THE ART OF RUBBISH: 

                                                                                                       July 2013

In 1973 Soylent Green an American science fiction movie premiered.  The film was set in New York, the year 2022. The city is polluted, over populated, there is great poverty, unemployment and inadequate food and housing.  A true dystopia.  The ‘big secret’ is that soylent green, the main food source, is processed human beings.  One of the main characters Roth, played by the wonderful Edward G. Robinson, learns the secret of the food source and chooses ‘assisted suicide’ rather than life in such a depraved and depleted world.  The euthanasia process, carried out in the government facility known as the ‘Home’, consists of the patient choosing their final imagery and music before being lethally injected.  The patient then slowly passes away watching and listening to the ‘beauty’ that once was the world.  This is a classic cult science fiction movie of the 1970s.  There were grave concerns then as there are today about the environmental and ecological devastation of our plant. 

In the late 1960s Jack Burnham an American artist and theorist wrote:

Increasingly “products” - either in art or life - become irrelevant and a different set of needs arise: these revolve around such concerns as maintaining the biological livability of the earth, producing more accurate models of social interaction, understanding the growing symbiosis in man-machine relationships, establishing priorities for the usage and conservation of natural resources and defining alternative patterns of education, productivity and leisure.(1)

It all sounded so easy, but it hasn’t happened!

The 1970s was a time when many artists were rethinking their art practices, to be more political, more environmental, more ecological, more inclusive and/or more spiritual. The world was in flux with great social and political unrest, which was seriously exasperatedby the Vietnam War. So many artists sort societal change, many believing that art could be the conduit for a social revolution that would create a better more caring, more equitable world. In hindsight this was somewhat delusional, the art world went ballistic during the 1980s and the art market, spawned by corporate money flourished and many artists became rich entrepreneurial art directors.  Nevertheless, there were genuine concerns during the 1970s about the progressive capitalistic consumer driven societies that had flourished in the western world post World War 11.  And of the impact that this constant industrial progress was having on the planet.

Two artists working in the 1970s, reflecting the antithesis of their individual nations art establishments, working in diametrically opposed countries, was the American Gordon Matta-Clark and the German Joseph Beuys.  Matta-Clark was a young architecturally trained artist, the son of the Chilean surrealist artist Roberto Matta and godson to the French conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, making him New York art royalty.  In contrast Joseph Beuys was 50 years of age in 1971. He had survived as a pilot in the German Air Force during World War 11, but sustained war ‘wounds’ which became part of his mythology. Beuys became the voice of social, political and environmental concerns for a new generation of young German and European artists.  Both these artists were activists and performers and cult figures of their day. Both believed that ‘art’ could lead the way to new idealisms about the formation of more equitable and environmentally sustainable societies. 

Earth Day was celebrated for the first time on 22nd. April 1970. This was an initiative of UNESCO to highlight environmental concerns and bring awareness to communities, initially across the United States of America, but now across the globe. 

Matta-Clark created the first of his Garbage Wall installations in Manhattan from the 20th. -  23rd. April, for this first Earth Day celebration.  Matta-Clark encouraged people passing by to collect and deposit street debris which was then mixed with plaster and tar to form a solid wall of urban detritus.  Unfortunately, this first Garbage Wall , after the construction and associated performances ended, ended up in a garbage bin. In true conceptualist form, the idea was more important than the work or what eventually happened to that work.  Irrespective of the fine moral intent of this work, the end product was effectively no more environmental than the daily rubbish being dumped into the local environment.  New York struggled with many ‘sanitation’ strikes, beginning with the nine-day strike in 1968 and the city remained toxic for most of the 1970s.  

In 1971 Matta-Clark made another smaller version at the Brooklyn Bridge, his Garbage Wall for Fire Boy.  Matta-Clark died young, but he left instructions on the remaking of this supposed “prototype for the homeless”, to be made with chicken wire, concrete and collected rubbish. “By observing the lives of those who were forced to live on the street ... he came up with prototype forms, free of any commodity value, which could be used by anyone to create a shelter”.(2)  New York during the 1970s, was not that dissimilar to the dystopia envisaged in Soylent Green, there was great poverty, homelessness, unemployment and inadequate food and housing for the poor. But the Garbage Wall as a poor man’s shelter, leaves a lot of be desired.

