Trash to Treasure: The Art of Found Materials

Krištof Kintera, Memorial of the One Thousand and One Nights, 2011

Hendrick Kerstens, Doily, March 2011

"A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine and fabric".

—Robert Rauschenberg

In the opening of Don DeLillo's 1984 novel White Noise, narrator Jack Gladney, a chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill, describes a move-in-day caravan of station wagons as they twist through campus. Car roofs are loaded down with suitcases filled with what Jack imagines to be a laundry list of dorm-room paraphernalia. He watches the students unpack and haul to their rooms electronics and small kitchen appliances, items more suited for starter homes than dorm living, and a cornucopia of junk food overflowing brown paper bags: nacho thins, onion-and-garlic chips, toffee popcorn, and peanut-butter patties.

Hendrick Kerstens, Paper Roll, 2008

As a professor in a university town, I have noticed over the past twenty years that move-in day has changed very little since DeLillo's iconic scene, although a few U-Hauls now also transport entertainment centers and bedroom suites. Lately, I have been noticing the flip side as well—move-out day. In mid-May and early June, steady streams of students drag the detritus of college living to the Dumpsters outside their dorms and apartments—some schools estimate approximately 50 tons of trash—only to replace it the next fall with the latest stuff from Costco and Ikea. Not all of it ends up in landfills. After the students have retreated, junk collectors beat city sanitation to the mounds of cast-offs and load up their truck beds, offering a second life to the junk of the transient student population.

Hendrik Kerstens, Bubble Wrap, August 2008

A new era of painters, sculptors, and photographers is also taking an interest in disposable culture, scavenging the leftovers of our "spend-centric" society for the banal, the everyday, and incorporating it into their artistic creations to give it new meaning. Museums and galleries around

HA Schult, Great Wall People, 2001

HA Schult, Street into Advent Valley

the world are exhibiting artists who, with an anarchic, Duchampian spirit, work with repurposed materials, illustrating that what a culture throws away can be enlightening and revealing.

Michael Johansson, Self Contained, 2010

The rise of modernism and the avant-garde movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries established a rich tradition of making art with reclaimed, alternative materials. Through collage and assemblage, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and Robert Rauschenberg employed found items in their work, leading the way for contemporary

Joyce Crago, from upper left: Art Bank, Paint Brush; Gardens, Ontario Reports; Pink (Inauguration, Glasses); Illness (Dr. G.P., Pipe)

Michael Johansson, Pack Daddy's Suitcases, 2006

artists to show that used objects can tell a story in a way that new things do not.

Kitty Wales, Migration, 2016

________

While Duchamp never cared about finding a wide audience for his work, in 1913 he inadvertently became famous in America when his painting Nude Descending a Staircase caused a stir at the Armory Show. To many viewers it summed up what was irrational, incomprehensible, and arbitrary about modern art. Newspaper reporters rushed to one-up each other in their sardonic depiction of his work, with Julian Street's description—"an explosion at a shingle factory"—winning the day. While the

Kitty Wales, Broken Sleep, 2004

Kitty Wales, Dog Machine, 2009