Object unit development & response to Chris Van Beck's comment

After reading my mentor, Chris Van Beck's comment on my 'Object Tutorial note'  post I began to think about the different aspects he brought up about my work and ideas. 

- I began by thinking more clearly about the materials I will use in my composition, thinking about both new and old waste to represent the different way we are destroying the environment.

- I will use throw away materials that are used everyday and thrown away after only a few days of use eg. paper, cereal box & egg carton cardboard, glass bottles and cling film; combined with film from data cassettes and videos which can be used for many years as well as bike tyres which are often discraded after a year or so of use.  

- I will also include objects that could be seen as more obviosuly destructive to the environment, which in my scene will be less obvious and once noticed look very out of place and shocking eg. batteries.

- I want to highlight human's throw-away lifestyle which how ever much someone calls themself an 'environmentalist' still contributes to this modern lifestyle. 

- I then began thinking about how subtle I want my theme to be; I want to begin by creating a beautiful 'sublime' scene inspired by Ansel Adams' vast landscapes but at the same time making it relatively obvious what it is made up of.

- Then as the viewer begins to look more closely they start to notice something out of place like a battery, the aggressive feel of the glass cutting through the landscape; representing the way we are wrecking our landscape through deforestation, littering, pollution etc. 

Chris Van Beck drew attention to the impact that we have as photographers which I found really interesting to think about. 

- Digitally speaking people are always wanting the new model of camera constantly discarding the old into rubbish tips, while 20 years ago a camera was kept for many years due to the lack of advances in technology.   

- Manually speaking when photography was new there was no understanding of the effect that chemicals have on the environment, yet despite our advanced & clear undertsanding of the effects now we still discard chemicals from all different types of businesses, companies etc.

   

- By photographing we are polluting the planet in both ways through, the need for the next best thing- technologically and through the ignorance of people when putting chemicals down drains, I want to represent this through the obscure out of place objects, while everything else looks quite natural and flowing these objects become very harsh even though they are not the main focus of the scene. 

- - Through the angle of the camera when taking my object photograph I want to make the scene look huge; I want to comment on the mass effect humans are having and the increasing pollution due to increasing population.

- Although we had already looked at the photographer Edward Burtynsky, my attention was drawn again to him by Chris Van Beck and his work 'Manufactured landscapes'.

-      - His images from ‘Manufactured Landscapes’ are beautiful and sublime but at the same time ugly due to the subject matter. 

Burtynsky comments on his own work: ‘Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work… I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.’

‘These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire-  a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.’

- There are many different interpretations that people have on what a ‘landscape’ is and how they represent it; through searching key phrases in a browser like ‘Human landscape’, ‘industrial landscape’, ‘man-made landscape’ I found many different artistic explorations through photography and sculpture.These are the following articles that particularly interested me:

Humans: Inherently wasteful, or good stewards? (And, why this question misses the point)

Posted by Max Liboiron ⋅ May 29, 2011

People are making more waste than ever before. The desire to luxuriate and waste is part of human nature. Humans are inherently wasteful. We’ve heard it before. But I doubt it.

So I did an experiment:

Rubbish Topographies, 2011. Mixed media, used tea bags, trash. Touchstones Nelson, Nelson, BC, Canada.

 

Rubbish Topographies is a landscape made of donated trash. Although the pile of tea bags and cardboard may bring to mind the panicked proverbial that, “we make too much garbage!”, it symbolizes something further. Every tea bag was saved, dried, and delivered by my family, friends, friends-of-friends, coworkers, and even strangers from around the world. Rubbish Topographies is not meant to represent a pile of guilt, but is a quantitative testimony to how people will mind and care for their waste when there is an opportunity to reuse it.

 

One of the problems with asking for peoples’ used tea bags is that tea bags mold as quickly as a house on fire if they aren’t taken care of. You have to squeeze them out and/or dry them and store them in a cool, dry place. Then you have to mail them to me from England, Canada, or California, or meet me in Washington Square Park and hand over your zip lock baggie full of green tea. In other words, people have to spend time, effort, and cash to steward their waste. People dipped into waste buckets for their office mate’s bags. Others refused to send me their bags  once they dried them because they were so beautiful. They posted pictures of their tea bags on Facebook. Strangers sent me cards with their trash.

As such, Rubbish Topographies is a tea-bag tally-chart of individual commitment to, conscientiousness of, and generosity with their waste.

