Rubbish Well

TURN UP THE VOLUME before u watch:)

Before I try out making these sound by myself, I noticed I have almost never pay attention to how these sounds exactly sound like!

By the way, first time knowing BLINKING has a sound as well!

Five facts about me.

1. I have been in the press of many famous newspapers.

2. Many artists have cooperated with me.

3. I have been associated with the collections of major museums.

4, You will see me in different areas, such as fashion magazines.

5, You can treat me as a resource.

So, this is me… (a picture of a piece of junk). Settle down for a moment, the five pieces of information mentioned above are all true, this is me on the front page of the news, this is me in the gallery,  this is my family at the British Museum, this is me looking exquisite in a fashion magazine (a big puzzle),.

Only: I don’t always appear in a positive light. 

I’ve been featured in news magazines:…. The threat of plastic to marine life. The economic loss. The inability to be recycled efficiently.

Does this make me seem like a worthless and harmful being? But what if instead of being discarded so quickly and going straight into the bin, I was used in a different way?

Fashion designer Alexandra sipa sourced discarded cables from a London recycling centre, and use exquisite technique to get the wires mimic the softness of traditional lace. She finished the garments to a luxury standard, wearable and look beautiful. Her collection tackles one of the fastest-growing sources of waste in electronic waste, reaching 50 million tons in 2020, This usage of discarded cables has brought attention of great magazines and brands to her work. (ins Magazine)

Here, me as the discarded wire being moved from the waste station to the human body, from being abandoned to being treated as a precious luxury, from an environmental issue to a fashion topic. This phenomenon seems to influence the public’s attitude towards me. At least people will start to take the time to answer the question in their minds: what is the waste doing here? One could argue that people are becoming more patient in recognising so-called waste.

So what is waste? Is it an annoying environmental problem that cannot be dealt with or is it an opportunity to create new inventions?  Whether I am helpful or harmful is not because of myself. I am the result of your behaviour.

(Definition of waste in the oxford dictionary, in addition to referring to materials that are no longer needed and are thrown away， it also refers to the act of using something in a careless or unnecessary way, causing it to be lost or destroyed.)

Am I meaningless if I am considered as without-use? For whom I am useless? Does everyone else agree? In which values I am meaningless, practical values, cultural or emotional values? Am I always perceived as useless or just temporarily useless? Am I considered useless due to where we appear? So. What do I mean to you? 

An artist, Song Dong, gives us his answer, who was born in the same year Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution began in China. family whose limited resources during the revolution required them to reuse objects and as he’s aid ‘make something out of nothing’. In his work Waste Not, cooperating with his mother, me, as household objects, are organised and displayed without any transformation. For Song Dong and her mother, I reflects their living conditions, their family background and their cultural environment. I have become a portrait of his family. 

Instead of being thrown away ,as the family became richer,me, the mother’s dated everyday objects have been kept and exhibited. Conveying Song Dong’s respect for the old Chinese elders’ philosophy of living a materially frugal life.

In addition to this, I have another identity, that of his father’s relics. Song Dong hopes this process of sorting and presenting us in gallery space will help him and his mother to get over the haze of his father’s death, which he later described in an interview as having made a significant difference to their psychological state. In this way, dealing with me waste became a form of therapy. 

Futhermore, me as ‘Private waste’ also bring social influence, where provoking public reflections on attitudes towards waste, especially in an increasingly commercialised and globalised world, when rapid replacement and discarding has become the mainstream. From private household to public gallery, the scenes in which I am placed seem to have an impact on people judging my value.

But if, for you, I still appear as useless and preserving me is a waste of your expensive living space. Could you consider using me for a different purpose? If I’m an unwanted  drawing paper, for example, I can be used as sketch paper, wrapping paper, a rag, then even as material for a video, an object to be painted, a photographic subject, and if you post this work online and received tons of likes, money received, then don’t I have a practical value again?

