Cosmic Detritus: Artists Mapping the Universe with Trash
Rotten fruit, chewed gum, hair wads, losing your marbles, the apocalypse.
Some people walk for the endorphins. I like to walk because I love to collect small objects that I find on the ground. Sometimes I can only collect a particularly decomposed or embedded thing (e.g., the imprint of a Band-Aid in freshly poured concrete) by snapping a picture, and that’s equally satisfying. While I may not always directly use these lil trashes in my art, I like to observe their trampled and fragmented forms for sculptural inspiration.
We all know that litter is “bad.” Sometimes people really do devour a 7-11 taquito in their car and brazenly toss the wrapper out the window. Or they smash out their cigarette embers and leave the sucked carcass exposed on a gum-speckled sidewalk. But most litter is an accident: hole in the pocket of newly thrifted jeans, pharmacy receipt fluttering out of a purse, rat chewed through the trash bag full of last night’s party, wind takes hold of an afternoon granola bar wrapper. The motion of life leaves behind the more ephemeral materials.
I’ve thought about litter going on ten years now—actually more since I’m just now remembering the fossilized olive pits from Pompeii that I saw in 2012. The research is ongoing, but one particular aspect that interests me is the unlikely order that arises out of litter in a cityscape. The scraps of trash end up in swirling patterns guided by the wind, water drains, and traffic. Like a smattering of stars in the galaxy, the nomadic materials of human consumption reveal a larger order…or chaos (actually, just forget the binaries).
Many artists eschew traditional art materials and rescue things waiting in line for the landfill. The results are always totally nebular. Or maybe I just gravitate towards art that sees the cosmic order in detritus and unassuming objects. B. Wurtz is one of the first artists that comes to mind when thinking about this topic. He often leaves a lot of negative space in his sculptures and suspends objects by wire, amplifying the feeling of anti-gravity.
Tony Feher offers up his own rendering of a triple Sun Copernican Revolution using wrappers and stickers. It looks like a mysterious intergalactic treasure map created by a wizard decked out in the Bode Dotted Appliqué Set (I’m gonna have to DIY that fit). My favorite details are the almost invisible hole punch support stickers that hold together the edges of the wrappers.
Marbles have always had planetary associations, due to the swirling colors and glowing interiors. Tony Feher perches each uniquely colored marble atop a champagne wire basket. This seems like the best organizational tactic to not lose your marbles. Like the last sentinels of your sanity awkwardly lining up to fight those inner demons.
Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit installation looks like the contents of an overturned fruit cart from afar. Closer inspection reveals that the piece is composed of stitched together peels slowly decaying.
Artist Zoe Leonard (b. 1961) began to assemble the installation shortly after the death of fellow artist David Wojnarowicz as a means of personal consolation amid the AIDS crisis. A prominent AIDS advocate and supporter of queer liberation in the 1980s and 1990s, Leonard’s multimedia work explores mortality and displacement within the urban landscape. (rxmuseum.org)
The scattered peels are tender and horrific. A constellation of once ripe living forms unevenly stitched together with the threads of grief.
Yuji Agematsu (perennial favorite) also finds the beauty in rotting organic matter. His cigarette cellophane collections of NYC sidewalk debris might be recipes for creating a New Earth Alien©. Wads of chewed gum with visible teeth marks, sticky hairballs, half-sucked lozenges, and expired ticket stubs marinate together, forming the the base layers of what will become the fossils of contemporary consumption.
Similarly, Sophia Belkin explores the poetic chaos of debris in her Fence at the End of the World series. These combine swirling embroidery patterns with small scraps of various materials. A distorted chain link fence grid holds abstract fragments of materials, a DNA sequence for a microplastic bloated Earth.
Trisha Baga has also been a favorite artist of mine since seeing their 2018 exhibition Mollusca & the Pelvic Floor at Greene Naftali. This newer painting, Earthshine, intrigues me because it seems like it’s painted from the perspective of a computer. Yellow studio bucket becomes a black hole…genius. Baga’s cosmic worldview isn’t elusive or pretentious, it’s cluttered, clumsy, and intimately endless.
A large part of making art is attempting to find a greater order in the Universe, only to discover that it’s just a collection of moments whirling together. Something that seems like a reliable pattern or category can be easily erased, forgotten, or reinvented.
Thank you for existing right now!
;} Paloma