It’s apocryphal that artwork which represents ideas of waste, garbage, or rubbish gets discarded or destroyed because it wasn’t explained properly.
The key problem is that while materials are referents, they are not the art objects themselves, even if the cultural interpretation isn’t quite as self-evident.
All the critical ink spent on “the thing itself”, doesn’t quite get to the issues associated with a necessary understanding of producing and consuming artworks.
To be fair, the museum’s cleaners were presented with a genuine conceptual challenge. They were told to clean up after an evening event – get rid of the empty wine bottles, that sort of thing.
Goldschmied and Chiari’s exhibition, a comment on the corruption of 1980s Italy that tried to evoke the decadence portrayed in Paolo Sorrentino’s film Il Divo about that same era, was a careful recreation of the aftermath of a party with lots of empty wine bottles everywhere. You can see how the confusion arose.
www.theguardian.com/…
It is often said that modern art is rubbish, but never did it ring as true as when an art gallery cleaner binned a work by Damien Hirst because he thought the installation was exactly that - leftover rubbish.
Emmanuel Asare thought the piles of full ashtrays, half-filled coffee cups, empty beer bottles and newspapers strewn across the gallery were the remnants of a party in the west London gallery.
The next morning when Mr Asare arrived for work, he decided to clean up the mess straight away by putting it all in bin bags. Mr Asare said: "As soon as I clapped eyes on it I sighed because there was so much mess.
"I didn't think for a second that it was a work of art - it didn't look much like art to me. So I cleared it all into binbags and dumped it."
Staff were dispatched to find the binbags in the rubbish, and salvaged the various objects, which they used to reconstruct the installation from photographs taken earlier.
www.theguardian.com/...
So I found this interesting idea, where recycling soot from fossil fuel vehicles and motors into art materials can be a interesting option, especially for economies more reliant on fossil fuels.
The social networking necessary to swap out soot collectors is more of what the system is about because the raising of firm or user consciousness about ecology is perhaps even a greater meaning aside from the production of materials. It could be argued that art materials generally get used perhaps therapeuticly to make unnecessary art if only a fraction are saved for museums, etc.
Graviky’s system starts with a cylindrical device that attaches to the exhaust systems of vehicles or diesel generators. Inside is a disposable cartridge filled with high-energy plasma. Applied voltages trigger the plasma to attract soot flying by, ridding the air of roughly 85 to 95 percent of the particles. Full cartridges are sent to Graviky Labs, where the soot is treated to remove heavy metals and toxins.
In India, Graviky sells the soot collection device to companies and organizations to use on diesel generators that help power buildings. So far, the devices have captured 1.6 billion micrograms of particulate matter, which equates to cleaning roughly 1.6 trillion liters of outdoor air. More than 200 gallons of the final product, called Air-Ink, have been harvested for a growing community of more than 1,000 artists from Bangalore, Boston, Hong Kong, London, and beyond. “Art helps us raise awareness about where the ink and paint comes from,” Sharma says.
www.graviky.com
Not to be confused with garbage can theories, Michael Thompson’s book Rubbish Theory begins with the question: “What does the rich person keep that the poor person throws away?” The answer of ‘handkerchief’ does raise some interesting questions about a variety of cultural practices.
More interesting is when we confer the status of artwork upon what one might assume is waste.
The first consideration should be an ecological one where just nominating something as art might have deleterious effects on the environment, despite its aesthetic possibilities.
The second consideration might include other messages related to the artwork and whether that social meaning changes the cultural value. For example, is scarcity or is uniqueness a guarantee of increased authenticity for the artwork.
Michael Thompson's
Rubbish Theory explains how the values of objects change and that to understand how we value objects we need to understand ‘rubbish’, that is, objects which hold no value. He explained that most objects lose value after they are created and eventually become rubbish. However, there are some objects that maintain their value, which he calls ‘durables’. His theory explains how some objects move from rubbish to having durable value. (
www.tandfonline.com/...)
Rubbish Theory
www.unz.com/…
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