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3 Enviroblogging: Clearing Green Space in a Virtual World Stephanie Foote I In April 2010, Discover magazine ran a story called “Museum-Worthy Garbage: The Art of Overconsumption” showcasing a group of artists who call attention to “the scale of our collective daily consumption and waste” by “gathering up the trash that washes up on beaches and digging through their own garbage cans” in search of material to transform into art. Featuring photographs of work ranging from pointillist-inspired “paintings” made of scavenged aluminum cans to wreaths made of gaudy bits of discarded plastic, the article also includes brief statements from the artists about their choice to use postconsumer waste as a creative medium. Although some of the artists discussed the aesthetic challenges of working with garbage, almost all of them believed that their choice had an important political dimension. Working with garbage, they agreed, makes visible the wastefulness of US culture. But it’s also a metaphor for what they believe to be the precarious, even endangered status of art itself as a way to generate crucial public conversation about social issues. Transforming what is valueless into something beyond price is a way to critique a commodity culture that generates more and more waste as well as draw attention to how those transformations inspire new kinds of conversations about what counts in late capitalism as a wasted object—and in the case of art itself, what counts as a wasteful or nonproductive practice. Few environmental policymakers, of course, would argue that using postconsumer garbage in art installations has any serious impact on largescale industrial issues of garbage. Indeed, few artists would make such a claim, and yet their work should be taken seriously not just as a concrete example of the increasing public visibility of environmental issues but also as a sign of the range of idioms and representational practices people are using to generate public debate. It is thus perhaps as interesting that 74 Stephanie Foote the media spotlight artists working in garbage—or fashion designers who use trash to design clothes, or public installations that draw attention to it like the life-size “trash people” of HA Schult (http://www.haschult.de/ trash.html)—as it is that artists are working in the medium of trash. It tells us (in the rhetoric of the very consumption that artists are working to criticize) that there is now a broad enough audience for environmental issues, especially those that constellate material waste and wasteful practices, to make such a story worth covering. And it tells us that the everyday practices of consumption and waste are now part of a dialogue about issues that necessarily implicate individual social actors in a larger understanding of global patterns of consumption, circulation, and waste. Up-cycling postconsumer garbage into art meant to inspire public dialogue is an example that indicates an interest in public conversation about waste, but in some sense, it is also an instance of the limits of such conversations . What, after all, are different people talking about when they talk about garbage? Are they telling the same story about it? Do they even agree on what it is? Not everyone who is concerned about garbage is an artist, not every act of weighing the impact of an individual piece of garbage will be displayed for other people’s consideration, and not every kind of waste can be so easily translated into a politically inspired artistic commentary. And yet although people who throw their recyclables in the correct bin probably do not consider themselves as making an artistic statement, they nevertheless exist in the same horizon of environmental awareness as artists, who most probably understand themselves as recycling . More critically, we might even say that those subject positions—recycler and artist—share a commitment to an aesthetic of self-improvement and civic cultivation—an aesthetic that is derived from one’s sense of individual agency in the world as well as anxiously dependent on one’s sense of interconnectedness with a world of anonymous others. We might understand the larger turn toward individual recycling along with the use of garbage and waste as public art as a convergence in the project of what Michel Foucault (1988) called “the care of the self,” and the social technologies that make that project widely available to a certain class and kind of individual. An artist working in garbage and an individual social actor for whom recycling has become not only a private virtue but also...

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