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No Trace, No Waste? The Art of Living in Trashscapes
Madalina Diaconu
Abstract
Humans have always striven to overcome their finitude by leaving traces. The phenomenology and hermeneutics of the twentieth century interpreted traces as meaningful sources for reconstructing the past and disregarded their materiality. This culturalist and retrospective approach nowadays has become untenable, as it is impossible to generate significative traces without producing waste as well. Waste itself forms a special category of trace that is unintentional and partly nocuous. Moreover, a final repository appears to have perversely fulfilled the dream of leaving ineffaceable traces that would survive humanity itself. In this new context, a future-oriented approach, one that would engage collectivities in controlling the production and erasure of traces and revaluate productivity and ephemerality, is necessary. In line with this, contemporary artists refrain from leaving durable traces, recycle materials, remove environmental waste and restore landscapes, visualize invisible pollutants, and anticipate future traces of destruction. By that, they redirect attention from traces to tracing and from human creativity to ecopoiesis.
Key Words
environmental art, phenomenology, post-hermeneutics, reclamation art, trace, waste
“The design of garbage should become the great public design of our age.”
(Mierle Laderman Ukeles)[1]
“Existence is temporary, consequences permanent.”
(Sabine Oberhuber & Thomas Rau)[2]
1. Introduction
The impermanence of the world and our own transitoriness has made humans from all times aspire to leave traces that would survive them. The sphere of culture added a whole array of possibilities to deliberately perpetuate one’s presence beyond death to the instinct of reproduction: founding institutions, heroic deeds, scientific achievements, monumental works, and so on. Even lending one’s name to a newly discovered insect species or a bred type of roses promises to transcend one’s biological lifespan. Art is just one thread in this fabric of collective memory that emerges from the intentional production and preservation of traces. Recent history, with its attending overproduction, environmental damage, and accumulation of waste, provides good reasons for not trusting this imperious drive to leave ineffaceable traces anymore; moreover, some anthropic traces were not actually intended, and some are even nocuous. In a world of too many anthropic traces, the question arises of how to reconcile the basic anthropological need to mark one’s passage through life with enduring material signs, on one side, with the practical need to remove traces, on the other. Removing these traces has become imperative not merely to make place for new ones but primarily to survive as a species.
The first section, below, roughly outlines the change of attitude towards traces in recent Western philosophy, mainly in phenomenology and (post)hermeneutics.[3] Next, the significance of emerging new features of traces will be emphasized through the example of environmental waste; in particular, how nuclear waste paradoxically appears to make the ancient dream of an indestructible, eternal “work” come true. The last section examines strategies, developed by (ecological) contemporary artists in response to the aforementioned dilemma of producing works, that do not represent a burden for future generations.
2. Traces as fragile sign-effects and residues of culture
In the history of Western philosophy, traces were either related to memory or to transcendence, as when mundane things were regarded as traces of a metaphysical being. Finally, traces were considered inner-worldly signs that pointed to an agent without making one appear.[4] In the following, I shall focus on this third tradition of interpretation, as it is epitomized by phenomenology and hermeneutics.[5]
From the perspective of experience, Levinas claims, a trace is a special kind of sign that signifies without presenting its agent.[6] In this respect, traces belong to the natural order (being perceivable, mostly visible effects), yet at the same time they transcend it (and the relation of causality, respectively). Otherwise put, only moral subjects can produce traces, and, conversely, traces remind subjects of their moral obligation towards the Other. Moreover, traces were produced in an irreversible past and in two respects are not representations. Their present perception does not re-present in the sense of mentally reiterating an event. Also, a trace is fundamentally nonmimetic: it is an indexical sign and not an icon; a sort of “signature,” not a portrait. Read through an environmental lens, this analysis may well reveal surprising analogies between trace and waste, as when Levinas mentions that the trace “disarranges” the natural order, yet on the whole it instead provides reasons for discontent. The materiality of traces is underestimated, and both the producer and the perceiver of trace are regarded as individuals. Finally, in terms of time, it relates the present with the past, being exclusively retrospective.
The scope of such a phenomenological analysis of traces is broadened by Paul Ricoeur, for whom these not only give off the earlier passage of a human or another animal but also record meaningful, symbolic activities: “People pass, their works remain.”[7] Ricoeur, too, attaches an imperative to the perception of trace, yet this regards the rescue of the traces themselves before they vanish—traces are fragile, and it is precisely their inscription into the world of things that incurs the risk of losing them. Most importantly, traces represent cultural vestiges and the only way of accessing the subjectivity of past life-worlds: they are responsible for coagulating a collective “we” and, in doing so, represent an indispensable means for the constitution of culture and history. Basically, traces are first and foremost documents that need historians who do not merely see them—traces are publicly visible anyway—but can look at them, that is to say, are skilled enough to decrypt them.
