Rubbish

Curently reading: Discard Studies as Science and Technology Studies (STS) By Max Liboiron. Discard Studies, 16/10/13.

Liboiron analyses the crossovers in Discard Studies and STS: “Not only do many of the premises and modes of inquiry between discard studies and science and technology studies map onto one another, but what is most promising in STS, and in discard studies, is how we can use our theory to inform intervention.”

Usefully, a list of references frames the defining of Waste:

“Waste and pollution are part of complex systems that “make” waste, whose elements include:

* social relations (ie. Reno, Joshua. (2009). “Your Trash is Someone’s Treasure: The Politics of Value at a Michigan Landfill.”)

* science (ie. Broto, V. C. (2013). “Symbolic Violence and the Politics of Environmental Pollution Science: The Case of Coal Ash Pollution in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”)

* infrastructure (ie. Boustani, A., et al. (2011). “Investigation of the waste-removal chain through pervasive computing,”)

* legal frameworks (ie. Karp, H. L. (2000) “Trash: a matter of privacy?”)

* materiality (ie. Breivik, Knut, et al. (2011). “Are Reductions in Industrial Organic Contaminants Emissions in Rich Countries Achieved Partly by Export of Toxic Wastes?”)

* economies (ie. Gidwani, V. and R. N. Reddy (2011). “The Afterlives of “Waste”: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus.”)

* activism (ie. Dillon, L. (2013). “Race, Waste, and Space: Brownfield Redevelopment and Environmental Justice at the Hunters Point Shipyard.”)

* governance systems (ie. Crang, M., et al. (2013). “Rethinking governance and value in commodity chains through global recycling networks.”)

* and their historical legacies (ie. Goldstein, J. (2013). “Terra Economica: Waste and the Production of Enclosed Nature.”)

Thanks Max! Plenty more reading material for those long train and plane journeys ahead :)

Currently listening to: Costing the Earth: CSI Landfill BBC Radio4 08/10/13 3:30pm

Tom Heap discovers landfill mining: finding value in what’s been thrown away. He visits Belgium to meet the first prospectors digging for treasure in trash.

For years rubbish has been thrown away and sent to landfill sites, but now there are moves to look at what’s been discarded as a resource.

Metals, plastics, ceramics and minerals are all buried under ground. As waste in landfill decomposes it emits gases. All are rich pickings and valuable to those looking to recycle and reuse the waste we’ve thrown away as scientists and engineers look to close the circle of waste.

Presenter: Tom Heap Producer: Martin Poyntz-Roberts.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03c3cnb/Cost…

In this 30 minute episode of the Radio4 programme which looks at the human affect on the planet, Tom Heap meets Yves Tielemans – the Belgian project manager of a revolutionary landfill mining project.

An estimated 60 million tonnes of waste in landfill is about to begin to be mined and useful materials salvaged.

Although some exhumed paper is barely degraded, most of what is dug up is a black clay like substance.

Currently Reading: Part Object Part Sculpture: The Scatter: Objects as Leftovers – Briony Fer. (2005). Pennsylvania State University Press

In this chapter (p.222) of Part Object Part Sculpture, Fer highlights a couple of key artists working with her notion of sculpture as leftover: Gabriel Orozco, Eva Hesse and Piero Manzoni.

She mainly discusses Orozco quoting him on his Working Tables (1996) and Various Models (1992-5): “Some pieces are more like finished sculptures, like the socks or the heart, and some of them are like models, like the car, the small DS or the little Yielding Stone which is the first one I ever Made. Then some of them are totally ready-made like the box of soap or the shoebox. Some of them are failed sculptures, models that didn’t work out but have interesting possibilities for the future, like nice leftovers.” – Gabriel Orozco interviewed by Benjamin Buchloch in the Clinton is Innocent exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1998, p.127

Fer denotes (p.224): “This constellation of terms is curious: failed sculptures, models, nice leftovers. They all refer to things you might throw out, but to Orozco they seem to be more interesting than some of the things you might keep. They are not quite waste products. They are kept on “standby,” as Orozco has put it, for future use.* They are left on hold rather than completely abandoned.

*Orozco in conversation with the author, Paris, November 2004

Furthermore on Orozco’s term: (p.225) “The ‘nice leftovers’ are the things you put aside but don’t jettison completely.”

Fer cites Benjamin’s notion of collections: “Orozco’s economy of leftovers differs from an economy of collecting […] However bizarre collections of objects might be, the drive is “to overcome the wholly irrational character of the objects’ mere presence at hand” through integrating it into a classifiable system as a form of practical memory.” Walter Benjamin – The Arcade Project. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999, p.211. (p.231)

On Hesse’s Untitled (1968), Fer cites Annette Michelson’s description; ‘part object to art object and describes; “They are both working parts and leftovers of other works, like relics without aura.”

Fer compares (p.227); “The turnover of objects [Orozco and Hesse] is reminiscent of what Karl Marx called the “perpetuum mobile of circulation”.

Fer goes on to define leftovers: “A leftover is a piece of something that has been remaindered – a part of something that has become detached and is now surplus to requirements or redundant. It is the flipside to the new commodity (the box for the shoes, but no shoes). Leftovers have history. The rise of the commodity has always gone hand in hand in the modernist imagination with the ragpickers picking over the debris of the city. As a cornucopia of the obsolete, the flea markets of Paris had fuelled the dreams of the Surrealists. The discarded could be generative and celebrated. Robert Morris’s roomful of detritus could hail antiform and process art”. (p.224)

“Leftovers come to stand not for what once has been but what will be. They suggest forever fluctuating possibilities […] Focussing attention on the leftover puts into question the value of what we choose to keep.” (p.228)

“Leftovers are part objects in time rather than in space. Leftovers suggest fractured rather than continuous time.” (p.231)

Today marks two things: that my boy turns the grand age of 7 months old and that I am officially back into study mode.

I will be publishing the rubbish research I’ve amassed on http://contemporaryrubbish.wordpress.com/ in a one-off limited edition newspaper and writing a ~15,000 word thesis to accompany it.

All the artworks will be rendered as simple black and white line drawings and I’ve set myself the challenge to do one drawing and 200 words a day. So far so good in the drawing tally: I’ve completed 5 (with 7 more already complete)! But no word count yet.

I’ve been procrastinating by watching some of the other presentations documented from the Canadian Association of Geographers AGM that I presented at recently.

Waste Less Live More Week 2013

The Art of Food Waste

By Alice Bradshaw

For Waste Less Live More Week 2013, artist, curator, researcher and writer Alice Bradshaw has compiled a selection of artworks using food waste to highlight the many ways artists work creatively with this medium which we are seeking to reduce in times of unprecedented consumption and waste.

http://www.wastelesslivemore.com/blog/the-art-of-f…