{"id":1811,"date":"2015-06-04T18:34:14","date_gmt":"2015-06-04T18:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=1811"},"modified":"2015-10-05T22:19:52","modified_gmt":"2015-10-05T22:19:52","slug":"make-art-not-landfill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/newecologies\/make-art-not-landfill\/","title":{"rendered":"Ecologies of Waste"},"content":{"rendered":"

Perhaps the only thing more surprising than the existence of an artist in residence program at the San Francisco dump is the fact that this program has existed for decades and will celebrate the work of over 150 artists in its 25th anniversary<\/a> this month.<\/p>\n

Last week the three artists’ four-month residencies drew to a close and a gallery walk through was offered. I decided to take a trip by bike,\u00a0and my route took me on an impromptu tour of the refuse of the city, from\u00a0the waste treatment station\u00a0to a partially demolished\u00a0Candlestick Park and finally to the dump and what may be the most novel artist residence in the country, conceived and initiated in 1990\u00a0by\u00a0the\u00a0the legendary environmental artist Jo Hanson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"FullSizeRender\"

Salvaging the ‘Stick. Accidentally filtered while operating bike.<\/p><\/div>\n

Along the way I thought about some of the paradoxes of waste, about how the demolition crews at Candlestick were using drinkable Hetch Hetchy water for dust mitigation<\/a>, about how nearby San Bruno mountain remains\u00a0undeveloped partially\u00a0because of the proximity of polluting industries that made the mountain undesirable (the industries are largely gone, but environmental protections sprung up in their place). I thought about how resource recovery, to put it euphemistically, runs in my blood. (Our family genealogist observes that several relatives were noted for their trash-picking skills, which may partially explain both my enthusiasm for Agnes Varda\u2019s The Gleaners and I<\/em> and the allure of landfill art.) I thought about how this\u00a0enthusiasm has become somewhat muted by an\u00a0awareness of how\u00a0easily the celebration\u00a0of gleaning can flip into a kind of trashsploitation, how\u00a0the on-screen solidarities forged by artists such as Varda or Vic Muniz are typically too transient to upset the inequalities that stratify societies into those who produce trash and those who pick\u00a0trash (on this see Jorge Furtando\u2019s short film\u00a0Ilha das Flores<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

Even if San Francisco’s Recology succeeds in diverting 100% of waste from landfills\u00a0by 2020, the allure and repulsion of landfills\u00a0will remain.\u00a0Slavoj \u017di\u017eek’s startlingly cogent cameo<\/a> at a rubbish tip in Astra Taylor\u2019s Examined Life<\/em> shows that trash incites more than just moralizing in the 21st<\/sup> century: it can also incite critical thought and critical revaluations of ecology and ecological art. \u00a0Think of Robert Sullivan\u2019s Thoreauesque celebration of New Jersey\u2019s toxic Meadowlands<\/a>, (\u201cThe garbage hills are alive\u2026\u201d) or Dana Phillip\u2019s \u201cexcremental ecocriticism,\u201d or Jane Bennet\u2019s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things<\/em>, which is initiated by the sight of an assemblage of debris–consisting of \u201cone large men\u2019s plastic black work glove, one dense mat of oak pollen, one unblemished dead rat, one white plastic bottle cap, one smooth stick of wood–in a Baltimore gutter.<\/p>\n

The gallery walk through\u00a0at the SF dump was\u00a0very well attended, and with good reason. These artists are\u00a0present-day alchemists. In each of the three remarkably diverse installations the vitality of matter was unconcealed. Each\u00a0installation\u00a0seemed to grow out of an engagement with\u00a0one set of\u00a0materials: plastic, lumber, or\u00a0textiles. And although the residency lasts only four months, each installation has grown out of, or into,\u00a0a larger project: Ma Li\u2019s <\/a> living sculpture Meet You at the Bird Bridge in the Milky Way<\/em>\u00a0will migrate to the Asian Art Museum, Michael Arcega\u2019s<\/a> Recologica: A Nacireman Excavation<\/em> is a but one iteration of an ongoing speculative anthropology of the Nacirema people, and Eden V. Evans<\/a>\u2019 Momento <\/em>opened up a conversation on, and proposed an amazing solution to, the current inability to divert textiles from waste streams. Even the residence program itself is expanding\u00a0to a number of other cities on the West Coast.<\/p>\n

\"Ma<\/a>

Ma Li, “Meet You at the Bird Bridge in the Milky Way”<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Michael<\/a>

Michael Arcega, from “Recologica: A Nacireman Excavation”<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Eden<\/a>

Eden V. Evans, from “Momento”<\/p><\/div>\n

In each of the installations trash functions, among other things, as an archive: one of incarceration, trauma, or the privatization of natural resources. The ruse of a speculative archaeology, in Michael Arcega\u2019s work in particular, also facilitated a degree of social criticism that partially legitimated the tongue-in-cheek designation of the works as \u201cfindings\u201d in a \u201cnatural history museum,\u201d as though a future paleontologist were reconstructing the life scenes of a late-Anthropocene society.<\/p>\n

As was the case for the\u00a0leachate seep of \u201cpure pollution\u201d that serves as Robert Sullivan’s muse, as was the case for the heart-shaped potato that Agnes Varda stumbles across on an abandoned field, each of the artists also uncovered what Jane Bennet calls the \u201cthing-power\u201d of trash: \u201cthe curious power of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.\u201d In this way, the exhibitions made me recall\u00a0the toxic legacies of careless\u00a0waste management in the past<\/a>\u00a0and the proximity of “poison” and “palate” in the Bay Area.\u00a0I\u2019m looking forward to being moved by the next show.<\/p>\n

\""Poison<\/a>

“Poison \/ Palate” from Rebecca Solnit’s “Infinite City”<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perhaps the only thing more surprising than the existence of an artist in residence program at the San Francisco dump is the fact that this program has existed for decades and will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1816,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newecologies","category-performance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1811"}],"version-history":[{"count":54,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1929,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1811\/revisions\/1929"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}