Displaying Garbage: Installations as Spaces of Domination and Resistance

Abstract

Contemporary artistic installations presenting the detritus of everyday life are an increasingly popular method of raising awareness of what we produce, consume, and throw away. As social critique, these displays examine the political and economic causes and consequences of waste production and resulting ecological degradation. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s conceptions of aesthetics, liberation, and ecology in capitalism, this article attempts to discern where we might find hope, encouragement, and active imagination of another possible future through artistic installations. This article cautions that garbage art may both open and close off creative and imaginative spaces for transformation to a liberated society. Differentiating between two categories of art installations, this article explores how installations can reflect back to us our complicated relationship with waste and consumer culture, raising questions as to how the aesthetic realm might serve as a springboard for critique of capitalism.

Notes

¹ See, for example, the garbage strike in Naples in 2010 in Philippe Ridet, “Naples Remains in the Grip of a Waste Nightmare,” The Guardian, 19 October 2010, sec. World News, available online at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/19/naples-chaos-waste-mountain, complaints from residents of Seattle about garbage haulers examining their trash in Jack Broom, Seattle Times, 17 July 2015, available online at: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/suit-claims-seattle-garbage-collection-inspections-violate-privacy/, and the wasteful remains of the People’s Climate March in New York in Lauren Evans, “People’s Climate March Leaves Trail Of Trash,” Gothamist, sec. News, available online at: http://gothamist.com/2014/09/22/climate_march_trash.php (accessed March 6, 2015).

² The “waste crisis” narrative began with ill-fated voyage of the Mobro 4000 in 1987, the first of two infamous gar-barges, departing from New York and traveling more six thousand miles up and down the eastern seaboard in search of a place to offload its waste. The Khian Sea, a second gar-barge containing ash from a Philadelphia incinerator, furthered the perception of a “waste crisis.” No crisis of a lack of space to dispose of material existed at the time or exists today. Both ill-fated gar-barges were the result of large cities and waste hauling companies slowly adjusting to the effects of the 1976 amendments to the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. See A.J. Hoffman and W. Ocasio, “Not All Events Are Attended Equally: Toward a Middle-Range Theory of Industry Attention to External Events,” Organization Science 12 (2001), pp. 414–34; David N. Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

³ The jacket of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s 1961 catalog for The Art of Assemblage states, “An ‘assemblage,’ extending the method initiated by the Cubist painters, is a work of art made by fastening together cut or torn pieces of paper, clippings from newspapers, photographs, bits of cloth, fragments of wood, metal, or other such materials, shells or stones, or even objects such as knives and forks, chairs and tables, parts of dolls and mannequins, automobile fenders, steel boilers, and stuffed birds and animals.” MOMA’s groundbreaking exhibition showcased a wide variety of assemblages from artists such as Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. A. Miller, “Forward and Acknowledgement,” in William Chaplin Seitz (ed.), The Art of Assemblage, 1^st ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), pp. 6–7. William Chaplin Seitz, The Art of Assemblage, 1^st ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961).

⁴ Lea Vergine, When Trash Becomes Art: Trash Rubbish Mongo (New York: Skira Paperbacks, 2007), p. 10.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Caroline Tauxe, “Garbage Art,” in Carl A. Zimring and William A. Rathje (eds), Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage (New York: Sage, 2012), pp. 296–299; William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish! The Archeology of Garbage (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001).

⁷ This article uses the terms garbage and trash interchangeably to describe material that is designated as no longer useful in its current form, including material that might be recycled.

⁸ Timothy W. Luke, “The System of Sustainable Degradation,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 17 (2006), pp. 99–112. For Luke, sustainable development in practice maintains environmentally destructive activities through small modifications of management which, perversely, do not address the root of environmental problems but rather make exploitation more efficient and effective: “Sustainable degradation constructs the ecological crisis as manageable within the current parameters of capitalism. It is a proactive, profitable and powerful policy that maintains some environmental viability by creating zones and spheres of control where degradation is lessened, but never stopped,” Ibid., 99.

⁹ Samantha MacBride, Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011); Rathje and Murphy, Rubbish! The Archeology of Garbage.

¹⁰ In a series of lectures delivered in Paris in 1974, Marcuse, referring to the slogan of the 1968 Paris student movement—Be realistic, demand the impossible!—stated, “The impossible is not impossible, but is very realistic.” In a later lecture, he provided a timeline for a socialist revolution, emphasizing “that, with sufficient preparation it could well happen” in advanced industrial democracies in seventy five to one hundred years, adding, “Now there you have it. If you want to take these dates for optimistic appraisal, it only shows you that you still have plenty of time to work that it may come about sooner.” He concluded by emphasizing that a socialist revolution is not strictly inevitable and will never occur if we do not work for it today. Herbert Marcuse, “Fourth Presentation,” in Peter-Erwin Jansen and Charles Reitz (eds), Paris Lectures at Vincennes University, 1974: Global Capitalism and Radical Opposition (Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015), p. 32.

