Rubbish

Currently Reading: Mark Dion – Archaeology (1999) Black Dog Publishing

p.18 On Cabinets of Curiosities, Colin Renfrew outlines a distinction between Natural Curiosities and Artificial Curiosities; naturalia and artificiosa which underlies much museum classification. He also outlines divisions between nature and fine arty and fine art and historical artefact, although notes the growing fashionability for “primitive art” which has found ethnography back in fine art realms.

p.25 On Mark Dion’s artist persona Alex Coles describes Dion as explorer, biochemist, ornithologist, ethnographer.

p.28 Alex Coles referenes Robert Smithson’s notion Sites/Non Sites http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/provisional.htm in discussing Thames Dig (1999) transferring material from one site to another.

p.31 Coles also references Marcel Broodthaers’ Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles (1968-72) http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1999/muse/artist_pages/broodthaers_musee.html labelled “this is not a work of art” and Douglas Crimp’s essay on Broodthaers “This is Not a Museum of Art” where he describes Broodthaers as “an archaeologist of the present.” Coles further links this to Walter Benjamin’s discussion on the role of the collector. “The collector, in Benjamin terms, rescues things from commodity circulation.”

Notes: Hal Foster – The Artist as Ethnographer: The Return of the Real (1999) MIT Press http://www.corner-college.com/udb/cpro2ZgGKfArtist_As_Ethnographer.pdf

On Phase 1: Collecting Methodology, fieldwalking is cited: Within archaeological method this usually prelude a more detailed survey or excavation which Dion uses exclusively in Thames Dig. Dion’s team is instructed to use a “scatter-gun” approach; collecting anything of interest (chasing the anomaly) – an approach used by antiquaries and early archaeologists.

To some degree, Museum of Contemporary Rubbish has an affinity with this methodology. Fieldwalking methodology has been applied in some cases (River Holme Collection, Bradford Collection, Cuba Collection, US Coast Collection) as well as “scatter-gun” approach in greater or lesser degrees.

On Phase 2: Organisation in the Field – The Field Centre (the tents on Tate’s south lawn), fieldworkers sorted items into broad categories eg ceramics, glass, bone, leather, shells, organic, plastic, metal. Dion and Field Centre managers then subdivided into different “species” of objects.

The method of categorising a collection is particularly of interest at this point in time as a task I’m undertaking with HOARD. Dion’s aesthetic leaning in his categorisation is highly appropriate to he found artefacts, whereas I have much more knowledge of the provenance of the items in my HOARD collection so am interested in using this knowledge in the categorisation process.

On Phase 3: Consequences, it’s noted that the site temporally linked undifferentiated materials as a collection (rather than chronology linked).

This notion underpins the event-based nature of the Museum of Contemporary Rubbish. The Collections are named by the place or event they were made at.

Trash Conference is nearly here!

On Thursday I’m off to Brighton to present the Museum of Contemporary Rubbish at The Basement (Kensington Street, Brighton) as part of the TRASH Postgraduate Conference at the University of Sussex

http://sussextrashconference.wordpress.com

I’m showing a selection of items from the Collections and setting up a new video acquisition booth where visitors will be invited to donate an item to the Museum and answer a few questions about it on camera as part of a new strand of my research into rubbish.

I will also be presenting a 20 minute paper on the Museum as part of the conference on Friday.

I’m very pleased to be a bursary recipient to cover my train fare (4 trains each way!) and it would be an understatement to say I’m looking forward to the event.

TRASH Art Evening

Thursday 13th Sept 2012

The Basement, 24 Kensington Street, BN1 4AJ

The TRASH art event on Thursday 13th September will bring together photography, interactive exhibitions, film, pictures and projections in an atmospheric exhibition space to examine and challenge the concept of TRASH.

As well as the exhibition space, the bar area will allow for further discussion and debate about the concept of TRASH.

