Philosophers have been asserting the death of nature and proliferation of trash culture for quite some time. For Wordsworth, it was only from “‘mid the din / Of towns and cities,” long after Tintern Abbey was already in ruins, that the poet longed for the valley of the River Wye. For Theodor Adorno, what defined Modernist artworks was that remainder—“opaque, unassimilated material,” or waste material¹—that he argued was constitutive of their forms, ultimately condemning them to failure.² And for Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism is that with which we were left once the modernization process was complete and nature was gone for good³—artworks littered with the “trash and junk materials of a fallen and unredeemable commodity culture.”⁴ For at least the past two centuries, trash aesthetics—an aesthetics of the “rags and the refuse”⁵—have been regarded as particular manifestations of their time.

But while trash aesthetics and culture are not unique to the contemporary, it would seem that North American trash art must be a new kind of register today—today, with Americans sending greater amounts of garbage to landfills and incinerators than ever before.⁶ Today, when we know that the methane gas from landfills is one of the leading contributors to climate change and that the emissions created by incinerators are among the most toxic in existence.⁷ We know that incessant consumption of one-time-use products—behavior conditioned and necessitated by the capitalist mode of production—is destroying our bodies and our environments. And yet we can’t—won’t—stop. A question becomes: what can trash art tell us about this contradiction that we live everyday?

Patricia Yaeger has argued that contemporary art’s particular preoccupation with trash has to do with the fact that detritus has come to replace nature itself—now all ecology is rubbish ecology, and detritus takes on the sublimity that was once associated with nature.⁸ What gleams is no longer the natural world or the past but rather the “mess and odor of trash.”⁹ I think Yaeger hits the nail on the head. But I would argue that some North American art and literature today—certainly the art and literature collected in this issue—reveal that there’s more to the story. It’s not just that we’re surrounded by the disposable and disposed of. We know something now that we didn’t before: we, too, are disposable. “I / a mere corpse,” writes David Brazil in his untitled poem. The irony lies in the fact that I know it and I don’t, at the very same time; in this way, mine is always already a life in death, a life wasting away. We, too, are disposable. BPA, Atrazine, and Roundup attest to this fact. Shale gas wells in the backyards of Texans attest to this fact. The proposal to extend the Keystone pipeline routing tar sands crude oil from Canada through the Midwestern United States attests. Katrina attests. Guantanamo attests. The murders of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, among so many others, attest. The 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States barred from health care attest. What we know is this: that the controlled administration, attrition, and disposal of life is now the rule of the west. The biopolitical state requires it: radical expendability in the name of furthering “democracy”—that triumvirate of science/technology, capital, and government.

How do the aesthetics of waste and wasting register the complexities of these entanglements and consequent conditions under which we make our lives in this early twenty-first century?

A poetics of wasted life, mourning, and desire is immanent to a number of the works included in this issue. Of the “biopolitical waste” that is the Guantanamo detainee’s body, Rob Halpern writes in his piece,

I long for the inconceivable, to wrest his “unremarkable genitalia” away from the death for which they’ve been rendered prepared melted for fat, rendered for glue and to return the commonplace to the common place [——] horizon of collective possibility where the nonsite inclines toward its negated material.…His body, this rupture where the fabric of things rips open, a demand I still can’t hear.

Halpern tarries with the question of how to subvert administered language (i.e., the language of detainee autopsy reports) for that which has been deemed trash, rendering this language, along with its subject-object (the individual body), irreducible once again. For Halpern, any attempt is already a failure, as even our queer desire is always “unwittingly contracted” (as Halpern writes elsewhere) to furthering the state’s imperial agenda. Samuel Ace’s oblique fragments also point toward the way that culture trashes desire, alienating queer languages and forms of communication. In Ace’s work, communication manifests as only a trace of itself in all of its longing: “the trash / the louder / the trifling / they yell / of boys.” CAConrad’s “I Loved Earth Years Ago” and “Suspension Fluid Magnificence” take up more directly the problem of the structural suppression of queer desire, the way culture names “trash” any manifestation of what Conrad calls the “feral interior.”