It seems that how I am treated by you determines what value I have, in other words, what value you think I have is how I will be treated. Waste is not an end, it can be a beginning. Archaeology, for example, uses me as a starting point and evidence for its research. The subject is digging waste left by humans in the past, because overtime, I am evidence of history.I can be seen as a representation of lifes and events that have ended in the past, However, for people at present, I am the beginning of knowing their history, of knowing themselves. My contribution to this is enormous.

So what do I mean to you? Am I always useless? In any scenario? How many ways can I get along with you?

I belong to you, my presence proves your existence, so please tell me,what am I?

Notes taken from this book Waste Not, which is written by Wu Hong and it discusses about the art work Waste Not by Songdong and his mother Zhao Xiangyuan.

1.All these 10,000 or so pieces of waste come from one place, they belong to the collection of a specific individual and are also cherished by that individual. Thus, really before being transformed into art material and entering the gallery, these objects have already created a link between the five items and have already taken on a different character and meaning from that of the grocery stall. (The objects have a strong sense of certainty and personal connection)

2. The sight of these objects brings to mind a friend or relative who has passed away. Preserving traces of everyday life and experiences that are not collected in orthodox galleries or museums.

3. Created in an increasingly commercialied and globalized world, when rapid replacement and discarding has become the basic attitude to objects in our time.

4. Has the relationship between mother and son – their relationship with other members of the family – changed in the realization of this artistic project?  How does this exhibition reconcile the private family with public society?

5 Not transform objects but transport the past to present.

6. rituals This normative social behaviour. A way of understanding the best use of things: see it as an artistic and ritual act with two meanings at the same time, one to preserve historical memory and the other to reinforce social relations. (Ritual acts: people, artefacts and programmed actions

7. There is no fixed form or style for this work; the exhibition format always changes according to the variation of the space. It is necessary to consider the connotations and components of this artistic project – its aims, its participants and the procedures for its realisation – as well as the two contexts of the project: 1) its connection with Song Dong’s other artistic experiments and 2) its position in contemporary Chinese art, in relation to a major art phenomenon that began in the mid-1990s: ‘a domestic turn’, through which the artist took a ‘domestic turn’. turn’, through which the artist deliberately explored and established the intrinsic links between contemporary art and Chinese society and history.

8. the commonality of the objects in the objects to the fullest: 1. the ownership of the objects – they all belong to Zhao Xiangyuan, 2. the nature of the material assemblage and the process of its formation – purely personal, non-commercial motives. 3. the objects are kept for the same precise and identifiable reasons (poverty and fear of the future, fear of material scarcity).

materiality (the fact that the issue or time in question is decisive), in legal terms an evidence is called material because it proves to be relevant to the consequences of a fact, especially when the issue at stake is one of liability and ownership)

The discovery of a real and clear individual in the midst of a mass of material.

9.In the early 1960s, as the country was recovering from the Great Leap Forward and natural disasters, there was a severe shortage of goods and rationing of household items, and life was difficult, even water needed to be reused. Soap had to be dried and stored away after each use. 

10. Xiang Yuan practically buried herself in the old things she had accumulated.

11. Things to Use – conceptualised as an autobiographical narrative: shown and told from the first point of view. Each object has an actual past and an imagined future, intimate memories and stories.

12. ‘Healing’ – moving on from the death of the father – becomes a bridge and a catalyst for building a ‘memory relationship’ between mother and child

13. When the quality of life is improved by not throwing things away (refusing to discard things that are temporarily useless but may be useful in the future) This habit allows our living space to be occupied by these materials waiting to be ‘used to their full potential’, and the panic of material scarcity becomes for us the anxiety of useless materials piling up. Their actions increasingly lose their practical justification and take on an artistic logic of ‘collecting for the sake of collecting’, not so much in terms of the needs of the future, but rather in terms of protecting a cherished experience of the past.

