Rubbish

Currently Reading: Raymond Williams – Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (1976/1983) Fontana Press

From wikipedia: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society is a book by the Welsh Marxist academic Raymond Williams published in 1976 by Croom Helm, with a revised and expanded edition published by Fontana in 1983.

Originally intended to be published along with the author’s 1958 work Culture and Society, this work examines the history of more than a hundred words that are familiar and yet confusing: Art; Bureaucracy; Culture; Educated; Management; Masses; Nature; Originality; Radical; Society; Welfare; Work; and many others.

The approach is cultural rather than etymological. Sometimes the origins of a word cast light on its meaning, but often one finds that it originally meant something quite different. Or that there has been a fierce political struggle over the ‘correct’ meaning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keywords:_A_Vocabulary_of_Culture_and_Society

I’m looking at Williams’ approach as I think about how to treat my “keywords” and the definitions and appropriations of Crap, Debris, Detritus, Dirt, Discards, Garbage, Junk, Leftovers, Litter, Mongo, Refuse, Rejects, Remains, Rubbish, Ruins, Scrap, Shit, Shreds, Trash and Waste.

Williams introduces Keywords as “an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society. (p.15)

In defining the selected words, especially those which involve ideas and values, is not only impossible, Williams declares, but an irrelevant procedure. He asserts that it is the range of meanings, and values that matters. (p.17)

“Keywords is based on several areas of specialist knowledge but its purpose is to bring these, in the examples selected, into general knowledge, meanings and contexts.”

The intrinsic nature of the book is to emphasize the interconnections.

“It is true that no word ever finally stands on its own, since it is always an element in the social process of language, and its uses depend on complex and (though variably) systematic properties of language itself.” (p.22)

Currently reading: Carloyn Christov-Bakargiev (ed.) – Arte Povera (1991) Phaidon, London.

“Arte Povera literally translated means ‘poor art’ but does not refer solely to the poorness of materials.2 (p.16)

Whilst Arte Povera may have set a precedent for the kinds of approaches of some artists working with rubbish today, only a few Arte Povera artists used waste and discards directly in their work, notably Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Piero Manzoni if he is to be included in the movement. Others did employ everyday/readymade materials such as Pino Pascali’s use of acrylic and steel wool in Vedova Blu [Blue Widow] (1968) and Alighiero Boetti’s use of cardboard pastry bases in Colonne [Columns] (1968) but materials were more commonly ubiquitous, industrial and cheap, or sometimes traditional sculptural materials in order to comment on those traditions.

In the chapter entitled Survey, Christov-Bakargiev defines Arte Povera:

“The term ‘Arte Povera’ initially referred not to the use of ‘poor’ materials, nor to a sociological critique of consumer society, but to the concept of ‘impoverishing’ each person’s experience of the world; this implies gradually freeing one’s consciousness from layers of ideological and theoretical preconceptions as well as from the norms and rules of the language of representation and fiction.” (p.22)

“It was Arte Povera’s affirmation of the vital importance of subjectivity in the process of experiencing the world that ushered in an art that, if not directly anthropomorphic, was clearly about the body and its experience; but because the focus was on real life and not artificial representation, the work had to be decentred from the figurative or presentational bodily reference. The result was that it often referred to the places we make for our bodies.” (p.46)

Arte Povera drew attention to process and to the historical and cultural significance of signs, attitudes ans objects.

Pistoletto’s 1967 work Venus of Rags featured used rags.

Michelangelo Pistoletto – Venere degli stracci [Venus of the rags] (1967) mica, cement, rags. Statue h.130cm

“The first version of this work [1967] was a mica and cement reproduction of the classical Callipigia Venus facing a heap of rags of various colours, which had been used by Pistoletto to clean his mirror paintings. Two further versions Venere degli stracci and Venere degli stracci dorata [Golden Venus of the Rags] 1967-71 were created from a plaster cast of the original. He later made others in marble and, in 1982, in polyurethane covered in fibreglass.”

In an unpublished artist’s statement in 1977, Pistoletto instructed: “In the various existing versions of the Venus, or the re-installation, you can use the same original rags or you can change them, but they must maintain their multi-coloured and ruffled character. One of the plaster Venuses of 1967 was broken. My project is to put the pieces together leaving the signs of breakage evident, like the tears in the rags.”

The Most Difficult Thing Ever

Kevin Boniface regularly deals with the everyday in his drawings, writing, books and videos, so it is inevitable that rubbish surfaces occasionally. In his award winning blog The Most Difficult Thing Ever, Kevin combines short videos with text narrative from his mail rounds as a postal worker in Huddersfield.