These two examples suffice to roughly evaluate the relevance of the phenomenology and hermeneutics of trace to environmental philosophy and aesthetics. The experience of trace transcends perception and calls for interpretation; furthermore, it is tinged with a feeling of emergency and contains the implicit claim that traces must be conserved as much as possible before it is too late. Apart from sporadic celebrations of the sensuousness of traces, mostly in the phenomenological aesthetics, their materiality is negatively connoted: the physical support of works makes these subject to corruption and destruction.[8] Traces in general are confined to the role of signifying objects, and their agency (for instance, their effect on spectators) is solely “borrowed” from the agency of their authors: traces do something for us only because they express another subjectivity; their Wirkungsgeschichte unfolds within the horizon of meaning.
This culturalist and conservative approach (that requires one to preserve the reminders of the past) has already been fissured in post-hermeneutics. According to Dieter Mersch, contemporary art operates with predilection in the gaps and fractures of meaning; artists stress non-senses and paradoxes, disruptions and subversions of rationality, seeking cracks in the fabric of an allegedly meaningful world. Cultural theory cannot overlook “the abysmal dimension of the cultural” anymore, which refers both to the deficiencies or failures of culture and to its excesses.[9] Unforeseeable, unmanageable, and contingent aspects come to the fore, be they unexpected costs, environmental damage and other non-intended collateral effects, inefficacy in using materials and technological accidents, the raw materiality of things devoid of any meaning, and so on.[10] The production of meaning turns out to have limits and be multiply conditioned; as a result, the focus shifts from the subject’s agency to the subject’s reactivity or responsiveness to a pre-given that Mersch indefinitely calls “It” or, in Lacan’s footsteps, the “Real.” This “It” precedes any subjective conveying of meaning and resists a complete rational appropriation by a subject who learns to humbly accept her or his limitations.
The metaphors of ruptures and scars, material residues, rests, and leftovers almost unexpectedly bridges (post)hermeneutics with the pressing issue of environmental waste and the contemporary artists’ ecological commitment, all the more since, in Mersch’s view, nowadays (the efficacy of) practices dethrone (the durability of) works in art. The recent field of eco-phenomenology, too, should meet the challenge of “updating” the phenomenological take on traces by examining the sphere of waste.
3. Unwanted eternity: indestructible waste
Waste in general represents a non-intended yet mostly unavoidable by-product of human activity and, as such, it is an anthropic trace.[11] No matter if we agree that in the Anthropocene most traces are humanmade, it remains indisputable that the enormous accumulation of waste during the past century and its pervasiveness, from soil and water to the “technofossils” of our settlements and up to the atmosphere and even troposphere, raise serious environmental concerns. Brian Thill may be suspected of rhetorical hyperbole when he claims that nowadays every landscape has become a trashscape and characterizes our world as “an enormous nest made of our civilizational excrement.”[12] Nevertheless, it is evident that any prospect of continuing life on this planet can no longer avoid the issue of how to avoid producing new traces and wipe out the existent ones. Even if we resist the temptation to extend the concept of waste to social processes and include in it all those “wasted lives” that are, so to speak, by-products of capitalist efficiency and globalization,[13] including the people who literally have no alternative other than living on or close to dumping grounds, we are still left with the challenging task of removing pollutant waste as much and as soon as possible. More generally, if becoming and ephemerality are the implacable laws of our world, practically everything (and everyone) has its date of expiry and will be enclosed into the sphere of trash: “Waste is everything, plus time.”[14]
Properly speaking, waste can hardly be relegated to a separate sphere, notwithstanding all the trash cans, dumping grounds, and landfills that lie outside our everydayness. The daily ritual of purification of taking out the garbage does not suffice anymore,[15] as the garbage may leave our homes but not our world, which, from an ecological perspective, is an extended home.[16] At present, it has become unavoidable to ingest microplastics and inhale pollutants; in other words, there is no way out for the Da-sein (for other species, too) to escape the toxicity of the global trashscape. Only some waste can be reintegrated in the natural or economic circuit, which paves the way for a philosophy of material metamorphoses. Much of it remains undegradable, and, in a world that is increasingly acknowledged as a space of universal interdependence, it “strikes back” no matter how remotely the global North may deposit its residues. A more general environmental purification (both through technological improvement and the turn to a sustainable way of life) should go hand in hand with solidarity with the physical and social “wastelands” at the peripheries—just note that traces participate to both the natural and the cultural order.
