Open blog prompt 1: The artists’ writings and manifestoes (and the artists described by Foster) all address the subject of waste, but in very different ways. Which did you find most striking, most resonant?
In your writing, you may wish to connect one of the artist’s works to one of the previous weeks’ readings (e.g., Kristeva on abjection, Gidwani on the economic principles of trash, etc.).
You may also wish to consider what these artists’ visualization or performance of waste brings to the fore. What might they help us perceive visually or phenomenologically that we might not appreciate intellectually?
Alternately, what are the politics of using waste in the artistic sphere?
Martha Rosler’s Gar(b)arge Sale Standard adopts the disposable format of the daily newspaper to approach questions of waste from multiple editorial and design perspectives. For example, in Dayna Tortorici’s “Party of the Family,” the author presents her argument in a journalistic fashion. Beginning with the statement, “Women, in other words, ‘reproduced’ the labor force every day maintaining the social conditions that enabled men to head out to the factory or work place,” she goes on to cite the Bureau of Labor Statistics to state that women account for 95% of paid childcare workers, 88% of nurses, orderlies, and attendants, and 89% of maids and cleaners (3). Tortorici then follows this exposition by referencing BBC and US Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that valued domestic labor as a £700 billion and $3.8 trillion industry respectively (3). In other words, the article adopts the tone and style of an economics reporter to convey the magnitude, and invisibility, of domestic labor. Yet Rosler’s newspaper juxtaposes this article with a two-page-spread infographic to hone the message. The “Domestic Work in New York City” section that appears on pages 4–5 visualizes Tortorici’s argument with a more focused exploration of the subject. Here, the pincushions and spools of thread—the materials of domestic labor—emphasize the inequities of the trade. Most striking is the evolution of the infographic itself: it starts in small multiples (the pincushions) and a multitude of statistics (e.g. access to healthcare, hourly wages) and ends in a comparison of employer and worker demographics that occupies a large block with plenty of negative space that highlights the racial mismatch between the two groups (5).
Whether it’s a brief statement of Rosler’s MoMA exhibit juxtaposed with a crossword that gestures to waste with clues like “Gently used by only one owner” or a conversation with Vinay Gidwani about the commons and waste as play paired with a flowchart detailing the disposal of electronic waste in the global south (2, 7–9), Gar(b)age Sale Standard approaches its themes with a whole range of editorial forms and design tactics to portray the immensity and import of waste and its relations to gender, race, and value.
I find Martha Rosler’s words and performance/installation to be very fascinating. I actually went to the Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at MOMA and remember being shocked at the sight of old underwear for sale. Visitors seem to go for records, jewelry, and old tapestries while nobody seemed to care about the overpriced VHSs. Maybe VHSs are not old enough to to gain some kind of new value.
In Gar(b)age Sale Standard, Rosler states “(the garage sale) allows for several masquerades: homeowner as recycler, as idiot, as predator, as business-wise householder, as neighbor, as parent of rapidly growing children, as empty nester simplifying the home. The buyer is not a sucker but a smart deal maker, a connoisseur with secret knowledge, a neighbor helping out” (11). Homeowners hold garage sales to get rid of their junk, hoping to gain extra income when somebody finds value in their waste. Participants can play any role described by Rosler. Garage sale is community economy that happens outside the traditional capitalist economy, but it exists as a result of capitalist economy.
MOMA is a strange place to hold a garage sale. People have to pay the admissions to get in. Essentially, visitors pay for the experience to look at goods that lost commercial value and traditional market. Just like how Amy Von Bokel portrays in Artists’ Installations Raise Questions About Abandoned Buildings, I find it ironic that tourists and middle-class art admires pay to experience the suburban American tradition and think for themselves about the role of garage sale in commodity-obsessed society.
I was particularly struck by the two Warhols examined by Hal Foster in “The Return of the Real”: White Burning Car III and Ambulance Disaster. The top image of the latter can be seen as a screen posing as the real. But the bottom image disrupts the illusion. It reveals itself as an image through an absence: the “obscene tear” that Foster refers to as Warhol’s “popping of the image” (134). The gash gives an intimation of something beyond; the image is just surface, but there exists something behind it. The image also calls to mind Kristeva and abjection: the “non-being” of a corpse, and as a body straddling the boundary between inside and outside.
Foster argues that this “popping of the image” is “the visual equivalent of our missed encounters with the real” (134). It exposes us to the gaze, a “cone [of vision] that emanates from the object” (139) and destabilizes our sense of centered subjecthood. Under the gaze I may feel threatened, exposed, called into question; when it is ME who would prefer to do the seeing and questioning.