Surrounded by over-flowing wheelie bins, a collapsed stack of breeze-blocks, a roll of sodden carpet, an empty hanging basket, a discarded moulded fairy-garden water-feature with a crack in it and an unruly jasmine litter trap – energy drinks cans, a plastic elbow pipe fitting and an empty children’s bubble mixture bottle – the door was opened by “Beautiful Sajida”.

http://themostdifficultthingever.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/at-530am-i-distracted-rat-as-it-sped.html

Kevin also has a Found Notes section on his website which features note he has found http://victorygarden.co.uk/VG/Found_Notes.html

Pecha Kucha Night Wakefield Vol. #8: Leftovers
The Hepworth Wakefield
Thursday 20th December 2012, 6:30-9:00pm (doors 6:00pm)
£3 entry | 01924 247360

Indulging in the excesses of the festive season, the eighth Pecha Kucha Night Wakefield is themed “Leftovers.” Presentations respond to the idea of presented content as the “shallow-fried bubble and squeak” of the year. Scraps of thoughts, unused images, surplus projects and remainders of research are mashed up and loosely bound together in quick-fire presentations in the 20 slides x 20 seconds PechaKucha format.

Speakers: Gav Leonard, Chris Gittner, Matt Lawson, Joss Cole, Pam Judkins, Madeleine Walton, Robertson/Sharp, Phil Wood.

Curated by Alice Bradshaw for the Art House in collaboration with Hepworth Wakefield.

Also at The Hepworth Wakefield this evening are Chrsitmas Carols under Heather and Ivan Morison’s The Black Cloud (5-9pm) http://www.hepworthwakefield.org/whatson/christmas…

About Pecha Kucha Night: Pecha Kucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of “chit chat”, the Pecha Kucha presentation format is based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds. It’s a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

http://www.pecha-kucha.org/
http://www.alicebradshaw.co.uk/
http://www.the-arthouse.org.uk/
http://www.hepworthwakefield.org/

http://www.facebook.com/PKNWakefield
#PKNWakefield

Currently reading: Mike Kelley – The Uncanny (2004) Verlag der Buchhandlung WalterKőnig, published on occasion of The Uncanny exhibition at Tate Liverpool 20 February – 3 May 2004.

In The Uncanny exhibition (originally produced for Sonsbeek 93, reproduced for Tate Liverpool in 2004), Mike Kelley takes on the role of artist as curator, or “Sunday-curator” as Kelley denotes in the 1993 exhibition text Playing with Dead Things (p.38).

Freud defined the uncanny as not belonging to the domain of the psychological but unambiguously as a category of the aesthetic and as the over-accentuation of physical reality in comparison with material reality. (John C Welchman – On The Uncanny in Visual Culture p.57). In the introductory text: “The power of these works derived from an eerie feeling of recognition, which Freud defined as the essence of the uncanny: “A hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression than emerged from it.” The impulse to collect is described by Freud as “repetition-compulsion” in the unconscious mind. It is the conscious recognition of this familiar but repressed compulsion that produces the feeling of the uncanny.” (p.10)

Kelley refers to his collections as Harems: “A term used to describe a fetishist’s accumulation of objects, which are generally alike in character.” (p.9) “The Harems are not fixed or finite – items are added to or subtracted from them depending on their usage (things break or are lost, etc). […] The fluid nature of the Harems’ definition reveals the fact that their specific makeup is not crucial to this project.” (p.11) The Harems are of varied size and importance. “Most of this stuff is utterly mundane – the everyday crap that fills the house.” (p.12)

“For Baudrillard the fatal “indifference” or signifying systems predicated a simulation developed from a crucial point of origin in the use of the commodity economy and the exchange of mass-produced objects – that cascade of “identical objects”, as he termed them, “produced in infinite series.” Baudrillard outlines the commencement of the ambiguousness of nullifying effects he will later elaborate as simulation in L’Echange symbolique et la mort” (p.86, Gallimard, Paris, 1986) (cited by John C Welchman – On The Uncanny in Visual Culture, p.48)

John C Welchman: “The relation between them [identical objects] is no longer that of an original to counterfeit. The relation is neither analogy nor reflection but equivalence and indifference. In a series, objects become undefined simulacra of each other. […] We know now that on the level of reproduction, of fashion media, advertising, information and communication (what Marx called the unessential sectors of capitalism), that is to say in the sphere of the simulacra and the code, that the global process of capital is held together.”

“The marvelous is not the same in every period of history: it partakes in some obscure way of a sort of general revelation only the fragments of which come down to us: they are the romantic ruins, the modern mannequin, or any other symbol capable of affecting the human sensibility for a period of time.” André Breton – Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) (cited p.52)