Venice: be NI's Curator/ Troubles art / new ACNI Board member / real junk art (Thursday 1 May 2008)
Post of NI Venice Commissioner advertised
Hot on the heels of the announcement yesterday of the Republic's Commissioner for Venice - more here - comes news that the equivalent post for Northern Ireland has been advertised. Closing date is 23 May; more here.
Pack up your Troubles...
The Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) has announced an initiative aimed archiving the Troubles. "The Troubles Archive will cover a broad range of arts activity and will include recorded interviews with artists, writers and other practitioners. It will provide a resource for a wide community of researchers, students, academics, visitors to Northern Ireland and survivors of the conflict." More here.
Ian Montgomery for ACNI Board
Someone with a visual background has made it onto the Board of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. According to ACNI,
Professor Montgomery has been Head of the School of Art and Design at the University of Ulster since 2005. Prior to this appointment he was Director of the Research Institute where he was responsible for the development of the Art and Design Research Unit of Assessment. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Architecture and Manufacture, a member of the International Society of Typographic Designers and a member of the Design Research Society.
The appointment is effective from 9 April. Montgomery replaces Lucy Finnegan. He was chosen by open competition. More here.
Exhibiting our garbage
compiled by Amanda Dyson
There are things in life that cannot be ignored. Garbage is one of these things. The art world has, for some time now, brought garbage into the studio and exhibition space and continues the attempt to discover views on the refuse reality. A recent exhibit in New York has shown the public who really has to deal with the bulk of trash that people discard every day.
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| Viewing the NYU window display; image held here. |
The Department of Sanitation, in collaboration with New York University, put on display the history and importance of the department in an exhibit titled Loaded out: the making of a museum. On display 24 hours a day from 13 December 2007 to 13 January 2008 in the windows of New York University’s Kimmel Center, the exhibit showcased historical photos and included related topics such as recycling.
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| Recycling in New York in 1909; Image held here. |
The exhibit sprung from a NYU class, 'Making a Museum: Materializing Regimes of Value with the New York City Department of Sanitation', taught by professors Haidy Geismar and Robin Nagle. Nagle expresses her concern on “the invisibility of ‘san men’ as they are called, the ways in which people look past them, almost straining to ignore their work” (Rothstein, 2008). Attitudes about personal contact with garbage are being placed in the context of the ritual of clearing it away.
The reality is that garbage does not go away and something must be done with all the waste. Approaches to these notions in art seem to fall under categories such as calling attention to issues or promoting awareness and turning trash into treasure. Listing artists who work with found objects or trash items is not beneficial here. These artists are easily found.
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| La Chureca Poster; image held here. |
One more recent exhibition that draws attention to the effects of waste on the human condition is the La Chureca exhibit of 2007. Photographs by American-based photographers Eric Kelley and Esther Havens reveal scenes from trash dumps in Managua, Nicaragua. Money from sales at the exhibition go toward education for children through the Love, Light and Melody Organization.
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| PET bottles; image held here. |
Earlier in Tokyo, Yume no shima ('dream island'), in Tokyo Bay and Hokkaido’s Moerenuma Park are each based on incombustible trash. A bulk of the incombustible trash in Japan is made up of what are called PET bottles, or clear plastic beverage bottles that may be rinsed and recycled with labels removed. Following these projects, artists Atsushi Toyama and Naoki Sato designed and sold colorful plastic tumblers to promote reuse rather than discarding beverage bottles. Their project, titled Treasured trash, encourages recycling and reuse as a means to reduce waste. Despite the title reflecting trash to treasure, the project narrowly escapes the fall into this category due to the idea of creating an art object for a specific and expressed cause.
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| Treasured trash tumblers; image held here. |
The La Chureca exhibit uses photography to generate information about waste problems and raises funds that support a better way of life for people living in Nicaragua. In Tokyo, projects have focused on the sheer amount of human-generated trash and the need and means for addressing the problem. Both styles of work are evidence of the ways in which garbage is viewed. The first is an outsider perspective while the last comes from an insider view.
Needed now is a general view of what exactly garbage is. Individuals and organizations, together with the Association of Science-Technology Centers Incorporated and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, have created a website under the name of 'The Rotten Truth About Garbage'. The site calls itself an online exhibition and is broken into four sections that explain what garbage is, that it does not go away, about natural decay, and about choices that can be made when it comes to trash.
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| Trash-O-Saurus at the Children's Garbage Museum; image held here. |
Another more educational approach has been taken by a hands-on exhibit at the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority Children’s Garbage Museum in Stratford. Visitors experience how waste can be turned into energy. Educating the public about our garbage has, strangely enough, fallen under the title of 'exhibit'.
New York’s Loaded out: the making of a museum seeks to achieve something different that other garbage exhibitions do not. The Department of Sanitation of New York Museum seems to aim for the appreciation of the people that deal with what the rest of us don’t want to deal with. Sanitation workers are necessity for our health and even, perhaps, for our sanity.
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| NYC garbage; image held here. |
I admit that I am not overly excited about the idea of every department wanting its own museum, but some people just aren’t really given credit elsewhere. A space for the Department of Sanitation New York to show us what they have done, what they do and where they are going is the least we can return to the workers. "Without an army of sanitation workers to handle a vast huge ecosystem of refuse, city life would be impossible. So where's the love?" (Segal, 2008) Displays and exhibits may be temporary but our garbage is not.
Most recent news items:
• Corrigan to pilot Republic to Venice / warm North-South feelings (Wednesday 30 April 2008)
• Social and personal: images from two openings yesterday (Friday 18 April 2008)
• Eiffel Tower with a hat on / Tate with paint on (Friday 11 April 2008)
• 'Burial of Patrick Ireland' at IMMA (Wednesday 9 April 2008)
For a full list of news items, click here.
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