Art Made from Trash
We Reject Waste and Value Art
When we throw something away, we usually do it with a touch of disdain, if we think about it at all. Transforming rejected material into an object worthy of attention and contemplation transforms our rejection into curiosity. Viewers may not recognize the source material at first, and when they do an appreciation of the aesthetic and conceptual feat often elicits a smile of appreciation.
An artist seeking to create art from trash might experience an epiphany when the concept for the final product emerges. Skillful artworks illuminate connections and celebrate human creativity. Artists who bridge the distance between discarded waste and our vital world remind us of the power of the creative human mind and the importance of embracing all aspects of our world.
Making Art from Trash
The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp exemplify some of the earliest well-known modern artworks utilizing common objects such as a snow shovel or a bicycle wheel and stool without physically transforming them, but the Italian Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 1970s more consciously addressed the departure from the classic materials of paint on canvas, marble, and bronze to more humble materials as a rejection of symbols of wealth.
But as human waste products began taking up more and more space on our streets and in city dumps, we created incinerators and landfills to hide the waste. To add some dignified recognition of people who manage our trash and the places where this is done, artists were commissioned to work with trash and the sanitation industry. Artist Mags Harries cast refuse from Haymarket in Boston into bronze and pressed the sculptures into the Haymarket pavement in 1976. Mierle Laderman Ukeles became the New York City Department of Sanitation’s first artist-in-residence in 1977. Her works highlighted the people and infrastructure of the Department of Sanitation to bring compassionate attention to a critical aspect of our human community that we typically ignore. New York City’s Department of Sanitation continues to maintain an artist-in-residence program, although the artists in the program tend to celebrate the people who work at the Department of Sanitation as much as the waste they manage.
Not “Recycled Art”
“Recycled” generally refers to a useful object or material that no longer serves its original purpose but could be refashioned or remade into something useful. Art works are objects of contemplation, and so they have no utilitarian purpose. As such, art is not “recycled”.
Some artists created a separate work by changing an existing work. For example, Dali painting a caricature of his handlebar moustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa portrait. Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning” might be another example of this. But these works do not have the true transformative power of art projects made from trash.
How and Why
We Make Art from Trash
One skill that many artists employ in any medium is the transformation of materials: gobs of paint transformed into shapes with apparent mass and volume; blocks of stone transformed into delicate imagery. Making trash into art could involve a similar process. Rather than beginning with an object from the trash bin and consider what it could be turned into, although this approach is certainly workable given the inspiration, start with the product or subject that interests you, and then find the materials to create art projects from trash. When creating art from trash, the original refuse material comprising the work should be nearly incidental. The viewer first perceives the artist’s vision as embodied in the object, the subject and skill with which it is rendered. The fact that trash was used to create art object is often perceived later. By emphasizing the conceptual and technical skill of the artwork first, the source of the original material adds an additional conceptual dimension to the final product.
Of course, inspiration can always strike. The seat and handlebars of a discarded bicycle inspired Picasso to fashion a bull’s head with horns. But consistently converting trash to art requires some discipline and perseverance as with any other medium, and sometimes work should proceed without the pure spark of inspiration.
Often the discarded materials artists utilize reflect significant elements of the artist’s physical or social landscape. In other words, the discarded tires often seen piled along urban roadways can inspire an artist to incorporate them into a composition which inspires us while it elevates something usually considered unsightly. In this way, artists help us reimagine our entire linear production-consumption-waste cycle of living.
The persistence and ubiquity of industrial products from PCBs and other persistent chemicals to micro and larger plastics throughout our planet and its ecosystems inspire some artists working with trash to illuminate this sometimes as a tragedy and sometimes as a simple fact.
Many people describe our current geologic age as the “Anthropocene”, meaning that the impact of humans on our planet has reached such epic proportions that global transformations have begun with unknown and far-reaching consequences. Certainly, global climate change resulting from the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide resulting from fossil fuel combustion is already resulting in global changes that were thoroughly predicted in the 1970s and 1980s. But when artists transform trash into art, we are not so much mourning the loss of the pre-industrial past as we are describing our living present. Our trash is as much a part of our world as paint, canvas, and marble, and not only can we work with trash, but we have to learn to work with it as we do all other aspects of our environment.
Some Artists Making Art from Trash
Chakia Booker
As a New York City-based artist with training as an environmental scientist, I see many artists working with trash, and I appreciate all of them, but a few stand out to me. Modern steel-belted radial tires comprise a substantial waste stream with limited options for recycling and reuse. The artist Chakia Booker has developed techniques and the strength to shred, twist, and transform this intractable garbage into forms so graceful they practically breathe.
Bill miller
Pittsburgh-based artist Bill Miller retrieves linoleum from abandoned homes in his area resulting in a palette that completely transforms the base material into “paintings”.
The resulting landscapes and portraits convey the richness of the living subject matter with a material that embodies the artist’s own geographic and cultural history.
Christy Rupp
One artist who has been working in the art from trash world for years and whose work more explicitly connects our trash with our living Earth is Christy Rupp.
Ms. Rupp refers to her discipline as “Discard Studies”, and her work speaks simultaneously to the tragedy of the ecological burden of human waste as well as the persistence of life and our planet’s ecosystems.
Since I work primarily in a diorama format, my own sculptures incorporating trash envision four-armed people living with the trash.
(The four arms are a visual metaphor for a deeper connection with the world outside of the individual.)
Ancient Greeks had a mosaic motif called Asárotos òikos, or “the unswept floor”, which the ancient Romans imitated, and which depicted food refuse strewn about the floor. While some artists from ancient times to the present observed and recorded human refuse as an element of human life, in our current age human made trash takes up so much physical space that it is inevitably coming back to us in our landscapes, in our food and water, and in our own bodies. If trash is “dirty” then we will never be “clean” in our lifetimes.
Transforming trash into art speaks to the potential of the human mind to create beautiful objects worthy of curious contemplation from virtually any material and requires the opening of our hearts and minds to the possibility of magic. But creating art from trash also embodies the power of living things to thrive whenever and wherever conditions permit, even if the conditions shorten potential lifespans. The health of human communities is measured less by appearances and more by the strength and depths of our hearts to continue to sing, paint, sculpt, love, and nurture regardless the circumstances.
Recyclic
My series of sculptures incorporating tires, titled “Recyclic”, depict figures working and playing around structures that appear to be created from tires and situated within a landscape held in a tire.
Plastivegetation
In my “Plastivegetation” series, plastic bottles are reshaped to resemble plants, with people living in and around them. These sculptures present trash as part of the material of our daily productive lives.