Rubbish

Last night was also the mid-show private view of Microcosm in Leeds which I’m exhibiting in with Elastic Band.

Departure Foundation (also producing HOARD) have secured a huge office space in Leeds Valley Park where Microcosm is taking place 14 June – 31 August 2012.

http://www.departurefoundation.com/Exhibitions%20M…

Whilst few of the works on display directly or overtly deal with the notion of rubbish, there were a couple of pieces using throw-away/discarded/found materials and drawing attention to the life-span of objects and materials.

Fiona Long’s Microcosm was probably the most obviously rubbish-related work featuring Haribo Starmix packets pinned to a board in a constellation-like composition.

Marcus Orlandi’s wood used in Deserted (HELP) is not labelled as found or reused but my suspicion from the wood’s condition is it’s been salvaged from desertion, possibly from a skip or a house renovation. They look like old floorboards and I’m keen to know more about their history.

Lesley Guy’s Transformations are composed of oil and pencil on newspaper, newspaper and a paper coffee cup, and newspaper and a toilet roll middle. The objects look to have been considerately selected for the images portrayed in the temporal medium and for their specific sculptural form. These materials are from the everyday world of the consumer society and throwaway culture, now elevated to the status of art through precise and attentive transformations.

Steve Hine’s Prosthetic is labelled as a found table with chrome plated tube, caster and fitting. Likely to have been a skip find thrown away due to damage beyond functionality, Steve has rescued and restored this piece of unfashionable furniture. Unlike traditional furniture restoration where repair is designed to be as unnoticeable as possible, Steve has fashioned another contrasting table leg, matching in height, to form an anthropomorphised prosthetic limb for this elderly and neglected piece of furniture.

Louise Winter: Per Diem

Grey Space Galleries, Leeds

Friday 3 August 2012

Last night I went to see Louise Winter’s new solo show opening at Grey Space Galleries at Melbourne Street Studios, Leeds.

GreySpace Galleries will be hosting the first solo exhibition by contemporary Newcastle based artist Louise Winter. the artist is concerned with questioning the fixed identity of objects and materials so they defy usual definitions or expectations.

Central to Winter’s practise are ideas of displacement: is the location of material central to its definition so that if it is displaced from it ‘real’ context can it still be regarded as the same object, where then does it exist if at all?

Winter continues to develop these themes at GreySpace as she attempts to re-assemble discarded aspects of known objects, creating a tension between the literal and abstract reading of these things as signifiers. Her practise is investigative in its nature and form, moving between object, process, event and performance, exploring the poetic and often absurd potential of the everyday.

Louise showed a mixture of pre-existing, site-responsive and previously unseen new works including:

rubbish pile and fan (2012) http://www.axisweb.org/artwork.aspx?WORKID=103011

can and shelving (2012) http://www.axisweb.org/artwork.aspx?WORKID=103046

pouring can (2011) http://www.axisweb.org/artwork.aspx?WORKID=103537

She also found a novel way of blacking out the windows for the video projection: Black binliners scrunched up and stuffed inbetween the window and the security bars. I asked her if she considered them a piece of work or more of a functional intervention and she leaned more towards function as the primary motive.

We talked a little bit about her rubbish hoard and where she sources her rubbish: She has a particular old quarry-like place near where she lives where she frequents in search of potential items to make work.

Louise likes making work from objects that already exist, namely rubbish, because (paraphrasing) the world already has enough things in it.

Axisweb profile: http://www.axisweb.org/seCVPG.aspx?ARTISTID=16076

Modernity and Waste, September 2007, Philoctetes Center, New York

Roundtable discussion featuring Jennifer Gabrys, William Kupinse, Robin Nagle, Elizabeth Royte, and Susan Strasser.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQG4sWnbdtY

Transcript: http://philoctetes.org/documents/Modernity%20and%20Waste.doc

Here are my notes from this talk via youtube:

Susan Strasser talks about the relationship between waste and creative process: The central point of her book Waste and Want is that of hand work to machine work. Hand work involves a knowledge of what to do with waste and skills for fixing and the saving of materials for fixing and making have been lost. Bricolage is considered something artists do, not what everybody does, and the role of the artist involves a different relationship to the material world.

A poignant phrase comes up: Waste of time. There is a critical relationship between time and consumerism and waste.

Robin Nagle takes about Mongo collection and reuse as a creative process.

