In his dismal and provocative statement, Canadian artist and theorist Tom Sherman reflects on the fact that we form our environment with our actions and way of life. Human culture is inextricably bound to the earth’s ecosystem. Ecological change has been brought about by human interventions in existing ecosystems, among other causes, and is one of the most relevant problems society has to deal with today. Environmental catastrophes and global warming are the results and consequences of a highly civilized and industrialized way of life. Ecological rethinking and long-term action are among the present day’s most important tasks if we want to avoid further damage to the environment and thus to our own living space.
Art has intervened in many ways since the destruction of the natural environment. Attempts have ranged from Romantic designs for countering the first stirrings of capitalism in the early 19th century through Land and Environmental art of the late 1960s and early 1970s, to Contextual art of the 1990s as well as eco-media strategies deployed today by global capitalism. These various approaches have greatly diversified in recent years in the context of new media and have tested new methods based on collaboration between art, science and technology. Environmental issues are addressed by many artists today, and more and more exhibitions have dealt with the topic of ecological change in recent years. In this essay, I would like to focus on recycling strategies in contemporary art practice. Examples introduce projects that aim to raise consciousness for environmental issues and the need for the sustainable use of resources in particular.
The use of recycling strategies in art has a long history. In the 1970s, Environmental art developed from Land art and alongside aesthetic concepts it placed concrete ecological interests and their relevance to society in the foreground. Mierle Laderman Ukeles is one of this movement’s central representatives. In her piece Touch Sanitation (1978-80) she visited all the facilities of the New York City Department of Sanitation over the course of an entire year. The artist shook the hands of the 8,500 employees and expressed her gratitude to them for “keeping New York alive”. For Laderman Ukeles, recycling processes are the great art challenges of our time and she has been dealing with these issues in her work since her first projects about garbage in the late 1960s. She emphasizes the importance of the reuse of garbage for our society: “The design of garbage should become the great public design of our age. I am talking about the whole picture: recycling facilities, transfer stations, trucks, landfills, receptacles, water treatment plants, rivers. They will be the giant clocks and thermometers of our age that tell the time and the health of the air, the earth, and the water. They will be utterly ambitious–our public cathedrals–for if we are to survive, they will be our symbols for survival.” Laderman Ukeles projects call attention to the environment and to the changes brought about by globalization, pollution and the unsustainable way we spend our resources. Her works are a plea to reflect on our own actions and lifestyle and an invocation for sustainable behavior.
Since the 1990s, American artist, Dan Peterman, has dedicated himself to the topic of the waste of natural resources and the resulting necessity of recycling. An example is Spending Energy Storing Energy Spent (1993), a sculpture made of batteries. As is well known, batteries contain a considerable amount of heavy metals and therefore warrant special disposal arrangements. Peterman has also exhibited blow-up furniture made of transparent plastic in Advances in Bio-Gas (1992). This is a closed system, which produced methane gas through the breakdown of organic material by anaerobic bacteria, and which he then stored. The inexorable destruction of the earth’s ozone layer has made methane gas an increasing threat to our environment. In Peterman’s work, the gas is transferred into a positive context and transformed into a make-shift battery or energy source. The process-based and transitory nature of objects is not only made a central element of an artistic end product: the works themselves often set processes of growth and decay in motion.
Running Table was made in 1997 as a commission for public space –a sculpture of recycled plastic for Grant Park in Chicago. The installation consists of a unit made up of a table with two benches; its segments can be joined together and incorporated into functional contexts either as a large sculpture or separately. Thousands of reprocessed plastic milk cartons and plastic bottles were recycled to make a thirty-metre-long table, which visitors to the park immediately accepted as a possible picnic spot and place for social gatherings. Peterman turns a throwaway product into a practical object that is reused in a social function. He examines the production cycle of the manufacture, usage and consumption of an article. Plastic is used particularly because of its inherent quality as a shapeable material. Although it is basically shapeless, it can be moulded into any shape imaginable. It is still to be found in many everyday objects. Despised and held in contempt as a cheap material, it mostly ends up on our cities’ rubbish heaps. By means of recycling it is put back as a product into a cycle that takes our limited resources into account–one which calls for a more sustainable way of treating these resources in contemporary society.
Peterman addresses the deplorable state of society’s affairs in which the endless exploitation of resources and waste of energy are supported in the name of a free-market economy. In his works, he opposes and criticises a social norm determined by consumption. The driving force behind his work and his artistic strategy is the attempt to persuade the public to accept responsibility by participating in our culture–both economically and aesthetically...(extract)

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