Spontaneously, when thinking about the role that art could play in the field of ecology, we think recycling, and it is true that this practice of revaluation has a long artistic history that goes back to Cubism. But the recovery of waste is not necessarily synonymous with ecology, far from it. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque have had the decisive instinct to stick, pieces of reality on their drawings and their canvases, some of which had been recovered from the garbage.
By introducing elements of everyday life into their works, they would permanently disrupt the codes of art. But let there be no mistake here, neither of them can be called environmentalists. Even though poet Jean Cocteau had nicknamed Picasso "King of the Ragpickers" due to the artist’s mastery of finding abandoned objects, like a wicker basket that he would turn into a goat, for example, this does not make him a champion of recycling in the ecological sense of the term.
Ragpicking, is one of trash recovery’s minor jobs seen frequently in cities, and captured by photographer Marianne Breslauer in 1929. She pays tribute to the hardships and conscientious efforts of this activity of subsistence, both modest and essential. It is worth knowing that this practice of collection lasted until the middle of the 1970s in France, until it was replaced by the system we know today.
However, it was not until 1992 that the French municipalities were obliged to develop and to organize the recycling of a part of our garbage. Let's rewind to a century earlier, this time, in Germany. From 1918, Dada artist Kurt Schwitters started to pick up small leftovers.
They ranged from modest stamps, to pieces of paper or lost buttons that he would introduce in his works. By this gesture he activates the element of creative chance appreciated by Dadaists, while taking a critical look at German society. The country was then shaken by an significant financial crisis and, paradoxically, by an accelerated industrialization that the artist observes with an a gaze that is both humorous and critical.
In his paintings and drawings, kurt Schwitters does not take up the cause for the environment as we understand it today. In fact, the term barely existed in the 1920s. What he does is a symbolic movement of waste recovery from the gutter to the painting.
With these simple gestures of collection, then collage or assembly life and art merge. The daily time of the ephemeral is transformed into artistic eternity, while uselessness and degradation are adorned with a certain grandeur that these artists of the historical avant-gardes were the first to understand. In 1960s France, the New Realists were once again making work from trash, creating a ripple of change in society.
In the middle of the "Trente Glorieuses", one inhabitant of metropolitan France produced 250 kilos of waste per year and this number will only increase. The West consumes and throws away. Arman, César, Gérard Deschamps, Jacques Villeglé, but also Jean Tinguely, observed this flood of objects and embarked on a critical recovery that upset the standards of “good” artistic taste.
Arman's trash cans offer a hollow portrait of society, as here with this specimen found in the district of Les Halles in Paris. Newspaper, cardboard, fabric, straw, metal box, dried mimosa, bulb base, pencil, plastic film and labels all lie in this wood and glass box that becomes a sarcophagus. With this trash can, Arman signs a modest snapshot of Parisian life, saved from destruction to end up in a museum The irony is stinging!
But is it ecological? Still not, but trash recovery became clearly acerbic, positioned on the territory of a sharp social analysis in which Gérard Deschamps will also engage by recovering and aggregating all kinds of materials, such as these advertising tarps, to make a painting. Criticizing the incentive to consume, is also at the heart of César’s crumpled metal sheets.
He would become the inventor of these compressions, and would send hundreds of vehicles to the artistic scrapyard well before the 1973 oil crisis. With him trash becomes a symbol of a drift and a consumerist indigestion to the maximum. The flood of waste, especially plastic, became a growing concern, starting the 1970s.
And with the appearance of sprawling landfills, trash transformed into a real pollution. People became conscious in the face of this looming threat of unregulated garbage growth, proportional to our consumption, and which seemed to be totally out of control. Sometimes, while collecting material, artists do not only accumulate: what they collect is sorted, indexed, organized, and put in order, in a way, which exposes the invention of true taxonomy, in the manner of scientists.
This is the case with the English artist Tony Cragg who, despite not transmitting an ecological message, appeared on the international artistic scene with arrangements made from dozens of different used plastic parts collected by color. It was his way of rationalizing, and arranging the flow of detritus, a practice that many artists still use today when they try to to put some order in this invasion of plastic waste in every corner of the world. From the oceans to the mountain peaks, plastic has indeed entered in all ecosystems, either whole or in crushed form, and it is thus very present in many artistic creations.
The "Cardboard and glue" were made in 2005 by the Emirati artist Hassan Sharif and constitute the second example of amalgamated cardboard sculptures that he made. It's ironic, but it's likely that the first one ended up in the garbage. Indeed, the artist had first placed them in the urban space before trying to bring them back into a proper exhibition space.
But, unable to find them, he had to repeat his approach. The cardboard in this version is unrecognizable shredded and amalgamated with glue, it forms a kind of sand roses. Like archaeological remains, these forms testify to the political glance that Sharif directs on production gestures that are repetitive thus criticizing destructive overconsumption.
But what we also need to see is the pleasure of reinserting complexity to a poor material. Normally used for packaging objects of desire, the material itself, thanks to the artist, becomes precious. This metamorphosis of waste is also practiced by El Anatsui, a Ghanaian artist living in Nigeria.
These are monumental works made from capsules and corks, of lids and packaging transformed by a singular weaving technique. El Anatsu approaches through these works the colonial, political and social history of these remains of objects. The transformation process changes this modest resource used and abandoned into opulent, rich and complex matter, while expressing a potential rather than a miserable sense of exhaustion.
The large sculptures of the Ghanaian artist mimic the activity of ragpicker children who recover raw materials from huge dumps. The economic domination of the large Western brands, has been for some years an environmental concern. As the African continent has become soiled by the accumulation of garbage, some of which comes from northern countries, El Anatsui imbues his works with an ecological awareness.
This is also the case for many artists who work with this overabundant material in Africa and who question its ecological impact on the earth and its populations. Until now, the artists we have approached were working with waste, but did not necessarily claim a specific ecological commitment. However, Vik Muniz, has long positioned his practice within this field.
In 1998, in a series entitled "Aftermath", he created portraits of homeless children in Sao Paulo, Brazil. And to represent in this particular case the young Angelica, he picked up everything that was lying around after the celebration of the carnival, replacing pixels by confetti and dust. With this gesture, he makes a symbolic yet crushing analogy between rejected waste and abandoned children.
This series began his interest in the poorest classes and interlope economy that generate sprawling dumps, especially in Rio. This will to link social misery and environmental pollution in a critical and committed approach has since been strengthened with the production of documentary films. Thus, in a century, waste has gone from being a tool of fracturing the autonomy of art to bring life to it, to a role of critical analysis of the consumerist society, to finally reach an environmental dimension, without being locked into it.
Waste is an essential subject, material and motif to approach the field of ecology, but its societal, economic nature, and archaeological material makes it particularly versatile which cannot be reduced to a single ecological reading.
