Currently reading: Gillian Whiteley – JUNK: Art and the Politics of Trash (Part 6)
Afterword: Digital Ordure, leftovers and leavings
“The politics of junk is complex and contested: it is tied up with social and cultural histories and with economies and ecologies of human and consumer waste.” (p.151)
Whiteley equates the use of trash as raw material to practices of dissent, outsider art, the radical and subversive, not just in the intrinsic nature of the materials and their connotations, but through the cultural contexts they are produces and presented in. “Trash provides a metaphor which continues to signify cultural radicalism and political subversiveness.”
“So, readings of junk depend on our own subjectivities but also they are shaped by trash’s situated histories. … Widespread does not equal homogeneous or universal.” (p.152)
Whietely also notes that e-waste may be the biggest growing problem and references Australian based Slow Art Collective http://sac-ts2.blogspot.com (p.154)
Further references include: British artist Stuart Brisley, Jean Shin, Tomoko Takahasi, El Anatsui, Mierle Laderman Ukeles.
Stuart Brisley is also co-founder of the Museum of Ordure which presents the process of digital decay ‘bit rot’ exploring cyberspace as a site where language and imagery disintegrates just as in the physical world. www.ordure.org
Michael Cataldi and Nils Norman – Univeristy of Trash at the SculptureCenter, New York in 2009 www.universityoftrash.org
In conclusion: Whiteley provides an indepth study into the histories of trash in art. For me, she provides some very useful points and references on the definition, categorisation and hierarchies on trash in the first few chapters, discusses comedy which is a key aspect and provides more focus on what she considers key movements and their cultural contexts. The political dimension is quite vague. The case studies of individual artists and movements provide the assertion that using junk in art is often intentionally or consciously politicised and dependent on cultural context.
