So that's also part of the dystopia. But what it does, what it does to us is force us to overcome certain kinds of spatial fallacies, like the spatial fallacy that we can put waste out there instead of have to cope with it from within. It forces us to understand that we have this commonality with all others, with all living others, but also that with all non-living others too. So there's a way that it's starting to to shift our understanding of subjectivity, potentially in good ways, in ways that will instigate a different understanding of not just collectivity, but inter subjectivity or inter subjectivity as well. I don't see that as a kind of comfort in the face of extinction. I don't think it can be that at all. But at least if all of this is happening, we can produce a perspective and a sensibility for the way you know, to the maximum of our perceptual ability, we can develop a sensibility for exactly how this is playing out.

Speaker2: [01:00:16] Yeah, no. I think that's very well put, and it seemed like wise words on which to maybe wrap up our conversation. Efficiency above all right? That's right. Turtle productivity is necessary, and I know this has been this has been a wonderful, a wonderfully inefficient and glorious conversation with your Amanda. And that's the that's the fun of the podcast for me.

Speaker5: [01:00:36] You got a little kernel at times.

Speaker2: [01:00:37] Well, maybe, maybe

Speaker4: [01:00:39] It did get carnal. And I, yeah, I I appreciate the conversation.

Speaker2: [01:00:46] Terrific. So the book is plastic capitalism out from MIT Press. Amanda, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Speaker4: [01:00:52] Thank you for having me.