Junk

Art and the Politics of Trash

Gillian Whiteley

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781848854130
• eBook ISBN: 9780857731401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Trash, garbage, rubbish, dross, and detritus - in this enjoyably radical exploration of 'Junk', Gillian Whiteley rethinks art's historical and present appropriation of junk within our eco-conscious and globalised culture. She does this through an illustrated exploration of particular materials, key moments and locations and the telling of a panoply of trash narratives. Found and ephemeral materials are primarily associated with assemblage - object-based practices which emerged in the mid-1950s and culminated in the seminal exhibition 'The Art of Assemblage' in New York in 1961. With its deployment of the discarded and the filthy, Whiteley argues, assemblage has been viewed as a disruptive, transgressive artform that engaged with narratives of social and political dissent, often in the face of modernist condemnation as worthless kitsch. In the Sixties, parallel techniques flourished in Western Europe, the US and Australia but the idiom of assemblage and the re-use of found materials and objects - with artist as bricoleur - is just as prevalent now. This is a timely book that uncovers the etymology of waste and the cultures of disposability within these economies of wealth.

CHAPTER ONE

Rehabilitating Rubbish: Histories, Values, Aesthetics

Introduction: Skip Raiders, Dumpster Divers and Tip Dwellers

Alf put a flashlight on a band around his head. He looked like a miner as we turned to where the bins stood, then I saw the other lights, and a large group of strangers. ‘Bin raiders' said Alf. ‘They all come out at night.' Some of them were immigrants from Eastern Europe, who had come to London to live the dream. A man from Poland had laid out five plump grapefruit on top of a wooden palette. ‘Are very good,' he said. ‘Not rubbish'.¹

Feral scavenging provides a means of existence for skip dippers, dump-ster divers and tip dwellers the world over – from Alf and the Freegans of Camden² to the karang guni of Singapore.³ A few weeks ago, the Financial Times weekly ‘pull-out' review of the investment industry featured a photograph of a group of people crawling over a pyramid of waste, tossing objects into their baskets on their backs. The caption read ‘... poverty stricken rubbish scavengers in Jakarta: the Asian financial crisis of 1997– 1998 took its toll'. Their destitute existence does not provoke a sociological analysis of global economics; it is merely presented as ‘illustrative material' for a short article advising investors on how best to ‘soften the impact of financial crises on their portfolios'.⁴

I grew up in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, when the consumption of goods in working-class households was meagre and domestic waste didn't have today's high levels of packing materials and packaging. Then, people stigmatised the Council rubbish tip which happened to be at the edge of my village. Tips were dirty, smelly, unhealthy places. The odours wafting across from the nearby coke-processing plant and sewage works mingled with the smells of fusty clothes, rusted metal and the interminable smell of burning from incinerators. Then, the tip overseer directed carloads as they arrived, dumping everything into one large container, purloining anything worth ‘weighing-in' for scrap – this, like the routine theft of ‘mullock', was a common practice and legacy of the area's steel industry. Now the rubbish tip has been rebranded as a ‘recycling centre' and the athletic sun-tanned supervisor oversees a thriving privatised business. Domestic waste is sorted and categorised into containers marked glass, metal, paper, electrical. Lines of open car boots are marshalled and skips are neatly painted in vibrant colours. ‘Dumping' has become anachronistic as the activity has become, at least superficially, part of the responsible citizen's contribution to an ecologically aware community.

The trashcan and the cess pit have always, of course, provided staple materials for archaeologists. More recently though, besides destitutes and down-and-outs, rubbish dumps have attracted academics and writers who have identified trash as a key social anthropological site for the examination of a range of discourses to do with local and global politics and economics. In December 2001, Jeff Ferrell resigned from his job as a tenured professor in criminology at an Arizona University and embarked on an eight-month stint of field research and ‘free-form survival' as a feral scavenger in the urban neighbourhoods of Fort Worth.⁵ Exploring and embracing the ‘rhythms of urban scrounging', Ferrell drifted into a nether world that he came to call ‘the empire of scrounge'.

