Category: Architecture

Slippers and Wire, a crude episode of Plastic Capitalism

Slippers and Wire, a crude episode of Plastic Capitalism

In “Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste,” Amanda Boetzkes, professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, School of Fine Arts and Music, University of Guelph, links the increasing visualization of waste in contemporary art to the rise of the global oil economy and the emergence of ecological thinking. Often, when art is analyzed in relation to the political, scientific, or ecological climate, it is considered merely illustrative. Boetzkes argues that art is constitutive of an ecological consciousness, not simply an extension of it. The visual culture of waste is central to the study of the ecological condition. In the piece below, Boetzkes analyzes a new exhibition called Crude at the Jameel Art Center in Dubai.