But this was not my mother’s philosophy of life alone; it was the collective consciousness of her time. The different conceptions of life of different generations lead to vicarious shopping, because again we have a very different understanding of the good life.

14. It is difficult for today’s young people to understand the sweet and sour aspects of this ‘collection’: can so many worthless bits and pieces really constitute a cocoon of a private world, providing illusory security and warmth and even triggering a hint of intimate memories?

Visitors’ comments ‘Home becomes a large warehouse full of junk and scrap, losing its ‘strategic reserves’, mother becomes vulnerable, feeling that she cannot withstand the risks of life’.

15. Making the Most of Things is the first attempt to represent and reflect on this attitude to life and historical experience.

16. This exhibition uses contemporary art to facilitate three transformations: 1) objects – collected tangible objects become art materials, transferred from private space to public space; 2) people – it is not only Zhao Xiangyuan’s collections that make up this exhibition, but also her own. In doing so, she rediscovers and reorganises her material world and presents it to the public, acquiring the identity of a public artist. 3- The human relationship, in which the son and mother collaborate to reinforce the deep family ethical traditions of Chinese culture in the name of art.

17. Any transformation must be completed in time, unlike a conventional art exhibition with a clear opening and closing deadline. The exhibition begins with the removal of the objects, the organisation of the objects and the development of a new relationship with these objects, and the withdrawal of the exhibition is also an integral part of the exhibition, as the transformation of objects and people continues after the withdrawal.

18. What is the social and ontological significance of art materials and artists?

19. In her lifetime she produced one work, which was entered in an international biennial and won a prize. But the time she took to produce this work: a lifetime.

20. Many of Song Dong’s works revolve around family relationships, using family members as artistic themes.

21. Contemporary Chinese art (modern/avant-garde/experimental art) developed through three basic stages; 1976-1984 Contemporary art developed as a fine art phenomenon at the end of the Cultural Revolution. 1985-1989: 85 New Wave of Art avant-garde art movement – Conclusion 1989 Great Exhibition of Chinese Modern Art. Early 1990: Contemporary Chinese art is rapidly globalised and commercialised.

22. Commercialisation introduced Chinese art abroad, but took many of the original avant-garde artists away from real social and artistic issues, blurring the boundaries between them and commercial artists.

The fate of Political Pop and Cynical Realism can thus be seen as a historical irony: hoping to critically reflect on the proliferation of consumerism, they were automatically consumed.

23. The rapid changes in Chinese society, including the disappearance of traditional cities and neighbourhoods, changes in human relations, and new lifestyles, interests and values

24. Contemporary Chinese artists want to use conceptual art to discuss the stability of history and memory, the conflict between cultural myths and individual existence, and the meaning of fragmentation and disappearance.

25. Touching Father can be seen as one such serious endeavour. As described above, its aim is to reintegrate families that were divided, alienated and alienated by the ‘Cultural Revolution’.

“There’s something so archetypal about these legendary birds and seeing bright colours of ocean plastic against dead sterility is a powerful symbol for our human culture right now. We’re in a state of emotional bankruptcy,” says Jordan.

Chris Jordan

Me as discarded plastic, being thrown into the sea has caused lots of death of marine lives…

Where do I go after you throw me into the bin?

Has the recycler done great jobs? According to an article from guardians, we are not as effectively recycled as promoted due to profits…

“The price of cardboard has probably halved in the last 12 months,” he says. “The price of plastics has plummeted to the extent that it isn’t worth recycling. If China doesn’t take plastic, we can’t sell it.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/17/plastic-recycling-myth-what-really-happens-your-rubbish.

Some of us were originally from developed nations like UK, are sold to country which would like to take the rubbish, for example, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam. However they are the countries with some of the world’s highest rates of what researchers call “waste mismanagement” – we are left or burned in open landfills, illegal sites or facilities with inadequate reporting, making our final fate difficult to trace.