If you read Susan Strasser’s Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (1999), or Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers (1960), you’ll see that, historically, people bucked against the introduction of disposable and single-use items, planned obsolescence, and “wastefulness” more generally. Packard’s waste makers aren’t individuals, they’re industries and businesses. A passage from Strasser’s historical research highlights the lengths people would go to avoid paper cups at the turn of the last century:

“Disposable paper cups met significant resistance. Most public places offered them in coin-operated dispensers, and some people were not willing to pay for what had once been free. Respectable travelers carried their own cups, available in metal and celluloid in a variety of collapsible and folding designs. Others reused paper cups from the trash or drank out of the public tanks, putting their lips to the faucet or using the cover of the tank as a cup. Some people protested against the vending machines: soldiers smashed paper cup dispensers in Washington’s Union Station during President Wilson’s inauguration in 1913.” (1999: 177)

Many people are still doing their best to avoid waste. Beth Terry, author of the blog MyPlasticFreeLife, is one of those people. She specifically aims to live without plastic waste. She finds it difficult, and has changed her lifestyle significantly because it is nearly impossible to avoid disposable plastic in the course of everyday life in the USA. But she’s decreased the amount of disposable plastic in her life to nearly nothing. You can take her challenge to do the same and see for yourself how difficult it is to maneuver the infrastructure of everyday life without needing something that comes in disposable plastic.

This situation changes the stakes and context of statements like “we make too much garbage” or that, “We exist.. in a way that violently negates beings [and objects] rather than takes care of them.” Rubbish Topographies and Beth Terry’s PlasticFreeLife are two social experiments which indicate that humans aren’t inherently wasteful, but they certainly don’t mean that individual consumption habits are the best way to deal with waste. Beth Terry’s example shows how nearly impossible it is to live in our capitalist, commodity-driven, global economy without plastic waste, and the few thousand tea bags collected for Rubbish Topographies wouldn’t fill a dump truck. It means that changes in waste patterns aren’t going to come from individuals, but from the larger system of production. The focus on the “wasteful nature” of humans misses the problem completely.

 'Waste Landscape' Metallic CD Dune By Elise Morin & Clémence Eliard

Waste Landscape is on display in Paris’ Centquartre space in the Halle d’Aubervilles until September 11, 2011. Elise Morin (artist) and Clémence Eliard (architect) of SMALL MEDIUM LARGE design studio, in collaboration with the 104.fr, have collected 65,000 CDs, now representing throwaway technology and rubbish in our MP3 society.
The result is a 600 square meters artificial undulating landscape of metallic dune, a seductive and artistic eruption into our environmental consciousness — should we choose to receive it.
Best explained in the words of the artists themselves, “the project joins a global, innovative, and committed approach, from its means of production until the end of its “life”.  Waste Landscape will be displayed in locations coherent with the objectives of the project: art’s role in society, raising consciousness towards environmental problems through culture, alternative modes of production and the valuation of district associative work and professional rehabilitation… Waste Landscape is at the crossroad of contemporary art, landscaping and environmental concerns.”
At the end of its exhibition lifecycle, ‘Waste Landscape’ will meet its next transformation into recycled polycarbonate.

 

Art-Lovers flock for rubbish - it’s Regent’s Park’s Frieze Art Fair

Ben Bloom , Reporter Friday, October 15, 2010
6:49 PM

Rubbish art installation as part of Frieze Art Fair

RUBBISH will be the first thing that greets the great and good of British art and thousands of visitor who head to Regent’s Park for the Frieze Art Fair this weekend.

One of the world’s leading contemporary art fairs is back in Regent’s Park with 173 galleries and more than 1,000 artists.

Satellite events will be taking place across the capital, as well as in the ticketed fair compound, but a free sculpture exhibition in the park can give a taster of what’s on offer.

Trash (pictured) by Wolfgang Ganter and Kaj Aune is one such artwork.

It consists of a moving pile of rubbish brought from Berlin which emits sound and smoke.

There are also 15 art bicycles created by Gavin Turk for visitors to ride around the park before receiving a certificate signed by the artist declaring they have participated in a work of art.

We all know that cell phones these days can call, text, surf the web and remind you to pick up your dry cleaning … but they can also be used for artistic purposes to create drawings, floor sculptures, light and sound installations and more. Artist Robert Pettit has a show up at the SMFA in Boston featuring these and other creative uses of over 5,000 cellular phones he collected for artistic purposes. As more and more cell phones fall by the wayside each and every day, scrapped for the latest model, one has to wonder if there are other things (artistic and otherwise) that these strangely ubiquitous objects could be used for.

 

I also came across Joel Sternfeld’s image ‘Museum of Architecture, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1980’ which when I first glanced at it looked like an overcast landscape but when looked at more closely it becomes obvious that it is a model- the figure peering in from the side, the solid backdrop acting as an overcast sky.

The scene becomes intriguing and unusual for the viewer, it could be seen as a person’s perfect lifestyle expressed through a model version of it contaminated by human intervention. By the way he photographs it, as if looking down from a hill the scene becomes very realistic looking which is the similar effect I hope to achieve in my final object image. Again the lighting is very natural which confuses the viewer as to whether it is sunlight or artificial light which I would also like to use in my image.