The category of waste modifies the temporality of trace. First, the acceleration of the production and consumption cycles increases the accretion of waste. Second, traces do not indicate an immemorial past anymore, in Levinas’s sense of falling outside of physical and historical chronology, but their production can be assigned to collective historical agents who are responsible for the present crisis. At the same time, through a rather perverse tweak, the waste becomes immemorial in a new sense: some objects are given no time to leave mnemonic traces (let alone to produce emotional binding[17]), while others may be discarded before reaching their first user, so that their usability remains forever in potentia. Planned and built-in obsolescence short-circuits the relation between past and present no less than that between desire and need, using and discarding. In today’s mainstream business model, a new product is that which is not broken yet, one which was designed to be (functionally) outdated and to appear unmodern as soon as possible after having been purchased, for no other reason than the dictatorship of fashion.[18]
Third, in addition to pace and memory, a temporal analysis of traces should also include orientation towards the future. If cultural traces are deliberately produced to transcend their agent’s finitude for posterity, the special category of trace-waste may resist the flow of time despite the producer’s intention: persistence becomes an unwanted and even feared permanence. Let me take the extreme case of nuclear waste. The problem with it is precisely that it does not disappear; quite the contrary, it generates a “million-year panic.”[19] The complex issue of storing the radioactive waste engages both technical and social aspects, such as the local (in)acceptance of waste disposal facilities. Eternity achieves a bitter taste when we come to realize that “no human artifact ever conceived and no human […] will last even remotely as long as our nuclear waste.”[20] Brian Thill speculates that nuclear waste reverses the relation between the humans and “their” waste, by converting the waste-makers into the “waste product of time” and things discarded into “ghosts.”[21]
But would these residues remain traces and waste in a world without a subject who would identify them as such? Who would still ascribe to them the double character of sign-effect, of cultural and natural objects? Apart from remedial actions for hazardous-waste sites, experts have made technical proposals about how future humans could be warned of the dangerous material that is buried in final repositories. As legitimate as this project may be from a practical point of view, it opens up a deeper hermeneutical problem, namely that of the possibility of building a warning system that would remain comprehensible over several millennia. How should symbols and geometries of landscapes look so that they would be recognizable in the remote future as anthropic traces that alert one to other intentionally hidden traces? This question is essentially post-hermeneutic, in Mersch’s aforementioned sense, because it involves the interlacing of culture with material residues and reaches the boundary of the symbolic order, where the mute “It” begins.
Most interpretations of waste employ negations: trash stands for moral and technical human fallibility, for economic inefficacy, and political injustice (some people may need things others dispense with). Even a tentative characterization of waste from an ontological perspective would probably emphasize its absence of meaning, purpose, and value. Whoever decides to take a closer look at trash will at best recognize former things and pieces of objects that were emptied of any practical or emotional relation to a subject, and at worst see chunks of matter simply lying around. As abandoned things or fragments, they can still be reconnected to our world, in the phenomenological meaning of the horizon within which any conveying of meaning and value is possible, yet solely in the past modus. As for their future, these “things” can have none other than decay and dissolution. Put differently, trash is a sort of ex-some-thing, which is underway to becoming (returning to) no-thing. The expectation that trash would just reintegrate itself into nature betrays naïveté; but even so, within this interval between ex-something and nothing, trash has practically no identity and no name — and recall that atomic waste will remain in this “provisional” in-between state unimaginably long. The present of this neither-thing-nor-nothing is eternity compared to the human scale; furthermore, this “It” manifests presence and agency—being radio-active, for example. In sum, the obsession of Western culture with permanence, which is a legacy of its metaphysics, starting with the ancient Greeks’ quest for an immutable ἀρχή, must be put to the test in our time by confronting it with the issue of indestructible toxic residues. When it is finally achieved, the ideal of eternity turns out to be uncanny.
Like a garbage bin and a dumping ground, a final repository remains a circumscribed place. As a matter of fact, such sites are not places in the classical phenomenological sense of a “good” place to dwell, patronized by a spiritus loci,[22] but are somehow haunted by the specters of abandoned objects. In addition to this, the empire of waste has no borders: garbage transcends the visible and hidden debris, can be microscopical or in another form perceptually subliminal, can freely circulate in air and water, and can be dispersed. Both the spatial dissemination and temporal ineffaceability of waste go beyond the scope of human perception, which operates in the here and now. In doing so, the new features of traces challenge the phenomenological perspective of immediate experience and the redefinition of aesthetics as aisthetics or the theory of perception.
