Waste in art and design: A timeline

From Duchamp and ready-mades to contemporary Design

DS.WRITER:

Σοφία Θρουβάλα

The ever-increasing daily consumption and disposal of products have brought the planet into a state of emergency. In the recent past years, governments, as well as individuals, have began to realise how much we’ve been harming the earth for centuries and there is an attempt to raise awareness to minimise the consumption of products made from materials that harm the environment as well as the consumption of meat and animal products. Moreover, it is suggested, or even imposed, that we replace plastic with biodegradable, environmentally-friendly solutions to escape further the pollution of water, atmosphere and space as well as the imminent temperature rise.

Artists and designers have always been concerned with environmental issues, from the beginning of the past century with the reuse of industrial or even animal (including of human origin) derivatives. The origins of reusing objects in art can be traced back to the 1910s, with the appearance of Readymades in France. These works were partly or fully made from combining existing objects, mainly industrially made ones. The new meaning these objects acquired with their new form was a way of criticizing the art institutions and theories of beauty, while for the first time there was a clear reference to the industry in future and present time.

The Readymades exhibition at the museum, a space that hosts and showcases culture, includes for the first time exhibits that display trash as residues of the post-industrial condition, equating it to classic exhibits. This gesture, deeply radical, with its self-criticism and self-deprecation, sets new foundations for dealing with art as an industrial product and consumable commodity and openly requests a dialogue beyond aesthetics and what is visible. The first artist to exhibit a readymade object was Marcel Duchamp with his “Fountain” in 1917, and many others followed, including the now famous “Bull's Head” by Picasso many decades later in 1942. (image 2)

Image 1: Fountain, Marcel Duchamp, 1917 | Source: phaidon.com

Image 2: Bull’s Head, Pablo Picasso, 1942 | Source: moma.org

During the second half of the 20th century, the need to reference the social decline is a given in art. After two world wars, with multiple blows in all sectors, and the absurd yet expected rise of industrial production, artists create “bodies”, movements and groups, within which they comment and criticise the events, incorporating again the environmental issues into their work, through reuse as a direct reference to this. Arte Povera, a movement that flourished in the 60s, mainly in Italy, used the method of recontextualising human waste and residues to directly address social issues such as poverty, bad management of wealth, urbanisation and overconsumption, and generally attempted to compare the pre-industrial era with the era of overconsumption. Some of its key representatives include Yiannis Kounelis, who amongst others exhibits literally anything, from horses in a gallery to store garage doors individually (image 3), Piero Manzoni, who exhibits the famous “merda d’artista”, that is, cans consisting of -or are thought to consist of- feces of the artist himself (image 4), and finally, it’s important to mention Michelangelo Pistoletto, who produced works that became iconic when it comes to criticising consumerism and the fashion industry like Venus of the Rags of 1967 (image 5).

Image 3: Garage door of a store, Yiannis Kounellis | Source: traveldreams.it

Image 4: Merda d’artista, Piero Manzoni, 1969 | Source: artribune.com

Image 5: Venus of the Rags, Michelangelo Pistoletto,1967 | Source: jdavidbuerk.com

During the same decade, artists belonging to the Junk Art and New Realism movements created abstract works, distanced from references to formalism or the classical as a rival of their contemporary art, elements that exist to a certain degree in the previous artistic “happenings”. Reuse in Junk Art takes the form of recycling waste (recycled art) and rejected materials of daily life, referencing both the over-consumption and over-discarding that characterize our times. The artist Arman creates the Accumulations (1961) series, showcasing over-corrosion and dramatic increase of single-use products (image 6). The New Realism movement is also inspired by the systemic pollution and ephemeral character of consumption. Daniel Spoerri (image 8) exhibits a table after a meal, showcasing the disproportion between time and consumption using the small scale of furniture. French César Baldaccini compresses various products, from coca cola cans to whole cars, into a new compact sculptural corpus, evoking the individualisation of the experience of consuming.

Image 6: Accumulation of real objects, Arman Fernandez, 1964 | Source: armanstudio.com

Image 7: Fanta-Cola, Cesar Baldaccini, 1989 | Source: dorotheum.com

Image 8: Tableau Piege, circ. 1972, Daniel Spoerri | Source: gr.pinterest.com

One of the most shocking works of the 20th century is the site-specific installation by Vince Hannemann, who transformed his yard in Texas into a “Cathedral of Junk” and named his work as such. Starting in 1989 he literally builds a place to worship 30 years' worth of his own trash. The structure is wholly constructed from industrially made objects that the artist recycled to create building elements (e.g. staircases and doors) and to adorn the “cathedral”, which reaches 10 metres high, thus making it clear just how oversized is individual -let alone collective- consumption today.

Images 9-10 “Cathedral of Junk” in Austin, Texas, Vince Hannemann’s. 1989- Image: Thomas Hawk | Source: thevalemagazine.com

In the field of Design, contemporary production is more and more concerned with environmental issues aiming to make audiences sensitive to the urgent need to minimise pollution while bestowing new value to “single-use” objects. Last year, Dutch Schneemann and van Krimpen created the 3D project Rudbish, reusing trash as findings and building materials in a collection of works that bluntly showcase overconsumption. As they mention, their project “gives trash a second life”, “a positive dish”, inviting everyone to evaluate the consumerism madness. (images 11-12)

Image 11-12: Radbish n. 1 | Source: damnmagazine.net

Finally, it’s important to mention the design team Messgewand of Romain Coppin and Alexis Bondoux, which, inspired by surrealist furniture and ready-mades, produces objects through re-locating waste to a functional position. They create house objects made from industrial products but with no industrial processing, once again bringing forth creative recycling and the better management of waste but also the value of the handmade and collectible.