Plastic Capitalism

Amanda Boetzkes is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and the author of The Ethics of Earth Art. She was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich in 2017.

Boetzkes offers a broad and subtle discussion of sustainability, art, and plastic waste in a world governed by neoliberal capitalism. The book shows us how we might strip away that veneer and make a spectacle of the waste that constitutes its materiality. Whether through a quasi-ecstatic celebration of our intimate coexistence with waste, or through photographic autopsy of the bodies that died from ingesting our plastic, the works discussed in this volume expose the undeniable fact that plastic is everywhere.—The Literary Review of Canada