Böcker av Michael Shane Boyle

The logistics revolution has stretched capitalist production across planetary supply chains, leaving nothing unscathed: art and culture included. The Arts of Logistics takes a unique approach to studying culture and supply chain capitalism, scrutinizing how artists retool technologies designed for circulating commodities. With chapters on the merchant ship, the oil barrel, the shipping container, and the drone, Michael Shane Boyle has assembled a global inventory of aesthetics since the 1950s that reveals logistics to be a surprisingly pervasive means of artistic production. Bringing together critical logistics research with Marxist cultural analysis, Boyle uses sculpture, theater, installation art, and popular culture to narrate the long history of art's connection to logistical infrastructure, beginning with the transatlantic slave trade and continuing today in the dream of a workerless world peddled by Amazon. The global reach of the artists considered reflects the geographies of supply chain capitalism, spanning from the North Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific. The Arts of Logistics takes meticulous stock of how aesthetics is entangled in capitalist trade and racialized labor regimes, analyzing influential work by artists like Christo and Jeanne-Claude alongside that of contemporary figures including Walead Beshty, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Selina Thompson. With this incisive study, Boyle demonstrates that art is both an opportunity to reexamine the violent history of supply chain capitalism, and an active participant in shaping this history.