Rubbish

Categorisation: Stuff, Things and Objects

In a recent Guardian article by Justin McGuirk (17 September 2012) the Museum of Things is inspected revealing a history of German design and notions of function and taste. Through questioning why the Museum of Things and not Design, McGuirk cites Heidegger’s division of the world “into ‘things’ (more likely to be hand-crafted) and ‘objects’ (more likely to be machine-made), arguing that ‘things’ were more authentic.”

Where Tracy Potts in her TRASH Conference keynote paper recently made a distinction between stuff and matter in her discussion about clutter, McGuirk’s references to Heidegger’s distinction between things and objects creates a synergy of categorisation in which the designed world can be ordered; stuff and objects being the machine-made clutter whilst matter and things have “thing-power” and Heideggerian Being-in-the-World (In-der-Welt-sein).

Heidegger considered the study of being a human phenomenological construct; “Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible.” Being and Time (Roderick Munday provides a useful glossary of terms in Being and Time here: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/b_resources/b_and_t_glossary.html )

Books as Rubbish

With the proliferation of digital information via the internet, ebooks and kindles, traditional books are arguably becoming or have become (to some degree) obsolete. There is strong support and advocacy to uphold a place for the traditional physical book object in our cultural and educational landscape, but the book is increasingly seen as an archaic receptacle of information. Another throwaway commodity, the value of many books is next to nothing. Artists often make use of this decline in value of a once revered subject matter through their work.

I recently met Laura-L Broad (@design_craft) on twitter and found out about her craft-based practice utilising old books to make functional objects such as floors http://laura-lbroad.blogspot.co.uk/

And yesterday I visited the paper exhibition First Cut at Manchester Art Gallery

http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=92 One of the artists featured in the show is Manchester based Nicola Dale who often uses books as material in her work as well as other paper materials such as wallpaper. http://www.nicoladale.com/

The piece presented in this show in Sequel (2012). “For Sequel Dale adorned the branches of a felled 12-foot oak tree with thousands of individual leaves cut from the pages of unwanted reference books rescued from library sales, charity shops and skips.”

The exhibition also has a room dedicated to the production processes of Dale’s and Westgate Studios’ Andy Singleton’s work. In here, a categorisation process is illustrated with photographs of the cut book-leaves in plastic tabs labelled with handwritten labels such as “dinosaurs.” Alongside the photographs is a text panel quoting Dvora Yanov in Interdisciplinary Introduction to Categorization, interview with Christine Baele:

“Categorization” means “making categories.” We all do it, every day, in everyday ways. Go into a supermarket: its produce and other goods are categorized. Have breakfast in the morning, lunch midday, dinner at night – you are engaging in categorization. Identify people you pass in the street as “infants,” “children,” “youth” or “teenagers,” “adults,” “elderly,” and you have categorized them. And so forth, from my perspective as an ethnographer. Because it is so common-place, there is no “most illustrative” example. The more important point to note is that because of its commonplace-ness, we do not attend to our category-making. That is the source both of its power and of its problematic character: category structures (“taxonomies”) entail tacit knowledge which is made explicit at times only with difficulty; and that knowledge is created from a point of view that also goes unattended – unless we make it a point to focus on this everyday, common sense, unspoken, unwritten knowledge…

Categories – all of them – do not exist in nature; they are human creations, made collectively (by a smaller group – e.g., an organization – or a larger entity – a society).

Full interview here: http://www.revue-emulations.net/archives/n8/categentretien

Currently Reading: Rachel Buchanan – Recycling Doctoral Waste

The offcuts, outtakes, remnants, scraps, dust and all the other intellectual waste products generated by a PhD or any other large research project.

http://journals.publishing.monash.edu/ojs/index.php/ha/article/view/ha100011/87

Buchanan references Klaus Neumann’s ‘the subversive potential of trash’

Klaus Neumann – But is it History? http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/viewFile/2095/2270

Klaus Neumann – Starting From Trash http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03149099209508456

“Many artists are working with ‘the aesthetic of detritus’, exploring rubbish to make comments on consumption, excess and climate change (Engberg 2009: 64–65). In August and September 2009, at La Trobe University’s Museum of Art, for example, Lauren Berkowitz made a garden from plants grown in takeaway food containers and Ash Keating created made sculptures from industrial waste salvaged from landfill (O’Brien et al. 2009: 23–49).” (p.11.4)

“Excavation is also an appropriate metaphor for rediscovering, recycling or uncovering the stories that are buried or discarded in footnotes.” (p.11.6)

Endnote 2: “I was influenced by John Frow’s point about aristocratic leisure being, at its core, ‘the deliberate and ostentatious wasting of time’ (Frow 2003: 27). In the collection’s introduction Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke write that waste is connected with time and history. ‘To the cultural coordinates of habits and emotion, we will have to add another: history. Waste is a product of time, since it is literally an end produce and the end of all living things. But it is a temporalizing effect, since the inevitability of waste is a repetitive and qualifying event. Events erupt and stay with us; others, as the saying goes, are consigned to history’s proverbial waste bin’ (Frow 2003: xiv).”

Currently Reading: Tim Noble & Sue Webster – Wasted Youth (2006, Rizzoli, New York)

I borrowed this book from the University library this acquaint myself with Noble & Webster’s back catalogue and find more about how they source their rubbish.

