Currently reading: Gillian Whiteley – JUNK: Art and the Politics of Trash (2011, I.B.Taurus & Co)
Introduction: Cultural Bricolage and Garbology
Whiteley briefly outlines history of trash in art through the twentieth century from objet trouvé (surrealists), assemblage (mid-50s) to kitsch and folk art/culture and artist as bricoleur* from the 60s onwards. She notes that she doesn’t cover ‘junk sculpture’ – the genre associated with welded crap metal eg Richard Stankiewicz, John Chamberlian and César and focusses on work which utilises rubbish in the form of ephemeral and found materials and objects.
Quoting Vance Packard’s study The Waste Makers (1960-1), “Waste is, of course, an adjunct of luxury. Junk, trash, garbage, rubbish, refuse – whatever we call it – is dependent on economic wealth and excess production.” (p.4)
On hierarchy of material: “Sustainability and ‘thinking green’ are increasingly fashionable in the economically rich West but working with trash, creatively or in any other way, has historically , cultural and social connotations which relate to hierarchies of materials at particular times and places.” and “Everyone contributes to the domestic rubbish tip and landfill site but the processing of waste is generally left to those on the social and economical margins.” (p.5)
On the position of trash in contemporary culture: “The histories, discourse and narratives of rash are multiple – from its associations, transgression and dissent to its appropriation as souvenir, kitsch – but importantly, its histories are no longer marginal or secret. … Trash has become the trope of the turn of the twenty-first century, with, as Nicolas Bourriaud has identified, the ‘flea-market’ as a omnipresent reference.”
“Since the early nineties, the dominant visual model is close to the open-air market, the bazaar, the soul. A temporary an nomadic gathering of precarious material and product of various provenance.” – Bourriaud in Postproduction, (New York, 2002/2005, p.26)
(p.8/9) “Art’s use of trash needs to be read accordingly in diverse social, cultural and geographical contexts and situations within specific cartographies, chronologies and ethnographies.”
The questions Whitley poses from the outset are:
Is the use of trash inherently an act of dissent or is that notion historically granted?
Does the use of trash provide merely a frisson of transgression?
Has the contemporary use of garbage and assemblage become orthodoxy?
*Whiteley cites Claude Levi-Strass’s description of the Bricoleur as a “… jack of all trades or a kind of professional do-it-yourself person” – The Savage Mind (1966, p.17)