White Burning Car III performs this “popping” as well. When perceived as a representation of the real, the two figures in the image couldn’t be at a further remove. The man walking by is impervious to the gaze, to the abjection of the crash and the corpse; while the corpse impaled on the tree represents the ultimate abjection. But the flattening of the image, as screen, puts the two in close proximity, even slightly touching. The recognition of the image as screen (which brings the two bodies together) superimposes itself on the perception of the scene as reality (which represents abjection) and exposes the viewer to the gaze.
Using his Instamatic, Robert Smithson gives an insight on his exploration of industrial sites in Passaic, New Jersey. One industrial site, or monument as Smithson labels is River Drive. He describes the scene as a landscape that is a “kind of self-destroying postcard world of failed immortality and oppressive grandeur”(54) and also notes that the idle machinery in place look like “mechanical dinosaurs stripped of the skin.”(53) He notes that the “ruins in reverse” are paid taxes at work and declares that “this [monument] is the opposite of the romantic ruin because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.” (54) Smithson’s take on ruins or ruination has an interesting similarity to Rubble the Afterlife of Destruction where Gaston R. Gordillo writes that, “a more useful way to examine ruins in their myriad forms is to conceptually disintegrate them and treat them as rubble”(1) The sites Smithson speaks of will eventually become something useful however before the will “rise into ruins.” Gordillo says to treat these ruins as rubble. Smithson indirectly agrees with the notion when speaking about the Passaic Center. He notes that the Passaic Center was no center at all- “it was instead a typical abyss or an ordinary void.” Similar to Gordillo definition of rubble. Although Smithson labels these industrial sites as rubble, he also attest them to the label of monument and even compares Passaic to the eternal city of Rome.Gordillo agrees that rubble is as historically significant as the ancient cities of Babylon and Troy. Smithson contends to this idea when declaring that in, “lining up the great cities, each city would be a three- dimensional mirror that would reflect the next city into existence.”
Artist Robert Smithson’s writing about his photography in “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” reminds me of several of the readings about ruins, in particular Andreas Huyssen and Anik Fournier. I remember the quote from Aimee VonBokel about the commodification of a ruin where “dissonant elegance evokes emotion, but the site remains a mute witness to history.” Much of what Smithson writes and photographs seems to correlate with that sentiment even if his work is from 1967 and about his hometown of Passaic, New Jersey which he considers to be full of “holes” in comparisons to the “filled” city of New York. Smithson’s language is what is resonating with me in how he addresses what his camera is seeing. He describes what sounds like an apocalyptic wasteland; something that is lifeless. “… machines were not working, and this caused them to resemble prehistoric creatures trapped in the mud, or, better, extinct machines- mechanical dinosaurs stripped of their skin” (53). Houses are described as “mirrored themselves into colorlessness” (53), debris is heard rattling through a pipe, craters appear “artificial” (54). Smithson loses me a bit with his writing about time and mortality as if he is suggest some sort of alternate reality when I’m more interested in what he is photographing at the moment and not what past or future possibilities his images suggest. His writing feels like more of a ‘performance’ than his photography, but it does give context to waste in this setting because the waste is such an engrained part of the environment. “This is the opposite of the “romantic ruin” because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built” (55). Art often has an emotional component. It has an audience in mind and there is a reaction that needs to be elicited. This is perhaps what can be gained through a visual medium rather than through one that is purely intellectual.
Of all the readings this week, I found Foster’s pieces the most captivating. Specifically, the section “The Artifice of Abjection” in “The Return of the Real.” Foster writes clearly, concisely, and simply about complex topics (something that, by now, the entire class knows I appreciate and admire).
In this section, I see Foster grappling with the ways ‘abject art’ can help make sense – even make use – of Kristeva’s theory of abjection: “abject art…identif[ies] with the abject, [approaches] it somehow—to probe the wound of trauma, to touch the obscene in order to provoke its operation—to catch abjection in the act, to make it reflexive, even repellent in its own right” (157).
I think the most striking, illuminating piece included in Foster’s chapter is John Miller’s Dick/Jane (162). As Foster says, in this piece “the difference between male and female is transgressed,” the doll pushed into “an anal world”(161). There is something unnerving about seeing a doll covered in a mound of shit, of course, but I like the way she/he has been ungendered primarily through waste – through the abject, even – and I think this is a clear example of the unique power that visual art can hold in exemplifying complex philosophical and political concepts. We can analyze text after text and read book after book of theory, but there is something uniquely striking about seeing a genderless doll covered in shit. One can’t help but feel something shake inside.
Side note – I think Foster’s discussion of trauma discourse in this piece (how it is different from other discourses, what it might afford) is extremely interesting, and I would love to hear what other people in class think about it!