Recently published is my contribution to a year-long exhibition at the EU House of History in Brussels, Throwaway: The History of a Modern Crisis. It focuses on the relationship that developed between artists and waste materials in the 20th century.
The twentieth century gave birth to the throwaway society, an acceleration of life in which the circulation and consumption of industrially produced goods and products demanded more disposal packaging and, indeed, more goods that could be made obsolete more quickly. Eventually this would lead to the growth of vast landfill sites designed to absorb the rubbish of everyday life, which were located on the margins of our towns and cities. These hypertrophied extensions of consumer life remained, for the most part, comfortably out of sight to most of us, ensuring that we could easily forget what we were throwing away.
At the same time as all this rubbish was being spirited away to these places, it was also being valued for other reasons by a wide range of European artists, and often associated with new aesthetic ideas that attached a different significance to the leftovers of everyday life. It was a series of development that would produce works associated with the largely French nouveau réalisme movement, established in 1960, the mainly Italian Arte Povera movement between the late 1960s and 1980s, and the more loose grouping of so-called YBAs — ‘Young British Artists’ — of the 1980s and 1990s.
‘Art / Waste’ in Throwaway: The History of a Modern Crisis
eds. Christine Dupont, Stéphanie Gonçalves, Emma Teworte
Luxembourg, Publications Office of the European Union, 2023, pp. 126-143
ISBN: 978 9284696 39 0
Links
Brussels Museums website about the exhibition
Buy the exhibition catalogue here.
Download a free PDF of the catalogue here.
Read my contribution here.