Elizabeth Royte talks about artists working with recyclable materials and

her impatience with the the belief that such practices are doing the earth some good in their negligible magnitudes.

Nagle talks about long term artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her first major project: Touch Sanitation project. http://www.brokencitylab.org/notes/touch-sanitation-maintenance-art-the-work-of-mierle-laderman-ukeles/

Strasser talks about Picasso and Braque as some of the first celebrated fine artists making collages from rubbish and historically contextualises it as during “that same transitional period, when it used to be something everybody did. You used found objects all the time. So during that transition, when people were not doing that so much, then it became elevated to something that artists did.”

William Kupinese talks about his research into around the same time on James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book that tries to represent the detritus of contemporary, or then-contemporary, consciousness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_%28novel%29

Kupinese asks is there a risk of aestheticising “garbage art”?

Nagle on our use of language: “I’ve always been curious about how we have decided that our garbage is repellent to us, and continue to create it in such massive quantities with such speed and persistence. I mean, the lovely English construction—we “throw,” which is very emphatic, “away,” which is very vague, our trash.”

Nagle on Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory: “He puts forth the idea that value is in fact on a continuum. He puts it in a triangle of how things move from being valued to being rubbish to being in a transitional stage in between being worthless and being valuable.”

Royte on Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld: “He [the protagonist] is a waste technician; he looks at everything before he buys it and imagines what kind of waste it will make, even before he decides to buy it.” According to Wikipedia; Underworld is a non-linear narrative that has many intertwined themes. A central character is Nick Shay, a waste management executive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underworld_%28DeLillo_novel%29

Royte on examining her own rubbish: “When I was going through my garbage for my book, I was ashamed about my garbage because everything in there represented some sort of failure.”

This last note is very relevant to HOARD. One of the things that appeals to me about the collection and exhibition of the rubbish generated through my practice is that it’s the objects and materials of failure; the failure to find a use; the negative in a polarisation of use and disuse.

Heather Rogers talking about Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage

Interview – Heather Rogers – The Hidden Life of Garbage (2005) 51:16

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1LWWSpl82Q

Interview with Ariane Conrad LITTERBUG WORLD: Overproduction, Waste & the Limits of Recycling published on Loud Canary, originally in LiP magazine and anthologized in Tipping the Sacred Cow (AK Press)

http://loudcanary.com/2011/06/29/litterbug-world-o…

Extract on the semantics of waste:

Ariane Conrad: Would you care to reflect on the semantic shift that occurred: it seems like it went from “garbage” and “trash” to “waste.” With your use of the word “garbage” in your title; are you taking a stand against use of the word “waste”?

Heather Rogers: I use the word “garbage” in the title because I think it’s really recognizable to people. I think that’s what most people call their waste or their discards. That’s why I use it; it’s not a statement of my political or ideological stance on the issue of discards. A lot of people feel very strongly about choosing the right word, and I really respect where that comes from. I think that what we call the things we throw away is very important and it does relate to the way that what we throw out is constructed as dirty and not okay to touch or to consider as having value or being a resource.

In the waste industry, especially the corporate waste industry, there’s been a conscious deployment of specific words to describe what gets thrown away. Often they’ll call it the “waste stream”—they always try to sanitize it. They want discards to be off-limits, but also they want what they do to be perceived as environmentally innocuous. So they call all of the trash that they get from households and cities “municipal solid waste.” They try and transform it into a technical problem, which blankets over the tougher questions about why are we throwing away so much stuff, and what’s in there? Why are there so many resources getting crushed into the ground, or getting burned in the incinerator? Why are we wasting so much? The semantics are a really big part of how the system works and manages public perceptions of it.

In the acknowledgements for her book Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, Heather Rogers acknowledges Professor David Harvey, Marxist social theorist and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, “who let me sit in on many of his classes while I was writing this book. His superb discussion of political economy deeply informs my analysis.”

Here is a great little RSA Animate based on one of his lectures at RSA in April 2010: David Harvey – The Crises of Capitalism

In this RSA Animate, renowned academic David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0

I saw David Harvey speak about Marxist theory at Liverpool Biennial with Alfredo Jaar and What, How & for Whom (WHW) as part of The Marx Lounge in conversation series of talks. http://liverpoolbiennial.co.uk/programmes/festival…

A very compelling speaker and key thinker in political theory, I can see how useful his lectures will have been for Rogers as she identifies from the outset how rubbish is politicised and intrinsically linked to capitalism.

http://davidharvey.org/