This has major implications for environmental aesthetics. First, environmental perception needs to be supplemented by appropriate scientific knowledge and controlled imagination. Second, abstract knowledge alone might not provide a sufficiently strong motivation for ecological commitment; in this respect, art can support scientific communication by assisting it with the tools of making danger perceivable and addressing emotion. While Ricoeur urged to follow the others’ traces before they vanish in order to better understand the (cultural) past, many artists claim that it has nowadays become an imperative to visualize nocuous invisible traces as a prerequisite for making them disappear and for perpetuating life. The case of waste shows that humans can also flee from their traces and recalls Levinas’ allusion to the murderer who could not avoid leaving traces; environmental shame and guilt openly compete in our days with the “arrogance of humanism.”[23] Third, as a result, the hermeneutics of traces recedes in favor of seeking practical solutions about how to reduce our ecological footprint without considerably affecting the quality of life.
4. Art and trace: an environmental perspective
Such a corrective program to the throw-away economy model was proposed by RAU Architects in the Netherlands. Their Turn-too model of avoiding waste has six steps:[24] 1) It calls for rethinking the product as a service, so that the producer takes responsibility for the entire life cycle of a product and the consumer purchases the right to use a product for a limited time. 2) A product is regarded as a depot of materials: its components can be processed into another product, its materials are separable and recyclable, and so on. 3) In order to make this second step possible, information about the materials contained in a product should be provided in a sort of “material passport” or identity card of the object. 4) Similarly to a cadaster that registers details about real estate, the “material passes” of products have to be registered at a “madastre.” Only then is it possible to have an overview of the rest “life”-time of various materials and set up a market for recycled materials. 5) A Universal Declaration of Material Rights must be adopted to “promote the awareness of the role of materials and the development of a long-term vision on our relation to materials,” legally protecting the “rights of materials.”[25] Finally, 6) all materials represent services of the Earth, which is regarded as the only owner. This would again have legal implications and enable one to use materials while avoiding their abuse.
Compared to the philosophy of traces resumed before, the Turn-too vision brings evidence for a multifaceted reorientation. The materiality of traces (products) comes to the fore; so to speak, the soil in which they are imprinted takes precedence over their form, meaning, and the subjectivity of their agent. The process of leaving and administrating traces must legally and globally be regulated in order to guarantee sustainable development. The retrospective (culturalist-historical) perspective, according to which traces mainly reconstruct the past, is replaced by a prospective-visionary thinking that aims to reduce the present ecological footprint. Most importantly, the human ceases to be the protagonist on this stage, stepping back in favor of the Earth as the real owner of resources. Similar alternative constructs discuss concepts like circular economy, zero-waste, or cradle-to-cradle design. Their discussion lies outside the scope of the present paper; instead, let me now inquire into how contemporary art reacts to this turn.
An environmental approach to art confronts the art world with the following questions: Is art entitled to constitute an exception to the rule that, from an ecological point of view, anthropic traces have become a burden for future generations? How can art reconcile its drive to leave a message to posterity with that of keeping its environmental impact as low as possible? And is it possible to gain recognition in the art world and remain present on the art market while avoiding the production of waste? A few preliminary remarks are necessary before any further exemplification. First, artistic creation inevitably consumes material resources and, like any other form of production, cannot avoid waste. Moreover, works of art are expected to enclose a specific value, which makes them special kinds of objects that deserve efforts of conservation, including supplementary costs related to a special infrastructure (museums and galleries), technology (devices that regulate the exposure to light and humidity, security systems, electronic devices), personnel (curators, museum guards, conservators, auctioneers), and the like. Resulting from the explosive development of the art world during the last century, the differences in quality of art projects, and the environmental side-effects of art-related, long-distance mobility (touring exhibitions, artists traveling in professional interest,[26] mass cultural tourism), art was transformed into a lucrative domain of cultural industry. As a result, it must also be discussed in terms of its environmental costs and impact.
Should art adopt the dictum “less is more” in all its stages, from art education and production to consumption and reproduction? Would this bind the aesthetic value to moral norms and environmental criteria that modern Western aesthetics has regarded as extrinsic to art? And how could the structures of the art world be transformed to accommodate pressing environmental issues? More generally, the entire history of art could be read through the lens of environmental traces—such an “ecological” or “naturalistic” approach would resonate with Mersch’s critique of the culturalist paradigm, but would it achieve the same relevance to art as, for example, Philippe Rahm’s “natural history of architecture?”[27]
These questions are too general to be answered here. Even when the discussion is confined to contemporary art, obviously not all artists are sensitive to environmental concerns; most of them presumably prioritize the visibility of their work over the imperative of saving resources. Moreover, the art forms that can be subsumed to so-called environmental art and ecological art are largely heterogeneous.[28] Finally, even environmentally committed artists cannot avoid any kind of waste related to documentation, the change in location of a work, and travels that are necessary for research and producing a work in situ, not to mention various forms of waste related to art fairs, exhibition openings, and other public gatherings. The following analysis deliberately concentrates on favorable artistic strategies on how to avoid waste or raise awareness of it.
