Spolia As Speculation

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 seventeenthcentury flower painting while alluding to the writings of Walter Benjamin, Giacomo Leopardi and Charles Baudelaire in dialogue with those of Bataille/Nietzsche.