The book depicts earlier light works (1996-2004) and light projected rubbish assemblages (1998-2003) as well as welded scrap metal pieces (2004-5) and resin figures (1997/2000). The large format of the book is akin to a 12 inch LP and is dedicated mainly to glossy images of the works and two essays by British curator Norman Rosenthal, and New York gallerist Jeffrey Deitch.

http://www.timnobleandsuewebster.com/wasted_youth.html

In the first essay at the back of this book by Norman Rosenthal, The Magic Arts of Noble & Webster – Tim and Sue, Rosenthal proposes that “an anti-aesthetic of vulgarity rules on the surface of their work” and discusses their skill – “aspects that are never – as is often the case nowadays, and historically – farmed out to studio assistants of even to craftsmen.”

“There is an extraordinary sense of craft and technical virtuosity that is both hard-won and has a self-self and improvisational quality, achieved largely through arduous trial and error.”

He mentions that the trash they use in their work is arbitrarily collected. On sourcing material for the scrap metal works, he mentions that the metal was scrounged from Sir Anthony Caro’s studio (with great irony).

On their self-portrayal in their work, Rosenthal asserts that Noble & Webster only depict themselves, refusing all requests from those who might want to have their own portraits made out of rubbish.

The second, longer, biographical account Black Magic by Jeffrey Deitch outlines their collaborative practice from meeting at Nottingham Trent University in 1986 to the current practice at the time of publication.

He cites the local carnival in Nottingham as a source of inspiration and material with its tacky displays and flashing lights. “Tim and Sue would spend time foraging for strange pieces which they would then assemble into sculpture.”

Deitch notes that the artists travelled to Turkey and the US on summer breaks whilst at university “touring junk yards foraging for discarded parts and dragging sacks of junk back to England.”

In 1990, the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds secured a studio for them at Dean Clough in Halifax where they made welded assemblages. After university they moved to Bradford, initially avoiding London, “absorbing themselves in the ‘rubbish landscape’ of the city.”

On the British Rubbish show at Independent Art Space, London, in 1996, Deitch accounts that they were invited by gallerist Max Wigram to curate a group show, but frustrated by the lack of a show of their own work, uninvited the lined-up artists. (the exhibition invite was “British Rubbish in tomato sauce” in the style of a label for tinned baked bins: http://www.timnobleandsuewebster.com/tnsw_exhibitions/british_rubbish_invite.jpg )

Dirty White Trash (with Gulls) (1998) was made from empty packaging of everything they ate, drank, smoked and otherwise consumed collected over 6 months and dumped in a pile on the studio floor. “The artists’ concept was to construct a work out of the remains of all the products that they needed to survive during the work’s creation. […] Despite its formalist logic Dirty White Trash (with Gulls) also recalls the radical anti-form attitude of the toughest scatter art and Alan Suicide’s punk sculptures of random piles of electronic debris.”

Cheap ‘n’ Nasty (2000) was assembled from piles of cheap and nasty tiys and household junk bought from the ‘everything for £1’ shops in the East End of London.

The installation The Undesirables (2000) involved the transportation of a mountain of garbage collected from the streets of the East End into one of the grandest galleries in the Royal Academy.

Falling Apart (2001) was made from objects broken and thrown in fights resulting from the financial pressures in The Dirty House studio project.

Kiss of Death (2003) was a choice of rats, crows and other scavengers; “the lowest form of animal life.”

Noble & Webster – Nihilistic Optimistic at Blain|Southern, London

10 October 2012 – 24 November 2012

Nihilistic Optimistic is Tim Noble & Sue Webster’s first major solo exhibition in London since 2006. Featuring six large-scale works, the show builds upon the artists’ sustained investigation into self-portraiture, further deconstructing the relationship between materiality and form which has been so intrinsic to their practice.

http://www.blainsouthern.com/exhibitions/2012/tim-noble-and-sue-webster-nihilistic-optimistic

Video on the Guardian website featuring the artists discussing the show: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/video/2012/oct/06/nihilistic-optimistic-noble-webster

Two key British artists working (together) with trash showing in London whilst I was visiting for the V&A conference was an opportunity I couldn’t miss. After trekking across London from South Kensington to Bethnal Green to see the Susan Collis show at Seventeen and then round to Oxford Circus to fight through the tourists all on lunchbreak, I arrived at Blain|Southern to be confronted by My Beautiful Mistake (2012) in the gallery entrance. In the main gallery are five works typically constructed and lit, dating from 2008-2009 (Nasty Pieces of Work) through to 2012 works. As mentioned in their video (link above) about the work, these pieces featuring the artists together and separately are autobiographical in nature, subconsciously referencing their personal relationship degradation through their work.

My Beautiful Mistake is the only work not projection lit (in classic Noble & Webster style to form portraiture shadows from the assemblages) and is lit from outside natural light through the windows and ambient gallery lighting.

The materials the artists employ are discarded objects – mainly wood offcuts, piece of furniture and tools, although interestingly the tools aren’t identified as such in the material list in the gallery handout. Stepladders form the base structures of the sculptures and dismantled, cut up wooden materials are carefully assembled although in quite a rough, haphazard aesthetic. Saw dust is scattered on the ground to give the impression of the work made in situ.

These works are the ones Noble & Webster are famous for, and I’m not too sure about other works they might have in their back catalogue, but do wonder what they might be making to create these offcuts and discards if it’s not these works themselves, how they gather the materials and how they select the items for use in each sculpture. There must be a formal criteria for selecting particular pieces to create particular shadows in profile, but in sourcing these materials do they keep everything they would normally discard in everyday life; the tools and furniture that become obsolete in their day-to-day activities, or do they find abandoned items in and around where they live or pick them up cheap from flea markets? I will have to found out more.