Exhibitors: Arpad Boczen, Alice Bradshaw, Johanna Bramli, Francisco Calafate-Faria, Michael Ezban, Thamyres VM, Loren McCarthy, Ben Parry, Owen Parry

http://sussextrashconference.wordpress.com/speaker…

TRASH Conference

Friday 14th Sept 2012

Silverstone building, Falmer Campus, University of Sussex, BN1 9RG

Keynote: Tracey Potts – Your Own Personal Landfill: Stuff, Matter and the Myth of Eco-decluttering

Parallel Panels 1:

DEALING WITH DEBRIS
Bel Deering – Mortal Remains: the perils, pitfalls and pleasures of studying rubbish in a graveyard setting
Amy Carson – The deconstruction of menstruation – with a focus on the ‘feminine-hygiene’ culture in the West
Chris Lloyd – Hurricane Katrina and the South’s disposable (trashy) bodies

THROWAWAY TEXTS
Will Viney – Eliot’s Exhalations
James MacDowell – So Bad it’s Good: Value, Intention, and the Aesthetics of Ironic Appreciation
Munira Cheema -Assessing the power of Trash TV in Pakistani television culture

Parallel Panels 2:

MEMORY AND MATERIALISM
Alice Bradshaw – The Museum of Contemporary Rubbish
Natacha Chevalier – When waste was trash: The thrifty 30s and 40s
Jeannie Driver – From SPIKE IT to HARD GRAPH: The Waste Remains

TASTE AND TABOO
Sarah Carney – ‘Sometimes a tampon in a banana skin is just a tampon in a banana skin’— Don DeLillo: keeping trash trash because beauty is truth and truth is death
Simon Hobbs – Antichrist as the Culturally Schizophrenic Artefact
Owen Parry – Performing Refuse/Refusing Performance

Panel 3: (Re)making the Metropolis

Francisco Calafate-Faria – The ‘Museum of Rubbish’ in Curitiba: Short-Cycling or Line of Flight?
Arpad Boczen – Sweet Urban Stink in our Ears, Advanced School of Architecture, Budapest
Claire Reddleman – “Modern and contemporary route-finding”: reactivating dead labour as spheres of appearance in ‘Pennine Street 2012
Michael Ezban – The Trash Heap of History

http://sussextrashconference.wordpress.com/conf-pr…

£5 entry for the art evening and £10 (£5 student) conference delegate fee which includes lunch – what’s not to like?

Manifesta9: Coal > Rubbish (Part 2)

In thinking about the coal and rubbish of Manifesta9, the question arose; is coal rubbish? It could be considered 300 million year old organic carbon-based rubbish. But in its natural, mined state it has intrinsic energy potential and therefore monetary value – surely the antithesis of rubbish? Such a precious, finite resource could not be rendered as rubbish.

In the Antechamber recreation of Marcel Duchamp’s grotto from Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in 1938, the brazier featuring a few coal pieces looks like a common urban bin. Such bin design probably originated from the brazier function of burning waste materials, and contemporary bins function as braziers either by discarded still-lit cigarettes or by bored teenagers’ arson.

When coal is burned and its potential energy transformed to heat energy, the waste materials are the toxic gases and ash. To make coal into rubbish you need to burn it – use it – resulting in the transformation into ash so it is no longer coal; it’s physical properties altered. The value of coal is in its energy potential, otherwise it is just very old dirt from the ground.

Rubbish and dirt are often synonymous. Dirt in the form of coal ash (dust) was collected by dust-men from households as one of the earliest forms of waste collection in the 1820s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_waste_management Coal is considered dirty as it leaves residual marks everywhere but now it also considered a dirty form of energy production http://www.coal-is-dirty.com/ releasing carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide and mercury into the atmosphere, massively contributing to greenhouse gases, acid rain and contaminated land and water as well as childhood asthma, birth defects and respiratory diseases. Filthy stuff. Dirt, as “a substance, such as mud or dust, that soils someone or something” (Oxford Dictionaries) is certainly the stuff of coal-based energy production.

But are dirt and rubbish always synonymous? To consider coal as rubbish, it’s definition of 300 million year old waste needs to negate its energy potential value. In a paradox of coal as very very old rubbish and also a highly valued resource, coal will only be considered truly rubbish if it can be defined as valueless in contemporary society – a very unlikely prospect given our dependency on energy.