There has been many recreations of the Garbage Wall.   In 1999 at the David Zimmer Gallery in New York and in 2009 in the Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark exhibition at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis Missouri.  And most recently in September 2012 at the Chicago EXPO. This recreation or more precisely the re-celebration of the memory of the original Garbage Wall was an attempt to highlight the environmental degradation of the midwest river systems, by the collection of debris from the Chicago, Illinois, Mississippi and Ohio rivers.  Symbolically, this Garbage Wall was positioned on the Navy Pier, next to the Chicago Lock, where the Chicago River connects with the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River systems.

According to Rhona Hoffman of the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago’s West Loop. 

[i]n the past forty years, Garbage Wall has only grown in significance, as the environmental problems we’re grappling with are far more complicated and widespread”.(3)

Perhaps the symbolism, the intent of the first Garbage Wall still has relevance?

Around the same time that Gordon Matta-Clark was constructing his Garbage Walls, the German artist Joseph Beuys was collecting street debris to highlight political and environmental concerns in his still divided Berlin.

Joseph Beuys, who was opposed to the hegemony of the Amercian art scene, was a very enigmatic artist; some would say a shaman others would say a charlatan. Beuys believed that art had the capacity to heal society’s wrongs and he used his art practice to challenge people to ‘re-think’ the social, political and ecological imperative of post World War 11 societies, especially Germany which had been devastated both morally and physically by the war. 

Ausfegen (Sweeping Up) was one of his ‘actions’.  He, accompanied by two overseas students swept Karl Marx Platz in West Berlin on Labour Day 1972,  after a rally.  The ‘fruits of their labour’, the street detritus was collected and placed inside a vitrine, a museum standard glass fronted display case, including the symbolic red broom that Beuys’ had used.  In this performance Beuys was commenting on the overt politicalisation of both East and West Germany; the Soviet communist west and the American capitalist east. He was also commenting on the use and abuse of foreign workers, as symbolised by his two assistants, for their uneducated countrymen would have been the real street sweepers. 

Beuys had become more political after the student uprising in France in 1968 which, coupled with his war experiences and the moral degradation felt in his homeland after the war, fermented into a new political, socio-ecological awareness.  Hence he formed the Deutsche Studentenpartel (German Student Party) in 1967, and then in 1971 the Organisation fur Direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung (Organisation for direct Democracy through Referendum). (4) In 1972 he was expelled as a professor from the Dusseldorf Kunstakademicfor refusing to limit the number of students he accepted into his course. He believe in free education for all.  Beuys, who died in 1986, politicised throughout his life, through his art and activism his political and ecological ideas and is still considered an important artist of the post-war generation, not least for his contribution in confronting Germany’s troublesome past. 

However, rubbish disintegrates and this work, like so many of Beuy’s other works, especially those using organic matter are a curatorial nightmare.

While writing this introduction, news has come in over the internet about the Italian artist Maria Cristina Finucci and her work The Garbage Patch State being exhibited at the current 2013 Venice Biennale. 

According to Isla Binnie of Reuters:

    Five huge patches of rubbish floating around the world will have their own unofficial national pavilion on the sidelinesof the world’s largest non-commercial art fair atVenice this week. These “garbage patches” are areas of high marine debris concentratedin the North Pacific Ocean the exact size and content of which are hard to define, according     to the U.S. National Pacific Ocean Atmospheric administration. Finucci says one of these areas is as large as Texas and 30 metres deep even thoughtthe patches are mostly invisible to the naked eye as the debris - chiefly plastic - breaks down over time, without ever fully disappearing. 5

Finucci has collaborated with the Venice Ca’ Foscari University to set up this “State” pavilion.  Apparently, Finucci approached UNESCO and was granted a symbolic statehood for her Garbage Patch State in order to participate in the Biennale.  The installation consists of two 5 metre square cubes covered in reflective material which Finucci believes makes them “almost invisible like the real Garbage Patch”.  Out of one cube a red net, filled with plastic bottle tops, snakes up and over a wall ‘heading’ in the direction of the Grand Canal.  In the other cube a 360 degree video projection submerges the audience in a virtual “plastic soup”.

This sounds like an interesting dual installation, but it is disingenuous? Funucci is bringing to the public’s notice a very serious and little known environmental disaster. This is good! But I would have preferred that this artist had physically collected discarded plastic bits and pieces rather than buying new plastic bottle tops to prove her point; to produce an art work that symbolised the environmental disasters that are the Garden Patches of plastic marine debris.

Not so long ago, the English artist Tony Cragg, did go out and source discarded plastic piece for his early works.

