Rubbish

Leftovers

Susanna Rustin at the Guardian discusses food’s latest hot trend: leftovers. “Our modern obsession with beautiful food – and reliance on ready meals when short of time – has led to huge waste. Is it time to put leftovers back on the table?” she asks.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/dec/15/foods-latest-hot-trend-leftovers

Rustin notes “In a speech to the Women’s Institute in York last week, environment secretary Owen Paterson talked about the challenges of feeding a growing world population, and called on the WI to “help us as a nation cut down on food waste”. He complained that we are in the grip of a “cult of beauty and perfection” around food, and said that celebrity chefs as well as supermarkets should do something about it.”

In his speech, Owen Paterson notes “Incredibly in 2011 the UK threw away 15 million tonnes of food and drink waste. For an average family that is £500 worth of edible food that’s chucked out each year. At least 60% of our household food waste is avoidable. We are already making progress. Since 2006 food waste has been reduced by 13% but there’s more to do. That’s why Government introduced clearer food date labels on products.”

In her article, Rustin case studies London chef Tom Norrington-Davies who she quotes: “Cookbooks in the 1970s and 1980s always had chapters on using up leftovers. But this stopped in the 1990s”

Leftovers, [Norrington-Davies] points out, are not just what is left on the table. The woman he buys goat’s cheese from has no use for her male goat kids. So he cooks them. The cheese straws he served this week were offcuts from a quince tart. Yucky bits such as rabbit offal or “funny looking ends of mackerel” he takes home to his cat.

“Many of my peers in this kind of place, at the mid-range, casual end of the market, are children of the 70s, which was quite an austere time,” he says. “We ate a lot of leftovers when I was a lad, and I still have a horror of waste. Readymade food was just not an option, it was very expensive, and I still find it incredible that in a supermarket nowadays people are drawn to buying readymade meals because it looks cheaper than doing it yourself. It’s a complete reversal.”

Rustin blames readymeals, supermarkets and consumer attitude for the waste over Owen Paterson’s recent emphasis on celebrity chefs’ perfectionism glorified on TV to the masses and concludes with the suggestion to make Monica Galetti from Masterchef the celebrity champion for reducing food waste.

Recycled Orchestra: Music from Trash

Landfill Harmonic is an upcoming feature-length documentary about a remarkable musical orchestra in Paraguay, where the musicians play instruments made from trash. Due to be released 2014, directed by Graham Townsley and produced by Alejandra Nash, Juliana Penaranda-Loftus, Rodolfo Madero.

“Cateura, Paraguay is a town essentially built on top of a landfill. Garbage collectors browse the trash for sellable goods, and children are often at risk of getting involved with drugs and gangs. When orchestra director Szaran and music teacher Fabio set up a music program for the kids of Cateura, they soon have more students than they have instruments. That changed when Szaran and Fabio were brought something they had never seen before: a violin made out of garbage. Today, there’s an entire orchestra of assembled instruments, now called The Recycled Orchestra. Our film shows how trash and recycled materials can be transformed into beautiful sounding musical instruments, but more importantly, it brings witness to the transformation of precious human beings.”

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXynrsrTKbI

http://landfillharmonicmovie.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/landfillharmonicmovie

Gabriel Kuri

Kunsthall Bergen in Norway have kindly sent me the curator text and press photos of the recent Gabriel Kuri show at Bergen Library previously mentioned on this blog.

Kuri presents eight new mobile sculptures, as four pairs, corresponding to materials and qualities that already exist in the architecture and interior of the library. The sculptures are also containers of a varied selection of objects including newspapers, stones, book loan receipts, potted plants and the library’s waste-paper bins Each is equipped with wheels to travel freely around the library, reminiscent of John Cage’s Rolywholyover A Circus exhibition at MOCA, LA in 1993.

Kuri works with remains: “Empty containers, packaging or remains of the actual act of purchasing: receipts that remain after the financial transaction has been completed; adhesive labels that are removed from the apple before it is washed and eaten; plastic bags that the goods are carried in on the way home from the shop; or the plastic bottles that only exist as containers for the true product (the mineral water inside). These are all some of the things that surround us all the time, but which often only spend a brief moment in our hands before being redirected into a system for waste disposal or recycling.

One pair of Kuri’s works in the library, Element C.1, consist each of three coloured bins with plastic liners in a veneered plywood structure on wheels, which creates a movable set corners for the bins. “During his preparations for the exhibition Kuri observed how the corners of the library were often used for an eclectic selection of waste bins in a number of different colours and shapes. The bins are strategically placed in places where experience has shown that there is a need to throw away rubbish. Each department of the library has a number of waste bins that are discreetly placed, often in fact in corners. Kuri’s rolling corners are bearers of just such waste bins. the waste bins are an effective reminder that the things with which we surround ourselves often encode a balance between use value and instant waste. The books in the library too can be seen in such a perspective. The library is forced to scrap many books every year. So are the publishers, who ‘bin’ a large number of books every season. And one sees that there is a fine line between the book as information and as elevated source of knowledge on the one hand, and the book as a simple material object consisting of printer’s ink on paper on the other.”

A second pair of works in red and blue powder coated steel, Element A.2, resemble giant extended book ends with pigeon-deterrent spikes functioning as receipt spikes. “These slips of paper, like receipts for purchases and transactions, have a distinct character as bearers of highly specific information and at the same time as useless waste.”

