Rubbish

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

I was invited to present at this PechaKucha event organised by Chol Theatre in Huddersfield. I took the opportunity to present some recent rubbish research and presented 20 artists’ work under the headings of Crap, Debris, Detritus, Dirt, Discards, Garbage, Junk, Leftovers, Litter, Mongo, Refuse, Rejects, Remains, Rubbish, Ruins, Scrap, Shit, Shreds, Trash and Waste.

Slides 1-5

Discards: Richard Wentworth – Questions of Taste (1997)
In Questions of Taste, Richard Wentworth juxtaposed ancient Egyptian drinking vessels from the British Museum’s collection with various modern drinks containers he found discarded around the museum.

Trash: HA Schult – Trash People (1996)
HA Schult’s installation Trash People is one thousand life size figures made from crushed cans, electronic waste and other refuse from human consumption.

Debris: Maarten Vanden Eynde – Plastic Reef (2008-12)
In 2008 Maarten Vanden Eynde learned that there was a ‘floating landfill’ about the size of the US, made up of plastic debris, swirling in the Pacific Ocean. He visited this location to collect several hundred kilos of this floating waste, which he then transported to his studio and melted down to create Plastic Reef.

Dirt: Allan Kaprow – Trading Dirt (1982-5)
Allan Kaprow spoke of the origins of Trading Dirt: “I woke up one day and had an idea. I would dig a bucket of dirt from the garden, and I’d put the bucket of dirt and a shovel in my truck. On some future day, I’d trade my dirt for someone else’s dirt.” He later exchanged it with a bucket of dirt from underneath the teacher’s chair at the Buddhist Zen Center in San Diego.

Shit: Piero Manzoni – Artist’s Shit (1961)
In May 1961, while he was living in Milan, Piero Manzoni produced 90 numbered cans of Artist’s Shit. A label on each can identified the contents as: “Artist’s Shit”, contents 30gr net freshly preserved, produced and tinned in May 1961.

Currently watching: Pacific Standard Time Symposium: Artists & Archives at The Getty Research Institute 12/11/11

http://www.getty.edu/research/exhibitions_events/e…

The keynote is from Sven Spieker: New Archival Practice.

He quotes Thomas Hirschhorn; “To connect what cannot be connected – that’s what my job as an artist is.”

He talks about the 1980s (romanticised) archive, considered as a random collection of artefacts and that the new archival practice is no longer archaeological study, with a move away from the notion of artist as producer. He describes the archival turn as disorientation in curatorial practice exemplified as showing (archival) documents of art rather than actual art (documentary realism). In the Q&A he outlines a return to the aesthetics of montage, collage and bricolage (a la 1920s Kurt Schwitters), a connecting of narratives rather than meta-narratives and the relationship to politics.

The second part is a series of artists’ talks from George Herms, Suzanne Lacy and Mario Garcia Torres. The most relevant to my research is George Herms’s talk which is an interesting introduction one of the founders of Californian collage art. “’Think of the American archives of art as your waste basket is what Paul Carston said to me in 1980.” he opens with. His works include The Librarian (1960) made from several books regularly thrown away on the dump in the North Californian town of Larkspur where he lived. He describes his work as “tossed salad assemblage.”

Ilya Kabakov – The Garbage Man (The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away) (1983–95)

In the National Museum of Norway’s permanent installation of Ukraine born Ilya Kabakov’s “The Garbage Man (The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away)”, the viewer is inside something that resembles a state-owned communal apartment from the former Soviet Union. The installation consists of three rooms where garbage has been accumulating over many years, carefully catalogued and archived. Small insignificant objects are glued onto charts or catalogued in cupboards with precise references to date and an “event”. The objects 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.

http://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/collections_and_re…

From wikipedia: By using fictional biographies, many inspired by his own experiences, Kabakov has attempted to explain the birth and death of the Soviet Union, which he claims to be the first modern society to disappear. In the Soviet Union, Kabakov discovers elements common to every modern society, and in doing so he examines the rift between capitalism and communism. Rather than depict the Soviet Union as a failed Socialist project defeated by Western economics, Kabakov describes it as one utopian project among many, capitalism included. By reexamining historical narratives and perspectives, Kabakov delivers a message that every project, whether public or private, important or trivial, has the potential to fail due to the potentially authoritarian will to power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Kabakov

In her 2008 essay Ilya Kabakov and the shadows of modernism, Fiona Woods examines Ilya Kabakov’s work in relation to modernism and post-modernism and suggests his work ocupies a more hybrid space, what Bruno Latour calls ‘the amodern’ (We Have Never Been Modern, 1991)

http://www.acw.ie/images/uploads/Ilya_Kabakov_and_…

This week in the Cultural Theory lecture, Prof Alex Coles introduced us to Latour’s work in the context of a post-critical paradigm which he describes as transdisciplinary (as opposed to Kant’s disciplinary critique and Frankfurt School‘s interdisciplinary critique).

