The philosophical nature of art can show us that to refuse to recycle and to cling to the false idea that the shiny new tin wheels on our roller blades, that originates in the scrap metal of our recent ancestors, is new is a powerful one. Scanlan's poetic musings in On Garbage also stress the humbling nature of garbage. All societies are reduced to relics after the death of the civilization. These waste products, such as broken and chipped pots, are now deployed as costly museum attractions. If we are not to bury ourselves in a world with rapidly dwindling space and resources, Scanlan argues, we must grapple with Western culture's mania for discarding things as a way of moving forward. Western culture has denied the natural lifecycle of rebirth, and clung to a false ideal of something beginning from nothing. Ultimately, this false idea of the 'new' creates only more garbage, as when we convince ourselves we are starting anew, and cast off everything from before, we need to produce more to re-start our society. Acknowledging our debt to the past in the form of garbage saves the environmental degradation, of needing to create more landfills, and also can part of the beginning process of integrating the cyclical nature of the environment's cycle into the Western philosophical...
If we have more respect for the environment and are more connected to its natural rhythms by making art our of garbage, we are less likely as a society to abuse the environment.
Much as Porter discovered playthings as a little boy in bottle caps, rather than collecting more and more matchbox cars, for example, remnants of consumerism only to be disposed of in weeks rather than things to be kept as relics of a bygone era, one must begin to see from an early age the slim line of difference between, say a Happy Meal Toy or a bottle cap from
The fact that his labors are more often than not, fortified by beer, to steel him to the unpleasant task of destruction, underline Hanta's futile attempts to disengage himself from the physical, material act of cultural destruction through drug-inducted dissociation. (2) Hanta records, particularly during the first part of the book, in excruciating detail the masses and masses of words he has rendered for the scrap heap, and his
Sociology of Waste Putting waste to use: sociological explanations behind specific beliefs in waste management Looking at the trash located in a dormitory, one of the items that caught my interest was a sheaf of papers containing readings, exams, and notes from a (notably) university student. Since some of the readings were somehow familiar or of interest to me, I salvaged these papers from the trash, and tried to know what is
Artistic 'Techniques' Art becomes reality. This is my desire, this is my purpose. So this is my creation, my child. The visions of primitive cave paintings dance in my vision as I put the last touches on the backdrop of this set. This abandoned Victorian house which is now home to leaves and spiders and forest creatures and my child, my masterpiece... we have carried generators and lights and cameras the
Koolhas's junkspace certainly paints a perfect picture of certain parts of Chicago where undifferentiated ethnic sprawl leads slovenly onto another and then onto another, often without demarcations being drawn and suddenly one finds one walking or biking onto the promenade running alongside the lake or staring up at the skyscrapers that have been squeezed and twisted into tight corners and loom down onto the twisting, careening streets beneath. Chicago is tight
While that process may be somewhat apparent in Kurt Schwitters's Merz pictures from this era, the artist was not so radical as to defy all means of self-expression - he clearly could not help himself from interfering by shaping his materials into a form that may not have seemed coherent at the time, but from a historical perspective, certainly seems to make sense. Both works seem to evoke a
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