Never Enough:
Artistic Production and the Problem of Raw Material
When: 25 March 2025; 4-6 PM
Location: Room 2.41, Bancroft Building, Mile End Campus, Queen Mary University of London
Speaker: Shane Boyle is Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts at Queen Mary University of London. His books include The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production in Supply Chain Capitalism (Stanford 2024) and the co-edited collection Postdramatic Theatre and Form (Methuen Bloomsbury 2019). For the 2024-25 academic year, he is a research fellow at global dis:connect, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Abstract: To hear some tell it, advances in communication, automation, and artificial intelligence have ushered us into an era of increasing dematerialization. With the threat of ecological collapse looming, this supposed “great reversal” in our consumption of the material world seems to have arrived just in time. However, there is something missing in claims that capitalist-driven dematerialization can solve the climate crisis: evidence. In reality, technological innovation is driving a rise—not a reduction—in global raw material consumption (Smil 2019). The notion that capitalism is dematerializing has been widely dismissed as a “myth,” one that serves to obscure intensifying growth and resource extraction (Conway 2023; Saito 2024).
This talk takes the myth of dematerialization as a starting point to develop a theory of “raw material,” treating it as a category that encapsulates capitalism’s instrumentalized relationship with nature. Raw material, I argue, indicates a social relation defined by a constant sense that nature is never enough. Drawing from political economy, Black Studies, and world-systems theory, I approach raw material as a set of interconnected problems: a problem for the earth, a problem for capital, and—the focus of my current research—a problem for art.
This talk explores how contemporary initiatives to improve the sustainability of art institutions are entangled in extractive logics and infrastructures. Like all human productive activities, artistic production depends on raw materials. Consequently, the art world warrants scrutiny of its material consumption like any other sector. What distinguishes art, however, is its potential to put on display the ecological and economic problems posed by raw materials—through both its aesthetic form and direct entanglement with extractive infrastructures. To illustrate this, I will focus on the use of one raw material in contemporary art: water. Recent works by artists such as Tavares Strachan, Florentina Holzinger, and Olafur Eliason highlight the contradictions of extraction that plague not only the art world but the capitalist world-system as well.