¹¹ For Marcuse, one-dimensionality describes a society without forms of opposition, where individuals are seamlessly incorporated into systems of mass production and consumption through forms of efficient technology supported by the totality of the administered state. Perversely, what individuals view as freedom, such as the ability to choose between items in the marketplace, is actually a form of domination. True freedom is the ability to express the self as an autonomous and creative subject, free to seek individual needs rather than the false needs imposed by the productive apparatus. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1991).

¹² Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969), p.4.

¹³ Charles Reitz, Art, Alienation, and the Humanities: A Critical Engagement with Herbert Marcuse (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), p. 8; Stephen Eric Bronner, “Between Art and Utopia: Reconsidering the Aesthetic Theory of Herbert Marcuse,” in Andrew Feenberg, and Charles P. Webel (eds), Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia, Robert Pippin (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), pp. 107–42; Malcolm Miles, Herbert Marcuse: An Aesthetics of Liberation (London: Pluto Press, 2012).

¹⁴ Douglas Kellner, “Introduction: Marcuse, Art and Liberation,” in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Art and Liberation: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Volume 4 (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 3.

¹⁵ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, p. xli.

¹⁶ See Reitz, Art, Alienation, and the Humanities; Miles, Herbert Marcuse: An Aesthetics of Liberation.

¹⁷ Reitz uses the categories “art against alienation” for the texts Reason and Revolution (1941), Eros and Civilization (1955), One-Dimensional Man and Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964), and An Essay on Liberation (1969). “Art as alienation” is described in Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) and The Aesthetic Dimension (1978). I include Marcuse’s paper “The Affirmative Character of Culture” (1937) in the category of “art against alienation” as it previews many of the concepts he teases out in the works in this category.

¹⁸ Reitz, Art, Alienation, and the Humanities, pp. 113–4.

¹⁹ Reitz, Art, Alienation, and the Humanities, p. 15.

²⁰ Kellner, “Introduction,” p. 25.

²¹ Becker notes the rarity of this actually happening due to the market and social constraints on artists today. In Essay on Liberation, Marcuse specifically notes that art can be absorbed and shaped by the market. Nonetheless, for Marcuse, the possibility of critique remains. Carol Becker (ed.), “Herbert Marcuse and the Subversive Potential of Art,” in The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 114.

²² Reitz, Art, Alienation, and the Humanities, p. 68.

²³ Reitz (Ibid., 195) marks Marcuse’s turn to art as alienation in The Aesthetic Dimension as his movement from militant activist to classic aesthete. Both Reitz and Kellner assert that rather than a disjuncture in thought, Marcuse’s shift in theory “reveals a symmetry and double-structure framework rather than sheer disjunction in his overall intellectual effort with regards to art, alienation, and the humanities.”

²⁴ Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979), p. 9.

²⁵ Ibid., 32–3.

²⁶ Rathje and Murphy, Rubbish! The Archeology of Garbage, p. ii.

²⁷ Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, pp. 7–8.

²⁸ Timothy W. Luke, “One-Dimensional Man: A Systematic Critique of Human Domination and Nature-Society Relations,” Organization & Environment 13 (2000), pp. 95–101.

²⁹ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: A Systematic Critique of Human Domination, p. 225.

³⁰ Timothy W. Luke, “Green Consumerism: Ecology and the Reuse of Recycling,” in Jane Bennett and William Chaloupaka (eds), The Nature of Things (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 154–72.

³¹ David N. Pellow, Allan Schnaiberg, and Adam S. Weinberg, “Putting the Ecological Modernization Thesis to the Test: The Promises and Performance of Urban Recycling,” in Arthur P.J. Mol and David A. Sonnefeld (eds.), Ecological Modernization Around the World: Perspectives and Critical Debates (Portland, OR: Frank Cass & Co., 2004), pp. 109–137.

³² Timothy W. Luke, Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

³³ Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, p. 49.

³⁴ Heather Chappells and Elizabeth Shove, “The Dustbin: A Study of Domestic Waste, Household Practices and Utility Services,” International Planning Studies 29:2 (1999), p. 268; Martin O’Brien, “Rubbish Values: Reflections on the Political Economy of Waste,” Science as Culture 8 (1999), pp. 269–95.

³⁵ Chappells and Shove, “The Dustbin: A Study of Domestic Waste, Household Practices and Utility Services,” p. 269.

³⁶ O’Brien, “Rubbish Values: Reflections on the Political Economy of Waste,” p. 285.

³⁷ In the United States, the court case California vs. Greenwood established that the “borders of the household do not encompass the contents of the trashcan” according to Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 1999), p. 7.

³⁸ Johannes Scanlan, On Garbage (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), p. 129.

³⁹ Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago; Robin Nagle, Picking up: On the Streets and behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).

⁴⁰ Nagle, Picking Up.

⁴¹ Gillian Pye, “Introduction,” in Gillian Pye (ed.), Trash Culture Objects and Obsolescence in Cultural Perspective (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 4.

⁴² Edd de Coverly, Pierre McDonagh, Lisa O’Malley, and Maurice Patterson, “Hidden Mountain: The Social Avoidance of Waste,” Journal of Macromarketing 28 (2008), p. 289.

