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The Persistence of Waste

Popular understandings of ecology are now irrevocably connected to anthropogenic climate change and a future increasingly imagined as catastrophe. Against this background-turned-foreground, an alliance with practices of conservation, sustainability and care for nature would seem central for ecologically sensitive art practice that finds the tools of critique increasingly lacking in traction against the enormity of the ‘calamity for humanity’ that is forecast by many. This article asks what then becomes of earlier expressions of the performance paradigm which privilege radical acts of gratuitous expenditure and which reject notions of utility and commodification. Meditating upon the shale bings of central Scotland – massive piles of non-toxic waste left over from the beginnings of the oil industry - I suggest that a future ecological aesthetics may need to find new forms for Georges Bataille's idea of ‘expenditure without return’ and to make space for waste and excess. As remarkable sites that have been contested and reconstituted by industry, art and ecology, the Scottish bings offer a provocative ground, in both literal and conceptual terms, for asking how we might live creatively with waste of all kinds that cannot be disappeared, used up or recycled.