... a far-flung, mostly urban underground populated by ... illicit dump-ster divers, homeless trash pickers, independent scrap metal haulers, activist recyclers, alternative home builders and outsider artists ... ⁶

Ferrell offers a sociological examination of homelessness and poverty and he outlines the resourcefulness of those who find themselves on the economic margins – either through choice or through exclusion. It documents an ethnography of lost and found objects and presents a popular critique of the hyper-production and consumption culture of American society and the profligate waste which is generated by global capitalism. He describes the squalid, unhealthy and dangerous aspects as well as the meticulous processes of salvaging and re-assembling lost lives from tiny fragments of shredded documents, fading photographs and discarded mementoes. He is seduced by the promised bounty which each dumpster might yield.

In the 1990s, Ted Botha arrived in New York from South Africa and, after furnishing his home with ‘mongo' – a term coined in the 1980s to describe goods and objects retrieved from skips and tips⁷ – he realised that he was part of a community of urban foragers (Fig. 5). In his study published in 2004,⁸ he portrays a range of street characters, outlining the motivations and reasons behind their parasitic and erratic way of life. In Manhattan, besides survivalists and anarchists he finds treasure hunters, dealers and entrepreneurs who make a business out of sifting through rubbish. Botha's book reminds us that appearances can be deceptive – ‘mongo' can be lucrative: even rubbish-scavenging in Jakarta can offer a good living.

Fig. 5 Abandoned van crammed with cardboard and debris, Union Square, New York, September 2009. Photograph by the author.

Whilst Ferrell admitted he was not totally dependent on his daily pickings for survival or shelter, there are plenty of circumstances in which people rely on trash out of necessity. There is an insidious exploitation at work in a project such as Ferrell's which aims, overtly, to ‘speak for' the destitute. As with the recent phenomenon of favela tourism in Brazil⁹ – the comfortably-off always experience the poor as ‘elsewhere' and ‘other' – these encounters reveal how one part of society provides spectacle for another. The desperate plight of ‘the other' becomes a voyeuristic object of tourism.

The documentary series, The Tower, broadcast by BBC television during 2007, exemplified a similar kind of faux social engagement. Lol and Nicky were two of the most compelling characters throughout. They met in a skip whilst looking for metal to ‘weigh-in' for scrap to fund their heroin and alcohol habits. The film sensitively conveyed the social paradoxes and economic inequities inherent in the regeneration of a particular area of Thames-side Deptford but, at the same time, the aestheticisation of destitution has the effect of annulling any possibility of real empathy or impetus for social change. In perhaps the most extreme example, a Channel 4 TV ‘reality' show took this further; in Dumped, the waste tip itself becomes the site of spectacle as participants were invited to ‘survive' on the dump.¹⁰

Ferrell's project may be viewed as parasitic but it did show that, for some people, feral scavenging can be a purposeful lifestyle choice which is motivated by a personal ethical agenda, an anti-materialist gesture. In the UK, disillusioned by contemporary society's obsession with money and ownership, Alf and Martin gave up their possessions, to devote their lives to ‘Freeganism'. Living in the back of a van, they go out at dusk searching supermarket skips and bins for food past its sell-by date. As Andrew O'Hagan points out, Alf and Martin's ethos is more ‘soft utopianism than militant politics'. Their ambition is ‘not to gather political forces but to replenish the spiritual motives of their generation'.¹¹

This brings us back to Shoat and Stam's comment cited earlier regarding ‘the co-existence of pre-modern, modern and postmodern economies producing a series of interlinked, coeval worlds living the same historical moment but under diverse modalities'.¹² The world of feral scavenging is paradoxical and polysemous – from the desperate poverty-stricken existence of the gecekondu slum dwellers living precariously on garbage mountains in Turkey¹³ to the Freegans, skip dippers and mongo seekers of the developed world. As Susan Strasser points out,

To the dumpster diver – as to the scavengers who live on the Mexico City dump, the ragpickers who fascinated bohemian Paris, and the Chinese immigrants who foraged on San Francisco streets at the end of the nineteenth century – what counts as trash depends on who's counting.¹⁴

From the chiffoniers of nineteenth-century Paris through to the retailers of recycled designer wear in Brick Lane, trash has undergone a lengthy rehabilitation. This chapter will consider some of the histories, definitions and shifting values of detritus in its diverse forms and the implications of all that for a subsequent consideration of ‘junk art' within an aesthetic and anti-aesthetic context.

