The Art of Garbage

Artsts such as Joseph Cornell have used items found in the garbage to create artwork. This includes broken dolls, paper cutouts, wine glasses, medicine bottles, etc. Garbage proves to be quite telling. In an article by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in the book “Visual Culture Reader”, the aesthetics of garbage are described as “a strategic redemption of the marginal.” Consider the following example.

At age 20, Rio citizen Gabriel Joaquim dos Saints began creating his entire dream house out of the “city's leftovers” demonstrating how the “power of wealth” can become one man's “power of poverty.” As Shohat and Stam note, “The trash of the haves becomes the treasure of the have-nots.” Gabriel, illiterate until he was 36 years old, writes in his journal, “There comes somebody with a Dutch tile and I find a place for it. There comes somebody with a broken dish or a broken jar and I make a tiny branch or a rose out of it, I turn it into an ornament.” Considering the implications of such art is useful in our present day society in which so much is consumed, and yet so much is left behind. The average American discards 5 pounds of garbage per day! In such debris exists a hybrid of fragments from all classes of society. Use of these fragments can represent a search for healing. In western and central Africa broken vessels displayed on Kongo graves “serve as reminders that broken objects become whole again in the other world.” I think Gabriel’s story in particular is one of hope. It takes a creative and humble mind to pick up the pieces of what once was forgotten or discarded.

(See more of Gabriel’s story at http://www.casadaflor.org)