If (or maybe when?) NYC’s winters get less cold, I may have to move there. I love that city, and right now, I wish I could check out Trash: What We Value, What We Throw Away, an exhibit going on at the Atlantic Gallery.
Found out about this show via the vlog Rocketboom — and it’s fascinating. Click through to watch an engrossing 3-min video about the show. We’re talking lint-as-art, parrot-ravaged paperbacks, and an umbrella-bird –
I was especially taken with Valeri Larko‘s huge, oil paintings of junkyards full of discarded electronics. Valeri says these paintings offer “just a small glimpse of the overwhelming amount of stuff the American society throws out every day to get newer and shinier appliances.” Frightening.
It’s all fascinating to think about: the political implications of trash, the fetishization of trash, the purposeful creation of trash (trash for art’s sake), artistic creation as reclamation and recycling both of ideas and of physical matter, etc –
Thanks to Robin for introducing me to Rocketboom :)
Thanks for the link to the exhibit… this stuff always fascinates me, and we need more of it to wake up the huge percentage of folks that are not considering the waste stream… (or their grand children…)
A photo of what I used to do with milk containers, when I had a garden…
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Comment by Chris Martell — June 28, 2006 @ 6:25 pm
For a sociology class at Occidental, I had to write an essay on trash for a final, I think it was my Class and Inequalities course. Interesting stuff to think about. I’ll plug Wendell Berry’s Art of the Commonplace, because I’m pretty sure he’s got an essay in there about how New York or some other East Coast big city wanted to put a vast galatial dump/landfill in Kentucky, his home state, and because he provides more of the same kind of analysis of our everyday lives.
Comment by NC — June 28, 2006 @ 10:11 pm
Chris — I think part of the address for the milk containers is missing –
NC — I’ll add Berry’s book to my to-read list. Thanks for the recommendation :)
Comment by Siel — July 1, 2006 @ 4:13 pm