Certainly, the visual language found here, image and type, is graphic. Even the methodology — one of intentionality and audience — is design-oriented. The text that surrounds the piece frames and contextualizes. All these things make this design, rather than art. And I like to think it is perhaps just that. And yet, the design language has been co-opted to offer homage to the very things design has made manifest, and then discarded. Design language as a weapon turned in upon itself (?) with no client, no practical function.

Art informs, tweaks, perverses design. Art calls for an abstruse point of entry, one based on chance and expression. For instance, there is no rational that explains why color has been used as the primary lens for this project. The video, ‘Color by Day,’ although it pretends to be about data, can not be ‘read’ as such. The transitions are chance encounters; colors dissolve one into the next without clarity. We stand mesmerized by the flickering light as one might at the overwhelming visual stimulus found in Walmart. The piece is a qualitative, spiritual response, more than a quantitative one.

Walking the thin line between can be an uncomfortable place. But I’d argue fruitful, if one is interested in a research-based practice that attempts to explore emerging issues in a poetic way to instigate a sense of wonder and seeing anew.

La Poubelle Agréée archive, 2011

Holds 150 prints of the 1,144 items documented. 10″ x 10″ x 3″

—-
La Poubelle Agreee

This collection is a visual meditation on the objects and materials that pass through the lives of a family of four over 300 days from September 2009 to July 2010. As a mock anthropological study, each artifact (>3g in weight) was photographed and tagged with its respective date, material, weight, user, function and color and uploaded daily to an online feed.

Users were able to ‘sort’ through a family’s trash and via this act expose the trash can, like the project itself, as a portal from private to public property. This collection, a sampling of the 1,144 items documented, is unbound and likewise sortable.

The notion of documenting trash is as absurd as the notion of trash itself. Archiving our own absurdity was only one of the intentions. One might consider how these objects hold sway over our mental realm, how our own subjectivity is governed by the things we consume on a daily basis.

A still from ‘color by day,’ a video that pulls the primary color from each article documented during the course of the project and couples this with the corresponding date. Each day represents 1 second resulting in a 300 second or 5 minute video. On days when there is more trash the colors flicker faster, when there is less it is slower. The sound was recorded in the woods of Vermont in Fall 2010. View in Vimeo.

squanderless interview from jeanbrennan on Vimeo.

Zach Rodgers, my husband journalist, encouraged me to do a debrief video on the project. Here’s an impromptu and meandering (but fairly short) take.

Karin Sander (artist, b. 1957) plans an intervention at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein that takes up the everyday activity of trash disposal and translates it into sculpture by using a banal and devalued material, trash. The portal metaphor invoked in the Squanderless project is made physical here:

Through the ceiling of the exhibition space, which is the floor of the n.b.k. offices above, she has had 30-centimeter-wide holes drilled in the places where usually the wastepaper baskets are located. The holes replace the wastepaper baskets, and visibly link administrative practice with the practice of exhibition. Karin Sander captures the everyday gesture of disposal by instructing the n.b.k. employees to ignore the fact that the wastepaper baskets are missing. In this way material that has become useless falls from the administration offices to the exhibition space, and is transformed by way of the shift of context into a constantly growing temporary sculpture. The falling paper—as a metonymic sign of everyday life—becomes an object of the exhibit. This open concept of sculpture shows Karin Sander’s approach, which can be described here as the “brute” transformation of a found situation.

With this intervention, Karin Sander not only shifts the perception of the institutional body itself, but also the perspective of visitors and n.b.k. employees alike. Karin Sander’s works emerge in the context of the location in question. She takes recourse to things already present in the system and that can turn the system against itself. The relations between inside and outside, between an institution and the city space are made legible and displayed in their ambivalence.

A little in-progress maquette that shows the image walls along with Italo Calvino ‘La Poubelle Agreee’ text on walls and a simple form poster with drawings that could be contributed by those attending:

I am currently organizing a compost garden tour along with the Beacon Zero Waste Committee. Event will be held on June 12, 2010 (and June 11th, 2011). The tour will follow the logistics of a garden tour and encourage neighborly knowledge sharing to help motivate and assist residents to reduce garbage output through composting. We presently have sixteen Beacon residents who have put their gardens (any size or variety welcome!) on the map and will share the joys and challenges of small-scale residential composting with neighbors and friends.

Goals:
1. Increase awareness of composting and principles of Zero-Waste.
2. Provide information about composting techniques and products
3. Reduce garbage output
4. Encourage fertilizing of lawns and gardens without chemicals

Two formal composting workshops and one vermiculture workshop will be presented on the same day at a set location. Check out our Garden Tour Facebook page for conversation and news regarding this event.

Read more about biomimicry here.

A recent article, “Dutchess loses waste expert at crucial time” in the Poughkeepsie Journal, talks about legislative proposals to add a standard waste fee for households.

Under the solid waste user fee proposal, residential units would pay a standard fee per household unit, while higher waste generators would pay a higher fee per square foot. Properties could be classified as anything from residential to parking garages to minimarts. The user fee would replace the net service fee the county was obligated to pay the agency.

While shifting fees to residents is not a bad idea, as it may involve citizens more actively in waste decisions, a standard fee offers no incentive to reduce waste.

Legislator Joel Tyner, D-Clinton, has concerns about the user fee. He said the user fee doesn’t reward households that compost and recycle because residential units would have to pay a standard fee. “It’s not fair,” Tyner said. “It’s not fair that tens of thousands of households would be paying the same user fee, regardless of whether they compost or recycle.” Tyner, who headed the Green Ribbon Task Force on Solid Waste Management, said he wants a “zero waste” expert to prepare a report on how the county can reduce waste as much as possible by recycling and composting.

Note added January 2011: The Poughkeepsie Journal article link is no longer active, but a county memorandum dated November 2009 provides details here.