Kuri’s works oftens involves a continual cataloguing and organizing of objects and information. “In earlier works he has, for example, sorted a large number of receipts by size into special heaps, a system that becomes absurd compared with the verifiable filing system of a bookkeeper. In another work he has organized a number of utility objects by criteria such as whether the thing is wrapped, whether it is made of wood or plastic, whether it is in one piece or put together with several pieces, etc. These ordering principles may be unconventional, but in fact make up distinct and internally coherent systems.”

Currently reading: Jo Applin – Bric-a-Brac: The Everyday Work of Tom Friedman, Art Journal 67.1 (Spring 2008) pp.69-81

http://prod-images.exhibit-e.com/www_luhringaugustine_com/ArtJournalSpring2008.pdf

Abstract: L’Invention du quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life) .4 The significance of Friedman’s work lies in the conceptual strategies of assemblage and bricolage that he employs.1 For all their playfulness and apparent slickness of execution and conception, Friedman’s works and the stock of arthistorical motifs he frequently (if obliquely) exploits through various strategies of recycling and appropriation or borrowing articulate a model for thinking about art’s relationship with its past. 41 For de Certeau, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, and Friedman, using the merest set of blocks to do it yourself, implies a very different learning of the world, one that is tied not to the passive and readymade form of the plastic toy or consumer good, but to a process of generating individual, active modes of engaging with the world.42 Bricolage and braconnage, far from offering outmoded approaches to making and making do, might yet provide die most productive modes of explaining and encountering one’s lived environment.

Applin puts forward the notion that Friedman’s process of making, and making do, draws on the twin strategies of bricolage (“do-it-yourself”) and braconnage (“poaching”), terms which she, in turn, poaches respectively from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 1962 work La pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind) and Michel de Certeau’s 1980 book L’Invention du quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life).

“Lévi-Strauss’s description of bricolage is a temporary, do-it-yourself form of collecting, reordering, and recycling – a borrowing from other spheres and practices in order to generate if not something new then at least something else. De Certeau compares and integrates Lévi-Strauss’s model of bricolage with the practice of braconnage, or “poaching.” Braconnage relies not on established modes of reading, in which readers passively absorb the text before them, but is, rather, a dynamic process in which the readers as braconneurs establish their own routes through the given material with what de Certeau calls an “artisanlike inventiveness.” For de Certeau, the two practices are commonplace, banal activities in which we all engage; yet both potentially enable us to produce distinct, oppositional ways of engaging with the world.

In defining Friedman’s work:

“While Friedman does not use junk or throwaway materials, his works do address the impoverished conditions under which the object qua object now operates.”

“A continual procedure of recycling lies at the core of many of Friedman’s works, a circuit of exchange in which the leftover remnant of one work provides the building blocks to generate another, suggesting a process less of renewal than of making do.”

Tom Friedman – Untitled (Eraser Shavings), 1990 http://artintelligence.net/review/wp-content/uploa…

Applin references Briony Fer’s “sculpture as leftover” – Briony Fer, “The Scatter: Sculpture as Leftover,” in Part Object Part Sculpture, ed. Helen Molesworth (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2005) – a book on its way to me in the Christmas post.

In 2000 Friedman participated in the group exhibition American Bricolage at Sperone Westwater, New York, curated by David Leiber and Tom Sachs. The gallery’s promotional material claimed to eschew “traditional artistic materials (but not an awareness of the history of art)” in order to create a “new cultural syntax out of the debris of the already-given.”

Axisweb Curated Selection Prizes – Winners Announced

I have been selected for the Axisweb Curated Selection Prize

“To support the next generation of curators, we invited students on MA Curating (or equivalent) courses around the country to take a look through our directory, choose six artworks and pitch for a chance to publish their Curated Selection on Axisweb.”

“We were delighted with the response and range of applications we received, although this did make selection difficult. But with the help of Alessandro Vincentelli, Curator of Exhibitions and Research at Baltic, Gateshead, we selected three winners who will work their proposals up into full Curated Selections to appear on the site in the New Year.”

The Winners:

Alice Bradshaw – MA by Research, University of Huddersfield
Alice’s selection focuses on artists whose practice appropriates rubbish and waste. She is interested in rubbish as a human construct with complex anthropological and socio-economic associations.

Susannah Worth – MA Critical Writing in Art & Design, Royal College of Art
Susannah examines the parallels between art and cooking, exploring what these activities have in common and how they touch on fundamental aspects of what it means to be human.

Helen Hillyard – MA Curating the Art Museum, The Courtauld Institute of Art
Helen selected artists who use language, be it written or spoken, as their primary material. Her chosen works, all by female artists, reveal an ongoing conflict between the need to speak and the difficulty of speaking.
Amelia Crouch, Lap and Skirt, 2008

The Runners Up:

Elizabeth Ibbotson, MSc History of Art, Theory and Display (University of Edinburgh)
George Vasey and Lucy Macdonald, MFA Curating (Goldsmiths)
Hannah Conroy, MA Curating Contemporary Art (Royal College of Art)
Joshua Tengan, MA Art Museum & Gallery Studies: Curatorship (Newcastle University)
Victor Wang, MA Curating Contemporary Art (Royal College of Art)

http://www.axisweb.org/atATCL.aspx?AID=2726