⁴³ Maarten de Kadt, “Solid Waste Management at a Crossroads: Recycling on the Treadmill of Production,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 10 (1999), p. 148.

⁴⁴ Herbert Marcuse, “Late Philosophical/Political Reflections,” in Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (ed.), Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation: Herbert Marcuse Collected Papers, vol. 5 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), p. 222.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 223.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 224.

⁴⁷ Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Boston, MA: Ark Paperbacks, 1984); Johannes Scanlan, On Garbage.

⁴⁸ Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 48.

⁴⁹ Luke, “Green Consumerism: Ecology and the Reuse of Recycling,” p. 158.

⁵⁰ Bronner, “Between Art and Utopia: Reconsidering the Aesthetic Theory of Herbert Marcuse,” p. 111.

⁵¹ Miles, Herbert Marcuse: An Aesthetics of Liberation, p. 23.

⁵² Ibid., 52.

⁵³ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, p. 64.

⁵⁴ Becker, “Herbert Marcuse and the Subversive Potential of Art,” p. 120.

⁵⁵ Luke makes this argument as well, writing specifically from the “vantage of a radical ecologist concerned about art” in “Art and the Environmental Crisis: From Commodity Aesthetics to Ecology Aesthetics,” Art Journal 51:2 (1992), p. 72–6.

⁵⁶ Miles, Herbert Marcuse: An Aesthetics of Liberation, p. 149.

⁵⁷ Becker, “Herbert Marcuse and the Subversive Potential of Art,” p. 122.

⁵⁸ Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, p. 9.

⁵⁹ Lorraine Rubio, of Scanlan in note #54. The Trash at London London the Trash at Artnet News, June 18, 2014, available online at: http://news.artnet.com/in-brief/artist-sorting-through-london-museums-trash-43399.

⁶⁰ Nell Frizzell, “Mr. Garbage: The Man Who Will Be Rifling through Rubbish All Month for Art’s Sake,” The Guardian, available online at: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/17/rubbish-collection-science-museum-joshua-sofaer (accessed March 22, 2015).

⁶¹ By the end of the sorting process, Sofaer cataloged £40.16, ten French francs, one Swiss franc, three US cents, and one Euro cent. The display caption explains, “Notes and coins were discovered soiled and caught in wrappers and thrown into bins.”

⁶² Frizzell, “Mr. Garbage,” p. 1.

⁶³ Joshua Sofaer, “The Rubbish Collection,” Inside the Science Museum, 2014, available online at: http://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/insight/tag/the-rubbish-collection/.

⁶⁴ Ibid.

⁶⁵ See, for example, Bound and Voulvoulis, “Household Disposal of Pharmaceuticals as a Pathway for Aquatic Contamination in the United Kingdom,” Environmental Health Perspectives 113:12 (1 December 2005), pp. 1705–11, as well as Singh, Singh, Alam, Patel, and Datt, “Safe Management of Household Pharmaceuticals: An Overview,” Journal of Pharmacy Research 5:5 (2012), pp. 2623–26.

⁶⁶ Sofaer, “The Rubbish Collection.”

⁶⁷ Reitz, Art, Alienation, and the Humanities; Sonja Windmüller, “‘Trash Museums’: Exhibiting in between,” in Gillian Pye (ed.), Trash Culture: Objects and Obsolescence in Cultural Perspective (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 39–58; Timothy W. Luke, Museum Politics: Power Plays at the Exhibition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

⁶⁸ Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1979).

⁶⁹ Two Müll Museums exist in Germany, one in Wuppertal and the other in Bad Säckingen-Wallbach. Both display mongo pulled from piles of material destined for the landfill Windmüller, “‘Trash Museums’: Exhibiting in between.”

⁷⁰ Ibid., 41.

⁷¹ Gillian Whiteley, Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash (New York, NY: I. B. Tauris, 2011).

⁷² Ukeles has completed a variety of exhibits in her artist-in-residence role. In her first and perhaps best known piece, Touch Sanitation, she shook the hand of every employee of the New York Department of Sanitation, more than eight thousand workers in total, saying to each of them, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.”

⁷³ Alex R.D. Zahara, “Bringing Waste to Public Spaces: A Discussion with Saskatoon Visual Artist Keeley Haftner,” Ideas on Plastic and Northern Waste, available online at: https://alexzahara.wordpress.com/2014/04/29/bringing-waste-to-public-spaces-a-discussion-with-saskatoon-visual-artist-keeley-haftner/ (accessed March 22, 2015).

⁷⁴ Ibid.

⁷⁵ Tristin Hopper, “Saskatoon Man Angrily Throws Tarp over Public Art That Consists of Two Large Bundles of Garbage,” National Post, 2014, available online at: http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/04/23/saskatoon-man-angrily-throws-tarp-over-public-art-that-consists-of-two-large-bundles-of-garbage/.

⁷⁶ Henry T. Blanke, “Domination and Utopia: Marcuse’s Discourse on Nature, Psyche and Culture,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 5:3 (1994), pp. 99–123.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 116.

⁷⁸ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, p. 70.