Waste Management
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, April 7–July 11, 1999
Curated by Christina Ritchie

Artists: Tom Friedman, Germaine Koh, Michael Landy, Daniel Olson, Sandra Rechico, Joe Scanlan, David Shrigley, Kelly Wood

Reduce, reuse, recycle – at a cursory glance, this is what is happening at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in “Waste Management.” In fact, the show is not at all an eco-political monologue about recycling. Recycling implies creating something new and useful out of things whose use value has been expended. The artists in “Waste Management” prove that ‘use value’ is a relative term and that, in fact, many of these objects are only beginning to see their full use potential. Many of the works build off the tradition of the readymade but, seem to take it one step further. Rather than just displaying the everyday object, they transform it in some way, challenging our ideas about waste and use. These transformations reflect a broader cultural shift away from such binaries as useful/useless. This is a shift away from the modern and towards a new economy of labour, leisure and consumption. The art that has been created for “Waste Management” is clearly a product of this new economy and also a critique of the institutions and binarisms of modernism.

Germaine Koh’s works for the show use the Duchampian found object in entirely new ways. In Knitwork, Koh unravels knitwear found in thrift shops and re-knits the yarn into an outrageously long scarf-like object. A little pile of pullovers and scarves sits in one corner of the space, while the long knitwork sprawls over the floor, bunched up even in its expansiveness. The sweaters are originally often solid colours, but once re-knit, the new object is both exalting and repulsive in its technicolour. Each item of clothing was individual unto itself with a clearly defined use—gloves for your hands, a sweater for your upper body. The new object is a collective garment. Where it is from or what it is for is entirely unclear. The individual items had an integrity of composition. Unraveled and reconstructed, they become a surface area, every inch of the item is exposed in its final form. It is unclear how any of these colour blocks could have once been unitary objects. Knitwork looks like the colour map that a disk utility on your computer might have if your hard drive was fragmented, showing the scattered categories of files. Koh’s new handknit object stands against much of the Third World mass produced clothing we find today—whether in thrift shops, or brand new. Our unskilled labour force no longer consists of the industrial worker, but the service worker. The manufacturing process, moved to the Third World because of cheap labour, is brought back to North America as a labour of love. The archive of old garments is re-organized for a new world order. And within the museum space, Koh’s project becomes a highly (dis)ordered archive within an archive, created with a self conscious relationship to art history and to the museum. A heap of fragments, Knitwork lays bare the museum’s myth of homogeneity and of ever classifying the “bric-a-brac.” Her approach to history echoes Foucault’s, that we look deeper than the smooth surface and seek out the disruptions.

Koh’s other archive in the show is also one of discontinuity. Her work, Sightings, deals with discard. She has found cast-off snap shots—the photographers have obviously chosen to edit these “bad shots” out of their photo albums to create their own smooth fiction—and turned them into picture postcards. Postcards are normally purchased as an index of where you’ve traveled. Koh has listed the photo’s finding place on the back as a marker to where she has visited. In turn, the viewer can purchase the cards for $1 each as a souvenir of the gallery visit. Sightings takes private data, the family ‘snap-shot gone bad,’ and makes it public. One of the cards shows a woman sunbathing topless – the original intent of that photo was hopefully not for public use. Additionally, the postcards operate as simulacrum, in the sense that they are representations of photos we have, more than likely, already seen or taken ourselves. The photos are blurry, poorly composed and lacking any so-called artistic vision. Who hasn’t had a role of film not turn out, or taken goofy photos just for the heck of it? Koh’s postcards re-present our world of images back at us. And when viewing the cards, she has displayed them in a wobbly souvenir-stand postcard rack that rotates. The viewer can spin the rack and see all the different cards. The AGO’s security guard will then step a little closer to make sure you’re not “damaging”  the art. Above all, Koh’s piece questions the modern idea of the art object and the museum. Are you allowed to touch the art? It isn’t quite clear. (Possibly the most ironic comment on this same issue is Daniel Olson’s work in the show entitled A sad and beautiful world, in which a papier maché globe with a motorized toy inside roams around the gallery floor, bumping into the walls and the patrons. The art is allowed to touch you, but you’re not allowed to touch it!) Tacky, touristy souvenirs, Koh’s archive of postcards takes our “useless” cast-offs and gives them a renewed use for the gallery tourist.

Germaine Koh is not the only archivist in the show. Kelly Wood’s Continuous Garbage Project is literally an archive of trash. Wood decided to photograph her garbage on a daily basis for a total of five years (her first year’s worth is on view in the show). Wood declares that trash can be art as her archive, and too, questions ideas about the modern versus postmodern museum. Her photographs are of what she herself has deemed useless. She is saving these objects from their final fate in only the record of a photograph before they are dumped by the curb and carted off by city workers. In this “continuous” project, there are so many curious discontinuities. Many envelopes from galleries, mountains of Starbucks cups, and possibly more shoes than Imelda Marcos, Wood’s trash is emblematic of our consumer economy. Desire is aroused but never satisfied. The work also hints at ideas of the confusion between public versus private space. Our culture is paranoid to throw anything out that may contain personal information – credit card bills, bank receipts, these are not for public consumption. And yet Wood turns all eyes on the trash, with its see-through bags, urging us to peer carefully inside and see what she has been consuming. And she has been consuming a lot.

And so have all the artists in “Waste Management” been consuming – the theme is deceptively environmental. Far from a didactic display, the work in the show is whimsical and inventive. But the work also points out our complicity in this new economy. It might have been very easy to shake a finger or two at child factory labour in the early part of the century, since the offenders were only the few factory owners. But now it is next to impossible not to play a part in the ills of industry, when every day we buy more coffee, more shoes, more knit sweaters. In a way, the work exhibited implicates us all and takes some of the guilt away in acknowledging our shared part in the waste. As art objects, these pieces go beyond the traditional objects of art history. One Untitled work by Tom Friedman is a self-contained sculpture using plastic drinking straws and a cup, whereby the straws spiral out from the centre of the cup to form a donut-like shape. I’ve seen the show twice now, and on my second viewing, the work itself was gone and there was a sign saying the work was removed in order to preserve it. It is collapsing because of the mass. How does a museum deal with an artwork that can barely stand two months of being on display? Maybe it doesn’t matter, it’s just trash anyway.