I’m not wasteful, but during our demolition and fit out of the Brunswick gallery, we generated a decent-sized skipload of rubbish. It was filled with what I’d consider ‘rubbish rubbish’, that which I couldn’t imagine possibly being used or recycled. And yet, each day I’d note the disappearance of true rubbish. At one point a picker drove in with his trailer and set to work removing the wires from inside discarded lighting battens. He’d methodically strip them for the copper threads to sell to the local scrap metal dealer. I asked the going rate, and calculated his day’s labour as coming to the tens of dollars. Something of a depression era scene, and a glimpse of another world of a scavenging micro-economy.
This skip got me thinking about the local relationship to rubbish. Of how exposed we are through our trash, and of the honesty of having it on display. I have a vague memory of a local artist some years back exhibiting documents pilfered from the bins of galleries, and have always felt some anxiety about what goes in the work bin.
There are a few temporal touchpoints for the exhibition. It grows out of a particularly abject Melbourne aesthetic, and methods of Arte Povera and assemblage, using impoverished, everyday, discarded and gleaned materials. Artists of Arte Povera aimed for a radical rejection of the art market’s object-based consumption, though ironically this exhibition of the movement’s inheritors is presented in a commercial gallery. The artists here have practiced across a number of decades, spanning 60s bricolage though 80s found object, 90s grunge and abjection and 00s grot.
The materials used are remnant artefacts of consumption, no longer useful commodities, and so critique our consumerist society. There is also the hint of a Bunnings DIY aesthetic in some of these works, a joyous pleasure in crafting something from waste. Seeming past their use value, exhausted of capitalist value, freed of function, these waste products take on new potentialities. It’s a resourcefulness that many artists know well. An ability to see the potential within a material, a life for it beyond what was intended, and an alchemical quality. Let’s also be practical: this is a timely, cost-of-living appropriate show. In a time of climate and financial crisis, reusing scrap is an ethical and economic choice, alongside a conceptual and aesthetic decision.
This exhibition is also tied to place. It is situated in Brunswick, in Merri-bek, which has always relished hard rubbish, perhaps more so than other municipalities. For years the biannual hard rubbish was a particularly suburban fiesta of promenading, swapping and recycling. My daughter delighted in finding a Barbie Dream Camper, which never would have entered our home otherwise. Over the course of the hard rubbish period, detritus would be so thoroughly picked that it was a delight to see just how terrible something would need to be to remain on the street (mattresses and water-logged MDF, primarily). When I moved house from Merri-bek to the more slightly more bourgeois Yarra Council, I missed this hard rubbish carnival, as we instead had to comply with a strictly policed pre-booked collection. And then, in 2022, much to my sadness, Merri-bek also went the way of the pre-booked rubbish collection. In the gentrifying hood, residents were growing tired of the messy streets. And so ultimately, this exhibition is something of an elegy for Merri-bek’s hard rubbish.
— DS