Rubbish

Liverpool Biennial: Thresholds: The Unexpected Guest

Yesterday I was back at the Biennial getting annoyed with the exhibitions programme. It doesn’t list venue opening times, doesn’t list many exhibitions at the venues it does briefly list but above all annoyances advertised both weekend events I’ve been to so far as starting at 12 whilst they have actually started at 1pm and 2pm. Neither did the web booking system say otherwise when I booked yesterdays’ event, and Camp & Furnace (previously A Foundation) is quite a way out from anything else.

So, annoyed, I stomped down to the docks to see if Tate Liverpool could cheer me up. The Biennial show there is a considerably themed and interpretation panel orientated exhibition justifying why this selection of Tate’s collection has been brought out for this year’s Biennial theme of The Unexpected Guest. The enthusiastic staff pounce on you at any given opportunity to check if you’ve read the texts on the walls and offer you more support to using your eyes to encounter what’s on display.

Anyway, irritants aside, I did find some rubbish of note:

Keith Arnatt – A.O.N.B. (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) (1982-4)

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/arnatt-aonb-area-of-outstanding-natural-beauty-t13144

Arnatt photographs landscapes in black and white which show traces of human existence, seemingly no longer present. Dereliction, abandonment and decay, from dilapidated monumental buildings to bent signposts to strewn rubbish, are presented against a backdrop of designated sites of natural beautiful.

Sophie Calle – The Hotel (1981)

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/calle-the-hotel-room-47-p78300

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/calle-the-hotel-room-28-p78301

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/calle-the-hotel-room-29-p78302

Sophie Calle’s monumental The Hotel series also deals with traces of human life and closely examines the private object arrangements of guests at the hotel she temped at. In each text describing the scenes she encountered, she concludes with the date and description of what the guests leave behind on their departure.

Thomas Hirschhorn – Drift Topography (2003) http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hirschhorn-drift-topography-t11885

Hirschhorn’s sculpture is made with cardboard, foil, paper and plastic bound together with tape in a roughly assembled box structure. The cardboard cut out figures of soldiers face inwards apparently guarding a landscape card box packaging and detritus of capitalism.

Jimmie Durham – Dans plusieurs de ces forêts et de ces bois, il n’y avait pas seulement des villages souterrains groupés autours du terrier du chef mais il y avait encore de véritables hameaux de huttes basses cachés sous les arbres, et si nombreaux que parfois la forêt en était remplie. Souvent les fumées les trahissaient. Deux de… (1981)

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/durham-dans-plusieurs-de-ces-forets-et-de-ces-bois-il-ny-avait-pas-seulement-des-villages-t13290

Durham’s long-titled sculptural composition from discarded materials is mentioned because of the use of found materials re-contextualised into an anthropomorphic machine-like creature. The proposition that these materials have not only a second life as art but also a second history as this contraption connote Jean Bennett’s earlier discussed theory of “thing power.”

There is also a sculpture show on at Tate Liverpool and having just started to read Gillian Whiteley’s Junk: Art and Politics of Trash (2011, I B Tauris & Co Ltd), I was interested to see examples of the scrap-metal genre of junk art she notes in her introduction as not covered in her book are on display in this show. Specifically two of the three artists Whiteley cites (Richard Stankiewicz, John Chamberlain and César) are featured in this exhibition, with no other rubbish related works of note.

John Chamberlain – Kora (1963) painted steel http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/chamberlain-kora-t01094

César (César Baldaccini) – Three Compressions (1968) painted steel http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/cesar-three-compressions-t01052

Both works on display are made from crushed cars. César’s simply selected industrially compressed car and Chamberlain’s sculpted in a more abstract expressionist manner.

Stankiewicz (not in the Tate collection) tended towards more figurative scrap metal sculpture which could now quite easily find itself defined as kitsch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stankiewicz

Museum of Contemporary Rubbish is back at it this week with another exhibtion and collection, this time in Lincoln.

Abandoned At The Exit
Wednesday 19 September 2012
Revival, Sincil Street, Lincoln, UK

Exhibiting artists: Ehud Lavski, Alice Bradshaw, Laura Wilson, Sonya Barnett, Mel Langton.

Reel-4 artists to include David Blandy, Doug Fishbone, Aislinn Richie, Nathan Baxter, Thomas Went, JONAS BJERRE. Curated by Thomas Cuthbertson, and Peter Rollings’ Experimental Sonic Machines http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gObMM0dzsjM

http://lincolnartistnetwork.blogspot.co.uk/

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Hospitality: The Unexpected Guest

I’ve only seen a fraction of the Biennial so far, and not much rubbish to note except Laura Keeble’s John Moores Painting Prize short-listed “I’d like to teach the world to sing!” which has done the rounds in the media. Sadly she didn’t win a prize but inclusion in the show at the Walker Art Gallery as part of the Biennial means the squashed coke can painted with scenes from the London riots in August 2010 and titled with the song name which originated as the Coca-Cola TV ad jingle “Buy the World a Coke” in 1971, can be seen by all.

www.a-n.co.uk/p/2275026//1818356

However, I did attend the artists’ talks on 15 September at the Bluecoat which included a conversation between artists Anja Kirschner and David Panos and Costas Douzinas who provided the Liverpool Biennial 2012 catalogue essay. In relation to Kirschner and Panos’ film installation at FACT, Douzinas talked about money and how the Greek for money/currency nomisma is derived from the Greek word for law. He described how metal has a use value and a change value and in archaeological terms a meaning value. Before the stamp of the law on a coin, the coin was simply worth it’s weight in silver/gold and the stamp regulated the value of the material. Douzinas talked about the move (push) towards a cashless society which would render coinage neither of use value nor change value. Coinage may become rubbish, just as the Museum of Rubbish as presented at the TRASH conference 13/14 September showed how money in Brazil (which has changed several times over the last few decades) has been rendered rubbish.

