by Jon Lackman | 9 November 2007 | Books, Modern
Lea Vergine’s 1997 exhibition catalogue Trash, Quando i rifiuti diventano arte has been translated into English, as When Trash Becomes Art: TRASH rubbish mongo. It considers the use of trash by a wide variety of artists from Picasso, Tatlin and Marinetti to Mimmo Rotella, Louise Nevelson and Christian Boltanski. Vergine writes:
… why did the artists of the last century employ and why do they continue to employ [trash]? … let us reflect on the fact that 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 … To paraphrase a 1966 text by Giorgio Manganelli, we might say that ‘trash is language.’ It is also the tragic face of consumerism … Tommaso Labranca … perceptively defined trash as an unsuccessful emulation, a failed imitation … The presence of trash in the world is not eliminated with the supposed elimination through the various forms of waste management. Aside from that, we should recognise its reeking presence in the noosphere, that is, in the world of knowledge and understanding, which represents in some sense a parallel existence of trash in the heavens of the spirit, a genuine and full-fledged soul … Trash is indeed an enormous deposit of information of great value … It is possible that choosing to make use of trash is a form of revolt in the sense — as maintained by Julia Kristeva — ‘linked to the etymology of the word, which signifies a return and a shift’ … Trash can be enlightening. Artists scrape away at its skin and use it as a stage setting for Metaphor, the Spirit of the Time and the Weltanschauung. Here is the echo of our years: violence, fragility, nostalgia, lacerations, a bitter heartbreak, an affable deformity, the filthy and the despairing. The artists presented here have done more than merely patiently cultivating the infernal vocation and the heroic vilification. They mingle livid parodies with amorous elegies, civil invectives and ephemeral refinements, dark grace and miracle-working agility. This is not the poetics of undarned socks … As the old Chinese proverb puts it, ‘The darkest point is always directly under the lantern.’
