So cruising my news feed this morning, I came across the work of
Angela Haseltine Pozzi. She's particularly interesting to me because her materials
here are reclaimed trash, as part of the
Washed Ashore Project's "Buoy, Beat-n-Bop" exhibit.
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| View of Pozzi exhibit at SF Zoo, 2014 |
The idea of working with trash to draw attention to the beauty of the ocean--especially its textures--is interesting because it simultaneously draws attention to the need to preserve the ocean. I think she's working in a vein similar to
Chris Jordan's Midway project. (
I want to write more about Jordan at some point but here's an intro to one of his projects) The difference of course is that Jordan is drawing attention to the destruction that's being caused through the decay of the birds--it's meant to be graphic and visceral, in part because the birds themselves cannot pull themselves away from the graphic and visceral fascination they have with our trash.
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| Chris Jordan, Midway Project, 2009-present |
Both Jordan and Pozzi are aiming to draw attention to the environmental issues through their work.
But what drew me to Pozzi's art is that it is
constructive--
making something new from the trash--and
interactive.
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| Pozzi, Starfish at SF zoo, 2014 |
The starfish has bottles into which one can blow and on which one can tap. You are encouraged to stand inside its arms. This lets you be part of the piece and experience it more closely. Pozzi's point is that this makes the work more memorable--because you aren't just looking. You are learning it as a sensory experience. Where Jordan's Midway photos are flat depictions of information (tremendously moving, nonetheless), Pozzi is suggesting that you need to be part of this--you need to be part of the idea that reclamation of trash can be fun and beautiful and TRANSFORMATIVE.
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| Pozzi, Whale Spine, SF zoo, 2014 |
That's what
so many artists are doing, such as Tim Noble and Sue Webster, and local Hartford artist
Anne Cubberly are doing. That's what schools around the country are doing in their art classes--what can you make by seeing your trash in a different way. And the more we can pare our art with the message, the better...
We went to a talk by Chris Jordan a few years ago, which was indeed a (viscerally) moving experience. It gave me deep qualms about reclaimed trash art like Pozzi's. The difficulty is differentiating the notion that reclamation of trash can be fun and beautiful from the notion that the trash itself can be fun and beautiful (and therefore less problematic than it is). Ironically, I think as more artists work in that vein, it becomes easier to gloss over the enormity of our trash problem, and easier to see something beautiful in the Midway photos.
ReplyDeleteA key point in working with trash is the degree to which you engage the viewer in the process of making. Somehow it works best to me on the children's art class level: make them go out and pick up the trash, sort through it, clean it before they use it. I'm not sure how we go from art in the gallery setting to the active understanding that environmentalism really needs.
ReplyDelete(At some point, I'll write on Mark Dion who builds off the wunderkammer idea that collections can be themselves works of art visually and experientially. Until then, you might want to look at his work, since one of the things he does is dredge a canal in Venice, and taken items out of the Thames to fuse these ideas of archaeology, culture of discarding things, taxonomy and display. I think Dion makes trash captivating without necessarily making a condemnation, though he himself is interested in the process and the issues)