In critical response to land art, ecological artists use materials available onsite. Their “traces” merely rearrange natural material, and it is this configuration alone that gives away human intentionality, like Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison’s projects since the 1970s. Besides, artists often take into account the natural decay of their onsite works and their physical reintegration into the landscape. As though echoing the eco-phenomenologist David Wood’s claim about the “celebration of finitude,”[29] eco-artists realize unfinished works that will be “completed” by the natural becoming of materials: new traces enter a metamorphotic process at a faster pace than conventional works of art. For example, Andy Goldsworthy remarks that his projects using wind-fallen branches and trunks found onsite in forests are not completed by the artist himself, but by the agency of nature. Instead of being “fixed, self-contained objects made for posterity,” they are “launched” (an allusion to the Latin etymology of proiectum) into an unpredictable future.[30] By that, the artist assumes the vulnerability of his traces and is open for a creative cooperation with nonhuman forces.
Another tactic of circumventing waste is to profess ephemerality in the form of performances. As for the performances of olfactory art, these double down on the transience by operating in a medium that is fleeting par excellence. Brian Goeltzenleuchter legitimates his performances, which he calls “counter-monuments,” with reference to the high volatility of the public flows today.[31] However, olfactory ephemerality in no way excludes persistence: Goeltzenleuchter’s olfactory performances, like Sillage (2014), are designed as participatory events and opportunities for people to freely engage in conversations, including on environmental issues, that are expected to remain memorable. The artist’s short-living physical traces become the trigger for the inscription of mnemonic traces in the audience. The political dimension of such performances is obvious: art is conceived as a catalyst for social transformation and community-building processes. What does disappear is indeed the aspect of physical continuity: performances have to be repeated, and reproducibility goes along with intermittency.
A third manner of avoiding waste production beyond organic decay and unique or repeatable performances is the reuse of materials.[32] Despite their analogy with circular economy, recycling art and design to a large extent are a form of upcycling, given that materials re-enter the market embodied in products with a higher value. To confine the discussion to art, this strategy is not new, although neither Duchamp’s ready-mades nor Spoerri’s fascination for flea markets, to give only two examples, were ecologically motivated. In contrast, waste art deliberately uses disposable material, from plastic packages and discarded technological material to cigarette butts and human hair. A special case is Rob Fischer, who not only made sculptures and installations from architectural debris but also recycled his unsold artworks into new ones. Other artists transmit through their works the message that the difference between waste and non-waste is only a matter of perspective. For example, the “dirt” Joe Scanlan produced in an art gallery was nothing other than fertile humus; this was packaged into IKON EARTH bags and sold to visitors, who were encouraged to use it in their gardens. Even though the action was provocatively entitled Pay Dirt (2003), the “art product” was not waste, but a resource for life processes outside the art world; in doing so, the traditional understanding of art as a disinterested and autotelic activity radically is called into question.
A noteworthy example of recycling is the Hope Cathedral on the Norwegian coast.[33] The project was initiated in 2018 by Solveig Egeland, who stimulated residents, children, unemployed and socially marginalized people, and other volunteers to clean the ocean of plastic. The “fished” fish boxes were then transformed into brightly colored roof tiles and placed over a construction of wood, recalling traditional Norwegian sacral architecture. Hope Cathedral sublimates a pragmatical attitude into devotion and connects ecological hope with the soteriological one: the almost Sisyphean gesture of cleaning the ocean acquires the meaning of inner purification and repentance. In addition to this, the project fosters a sense of community by prompting the local population to take care of their environment.