Trash Histories

Rags, Bones and Refuse

As excess matter resulting from industrialisation and urbanisation, rubbish is a relatively new phenomenon. The development of mass production of desirable commodities to satisfy and stimulate mass consumption is linked to the rise and expansion of capitalist economics in the wealthier Western and ‘developed' parts of the world. But ‘excess' is not exclusively a capitalist or twentieth-century problem and landfill and rubbish tipping are not recent solutions to dealing with garbage.

As Richard Girling puts it, ‘waste has always been a badge of affluence' – as early as 3000 BC, the Minoan palace at Knossos in Crete had its own refuse site layered with earth.¹⁵ However, in pre-industrial cultures and even in early industrial societies, the contents of refuse pits, middens and rubbish bins tended to be organic and relatively benign.¹⁶ It was primarily the proliferation of permanent settlements and urban concentrations that led to unprecedented quantities and new forms of waste – and a failure to deal with this in an organised way leads to epidemic disease and high mortality rates.

In Britain, the ‘insanitary state' of fast-growing industrial urban centres was a major concern in the nineteenth century. At mid-twentieth century, Sheffield with its steel mills and engineering factories was one of the most polluted cities in the UK, but in Victorian times, its chief environmental problems were caused by organic effluence and human sewage.

We have surveyed Birmingham, Stafford, Wolverhampton, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Hull, Shrewsbury and other towns, but Sheffield in all matters relating to sanitary appliances is behind them all.… The rivers that water Sheffield so pleasantly are polluted with dirt, dust, dung and carrion; the embankments are ragged and ruined; here and there overhung with privies and often the site of ash and offal heaps – most desolate and sickening objects …¹⁷

In the most densely populated districts, zymotic diseases such as cholera were generally spread by insanitary conditions. Poorly ventilated housing, undrained courtyards, stagnant water, sewage, decayed carcasses and putrid animal matter from slaughterhouses all contributed. In a report for the Royal Commissioners for the Health of Towns in 1842, the overcrowded lodging houses were cited as ‘dens of disease'; here, lodgers slept amongst piles of rags as a common occupation of the lodging-house keepers was rag-collecting.¹⁸

In the nineteenth century, living amongst filth was perceived as breeding poor morals, leading to licentiousness and laziness. Public health reports made this clear. In one of the Sheffield Borough Surveyor's reports, he noted a house where sewage had been amassing on the tenant's roof and advocated

... the strong necessity of appointing some person to see that they are regularly cleansed – for unless this be done, all the attendant evils of filthy habits and filthy houses must necessarily follow ... ¹⁹

The history of waste has been the history of separating organic human waste from the rest. Processing rubbish involves sorting and categorising forms of waste – whether human, organic or industrial – into sanitary and insanitary, toxic and non-toxic. As Susan Strasser points out – trash is created by sorting. She relates an early twentieth-century description of a factory that extracted useful products from bones:

The first operation is that of sorting … several women are constantly engaged in separating rags, iron, beefy matter, hoofs, horns, etc. As they are sorted the bones are pushed to the mouth of the crusher ... ²⁰

The trade in used goods and the reclamation of materials was an essential part of the early industrial system and it provided a living for many people. In his four volume study of ...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE   Rehabilitating Rubbish: Histories, Values, Aesthetics
• CHAPTER TWO   The Cultural Life of Detritus: From Objet Trouvé to the Art of Assemblage
• CHAPTER THREE   Dissenters, Drifters and Poets: ‘Placing' Assemblage in the San Francisco Bay Area
• CHAPTER FOUR   The ‘Comedy of Waste': A Load of British Rubbish
• CHAPTER FIVE   Accumulations, Panoplies and Le Quotidien: French Practice and the Transfiguration of Everyday Mess
• CHAPTER SIX   Cross-Cultural Encounters and Collisions: The Annandale Imitation Realists and Australian Modernism
• Afterword: Digital Ordure, Leftovers and Leavings
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography