Rubbish

Rubbish News

Rubbish has been in mainstream media a far bit this week.

Wayne Gooderham looks at items left in secondhand books, specifically the vast collection Skoob Books in London have collected in their warehouse in Oxford. Pressed flowers, bookmarks, tickets, telegrams, business cards, postcards, photos and maps or among items left in books. Many items were probably accidentally left in the books, so maybe not actively discarded, and rescued from the rubbish category by becoming part of this collection.

The secret contents of secondhand books, 5 December 2012, The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/05/secret-contents-secondhand-books?CMP=twt_fd

The Shit London Awards 2012 got press coverage too. The organiser Patrick Dalton is keen to stress that the awards are not commenting on how shit London is, but specific aspects of it.

Categories are:

* UGLIEST BUILDING IN LONDON

* BEST/WORST SHOP NAME

* MOST DEPRESSING VIEW FROM WORK

* BEST PICTURE

New 2012 categories:

* BEST BRITISH PHOTO

* BEST INTERNATIONAL PHOTO

There’s some rubbish (Best international photograph: Possibly soiled mattress, Sydney, Australia, by Katja Forbes) and faeces to be seen (Best photograph: Pigeons and Boris bikes, central London, by Andrew Smith)

but the shitness is broader than rubbish and faeces and incorporates shit signs, shit buildings and shit views.

http://shitlondon.co.uk/shit-london-awards/

The Secret Life of Rubbish has been on BBC4 in a 2 part series:

Episode1: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01p48tt/The_Secret_Life_of_Rubbish_Episode_1/

Episode 2: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01p65qn/The_Secret_Life_of_Rubbish_Episode_2/

Archive footage is woven together narrating the recent history of British waste management.

The first programme deals with the decades immediately after the Second World War from post-war Make Do and Mend through to the arrival of supermarkets and consumerism.

The second programme looks at the 1970s and 1980s including the Winter of Discontent in 1978 and the 1974 Labour Government policy War on Waste.

Dr Timothy Cooper examines the War on waste? The politics of waste and recycling in post-war Britain, 1950-1975 (published in 2009 in Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 20, no. 4)

The next PechaKucha event I’m curating at the Hepworth is themed “Leftovers” with an open call for presentations:

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
Call for 20×20 presentations

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

To apply:
1. Download the presentation proforma from
http://the-arthouse.org.uk/upload/file/pkn.ppt
2. Add your title page and 20 slides (no more, no less) without changing the preset timings.
3. Email your presentation to [email protected] including a brief outline/description of what you will be talking about, name, contact details and a short introduction about yourself.
4. Deadline: Monday 10 December 2012

Presenters can bring a +1 free entry. No fees or charges. Free parking available at the Hepworth for presenters. 10 minutes walk from Wakefield Kirkgate train station.

Short videos up to 6 minutes 40 seconds in duration fitting with the theme are also sought to be screened at the event. The videos must be your own work and/or you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to screen the work. Please send preview or download links to: [email protected] with the following details: Name, title, date of Production, duration, short synopsis, short biography, website.

Local musicians interested in performing short sets at the event are also invited to get in touch.

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

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

PechaKucha x Chol Theatre at The Media Centre, Huddersfield, 29/11/12

Slides 16-20

Crap: Chris Ofili – Afrobluff (1996)
Chris Ofili’s Turner Prize winning elephant dung paintings began with a British Council-funded visit to Zimbabwe at the beginning of his career in 1992. Born in Manchester to Nigerian parents, this was his first trip to Africa and it had a profound effect on his work.

Shreds: Ni Haifeng – Return of the Shreds (2007)
Return of the Shreds was first exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in The Netherlands. Several tons of shredded, discarded fabric from garment factories was shipped from China to The Netherlands for the exhibition.

Leftovers: Anya Gallaccio – Because I Could Not Stop (2002)
For the 2003 Turner Prize, Tate presented shortlisted Anya Gallaccio’s sculpture Because I Could Not Stop – a bronze cast of an apple tree, embellished with real apples which inevitably rotted over the duration of the show.

Waste: Song Dong – Waste Not (2012)
Waste Not comprised over 10,000 items collected by Song Dong’s late mother over five decades. The activity of saving and re-using things is in keeping with the Chinese adage wu jin qi yong – translated as ‘waste not’ – a prerequisite for survival during periods of social and political turmoil.

Rubbish: Alice Bradshaw – Museum of Contemporary Rubbish (2010-present)
The Museum of Contemporary Rubbish is an ongoing project I set up in 2010 where I collected items of rubbish from market visitors in exchange for my rubbish. The Museum exists as an online archive which has expanded to include several collections from across the world, with museum merchandise and now a research department.

PechaKucha x Chol Theatre at The Media Centre, Huddersfield, 29/11/12

Slides 11-15

Detritus: Kurt Schwitters (1919)
Dada poet Tristan Tzara recalled Kurt Schwitters’ use of the detritus everyday life in his early collages: “I remember seeing Schwitters pick up in the streets scraps of old iron, broken watch works, bizarre and absurd materials which even junk men would have discarded, to use them in the fabrication of works of art.”

Refuse: Michel de Broin – Dead Star (2008)
Dead Star is made from residual batteries at the end of their duty. Left to itself, the sculpture will slowly cool down since there is no longer electronic activity taking place in it.

Junk: Noble & Webster – Wild Mood Swings (2009-10)
Tim Noble and Sue Webster created their self-image as “art junkies” in the 90s in London during the rise of the YBAs. Their sculptural assemblages are crafted from junk which is light projected onto to create shadows of their own likeness.

Ruins: Jean Tinguely – Homage to New York (1960)
Jean Tinguely unveiled his self-destructing sculpture in the gardens of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1960. The enormous white machine made up of discarded items began smoking, whirring, crashing, flaming and committing mechanical suicide. This is what is left of the sculpture housed in the Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland.

Scrap: César – Three Compressions (1968)
The French artist César made sculptures from car bodies compressed into dense packages. In 1968 he visited a scrap metal merchant in London and requested standard compressions of wheel hubs be prepared for his inspection, from which he selected three for this specific configuration.

PechaKucha x Chol Theatre at The Media Centre, Huddersfield, 29/11/12

Slides 6-10

Remains: Hans Schabus – Remains of the Day (2011)
Remains of the Day at Collective Gallery in Edinburgh consisted of rubbish accumulated by the artist and his family during one calendar year – installed, cleaned, catergorised and displayed in the white cube of the gallery.

Litter: Raumlabor – House of Contamination (2010)
House of Contamination was an experimental museum hosting Artissima’s 2010 curatorial programme “Poetry in the Form of a Rose.” The walls were made out of crushed plastic bottles, compressed bales of advertising and packaging paper, leftover fabrics from the manufacturing process and discarded wood from doors and panels.

Garbage: Ilya Kabakov – The Garbage Man (The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away) (1983-95)
Ilya Kabakov’s The Garbage Man resembles a state-owned communal apartment from the former Soviet Union. The carefully catalogued and archived contents are a mix of things the artist took with him from the old communist state and things he has found since he moved to the West.

Rejects: Sarah Nicole Phillips – Curbside Object Status Tags (2010)
The practice of leaving useful but no-longer-wanted objects out on the curb for others to find is widespread in New York, but there are inefficiencies in this informal sidewalk gift economy. The Curbside Object Status Tags communicates to passers-by important information about the object’s condition and functionality.

Mongo: Justin Gignac – NYC Garbage (2001-present)
Justin Gignac picks up New York City street trash, in line with a long tradition of mongo collection. He arranges and packages his findings in plastic cubes which he signs, numbers and dates, and sells for $50 each.