Care lies at the heart of several contemporary projects of landscape restoration. Already the “maintenance artist” Mierle Laderman Ukeles has drawn attention to all ordinary activities that condition the functioning of (social) life yet used to pass unremarked upon. Her manifesto, “Maintenance Art – Proposal for an Exhibition” (1969), associates modern art and the avant garde with “The Death Instinct” and Maintenance Art with “The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations; equilibrium.”[34] Her exhibition, which remains a project, would have connected her personal maintenance work as an artist, woman, wife, and mother with the “general” (social) maintenance work in various professions, from sanitation and education to administration and sport, and with “Earth Maintenance.” This last element would have involved a daily delivery of several kinds of refuse to the Museum: “1) the contents of one sanitation truck; 2) a container of polluted air; 3) a container of polluted Hudson River; 4) a container of ravaged land.” All these containers would have been “serviced: purified, depolluted, rehabilitated, recycled, and conserved by various technical (and/or pseudo-technical) procedures.”[35] Years later, she claimed that landfills build “the basis of our whole culture” and that recycling facilities, which had to be improved, would become “our public cathedrals” and “symbols of survival.”[36]
Ukeles did not confine herself to statements. Alongside other artists, she rolled up her sleeves and launched projects that reconditioned the environment over the past few decades: they farmed, gardened, planted forests, detoxified the soil (recycling metals with the aid of vegetation), removed trash from rivers and purified polluted waters through bio-sculptures, reconverted town dumps into salt marshes, and so on.[37] Art has shifted its focus from production to maintenance and regeneration both in urban and rural settings, in a more general context, in which care surprisingly reveals its many affinities with the aesthetic experience.[38] These underlying approaches cover a broad field between a “nurturing” and even “feminine” land art and the restoration of others’ habitats in the sign of solidarity. For example, while Lynne Hull’s trans-species art gives expression to the feeling of interconnectedness with nonhuman species,[39] Herman Prigann’s works are inspired by an aesthetics of processes and metamorphoses that integrates transience based on the insight about the human’s ephemerality and the living dimension of art material.[40] Such projects can also considerably vary in terms of scale and form. Ecological art in a broad sense can be as modest as Hull’s “hydroglyphs”— small etchings on rocks that, retaining water, help wild animals survive in deserts—or monumental, like Prigann’s Museum der verlorenen Wünsche (1996-99) and Die Mottbruchhalde (1999), which practically transformed the Ruhr area.
Reclamation art, too, is particularly salient in terms of art’s relation to waste; as its name says, artists “reclaim” environmentally damaged and derelict landscapes—strip mines, abandoned quarries, landfills and waste dump stations, and the like —on which they develop usually large-scale, site-specific projects. These frequently involve cleaning (collecting and removing the garbage), transformation (restoration), and further maintenance and are participatory projects that directly depend on the long-term local communities’ engagement. More specifically, without continuous efforts of maintaining the metamorphosed landscape, the artist’s traces in time turn themselves into a “derelict artwork in a derelict landscape.”[41]
The objectives of landscape restoration through renaturation range from embellishing the landscape to commemorating the technofossils of industrial heritage; primarily, however, they offer constructive solutions to environmental problems. It is interesting that, in their majority, such projects do not erase industrial traces, but merely overwrite them in a form that is still recognizable as anthropic (either artistic or agricultural). Strikingly enough, these living “artworks” explicitly refrain from proposing the creation of something new; by calling their goals remediation, restoration, regeneration, revival, recultivation, renaturation, and reconstruction, the artists suggest a sort of repetition that does not reiterate the past and present, but repairs them. In a similar way, recycling in design and economy, too, does not imply absolute circularity.
Artists continue to leave traces, like the land artists of the 1960 and 1970s, yet within a considerably different framework: they acknowledge the agency or “livingness” of the material and comply with its natural dynamics. Their creation is understood as con-creativity,[42] a cooperation with the ecopoiesis of nature itself; by that, human making is assumed as a mere starting point of an open process. Traces remain temporary and secondary, whereas the process of an ongoing metamorphosis comes to the fore. The human self turns out to be relational; art becomes a kind of litmus test that makes patterns of connectedness visible, which at the same time confers the disengagement of modern art with the bitter aftertaste of alienation. However, building or reconstructing webs takes time; in contrast to the breathtaking acceleration of productivity and accumulation of waste on the consumer goods market, ecological art teaches patience and deceleration.
Finally, messages of hope coexist with fear, and art can raise awareness of environmental damage simply by showing the anthropic traces that either became so common that they are usually overlooked or are invisible; in both cases, art transforms the ordinary into the extra-ordinary. For instance, on a few evenings the duo HeHe illuminates the cloud of steam from power plants and household waste incinerators and colors its contours in green, in real time (Nuage Vert, Helsinki 2008, Saint-Ouen/Paris 2009, Ivry-sur-Seine 2010). The third edition could be realized only as a guerrilla affair with the citizens’ support. Robin Price’s public installations, Air of the Anthropocene (2018/9), visualize air pollution levels in several cities worldwide on vertical light carpets; the higher the atmospheric waste, the denser their ghostly fabric of light dots. Other artists anticipate future environmental destruction by leaving traces at present: since 2005, Eve Mosher has been marking with chalk those areas that, in various cities, according to climate change models, are expected to be covered by water if the sea level rises (High Water Line). Meanwhile, her project has acquired a participatory dimension; residents acknowledged this idea as a community service and started to mark the contour of future losses themselves, to protest against the inertia of politics. Instead of connecting the present with the past, the traces of High Water Line paradoxically project us into the future: art turned into an alarm signal. Another step further, anguish inspires strange visions in the modus of future perfect, and artists imagine post-apocalyptic environments in which only few primitive life forms will have survived a global catastrophe.[43] In a universe that will be devoid of subjects, in a post-phenomenological and post-hermeneutic time (after the end of experience and interpretation), without anyone who would be able to see this uncanny post-world as a mega-trace, the concept of trace itself will be suspended.
