Amanda Boetzkes contemplates what it means for waste to be charged with meaning

Amanda Boetzkes is a professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on the intersection of ethics and art as these relate to ecology. I reached out to her because I’ve been trying to understand the problem of plastics for a long time. If you remember, I spoke to Heather Davis, Mark Simpson and Sarah King back in February about this intimidatingly large problem. I had been reading Amanda’s book Plastic Capitalism and couldn’t stop thinking about some of the challenges that it makes. We talk a lot about the ideas in that book, but also unpack some of the more recent writing she’s done. Incidentally, I’m excited about the project that she’s currently working on, which focuses on the different ways we can visualize different environments, and especially the environments of the circumpolar North. One of the most important observations Amanda makes in this conversation is that when art reveals something, it’s not necessarily “revealing something that’s hidden.” Often, what art does, she says, is drag us “deeper into the mud.” Instead of illuminating some obscured part of social reality or offering up epiphanies about society and our relationship to wild nature, art that engages with waste communicates that we are awash in waste but don’t know what to do with it; we have tons of plastic but not much plasticity; we’re bent on accumulating energy but don’t really value energy expenditure in any radical way. Most of it is mindless. If we don’t get to the bottom of why this is such a feature of the modern human condition, we aren’t likely to address the climate emergency. We’re more likely to just replace fossil fuels with some other energy input like solar and change nothing about our arrogant attitude towards the fuels we extract for energy. There is a lot in this conversation on the need to be more conscious and critical about energy consumption. After all, it is dangerous to be anything else. But what Boetzkes is asking is whether we are in denial, too, about the “irrevocable” damage we’ve already done to the biosphere. Art, ecology and ethics form a “big knot,” as she puts it, and what is implicated is nothing short of how we choose to live on the Earth. She leaves us with the idea that, while art “must be political,” science is undermined if it’s is too political. And yet, the examples she explores in her work question that assumption, or the opposition between art and science, in ways that help us rethink the distinctions that determine funding and influence our means of knowing the world before, during, and after oil.