Currently Reading: Documents of Contemporary Art: The Archive, ed. Charles Merewether (Whitechapel / The MIT Press, 2006)

I’ve been researching artists’ use of the archive and archival practice in relation to rubbish.

The Archive, edited by Charles Merewether, is one of a series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art.

This anthology explores ways in which the archive has become central in visual culture’s investigations of history, memory, testimony and identity. Surveying the full diversity of our transformed theoretical and critical notions of the archive, as both idea and as physical presence, this publication includes writings by Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Hal Foster and many others, and essays on the archival practice of such artists as Gerhard Richter, Susan Hiller, Ilya Kabakov, Christian Boltanski, Renée Green and The Atlas Group.

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/cat…

From Derrida’s Archive Fever: “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion; the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution and its interpretation.” (p.13)

On Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away (1977) – scraps of rubbish bound and archives with numbered commentaries. Currently installed in the permanent collection on Norway’s’ National Museum.

“Ilya Kabakov’s first installation in a Moscow apartment at the start of the perestroika period; reconstructing imaginary vestiges of commu7ncal apartment life, arose from his view of the almost existential pathos that garbage symbolized. […] Accumulations of the discarded and useless can undermine the valorization of remembrance, as opposed to forgetting as much as they render absurd the process of making meaningful.” (p.10)

Kabakov is quoted on p.32 and p.37 respectively: “A Dump: The whole world, everything which surrounds me here, is to me a boundless dump with ne ends or borders, an inexhaustible, diverse sea of garbage. This whole dump is full of twinkling stars, reflections and fragments of cultures.” […] A dump not only devours everything, preserving forever, but one might say it continually generates something: this is where some kind of shoots come from for new project, ideas, a certain enthusiasm arises, hopes for rebirth of something, thgouh it is well-known that all of this will be covered with new layers of garbage.”

On Warhol’s time capsules and indiscriminate collecting of everything connected to his life and work, he is quoted in TRACES (p.31) on having everything your own separate in a closet: “Everything in your closet should have an expiration date on it the way milk and bread and magazines and newspapers do, and once something passes its expiration date, you should throw it away.”

Currently reading: The Value of Things – Neil Cummings & Marysia Lewandowska (August/Birkhauser, 2000)

(Part 4 of 4)

Part Four: Culture Industry

Here the authors provide an critical account of the culture industry. On the public and private faces of the British Museum: “Although academic research allied to conversation is still at its ideological heart, the policies that characterise the Museum’s attitude to the public appear to be driven more by principles of leisure management and crows control than by an ambition to educate, to diffuse the knowledge amassed at the core of the institution.” (p.175)

“The Museum’s interpretative drive stunted by [their] obsession with dates, provenance, authenticity and cataloguing and by inadequate funding.” (p.181)

Their recommendation is to theme display artefacts through use rather than provenance to “break the stranglehold of chronology fictions of chronology, order and evidence.” (p.182)

The side note on the ‘Treasure Trove’ principle outlines “that any article of gold or silver recovered on the British Isles that was buried with the intention of being recovered, when recovered, becomes the property of the crown (although an appropriate market value is often awarded to the finder by the Treasure Trove reviewing Committee, advised by the Museum staff.” (p.184)

Merchandise

The British Museum Company (BMCo) is “a (separate) marketing divisions responsible for the manufacture and distribution of a wide range of souvenir, clothes and postcards based on the Museum’s collections, either through direct replication or a more allusively-themed relationship.” (p.185)

The Facsimile Services of the British Museum “created replicas of objects for other academic institutions worldwide, or on request of private individuals or, increasingly, trade customers.” (p.185)

“Although as a public sector institution, it is forbidden to borrow capital against the assets of the collection, the Museum is nonetheless engaged in turning that collection into a revenue stream.” (p.189)

Labels

“Things as commodities are themselves empty of significance. As a consequence, a vast superstructure of images and documentation, information and commentary has grown up around objects to locate them amongst ranges of extremely similar things.” (p.185)

“The superabundance of objects initiated by the wealth creation of the 1960s intensified our reliance on labels to identify the ‘marginal differences’ between series of what are essentially the same things. Superficial differences are now all we have left.” (p.189)

Leisure

There is a constant argument over the amount of contextualisation the Museum should have. One side argues that didactic material hinders the pure aesthetic experience for the more educated visitor, whereas for children and tourists, more information is necessary to fully engage with narratives not available via broadcast and promotional media which is only through HEIs. The problem their identify is a lack of access to education. (p.195)

Upgrade

“Value can no longer simply be expressed with accumulated excess of labour, an excess of ‘stored’ material things.” (p.203)

“Nothing is intended to last; everything must be able to adapt or be disposable. […] In a networked electronic economy, knowledge is the new source of value; not to hoard – as in a material economy – but to share, sell or reconnect with other retail sites.” (p.204)

“Connectivity increases the potential for extracting value, as every node in the network becomes a route to other multiple points of exchange.” (p.205)