Currently Reading: Vergine, Lea. (2007). When Trash Becomes Art: TRASH rubbish mongo. Skira Rizzoli, Milan.
Vergine Lea presents an anthology of mainly Western artists using trash. The format of the book is straightforward and image rich. In the introduction she groups artists in her survey of their usage, follows with a large Artworks chapter featuring the mentioned artists and more, then by a Fragments of Writings by Artists chapter and lastly an Illustrated Chronology of the Use of Trash which is edited by Rosella Ghezzi.
In making a definition of trash, Lea paraphrasing Giorgio Manganelli’s unnamed 1966 text proposes “trash is language.” (p.8)
In the introductory subsection What We Mean By Trash, Lea uses Italian writer and radio host Tommaso Labranca’s 1994 book on trash (Andy Warhol era un coatto. Vivere e capire il trash, Castelvecchi, 1994) defining trash as “an unsuccessful emulation, a failed imitation”. (p.8)
In the subsection Trash, Lea cites Italian writer and economist Guido Viale (1994, Un monde usa e getta) “The predication for used things over factory-new objects is a product of the belief that not everything is brand new is necessarily to be used and not everything that is old and worn need necessary be abolished. “Trash constitutes a world of its own, complete and symmetrical to the world of merchandise: A world that behind the mirror in which consumer civilisation loves to admire itself and create its own self-awareness, restores our understanding of the truer nature of the product that populate our everyday lives. The waste of industrial society and in a very particular manner, the trash produced by consumer civilisation, is in a certain sense the dross of that systematic activity of robbery and waste of the sources of the earth on which they are based. […] The presence of trash in the world is not eliminated with the supposed elimination through the various forms of waste management. Aside from that, we should recognise its reeking presence in the noosphere,that is, in the world of knowledge and understanding, which represents in some sense a parallel existence of trash in the heavens of the spirit, a genuine and full-fledged soul,. Trash is indeed an enormous, minute and incontrovertible, of the habits an forms of behaviours of those who produced it, aside from the beliefs and perceptions that they have of themselves…” (p.11/12)
Lea also notes that Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva, writing on abjection, maintains that to make use of trash is “linked to the etymology of the world, which signifies a return and a shift.” (p.12)
Continued..
