Are there ways–through art–to acknowledge or conceptualize waste that would do more than celebrate such reuse or recycling? How can artists, philosophers, theorists, activists, and others produce new ways to acknowledge or envision events and phenomena like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, radioactive wastelands like Fukushima or Bikini Atoll, the animal wastes of feedlots, the water wastes of fracking, or the mountains of trash produced by consumer culture?
We are launching a new resource list of literary fiction that examines, exemplifies, or challenges the roles of waste and wasting in society. Help us figure out what to include. We’re looking for recommendations that do not only include settings or scenes of waste, but those that provide insight into the problems we look at in discard studies.
Like Emily Post’s famous edict on social decorum, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, these works present studies in logistics, in performance, and in how to look the other way. Where are the boundaries of polite society drawn, of individual agency, and of the state? Here, the boundaries of the state define statelessness, and what we deem to be waste contours the excesses of a material culture.
The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, is showing Damage Control: Art and Destruction since 1950 until May 2014.
In this special issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, authors reflect on how, when and why art has been used to articulate destruction over the past decades. Their essays are a glimpse into the topics that were recently discussed at the 2013 Doomsday Clock Symposium in Washington, DC.
By Max Liboiron. I suspect, that like me, urban followers of the Discard Studies blog spend a lot of time looking down. There is a lot of interesting trash on sidewalks, roads, and gutters, and now there is a place to share your awareness with the world (provided you have a smart phone): Litterati, the […]
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INSTITUTE FOR FIGURING August 3, 2013 Join us in crocheting plastic at our Silurian Monsters Workshop This Saturday, August 3, help construct a giant Silurian sea organism out of discarded plastic rubbish. Come and be part of an evolutionary art-work spearheaded by Science + Art Resident Christine Wertheim. You will learn how to apply the […]
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By Max Liboiron A long, long time ago, a younger, grubbier New York City dumped its trash on Barren Island off the south shores of Brooklyn. Barren Island was its own self-contained community and had a one-room school house, four saloons, and five factories boiling garbage all day, everyday. The buildings and island inhabitants–mostly immigrant […]
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*This is an edited transcript from the IDEAS City lecture on waste by Max Liboiron. Modern waste—that is, mid-20th to 21st century waste—is characterized by a few things. First, there is its tonnage– there is a lot of it, mostly industrial. About 98 percent of waste produced in the United States is industrial solid waste, […]
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By Max Liboiron. I want to be as surprised by my work as anyone else. For me, the joy in creating is that the creation takes on a life of its own. I am interested in exploring the intersection between art and life, between nature and artifice. – Heather Dewey Hardborg, artist In her much-lauded […]
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