In sum, contemporary ecological art resonates with present environmental philosophy by redirecting attention from traces (results), which remain temporary, to the never-ending process of leaving traces; otherwise put, from the authors’ creativity, as expressed in their works, to a more general poiesis. Human creativity itself turns out to be a form by which humans participate in the ecopoiesis or generativity of nature.[44] This shift of perspective goes along with regarding the individual self as connected and, at least for some artists, with adopting a holistic or at least systemic view. Waste reveals itself as an artificial category that assumes the existence of a difference between valuable production and useless residues. This characterizes anthropic activities; nature itself—if indeed it makes sense to employ this concept—does not know the category of waste. Waste appears as that which is autonomous, futile, and worthless, and falls apart from life-creating and life-perpetuating processes, resisting its (re)integration into ecosystems. Waste is that which was dropped out, literally ex-creted (from Latin ex-cernere: to sift out or separate), and now stands apart from the rest. Leaving traces is unavoidable, yet humans should learn to control their drive to unsustainable overproduction, put their selves into perspective, and reinterpret transience, including their own, as the source of an intensive appreciation of the present.
In a way, despite the limits of their anthropocentrism, Levinas and Ricoeur were right to relate the concept of trace to morality and culture. If traces are indeed more than effects of natural causes and imply intentionality, even when they are not wanted, like in the case of waste, then, in contrast to other producers of traces, humans cannot avoid taking decisions about leaving their specific traces. The dilemma (not only) artists are facing at present is double: how to continue to live despite unwanted and nocuous traces, and how to create history and culture without producing waste. In other words, how can the ideal of “no trace, no waste” be realized without requiring from the human to commit a suicide as historical-cultural agent?
Philosophy can accompany us on the way to finding an answer. The time has come to reconsider “the disappearance of the self without a trace,”[45] as Alice Lagaay claims, who recommends converting life, understood as an active making-process, into contemplation. Whoever “empties” herself or himself through practices of withdrawal and retreat paradoxically prepares for the broadest form of intersubjectivity and transforms the tyranny of “you only live once” and “the fear of missing out” into “the love of missing out.” While the production of things that unavoidably will be emptied of desire amasses waste, the contemplation of a subject who is already free from desires leaves traces, but no waste.
Acknowledgement: The author is grateful to the reviewers for their inspiring comments and useful suggestions for improving the present article.
Mădălina Diaconu
madalina.diaconu@univie.ac.at
Mădălina Diaconu is Privatdozentin for Philosophy at the University of Vienna and member of the editorial boards of “Contemporary Aesthetics”, “polylog. Zeitschrift für interkulturelles Philosophieren” and “Studia Phaenomenologica”. Her latest publications are Environmental Ethics. Cross-Cultural Explorations (Alber Verlag 2020, ed. with M. Kirloskar-Steinbach), Liber amicorum for Arnold Berleant (“Popular Inquiry” 2022, ed. with M. Ryynänen) and Aesthetics of Weather (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
Published on July 13, 2024.
Cite this article: Mădălina Diaconu, “No Trace, No Waste? The Art of Living in Trashscapes,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 11 (2024), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] Apud Sue Spaid, Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies (Cincinnati: Contemporary Arts Center, 2002), 94.
[2] Sabine Oberhuber and Thomas Rau, Material Matters. Wie eine neu gedachte Circular Economy uns zukunftsfähig macht (Berlin: Econ, 2021), 90.
[3] This focus on Western contemporary approaches does not support a Eurocentric view of philosophy. On the contrast between the typical Western rejection of transience and the Japanese culture, see my forthcoming book, Aesthetics of Weather.
[4] On this threefold interpretation of trace, see Anne Reichold [ARE], “Spur,” in Metzler Philosophie-Lexikon. Begriffe und Definitionen, ed. Peter Prechtl and Franz-Peter Burkard (Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart: Carl Ernst Poeschel, 2008), 582-583.
[5] The presence of the concept of trace in recent eco-phenomenology would require a separate discussion.
[6] Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” in Deconstruction in Context. Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 345-359.
[7] Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 120.
[8] Both claims coexist in Mikel Dufrenne’s Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique (Paris: P.U.F., 1953).
[9] Dieter Mersch, Posthermeneutik (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 330.
