Plastic Capitalism examines the interplay between the aesthetics of contemporary art, global systems of energy-use, and the ways waste is defined through its exchange, recovery and excess. Through the lens of contemporary art, I situate waste at the point of contact between ecology and the ideologies of energy management that drive the global economy. The book addresses waste as a topological agent that is gauged at the sites where it transforms social relations, subjectivities, the senses and the cultural imaginary. I propose that the oil economy is accompanied by a visual regime that expresses a highly contradictory form of energy management characterized by an imperative to conserve and redistribute energy, on the one hand, and on the other, an economic dictum to expand oil consumption.
Amanda Boetzkes 