Spolia as speculation

ABSTRACT

Do the concept of spolia, the ideas of Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ and the practices of artists point to the conclusion that there is no such thing as ‘waste?’ Are waste and value conflated today as never before? Is waste a modern, capitalist concept or conceit? These are some of the questions that motivate this article and which it hopes to illuminate, if not fully to answer. The article consciously mixes objective speculation with subjective and empirical experience and also features the writer’s own artworks as examples. The reader is invited to consider a constant, immanent economy; an endless, formless, qualitative ‘accountancy’ (perhaps anaccountancy) that avoids separate columns for profit and loss and dispenses with finalizing totals. This form of evaluation can be applied both to the content and the style of the article. The author draws upon the thought of Georges Bataille (as inspired by Nietzsche) to illustrate the concept of spolia as an affirmation of perceived ‘waste’. Waste is considered a historically variable concept, examined here in terms of capitalism and of bourgeois consumerist values. The author draws upon his own photography practice and also references Dutch seventeenth-century flower painting while alluding to the writings of Walter Benjamin, Giacomo Leopardi and Charles Baudelaire in dialogue with those of Bataille/Nietzsche.

KEYWORDS:

• Waste
• Bataille
• spolia
• values
• photography
• flowers
• Leopardi

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Paul O’Kane is an artist, writer and lecturer based in London. He writes regularly for Art Monthly magazine as well as for Third Text, Wasafiri, Miraj and other referee journals and artist’s catalogues. Paul O’Kane maintains an experimental weekly Blog ‘750wordsaweek’ (https://750wordsaweek.wordpress.com/) exploring the limits and freedoms available to art writing. Paul O’Kane is an International Member of AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d'Art). Paul O’Kane completed a PhD in History at Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2009. Paul O’Kane exhibits artworks that relate a history of technologies to accounts of subjective experience, history and narrative. He teaches Fine Art, Critical Studies and Art History as an Associate Lecturer at CSM and Chelsea Colleges (University of the Arts London) and as a lecturer at SOAS (University of London) and as a visiting lecturer at other colleges.

Notes

1. We might take this as a spur to also consider Aboriginal Australian or Native-American Indian beliefs and peoples whose unframed or differently framed understanding of time, value and economy lies beyond the reach of modern representational systems in forms of alterity. Given such examples – of other times, other societies, other ways of thinking – ‘waste’ increasingly appears to be a merely local, modern, we might justifiably say ‘bourgeois’ concept, that is, in reality, an aspect or conceit only of modern capitalism. Nevertheless, the concept is generative, allowing us to consider many established phenomena and procedures in its light.

2. Bourriaud uses the term ‘counter-images’ in his publication ‘Postproduction’ with reference to updated forms of détournement found in contemporary artists’ practices (Bourriaud 2002).

3. Here, I am thinking of the current British chancellor, his British Conservative Party, and also the ways in which Germany and the most successful EU states recently responded to the European economic crisis and the response to requests for assistance made by struggling Greece.