Manifesta9: Coal > Rubbish (Part 1)

Manifesta9 is definitely all about coal. Based in the former coal mining building in Waterschei, Genk (Limburg, Belgium) the curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, with associate curators Katerina Gregos and Dawn Ades, have gone OTT on the theme of coal for the ninth edition of the peripatetic European Biennial of Contemporary Art. If featured works aren’t directly about coal as material, they’re about industry and post-industrial capitalism. The historical narrative of coal as a response to the site were the context and content of this single-site exhibition, with coal heritage and a coal mining museum and documentaries about coal writ large.

The works of particular interest to me were incidentally not directly related to coal and (not surprisingly) featured discarded/waste objects and materials.

Ni Haifeng’s Para Production (2008-2012) is a large scale, participatory work inviting visitors to collectively machine stitch fabric remnants together to form a huge, seemingly still non-functional, patchwork hanging. The obvious rubbish connection is the use of discarded fabric. But discarded fabric has a resale value in the textile industry so are scraps and offcuts are arguably not all that rubbish.

Next, Martin Vanden Eynde’s Plastic Reef (2006-2012) made from discarded plastic that could be washed up beach rubbish is melded together to form a mass of more or less indistinguishable plastic items, the occasional fragment of object still identifiable. Resembling coral reefs that are threatened by pollution, Plastic Reef symbolises the pollution endangering it, overtaking it as the relatively new inhabitants of the sea.

Finally, a work that got my attention because of the process – hole-punching – one that I have employed myself extensively in various works so already have a particular perspective on it. In a performance installation Make a Molehill out of a Mountain (of Work) (2012) by Ante Timmermans (with the artist not present) shelves of reams of copier paper create a cell with a table and chair and a hole-punch placed on the table. Across from the paper cell is another desk/table with a small pile of hole punches. By themselves, these elements are not particularly interesting, but cabinet between them provide a new dimension. Sketch book pages depict various drawings some hole-punched parts and some featuring the small circular chads of hole-punched paper. One drawing in particular features a simple charcoal drawing of a mine with the bottom third of the page black. Holes have been punched from the black “ground” and displaced onto the white surface above in a pile and smudges and fingerprints of charcoal dirty the torn page as billows of smog from a crudely drawn chimney.

Currently Reading: Harriet Hawkins – Visions of Excess: Michael Landy’s Break Down and the work of Georges Bataille. Published in Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, October 2010

Hawkins talks about Landy’s work Break Down as “unbuildings” and compares to Bataille’s writings, particularly Visions of Excess in which, “excess […] is both necessary and importantly generative.” “For Bataille,” Hawkins explains, “excess is anything that is unproductive in a capitalist means-end economy.” p.20

“Excess is cursed by a production-orientated society because it will never be productive. It sits alongside waste, the formless (l’imforme) and base materialism – “a materialism that implied no ontology” – Bataille, Visions of Excess, p.50-51).” p.20

“Bataille’s heterodoxical operations of formlessness, excess and base materialism are, like the projects of deconstruction they at times seem to herald, performative.” p.20

Exemplifying Bataille’s notion of waste and drawing analogy to Landy’s unbuildings, Hawkins cites Bataille interrupting his object writings with; “Now I place a large glass of alcohol on my table.” and quantifies; “ As a wasteful expenditure of time this unproductive but hugely enjoyable interlude is the radical and destructive negative of the productivity previously found in the objects. […] This “waste” can be understood as unbuildings; acts which are at once destructive and also generative.” p.21

Applying Bataille’s philosophy to Break Down, Hawkins notes the following:

“In a Bataillean movement Landy’s embrace of what is usually “rejected of shunted beneath” – rubbish, waste – becomes understood as means through which to constitute an understanding of oneself and one’s relation to objects.” p.21

“Rubbish here disorders, and in so doing points to the understandings and orderings of objects, commodities, subjects and objects as an ongoing, uncertain process rather than the things themselves.” p.22

“Landy’s remains, shredded plastic, metal and paper arrayed in plastic bins, reflect Bataille’s description of the formless, they “resemble nothing especially not that which they ought” (Visions of Excess).” p.25

Finally, two especially poignant quotes:

“(The) assertion of object birth and object death being something that, as has often been noted in other contexts, is often kept separable from commodity form.” p.26

Citing Rom Harré, “Nothing happens or exists in this social world unless it is framed by human performative activity.” p.29