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| photo: Waste Not by Song Dong, Carriageworks Sydney |
1.
Content is what we
carry as humans. It
builds up around us, the same way the bricks and mortar of a home go up bit by
bit on a piece of vacant land. It remembers who we are as we move
from place to place, pack and unpack, whittle down if we have the mettle.
Content is what we need and desire and find a place for day by day. We stand
back and remark at it, our own and each other’s, covet it and guard it as the
context of our lives. It stands by, an understudy while we play, and speaks in
our place when we’re gone.
Each
of us has our own particular measure of where the scales should sit on content,
somewhere between keep and chuck. But
a relationship to material goods goes beyond domestic calibration. In the
western world, our economic well being relies on us chasing regular
interchanges for our worldly possessions. They are not meagre things but the chance to fulfil a duty.
Our capacity to accumulate is now our capacity to contribute to our world, to
hold it afloat. We must spend freely and waste appropriately to keep it ticking
over.
The appeal of Waste Not was obvious to me. On a
Thursday morning towards the end of its three month run, I stood essentially
alone but for the occasional staff member walking briskly and inattentively
past or the gallery attendant immediately sensitive to my presence but careful
not to impede my own design through the space.
Sunlight
stencilled the skeleton of a house across its contents, a room some five metres
squared, stripped of its walls, just a frame of beams and trusses pieced
together from steel pipes, bamboo lengths and motley off-cuts of timber. One
side was partially filled with square glass windows and an old wooden door for
which there was no need. Surrounding the shelter, thousands of household items
spilled onto the floor, they stretched at least 30 metres in one direction and
maybe fifteen in the other, an optical illusion of grand proportion: how had an
entire gallery of stuff come out of that
one small structure?
Despite
longing to see the exhibition, I stood immobilised before something I had no
desire to disturb, a geography of some 10 000 contours of colour and texture
and shape, familiar and unfamiliar, overwhelming and tempting all at once. The
obvious impact of the show is in the macro. But at the same time I felt an
urgent desire to explore the micro, a fetishized hunger for the objects before
me, an inclination akin to wanting to eat hundreds and thousands one by one.
A
young man in shorts and specs shuffled between the plywood boards on which the items
were grouped. He moved a bucket alongside him, and a dustpan and broom. He
stopped at a blue fabric handbag, held it up to the light and wiped its front
and strap. Should he be touching that so
casually? And he must have seen me staring because he looked up and smiled:
We do it almost everyday. We just start
at one end and work across. Just like housekeeping. He swept at the bag’s
dusty doppelganger, wiping its contours away and replaced the bag where it had
been.
I took off past a group of washed take-away
boxes, their lids flipped open like hungry jaws. And then two perfect regiments
of the foam nets which cocoon paw paws or other tropical fruits in transit.
Fabric in bundles and stacks, a wardrobe filled with perfectly folded squares.
Shoes in pairs, large and small, summer and winter, a vast square of them laid
out beside a bed. I walked past hats and scarves and hair clips, baskets, bird
cages; it was just like sightseeing. Software and hardware, of every type and size
from the largest paintbrushes to the elements of the tiniest household globes,
and then on towards pots, basins, cups, dishes, cutlery. Watches, lighters,
pens. I came to a stop in front of an assortment of toys or toy parts so
confounding as to elicit audible wonder: the single arm of a black doll no
bigger than an adult digit; a miniature bed; what looked like the tortured bits
of coloured plastic found only in Christmas crackers, poorly moulded plastic
guns, dummies, pineapples, mirrors, cars.
These
objects were placed with clear intention, sorted and arranged by type, each set
confined to its board, each board laid out across the floor like canvases
across a wall, pages across a text, a choose your own adventure of deep
proportions. From time to time, I came across an odd gathering of the most
unfamiliar objects, together like a family of misfits, seemingly beyond utility
or ornament, beyond function or aesthetics as I knew them. In fact, these
objects stood out the most, one offs which were somehow vital to the whole
picture. Orange sticks, bra inserts, empty medicine boxes.
Easy
with this work to become consumed in detail, to become consumed by the desire,
the responsibility, the commitment to see every object before you.
The
gallery attendant approached. We talked a while about favourites, hers and
mine. She told me stories of people’s looking, stories of people’s stories: the
woman who stood over an arc of common textas as if they were rare wonders; two friends
who argued about whether it is right or wrong to get rid of your own things
before you are gone, whether it’s a curse or a gift to leave them to your
children; or the gentleman who was told by his wife to sell off the attic
contents on ebay, who hesitated to
post paid-for goods for fear his customers were inheriting unnecessary things.
He sent emails to check if they really needed the item before he completed the
sale. I thought of my grandmother’s cupboards after she had moved into care and
of my battle to claim the spare room in our house which is still filled with my
partner’s archives which he cannot sort and empty. It’s really the perfect art
work isn’t it? Intensely personal but universal. As she said it I wondered
whose personal and whose universal? At that point, the personal belonged to me
and the other viewers, an interesting role reversal between maker and audience.
But the specific was definitely mine, an already long series of subjective
connections through which I was seeing the actual things before me. I still had
little idea of what their collectivity was ‘really’ about.
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