artists setting sail on seas of trash

(image: Brooklyn artist Swoon floats into the Venice Biennale uninvited on a ship of NYC trash)

A small version of myself one day heard-- at school? on television?--about the problem of trash-- extensive landfills, toxic waste, plastic islands. This version of myself was grief stricken, panicked. She sat wide-eyed in bed trying to come up with a solution to our world's throw-away problem. She winced anytime she had to toss something in the trash, because she knew it wouldn't just go away, as she had once thought. Since that time, the many troubles of the earth's balancing act in response to humans' ridiculous tendency toward imbalance have remained a central concern in my life. (Even prehistoric farmers over-farmed!)

Of course, as an artist, this preoccupation often slips into my work either as part of a loose narrative or as an admiration of the patterned interconnectedness of nature (the whole series Solving for Pattern is named for environmentalist/poet Wendel Berry's call to more deeply understand the patterns of ecology in solving environmental problems, e.g.). I avoid taking up any deeply felt cause as a guiding force in making a piece of art, however. Perhaps it's because I'm not convinced that art is the strongest voice for persuading or converting in a direct way. Perhaps I've seen too many bad examples of art that pleads for change. I tend to agree with a comment I read on a different blog posted by Jim Bovino: "When artists allow their politics to guide their creative choices it normally results in ham-fisted gestures and flaccid aesthetics." But are there exceptions to this tendency?

There are artists who deal directly with the modern trash dilemma. At a recent Society for Photographic Educators conference that I tagged along to, Edward Burtynsky spoke, and showed a career's worth of photographs documenting the vast effects of human consumption on the land and sea (Burtynsky is usually associated with his ship-breaking images, which are incredible, but click on Urban Mines on his site for even more of a direct connection to this post). While his photographs are stunning, they strike me as more documentary than anything. Chris Jordan's work, because of its clever mathematical or pictorial reorganization, carries a few more angles, but still serves relatively simply as aestheticized mental models for contemplating mass (curious about his event at Western Bridge on June 29th-- did anyone go?).

I know my requirements for art are idiosyncratic, and that there are as many functions for pictures as there are for words, but in a fine art context, I look for complexity, mystery, conundrum, ineffability. I look for a mental world with some swimming room. Swoon's prankster act at the Venice Biennial (pictured above) does more for me on this front. From the New York Magazine article:

Swoon and her group are emissaries from a specific underground culture: the bike-riding, Dumpster-diving, anarchist street-art movement that has flourished in Bushwick, Greenpoint, and areas near the Gowanus Canal over the past decade [...] For them, scrounging is a kind of religion, and the boats are an embodiment of that aesthetic. They’re not interested in expensive green technologies or recycling programs—the point is reuse, to breathe new life into the city’s detritus and build a new, separate world from those remains. “We’re not perfect,” Swoon says. “How much jet fuel was used to fly all of us here? But we’re not going to let being imperfect stop us. If you are too rigid in your ethics, you undo positive action.”

The life-as-art approach is age-old, but in the context of consumption and waste, this band of rebels leads by example. There's also something very Mad Max about the effect, becoming a picture of the global profligation and unconscious exchange of trash on every level. And then there are these unexpectedly hopeful observations on the human condition embedded in the work as well: “You start to build something like these boats, and you can’t believe it yourself, but enthusiasm has a way of sparking other people,” [Swoon] says. “What this project has shown me is that there is no place for pessimistic disbelief in the world; it’s just not useful. Once you’ve decided to be on the side of audacious wonder, beauty, and joy, you can’t go back.”

A useful tool, this wonder, when faced with information like this:


When I saw this last night, all of my childhood dreads and devotion came rushing back. I looked around at my plastic-y environment with awe. How pervasive this stuff is! I resolved to emphasize the Reduce and Reuse side of the RRR mantra, without relying as much on Recycling. Even if the problems are planet-sized, small steps en masse become large ones. (If you're in Seattle, here's an easy one-- vote in August!)

As for the questions raised about art exacting change, the jury's still out for me, and the discussion is likely to continue... I'm using this space to think out loud.