The 1978 work New Stones, Newton’s Tonesconsists of a myriad of found pieces of plastic. Craig was a trained biologist before becoming an artist, and he was part of a new generation of artists who pondered the “socio-economic and environmental problems of [their] disposable culture”. 6 In this early work Cragg has laid out his plastic detritus in a controlled coloured grid on the floor, creating order and beauty out of society’s throw-away remnants.   Many artists using found objects sort and catalogue their findings in a museum like regimentation, that equates to a neo-minimalism.

An even earlier work by Cragg, first put together while at art school was Stack.

The first Stack was made in 1975 and remade several times between 1975 and 1985.  His work from the beginning has been about the relationship between ‘the part to the whole’. In this first work there was a miscellaneous collection of wood, bricks, oil tins, sting, fabrics, cardboard and magazines to name a few, all stratified into a tight cubical form. 

Stack resembles a cross-section view of long-forgotten buried rubbish.  This reference to geology and archaeology resounds throughout Cragg’s career. He identifies as key themes in his work his relationship to the natural world and humankind's impact on nature. Insisting that what we call the 'natural world' is increasingly man-made, Cragg has said that he 'refuse[s] to distinguish between the landscape and the city', adding that man-made objects are 'fossilized keys to a past time which is our present' . (7)

The geological and archaeological aspects of Cragg’s work also resound in the later work of the American artist Mark Dion, particularly in his acclaimed work Tate Thames Dig 1999.  Both Cragg and Dion have scavenged found objects in the making of their respective works.

The formation of the work Tate Thames Dig 1999 was a collaborative excavation work, at low tide, along the banks of the Thames River, London. The excavation, the archeological dig, was carried out on both sides of the Thames River.  On the Millbank side is the historic Tate Museum, on the other side the old Bankside Power Station, which has been converted into the new Tate Modern Gallery.  This ‘dig’ was about the history of the river, the vast variety of debris that was washed in and out by the tidal flows, the history of the local populace and their own discarded detritus and of the historic sites particularly Bankside, with its unique industrial history. The selected contents of this dig, the bones, glassware, pottery, metal objects and plastic toys and other assortments went through the selection, classification, cleaning, identification and tagging process inherent in the traditional archeological and museumological practice. 

Thus, the art work Tate Thames Dig was about current museumology, urban archeology, conceptualism and wasteful consumerism; all wrapped up in a ‘cabinet of curiosities’.  Dion’s own particular cabinet of curiosities, was idiocyncratic and parodied the concept ofthe traditional ‘cabinet of curiosities’ or German ‘Wunderkammer’ the receptacles of the precious, the unique, the exotic, the absurd fragment or object, displaying the wonderment, the mystery of the world. Dion’s collection was not of the precious, the unique or the exotic, his cabinet of curiosities was of the mundane, the domestic, the fragments of urban detritus, collected and displayedwith no apparent exhibition rationale, except that the pieces had been found in the exposed banks of the Thames River. Dion re-interprets Tony Cragg’s belief that man-made objects are 'fossilized keys to a past time which is our present' . (8)

Dion has stated:

“Museums of history are one of the most essential sites for any investigation into how a dominant cultural group constructs and demonstrates its truth about nature.” 

“My work is not really about nature, but rather it is a consideration of ideas of nature.” (9)

A decade earlier the French artist Dominique Mazeaud, domiciled in Santa Fe New Mexico collected debris from the Santa Fe River, a tributary of the Rio Grande River. Mazeaud’s project from 1987 to 1994 was to ‘cleanse’ the river. This was much more in line with Beuy’s ‘actions’ as it was for Mazeaud a form of ritualistic based performance. Once a month, on the same day, either alone or with willing friends, Mazeaud would clean up a section of the river bed removing all the physical ‘pollution’.  

In her diary she sometime wrote poetry:

Picking up as can

From the river

And then another

On and on

It’s liker a devotee

Doing countless rosaries

On other days she wrote more disparaging comments:

We decide to clean the dumping area and set out to work.  This is a more delicate operation than picking up ‘a can and then another’.  It’s soiled rabbit litter, crates filled with rotting fruit scattered all over, and more.  Some of it is encrusted in the ice, some of it has been burnt.  As soon as we start stirring, the offensive smell of decaying fruit hits us and the ashes soil the water ... what a mess, but we get to it ‘faces down’ so to speak....(10) 

This was a solitary, undocumented personal art ritual.  A singular artist making an environmental statement, quietly and individually.  There have been many artists across the globe trying to create a better world in their own quite way.