“It’s really a complete myth when people say that we’re recycling our plastics,” says Jim Puckett, the executive director of the Seattle-based Basel Action Network, which campaigns against the illegal waste trade. “It all sounded good. ‘It’s going to be recycled in China!’ I hate to break it to everyone, but these places are routinely dumping massive amounts of [that] plastic and burning it on open fires.”

While virtually all plastics can be recycled, many aren’t because the process is expensive, complicated and the resulting product is of lower quality than what you put in. The carbon-reduction benefits are also less clear. “You ship it around, then you have to wash it, then you have to chop it up, then you have to re-melt it, so the collection and recycling itself has its own environmental impact,” says Geyer.

However, a company called Loop has developed a new sustainable strategy towards plastic waste, which provided an insight on how can human deal with waste from plastic packaging.

A major advantage to Loop’s business model, Szaky says, is that it forces packaging designers to prioritise durability over disposability. In future, Szaky anticipates that Loop will be able to email users warnings for expiry dates and other advice to reduce their waste footprint. The milkman model is about more than just the bottle: it makes us think about what we consume and what we throw away. “Garbage is something that we want out of sight and mind – it’s dirty, it’s gross, it smells bad,” says Szaky.

That is what needs to change. It is tempting to see plastic piled up in Malaysian landfills and assume recycling is a waste of time, but that isn’t true. In the UK, recycling is largely a success story, and the alternatives – burning our waste or burying it – are worse.

Instead of giving up on recycling, Szaky says, we should all use less, re-use what we can and treat our waste like the waste industry sees it: as a resource. Not the ending of something, but the beginning of something else.

“We don’t call it waste; we call it materials”

says Green Recycling’s Smith, back in Maldon. Down in the yard, a haulage truck is being loaded with 35 bales of sorted cardboard. From here, Smith will send it to a mill in Kent for pulping. It will be new cardboard boxes within the fortnight – and someone else’s rubbish soon after.

It seems that many artist who collect stuff would made a sculpture or an installation as their outcome while others would selectively put those things together as a whole collection.

They reminded me that, in which way to assemble your collection is worthy to consider: reform, combine, pile up or display? Because different combination would convey very differently.

Here, I like how Barlow assemble these sculptures after reforming them. They are individual sculptures, but in the same time, they interact with each other in the room and telling story together when you walking around them and view them as a whole. There is a rhythm within this room!

Belli entitled this work as Broken Column’ to refer Frida Kahlo’s, where she depicted herself wearing a steel corset with a broken marble column in place of her own damaged spine. Belli’s layered corsets suggests the collective pressures and enduring inequalities that women face in patriarchal society.

I like how Belli reformed corsets into spine. It appears to me as a quite powerful sculpture ,although it was made from daily objects. It seems less familiar and as a female, by only looking at it, I can feel the sense of tightened and the pressure as well as the inequalities she is expressing.

NUMBER

-Items starting with 0,1,2 (from left to right)

from top to bottom: rank by the second number from 1 to 9

-Items without a number

*TO PRESENT

The shape of mathematical model suddenly comes to my mind!

for example the Pascal’s triangle, which followed by one rule (a+b)*n.

The art of logic?? but there the numbers are only 0, 1 or 2…?

COLOUR

-colourless

-Colourful

*TO PRESENT

might be a collage or using them to create a picture based on their colour and the shape.

RANDOM

I mixed everything and randomly sorted them into three groups with my eyes closed and done it quickly without considering.

Whats’ happen with this random sampling?

I found in each group, other than the colour white, there is a pair of contrasting colour: group A(green&red/pink), group B(blue&yellow),group C(blue&yellow). Apart from this, each group include one rectangular shape.

It seems like without human consciously manipulating, objects classified themselves with a ‘principle’.???

This random choosing method is inspired by a Psychological method of selecting participants (Random Sampling),which is used to avoid low validity of the result concluded from the experiment, that caused by variation between participants.

*To present

Juxtaposing these three categories and encourage the audience to find similarity or differences from their own point of view.