[10] Ibid., 331.
[11] A separate discussion would deserve the question whether the concept of waste may be extended to biological processes and include the organic matter produced by the decomposition of organisms.
[12] Brian Thill, Waste (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 4.
[13] Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives. Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
[14] Thill, Waste, 8.
[15] Italo Calvino, “La Poubelle Agréée,” in The Road to San Giovanni, trans. Tim Parks (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), 91-126.
[16] The prefix eco- originated in the Old Greek οἶκος: family, house, place of dwelling.
[17] As a reviewer appropriately remarked, getting attached to a piece of “trash” makes it “lose its trashiness.”
[18] On the technical, functional, and psychological manipulation of products and customers to boost consumption, see Oberhuber & Rau, Material Matters, 28-42.
[19] Thill, Waste, 53.
[20] Ibid., 55.
[21] Ibid., 56.
[22] To claim that the waste centers themselves may be “good” places to dwell, as they express care of the environment and “free” people from superfluous and even nocuous debris, would be exaggerated. Nevertheless, such places make dwelling possible and emanate a specific atmosphere.
[23] David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
[24] Oberhuber and Rau, Material Matters, 109-216.
[25] Ibid., 240.
[26] Meanwhile, the “absurdly extreme mobility of art curators and performing artists” has begun to be perceived as an ecological problem (Sacha Kagan, Art and Sustainability. Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity, Bielefeld: transcript, 2011, 298).
[27] Philippe Rahm, Histoire naturelle de l’architecture. Comment le climat, les épidémies et l’énergie ont façonné la ville et les bâtiments (Paris: Pavillon de l’Arsenal, 2020).
[28] On the differences between various expressions that have been in use since the 1960s, such as ‘land art,’ ‘earthworks,’ ‘Art in Nature,’ ‘environmental art,’ ‘ecological art’ (eco-art), ‘reclamation art,’ ‘ecovention,’ and so on, see Kagan, Art and Sustainability, 271-74.
[29] David Wood, “What is Eco-Phenomenology?,” in Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, ed. Charles S. Brown, Ted Toadvine (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 83.
[30] Andy Goldsworthy, Projects (New York: Abrams, 2017), 6.
[31] Brian Goeltzenleuchter, “The Olfactory Counter-monument. Active Smelling and the Politics of Wonder in the Contemporary Museum,” in Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance, ed. Gwenn-Aël Lynn, Debra Riley Parr (New York: Routledge, 2021), 182-94.
[32] Strictly speaking, decay itself is a form of eco-systemic recycling that opens new possibilities for renewal.
[33] https://www.hopecathedral.no/ [22.03.2023]
[34] Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Maintenance Art – Proposal for an Exhibition,” https://queensmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Ukeles-Manifesto-for-Maintenance-Art-1969.pdf [22.03.2023].
[35] Ibid.
[36] Apud Spaid, Ecovention, 93-4.
[37] Notable examples include Herman Prigann, Dominique Mazeaud, Patricia Johanson, Agnes Denes, Aviva Rahmani, Lynne Hull, Mel Chin, Jackie Brookner, Susan Leibowitz Steinman, Buster Simpson, Viet Ngo, Betsy Damon, and so on. See also their discussion in Herman Prigann, Heike Strelow, Ökologische Ästhetik: Theorie und Praxis künstlerischer Umweltgestaltung (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2004), and Kagan, Art and Sustainability.
[38] Yuriko Saito, Aesthetics of Care: Practice in Everyday Life (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).
[39] Apud Kagan, Art and Sustainability, 300.
[40] Herman Prigann in Prigann and Strelow, Ökologische Ästhetik, 26, 32.
[41] John Krygier, in Hilary Anne Frost-Kumpf, “Reclamation Art: Restoring and Commemorating Blighted Landscapes,” [1995], https://nmr.collinsandgoto.com/weblinks/frost/FrostTop.html [30.03.2023]
[42] Heinrich Rombach, Der Ursprung: Philosophie der Konkreativität von Mensch und Natur (Freiburg: Rombach, 1994).
[43] Cf. Wolfgang Welsch, “Art Addressing the Anthropocene,” Contemporary Aesthetics 18, 2020, https://contempaesthetics.org/2020/02/18/art-addressing-the-anthropocene/.
[44] On ecopoiesis, see also my chapter, “Tornadoes as aesthetic happenings and figurations of the invisible,” in Applying Aesthetics to Everyday Life, ed. Lisa Giombini and Adrián Kvokačka (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 125-38.
[45] Alice Lagaay, „Spurlos verschwinden,“ Philosophie Magazin Nr. 02/2022, 64-65, here 65. I am grateful to Kira Meyer for this reference.