The Melbourne artist Ash Keating, certainly got ‘face down’ as Mazeud had done, with the task of retrieving suitable discarded materials, largely industrial waste products, from a land fill in an outer Melbourne suburb.  Keating spent several days sorting through the dumped industrial and corporate waste at a local community rubbish ‘land fill’ dump,  for his 2020? (Art and Rubbish Project). 

The selected refuse was then transported to an inner Melbourne gallery, the old

North Melbourne Meat Works, now the North Melbourne Meat Works Art House, a large turn of the century warehouse construction. Inside the large central hall the trucks dumped their loads of ‘selected materials’.  A large opening celebration took place, where people were able to see and understand the extreme wastage in the corporate and industrial worlds.  Framing the main hall area Keating had erected large vinyl advertising posters which he reused by painting over, blocking out words, in order to subvert the original intent of the poster. This according to Leon Goy “ foregrounded Keating’s history of cultural jamming and activism”. (11)

The next day the waste management auditors sorted out the ‘waste’ into specific waste categories. Then a team of collaborating artists joined Keating, as individuals or in groups and used the materials to createsite-specific ephemeral art.  These actions were well documented“with live-feeds and video-footage of the process of the various artists’ projects and the installation’s earlier incarnations being projected back into the exhibition arena”.(12) A forum finished the event with artists and environmentalists discussing the ways to move forward into a more environmentally sustainable society. “This project made an underlying statement on society’s never ending and ever increasing production of material waste, whilst also exploring collaborative practice in art”.(13)  But alas, similar to the fate of Matta-Clark’s original Garbage Wall being assigned to a rubbish dumpster, the 2020? materials were returned to the land fill site. But according to Goy:

2020? succeeded in generating valuable discourse on the role of artand its ability to draw light on and inform the wider social body on impending sustainable issues.

But the last word most go to the English theorist and writerT. J. Demos

One must confront the troubling observations that exhibitions dedicated to sustainability arefundamentally contradictory; foreven as they seek to address climate change and work towards creative solutions - although certainly not all projects are equally politically or pedagogically inclined - they contribute to the very problem of global warming by virtue if their own carbon footprint, the results of transporting artworks, maintainingthe exhibition space’s climate control and printing catalogues. One might conclude that eco-art exhibitions are simply unviable from an environmental perspective. Yet if this response is both inadequate and unrealistic - as much as it would be to insist on immediately discontinuing all unsustainable technologies, rather than working gradually towards a state of sustainability - we need at the very least to consider just what justifies the continuation of unsustainable art exhibitions committed to the subject of sustainability.(14)                

Where to go from here?

END NOTES

(1) Jack Burnham, Systems Esthetics, ArtForum 1968.

(2)James Attlee, 2007 Tate Papers - Anarchitecture Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier, p.14

http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/07spring/attlee.htm

(3)  Matta-Clark’s Celebrated Garbage Wall to Highlight Chicago River at EXPO CHICAGO, 

http://www.nrdc.org/media/2012/120807.asp

(4) Hrag Vartanium, Joseph Beuys: Ausfegen (Sweeping Up) 1972, 

http://hragv.tumblr.com

(5) Isla Binnie, 29th. May, 2013 Giant Garbage Patches of the Sea Become “National” Art in Venice. Reuters http://au.news.yahoo.com 

(6) Stiles, Kristen and Selz, Peter (eds. )1996, Theories and Documentations of Contemporary Art, Berkley :University of California Press, p.280.

(7) Delaney Aug. 2001, Tony Cragg Stack 1975, Tate Gallery Summary www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/cragg-stack-t07428

(8) ibid

(9) http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/arts/visart_dion.htm.

(10) Suzi Gablik, 1992, The Reenchantment of Art, Thames & Hudson Ltd., London, pp.119-120.

(11) Leon Goh, 2008 Ash Keating 2020?, Eyeline Magazine

http://www.eyelinepublishing.com/eyeline_68/review/ash_keating

(12) Dominic Allen, http://vimeo.com/30833780

(13) Leon Goh, 2008 Ash Keating 2020?, Eyeline Magazine

http://www.eyelinepublishing.com/eyeline_68/review/ash_keating

(14) T. J. Demos, 2009, The Politics of Sustainability: Art + Ecology, Radical Nature: Art + Architecture for a Changing Planet 1964-2000 http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/3417, p.19