Garbage Art

Creation and Materials

Creating art from trash involves “consuming” garbage in the sense that artists appropriate and rearrange [Page 297]the materials in personal ways, transform their meanings, utilize them to their own ends, and represent them in new ways. It involves taking unwanted materials out of their “waste” context and recontextualizing them as “art.” The previous uses and effects of such objects may be symbolically employed to evoke meaningful associations and to communicate messages about consumer society or environmental damage. This remaking of the meaning of objects is a defining characteristic of the garbage art genre and it is often what makes it so enjoyable and accessible to the art-consuming public. The playful and surprising effects of recombining evocative and often familiar objects in ways that transform their meanings provoke a high level of engagement in viewers that does not depend on conventional art appreciation knowledge.

Garbage art (or trash or recycled art) has been in practice for centuries but has remained on the fringes of the art world. It is often seen as a subgenre of what is known as environmental art. Dumpster diving is a popular method of gathering materials.

Broadly speaking, garbage art includes phenomena from the margins of industrialized society to its very center. The adoption of cast-off items of industrial origin for their ornamental value by people in nonindustrialized, tribal societies around the world can be considered instances of garbage art; for example, where pop-tops from beer cans, wire paper clips, or keys from sardine tins have been incorporated for their exotic novelty value into traditional jewelry forms. In postcolonial societies that are more thoroughly integrated into global systems of consumer political economy, items of industrial waste such as aluminum cans, telephone wire, and candy wrappers are used to produce artisanal creations such as toy cars, woven baskets, and handbags for both domestic consumption and the international ethnic art market. Such items are often marketed in the industrialized world as Fair Trade commodities produced in workers’ collectives, and they fetch high prices for this reason as well as their “ethno-chic” associations. The reuse of materials otherwise destined for the trash heap has also had a place in folk art produced by nonprofessional artists in developed nations. Traditional quilting, for example, arose as a frugal means of recycling the material from worn-out clothing to create warm bed coverings. Other examples are rugs woven from strips of waste cloth and sculpted figures (sometimes used to advertise auto-repair shops) made by welding together scrap car parts.

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