Henry Lefebvre – Clearing Ground (1961) published in Documents of Contemporary Art: The Everday. Edited by Stephen Johnstne. Whitechapel and The MIT Press, 2008
“A social group is characterized just as much by what it rejects as by what it consumes and assimilates. The more economically developed a country is, the more gets thrown away, and the faster it gets thrown away. People are wasteful. In New York, in the promised land of free enterprise, the dustbins are enormous, and the more visible they are the more inefficient public services operate. In underdeveloped countries, nothing is thrown away. The smallest pieces of paper or string, the smallest tin is of use, and even excrement is gathered. What we are outlining here is a sociology of the dustbin.”
And J J Charlesworth on Tino Seghal’s apparent dislike of things and conceptual art being a reaction against the ‘overproduction’ of things: “What’s creepy about this second wave of thing-hating is that it’s happening in the midst of a neverending economic recession, which, by definition, is the socially corrosive breakdown in the production of things.
At What Point Does Nothing Become Too Much of a Good Thing? Art Review p.52, September 2012 http://www.artreviewdigital.com
