Garbage as Art

Garbage

In what ways does looking at 'garbage' as art actually make the question of garbage more manageable?

One person's trash is another's treasure -- such cliches are frequently repeated in modern conversation. And indeed, everyone has known at some point in his or her life the pleasure of picking up an intriguing 'find,' perhaps a real wool winter coat at a yard sale at a greatly discounted price, or even better a 'free' yet pristine discarded bit of merchandise like a slightly outdated piece of electronic equipment by the side of the road, saved from the clutches of the trash collector. But beyond the issue of collecting refuse to stretch one's salary, authors Richard C. Porter's text The Economics of Waste and John Scanlan's poetic musings in On Garbage actually argue that garbage, beyond mere economics savings for the personal consumer or recycling to save one's own local environment, must begin to have a larger social and aesthetic value that cannot and should not be denied for the psychological and environmental health of our society.

In contrast to John Scanlan, Richard C. Porter stresses a more conventional, but still radically conservationist economic view of viewing garbage. Porter focuses on the use of economic analysis to reveal the costs of different policies and therefore how much can be done to meet goals to protect human health and the environment. But even in his own ecological recollections, citing his own early obsessions with conserving the environment, Porter notes, "I remember collecting bottle caps as a kid," finding beauty in the cast-off bits of other humans. (Porter ix)

But Porter reminds the reader that such scavenging by boys at play and even community recycling is not enough to save the earth's ecosystem. In fact, it has been estimated 25% of all waste is "yard waste" that contains so much glass and debris it cannot be recycled. An effective waste policy must integrate knowledge from several disciplines, including sociology and the ways in which human beings view consumerism, as America becomes an increasingly disposable society. (4) We must learn to think economically about what we now call mere waste, stresses the author.

John Scanlan offers a more potent philosophical answer to the problematic history of garbage, a problem cannot be solved by recycling alone, but must, Scanlan stresses, be resolved by looking at trash in a different way. 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 one's father's favorite soda.

Thus Scanlan asks, how do we decide what is considered junk in Western society? Simply because the discarded remnants one's immediate life may no longer be of interest to the original user of the commodity does not mean that garbage cannot provide a historian with a potent artifact later on, or even an enterprising art student with raw material to create something of beauty. What would we not give to see the trash of the ancient Egyptians, and is indeed some of the Mesopotamian broken pottery we so carefully assemble in art museums across the world what would be garbage, if it were only a few years old?

The memory of a society is thus always written in a kind of garbage. And, as the adage about trash and treasure cited at the beginning of this essay suggests, material waste viewed anew can produce something to be treasured and beautiful even in today's present. But to attain such insight, Scanlan suggests, modern Western philosophy, science, and technology must cast away its obsession wit cleansing, which only produces overwhelming mountains of waste.