TRASH Conference

Friday 14 September 2012

University of Sussex

Tracey Potts was the keynote speaker on Your Own Personal Landfill: Stuff, Matter and the Myth of Eco-decluttering

Her presentation focus was on clutter and stuff vs matter, challenging the pseudo-biomedical self-help trend in de-cluttering.

Citing self help books/blogs such as Flylady http://www.flylady.net/ and TV programmes such as Life laundry and House Doctor, she deconstructed the environmentalism around the use of 12 step / rehab / addiction terminology and self-proclamined “light-green” environmentalists

Theories of matter out of place (Mary Douglas), reverse living (Henry Le Fevre) and atrocious uselessness (Jean Baudrillard) were woven together.

From the outset she posed the question; How do we contain trash studies to talk about it without falsely tidying it up?

On stuff vs matter, she cited Disney/Pixar’s Wall E animation, Fraggle Rock and The Wombles, comparing volumetric stuff with “thing-power” matter that exceeds the status of objects, manifets traces of independence and becomes other (anthropomorphisation).

In her conclusion she cited Jane Bennett on “vital materialsm is a netter way of thinking about ecology rather than environmentalism.”

I was in the Dealing with Debris morning panel with speakers Bel Deering, Chris Lloyd and Amy Carson.

Bel Deering presented a paper on Mortal Remains: the perils, pitfalls and pleasures of studying rubbish in a graveyard setting on her research into rubbish left in graveyards. Handing around evidence bags with samples of rubbish she had retrieved from graveyards largely disused as the orgiinal purpose but re-appropriated as places for sleep, “sex, drugs and rock n roll.”

Chris Lloyd presented paper on Hurricane Katrina and the South’s disposable (trashy) bodies making the argument that a racial politics had resulted in black bodies of Hurricane Katrina being considered as trash amongst the debris of the devastation.

Amy Carson presented a paper on The deconstruction of menstruation – with a focus on the ‘feminine-hygiene’ culture in the West focussing on her research into perceptions of menstruation as “dirty” and urging people to talk about menstruation more as a tactic to negate the taboo.

I was speaking in the afternoon panel Memory and Materialism with Natacha Chevalier and Jeannie Driver.

My paper was on the Museum of Contemporary Rubbish, discussing the inspirations, methodologies, outcomes and future plans of the project.

Natacha Chevalier presented a paper on When waste was trash: The thrifty 30s and 40s looking at the “make do and mend” thriftiness of the era.

Jeannie Driver presented a paper on her art practice dealing with waste materials, predominantly waste paper, in From SPIKE IT to HARD GRAPH: The Waste Remains. It was great to hear Jeannie talk about her work which in the presented works deals with discarded paper from various offices and shredded paper on mass. http://jeanniedriver.com/

Finally the plenary panel (Re)making the Metropolis had four speakers; Francisco Calafate-Faria, Arpad Boczen, Claire Reddleman, Michael Ezban. Francisco, Arpad and Michael had each presented work in the TRASH Art Exhibition last night so this was a great opportunity to hear more about their work.

Francisco presented a paper The ‘Museum of Rubbish’ in Curitiba: Short-Cycling or Line of Flight? on his research visit to Brazil. The Museum of Rubbish is a large collection of items rescued from landfill by works at a recycling plant in Curitiba. The items are roughly categorised into stacks of radios, clocks, phones, a huge wall of discarded photographs and much more.

Arpad Boczen presented a paper on Sweet Urban Stink in our Ears discussing his music made from “found” urban sound.

Claire Reddleman’s paper “Modern and contemporary route-finding”: reactivating dead labour as spheres of appearance in ‘Pennine Street 2012′ presented her work Pennine Street 2012 – a Olympic twinning project of the Olympic High Street and the Pennine Way.

Michael Ezban’s paper The Trash Heap of History presented his research on the “feral monument” Monte Testaccio in Rome – a Roman trash dump comprised of methodological broken and stacked clay vessels (amphorae) used in the transportation of olive oil, described as a “hill of receipts” due to the bureaucratic inscriptions of name of producer, production and inspection dates.

TRASH Conference was a varied and fascinating collection of papers from post-graduate researchers in the broad field of trash. Further to the individual presentations themselves, it was also interesting to see how trash studies is found within various post-graduate disciplines.

Many thanks to the organisers!

http://sussextrashconference.wordpress.com/conf-pr…

TRASH Art Exhibition

Thursday 13 September 2012

The Basement, Brighton

Museum of Contemporary Rubbish participated in the TRASH Art Exhibition as part of the TRASH Postgraduate Conference at the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex.

The Brighton Collection is items #0616-0634 online on the MoCR blog: http://museumofcontemporaryrubbish.blogspot.co.uk/…

A selection of items from the Museum Collections was also on display alongside the 2011 video Rubbish. https://vimeo.com/40923906

MoCR also undertook video interviews with 10 donors of rubbish to the Museum.

http://sussextrashconference.wordpress.com/speaker…