Underworld, Underground, Underhistory: Towards a counterhistory of waste and wastelands

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ The notion of ‘counterhistory’ draws on Michel Foucault's 1976 Collège de France lectures concerning the emergence of heterogeneous counter-discourses that sought to uncover and make visible ‘buried’ histories and legacies (Foucault 2004: 72).

² Similar techniques were employed in England at the vast Byker incinerator near Newcastle in the mid-1990s and until August 2000 by London Waste for the illegal dispersal of dioxin-contaminated fly ash from its Edmonton incinerator (now re-branded the ‘London Waste EcoPark’). The Byker plant dumped more than 2,000 tonnes of untreated toxic ash on public parks, allotments and footpaths; the Edmonton waste was used in roads, car parks and in the production of 15,000 tonnes in bricks and breeze blocks (enough for an estimated 3,400 houses). See, for example, Sinclair (2003: 51–3) and Girling (2005: 192–205).

³ ‘Says the junk in the yard’ is a phrase from the chorus of a Paul McCartney song Junk (1968): ‘Buy buy, says the sign in the shop window / Why, why, says the junk in the yard’. Originally considered for inclusion on the Beatles' White Album, this modest critique of consumption was itself initially junked and only subsequently recycled and released on McCartney's debut solo album two years later. In 2007, McCartney's line was re-appropriated as the title of an exhibition of contemporary waste-related art at the Flowers East Gallery in London (see Dickson 2007).

⁴ Such a survey might also include work by artists as disparate as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Belmer, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Holt, Eva Hesse, Christian Boltanski, Anselm Kiefer, Gustav Metzger, Irving Penn, Peter Blake, Mark Dion, Richard Wentworth, Cornelia Parker, Ursula Biemann, Alastair Maclennan, Wolfgang Tillmans, Helen Chadwick, Sarah Lucas, David Shrigley and Yao Lu. For a discussion of Gavin Turk's White Cube exhibition The Golden Thread (2004), including his eight bronze bin liners (Pile), see Collings (2004).

⁵ They include, among others, Richard Misrach, Robert Polidori, Trevor Paglen, Naoya Hatakeyama, Sophie Gerrard, Mikhael Subotzky and David Hughes.

⁶ For full details of Field Operations' Fresh Kills Draft Master Plan, see the New York City Department of City Planning website: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/fkl/fkl4c.shtml. Sullivan (2008) includes an overview of the project and an interview with the director of Field Operations, James Corner.

⁷ It is pertinent to compare this ‘return of the repressed’ with psychoanalysis' core interest in the ‘secret histories' contained within the overlooked waste products of psychic life. Like Benjaminian collectors, psychoanalysts endeavour to ‘divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations’ (Freud 1985: 265). In Agnès Varda's film Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (2000), one of the elderly grape-gleaners Varda interviews is the celebrated psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, although she does not realize who he is until she returns to make a second film Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse – deux ans après (2002). In this later film, Laplanche suggests that both gleaning and psychoanalysis pay particular attention to the overlooked: what falls from speech (discours). What is dropped, what is picked up. Words which are beside usual speech are of special value to psychoanalysts, because things which are picked up or gleaned are more valuable to us than what is harvested. (Varda 2009)

⁸ This narrative thread seems to be based in part on the self-styled ‘non-governmental garbologist’ A. J. Weberman and his notorious pursuit in the 1960s of Bob Dylan (and others) through raiding his trash, an act of muckraking purportedly intended to recuperate traces that would offer a register of Dylan's ‘real’ identity’. For a more detailed account, see, for example, Scanlan (2005: 147–53).

⁹ See Biemann and Holmes (2006).