Lea Vergine (1936–2020)

Trash as material in art, from Kurt Schwitters to Louise Bourgeois

When Trash Becomes Art examines the work of artists who use garbage as their artistic medium, creating art that mirrors our alienation and consumerism. Author Lea Vergine suggests trash is a natural medium: “It has been said that trash represents risk and fascination, impending disaster and seduction. Now and then it is the mark of a creativity as menacing as it is ambiguous-garbage cannot be foreseen and therefore cannot be eluded.” In fact, trash and found objects can be seen in works from the early part of the twentieth-century by Fortunato Depero, Kurt Schwitters, and others, as well as through current works by Christian Boltanski, Cindy Sherman, Louise Bourgeois, and Andreas Serrano.Vergine's view is not limited to figurative art; she also explores the use of trash in other expressive modes such as architecture, cinema, dance, music, and theatre, thus providing a multifaceted interpretation of the artistic use of the very things cast off and abandoned by society.

"Why have artists employed - and why do they continue to employ - trash? Trash that has been incorporated, photographed, "treated", emphasised, camouflaged or "corrected", but which still remains trash, that is, something that belongs in a garbage can or a dump. We ourselves have been discarded or rejected by other human beings; more or less on a daily basis, we are forced to recover, scrape together and reassemble fragments of ourselves." "As we look at Alberto Burri's used sacks or the details of corpses photographed in the morgue by Andres Serrano, we might recall the voice of Cathy Berberian, capable of blending fine music with "pop" music; we might listen to a composition by Paolo Castaldi; we might reread certain lists by Bohumil Hrabal or certain "frisbees" by Giulia Niccolai; we might think back to certain film sequences by Abel Ferrara or other vocal collages by Meredith Monk ... and, as we do, we might realise that twentieth-century culture is packed with recovered material, reuses and contaminations, shreds, fragments, discards and "noise".

This book is based on the exhibition Trash. Quando i rifiuti diventano arte, held at MART, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, in 1997.… (mais)