Waste Land (2010) dir. L. Walker, J. Jardim & K. Harley
rio of trash
Reply
Tag Archives: trash
evidence
In January I went to White Columns to see, “Looking Back,” an exhibit surveying artwork shown in New York in 2010, curated by Bob Nickas. The work was a mix of mostly New York-based artists, young and old, living and dead. One piece that caught my attention was by Candy Jernigan:
Candy Jernigan, Found Dope: Part II, 1986 (detail)
Found objects on paper 28 in. x 39 in.
Broken bits of used crack vials are pasted into into grid formation on a large poster, sealed behind glass, like the butterflies of a 19th century natural historian. Beneath each artifact in the grid is small even block handwriting, marking the date, time and location of its collection, e.g. June 11/Second Avenue at Third street/west side/10 AM. At the center of the grid, towards the bottom, is a hand-drawn map of a section of Manhattan’s East Village, running from Houston Street in the south to Eighth Street in the north, and west to east from Broadway to Avenue A. A small dot on the map is marked with the words “We are here.” Is “here” the site of the piece’s original exhibition, or the home of the artist?
Seven months after seeing this piece, it stays with me as an influence in my own work. The simplicity of the idea, the dedication of the artist to the everyday routine of walking around her neighborhood, and the obsessiveness of collecting and labeling that pariah of all New York trash–used drug paraphernalia–all combine into a portrait of a neighborhood at a particular moment in its history; a moment all but unimaginable in today’s East Village, with its moneyed and policed revelers. What sorts of trash might an observant walker find on her morning walk through the same streets, two decades after Jernigan?
dumpster diving
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Alejandro Duran, Washed Up, 2010
New York based artist, Alejandro Duran, is creating art from trash that washes up on the beaches of Sian Ka’an, in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. Although Sian Ka’an is a federally-protected reserve, the Mexican government cannot prevent the area from becoming the final resting place for trash from all over the world. Duran collects the trash, categorizes the different pieces by color, strips them of labels, arranges his collections in the landscape, and then photographs them. The playful titles of the photographs, such as Nubes, Fruta Negra, and Mar (pictured above) belie the perverse horror of waste which will never biodegrade–carelessly discarded by people who believe what they can’t see won’t hurt them–travelling on the open seas and eventually choking the life of a nature reserve thousands of miles away.
Duran also creates “Product Portraits,” which he labels with the product’s country of origin:
Poland, Shockwaves
Switzerland, Zetafen
United States, WD-40
After photographing these items, Duran uses his own funds to cart the trash to recycling centers; however, this is an extremely difficult undertaking for one artist, working under the constraints of time, money and geography.
Washed Up is truly an exercise in “archiving the city,” if we imagine that cities all around the world create these waste-images of themselves, carried by currents to far-away places.
dangerous archives?
Watch the development of the case against Julian Assange very carefully. It’s pretty bizzare: sexual assault? espionage? Some are coming to his defense. As my friend Barbara says, one likely result of this drama will be greater restrictions on the way we are able to access, use and create various media archives. CBS News predicts a future of never-ending cyberwar. Never forget: sorting through these sorts of archives or databases is the political practice of our time, made even more so by sheer ubiquity. And the creation of digital archives themselves? What sort of politics is that?
One New Republic editorial questions Julian Assange’s/Wikileaks’ status as beacons of serious journalism, governmental transparency and democracy due to their commitment to collect data, without organization and argument. The article cites one of my fave media theorists, Lev Manovich:
The media theorist Lev Manovich has said that the definitive informational metaphor of our epoch is the database. The database is not just a metaphor, in fact—it’s a certification of what knowledge looks like and how it is to be gained. A metaphor is a carrier, a condensation of meaning. A database is a heap.
It is this “heap-ish” quality that makes databases like dumpsters. And I guess the creation of databases is kind of like garbage collection, except the goal isn’t disposal. There is no real possibility of (information) disposal as the existence of Wikileaks clearly proves. Does this mean that political action, and the creation of knowledge itself depends upon dumpster diving? Garbage collection and dumpster diving? Really?
YES! I think so. And I am kind of excited by this new political reality. I’m not the only one.
my archival practice
I had a great question from my colleague today:
Hi Adeola. I’m curious how you think about your archiving practices in relation to your archiving (analysis? retrieval?)… I know in your work you are more focused on studying rather than creating archives. But you do create them, so I’m wondering how the 2 activities relate for you. Is one more personal and the other more academic? Or can there be such a distinction for you? What do you think Benjamin was doing with the Arcades project?
This was a great question, because it forced me to think carefully and articulate my approach to archiving. Here is my answer:
I don’t work on “the archive”, per se, because I think that it is too fetishized as an object. I am interested in “archiving” as an everyday practice that has been part of modern life, for many people (anyone associated with a state, in one way or another) and today, it is THE modus operandus for most people who live in the world of electronic devices–from TV watchers, to phone callers, and email senders.
Right now, as I write I am engaging in an archival practice. To me this is more than simply creating an archive that someone can retrieve. I take a lot of inspiration from Benjamin’s arcades project, and many of his writings are part of my “top shelf.” I don’t want to make the comment TOO long, so here is a link to my blog, where I discuss Benjamin a little:
http://archivingthecity.com/2009/01/14/one-day-sculpture/
You will see that Benjamin is very interested in trash, debris, what as been discarded. Why? Not only because it needs to be retrieved and saved (the Arcades project was as much about his life in Paris, as anything else. It is far from a library, or national archive, or institutional archive), or worked with in any conventional way, but because looking at the trash–dumpster diving–was a way to re-train our historical senses, to begin to see how the past is never really gone, and does not necessarily need to be “retrieved” because it never actually left. The Arcades project is not conventional history, or even conventional archiving, in any sense. It is not about creating narratives. I think it is about training oneself as a researcher to do what, in one’s time seems odd, challenging, difficult or even embarassing. What is today’s equivalence of (academic) dumpster diving?
Trashing the city
On 14 december, 2009, on Stout Street, between Lambton Quay and Ballance Street, in the center of Wellington, New Zealand, there was a pile of rubbish blockading the entire road and making the street impassable for cars, pedestrians and cyclists. This impromptu blockade was a “One Day Sculpture” called Journee des Barricades by British artists, Heather and Ivan Morison. According to the artists’ statement:
Car wrecks, discarded furniture and other urban detritus barricaded a central city street in Wellington, New Zealand on Sunday 14th December 2008.
The temporary public artwork entitled Journée des barricades acts as a rupture in the everyday comings and goings of the city. In its barricade form, the sculpture might suggest associations with the history of political actions and social unrest, but as a collection of discarded consumer products it may also bring to mind questions about our environmental and economic future.
This street art in Wellington looks eerily like the streets of Naples looked last year (though probably not as smelly, and certainly not for the sake of art).
This artists’ collection of urban detritus also reminds me of the work of Walter Benjamin, especially the Arcades Project. Continue reading