Documentary practices—forms for seeing that which we would rather not—are also prominent among the contributions here. In Andy Young’s short film, plastic bags caught on a fence outside of Saqqara, Egypt, glint, dance, and murmur in the sun and wind. The film ends as quickly as it begins, but the sight and sound of the materials flash and reverberate through the viewer’s mind. For Catherine Owen and Sydney Lancaster—whose camera follows trails of discarded plastic on a mangy hill beside the Whitemud Highway in Alberta—trash resides always “at the edge of beauty.” Marthe Reed’s “Wasted,” a visual poem that bombards an intricate aerial image of the Gulf Coast with the names of toxic chemicals, also evokes what we might call the sublimity of the toxic landscape—at the edge of beauty, repellant and attractive at once, a kind of “negative pleasure.”¹⁰ These artists—notably, all women—dwell at polluted sites, inhabiting, perhaps, what Stacy Alaimo names “trans-corporeality,” an understanding of the body as inextricable from its toxic environment. For Alaimo, “thinking through toxic bodies allows us to reimagine human corporeality, and materiality itself, not as a utopian or romantic substance existing prior to social inscription, but as something that always bears the trace of history, social position, region, and the uneven distribution of risk.”¹¹

We might, moreover, read many of the works in this issue as rehearsals of rescue and recycling. Brenda Hillman’s collages are the product of a malfunctioning printer (quickly on its way to becoming e-waste), the recovery and rearrangement of what would otherwise end up in the trash bin. Alice Notley’s stunning “fan collages,” layered with rubbish from the streets of Paris, embody what she describes as a rigid deadness that is characteristic of art. Of course, trash is often a rigid deadness, too. In this way, art and trash are never far off from one another, and it’s this fact that trash art throws into relief. Alli Warren’s “Throng,” an animated series of screenshots from the Internet that she captured while sitting at her desk at work, registers a contradiction inherent to a culture that demands we let no time go to waste while at the same time inundating us with an excess of information, of which we have no capacity to make productive use. There is something almost scandalous about these rescue projects, which attribute a kind of value to that which has been deemed valueless. Perhaps it’s no surprise that their choice form is the collage, a form that has been associated with the illicit sticking together of objects (thanks to the idiomatic French coller) since its emergence in Modernist visual art.¹²

There is much more to be said about the aesthetics of trash as they manifest here. I look forward to other critical perspectives on this little archive. I am grateful to all of our contributors, whom I admire more than I can express. All my thanks to my brilliant co-editor/curator Laura Mullen, whose smashing idea this special issue was in the first place; to Joshua Marie Wilkinson, whose enthusiasm about this project ushered it into being; and to Afton Wilky, whose creativity is evident in the unique design of this issue. And thank you, reader, for being here, a human on the dump—to hear “the blatter of grackles,” to “cry stanza my stone.”¹³ Enjoy the “trash” issue.

Notes

¹Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 151.
Return to Reference.

²Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans., Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 157.
Return to Reference.

³Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), ix.
Return to Reference.

⁴Fredric Jameson, “Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist,” The Modernist Papers (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 234.
Return to Reference.

⁵Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 460.
Return to Reference.

⁶Heather Rogers, “Garbage Capitalism’s Green Commerce,” Coming to Terms with Nature, ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 238.
Return to Reference.

⁷Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (New York: The New Press, 2005), 4-5.
Return to Reference.

⁸Patricia Yaeger, “The Death of Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash; or, Rubbish Ecology,” PMLA 123, no. 2 (2008): 327.
Return to Reference.

⁹Ibid., 329.
Return to Reference.

¹⁰For more on the sublime’s “negative pleasure,” see Immanuel Kant, “Analytic of the Sublime,” Critique of Judgment, trans. John H. Bernard (New York: Cosmo Classics, 2007), 61-79.
Return to Reference.

¹¹Stacy Alaimo, “Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature,” Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 261.
Return to Reference.

¹²Marjorie Perloff, “Collage and Poetry,” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Return to Reference.

¹³Wallace Stevens, “The Man on the Dump,” The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 201.
Return to Reference.